Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went through grad school and I saw how change comes about one funeral at a time. A big shot professor that has made their name with their pet theory/work will fiercely defend it against competing ideas, and people will defer to their expertise. It's not scientific, it's egotistic. They are a wall against progress that gets removed upon death. These professors can also create a dogma through their students who also…
I can't help but wonder how much better our governments would operate if the median age of their workers were somewhat lower (IIRC that's around 45).
Experts from a world that no longer exists
191–200 of 267 posts
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#192Something I've noticed in the pandemic: there's a pretty big gap between what people remember "the experts" saying vs what, if you listened to one or two qualified professionals and kept them straight, actually said. Individual experts—the good ones at least—seem to hold up pretty well even if they didn't see everything coming. It's the widespread sampling of chyrons and faces that inevitably says everything all of t…
Real experts have name and surname yet in my country they created groups of experts all the time for politicians to confirm their ideas.
"The experts" say we must raise taxes (in my area only personal income can be up to 54% of your earnings). I do know experts, without the quotes, who are totally against this tax abuse.
Also, for some reason, I did not see any expert yet for the taxing stuff or the pandemic medical teams that were supposed to exist and we did not get even names or surnames of them. Strange to say the least...
Now extend this to all areas possible that have political intereset and this is basically what "experts" are: excueses used by politicians of all colors to convict nce people of their stuff.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#193What I found interesting is that the period for reappearance of “failed ideas” is roughly the length of a career. Coincidence or due to any real effect I don’t know. I wrote a little about it here: “Don’t be discouraged by the failure of technology or approaches of the past. If the problem is still important after all this time then it’s a problem worth solving. Don’t avoid unsuccessful solutions. Avoid insignificant…
That generational thing sounds a lot like IT's eternal flip-flop between thick clients and thin clients. (I'm fully expecting "web browsers are too thick, we need a thin alternative" to appear any day now). On the back-end, serverless is time-sharing. Your attempt-fail-stigmatise curve has a lot in common with the Gartner hype cycle.
isn't this the thesis of mighty.app?
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They simply can't do it and rather extrapolate current conditions to infinity. This is what I think more people should be paying attention to. I keep seeing the FIRE(financially independent; retire early) people talk about the returns they have gotten the past 100 years, not taking into account that the first 50 of those years saw tremendous growth, and the last of those 50 years saw tremendous stagnation and debt…
The value of USD is not constant. Either you adjust the 1970 values to today’s dollar, giving you $17B for Hughes’ fortune, or you index the $100B by the minimum salary giving you 23B vs 2.5B, a less than 10x increase. Not unreasonable considering the global scale business can have today.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you think MMT is great and will have no consequences Doesn't MMT just tell us that we should focus on inflation instead of The Deficit? I don't think any of its adherents believe that printing money is consequence-free; rather, MMT states that over-printing money will eventually result in inflation, and we can choose to respond to that inflation by either reigning in government spending (which enables us to dial ba…
> Doesn't MMT just tell us that we should focus on inflation instead of The Deficit? While this is roughly aligned with some of MMTs talking points, I don't think you can reduce MMT to just this. At a minimum these talking points have some other implications like: 1) Our current congress is capable of reigning in spending - I strongly disagree that there is any political will power to do this regardless of inflation.…
Your second point is a very good one, and has given me something to think about. Appreciate the detailed response.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know how a pensions would work in tech. 95% of the companies won’t exist by the end of your career so who pays for the pensions?
The stock market. You get a private pension.
Here's the thing, most humans find it less than scintillating to devolve ALL their activities to some sort of spreadsheet or algo optimization. World of Warcraft is fun for most until the end-game where discovery and imagination is ripped away and all that is left is actuarial tables and dice rolls.
The social contract between WesternCorp™ and their employees that involved a pension (or, conversely, through a Union), was an unfortunately brief period of history fueled by the tragedy of WWII (this is naturally an incredibly deep topic with many nuances that I'm shamelessly glossing over).
My humble and super-simplified opinion is that the PTSD of WWI fueled the subsequent Great Depression (Versailles, etc.), allowed the build-up to the global cataclysm of WWII, and when the emergent Super Powers were two complete divergent theories of government who had both been surprise attacked just a few years previous...there might be some feels.
Not being an economist, the small-S socialism that created the foundation coming out of the Depression which allowed the US to be the "arsenal of democracy" was slowly eroded by the worst excesses of capitalism, increasingly allowed and then accepted as normal because to protest would be to side with "them". Drunk on the irrational profits from WWII and the hyper-growth of the early post-war years, "Us vs. Them" of the Cold War was good business AND good patriotic politics. When you start to think those irrational margins are the norm, and they start to shrink, you do what you think is required to keep them aloft. With that mindset, sustaining a pension fund for a workforce that is decades out of employment can hardly be thought of as something that is increasing shareholder value (there was a time when a lot of the shareholders were also employees).
To be a savvy investor in the stock market requires both attention and treasure. The partnership between business and employee, always contentious (good!), during the Pax Americana emerged from innovation by firms like Kaiser, the G.I. bill mentality and the Marshall Plan. It ended with us recklessly dunking on a broken Russia for 15 years while "maximizing shareholder value" and ignoring the implications. The US dollar is now pegged to the value of our military to back it (rather than the intrinsic value of our production), which means we spend stupid amounts of blood and treasure while backsliding on the principles that built the Pax Americana to begin with.
At the end of the day, why should it be necessary for a citizen of the most dominant power in human history to toil their whole lives without some well-intentioned guidance and support so that it doesn't end in misery?
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the risk of explaining the joke... "predicted 83 of the last 7 downturns" implies a false positive rate of at least 76 incorrect predictions for 7 correct ones. Of course, if they made 83 downturn predictions but didn't correctly predict the 7 that actually occurred, thee false positive rate could also be worse than that.
It’s a reference to a 50+ year old economics joke: https://worldin.economist.com/article/17506/edition2020dont-...
> The stock market has predicted nine of the past five recessions—a joke from master Keynesian of decades ago Paul Samuelson.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/briandomitrovic/2018/11/22/the-...
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#198This line is what I think of whenever the cryptocurrency vitriol comes out here: """ Pets.com was mocked, but Chewy is now a $30 billion business. Webvan failed, but Instacart and UberEats are now thriving. eToys was a joke, but now look at Amazon. Some of the biggest businesses of the last 10 years are all in industries that were the starkest examples of stupidity 20 years ago. """
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is we're all now dependent on stock market performance to make retirement feasible. Employer guaranteed defined-benefit pension schemes are dead. My uncles pension scheme was structured to pay out 1.5% of his final salary, inflation adjusted for the rest of his life, for each year he'd worked. He worked at one company his whole career, from age 18 to age 55, when he retired. Factoring in his mortgage, whi…
> The problem is we're all now dependent on stock market performance to make retirement feasible. Which seems a bit convenient for the wealthy. I think it was intentional, to align the interests of pensioners with the wealthy. It seems to me that pensions are one thing governments can do a good job at, because companies may fail but the government is much less likely to be unable to pay retirement benefits. They may…
I also agree that when the middle class erodes to the point that asset ownership falls below 50% is when things get, uhh, interesting.
Re: Experts from a world that no longer exists
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is we're all now dependent on stock market performance to make retirement feasible. Which seems a bit convenient for the wealthy. I think it was intentional, to align the interests of pensioners with the wealthy. It seems to me that pensions are one thing governments can do a good job at, because companies may fail but the government is much less likely to be unable to pay retirement benefits. They may…
People who can retire are wealthy. They have a claim on [10, 20, 30] years of an income stream in the future. This can either be a claim on future tax revenues (public pensions) or on return to capital previously invested (private pensions). Most people have always worked til they died and it seems unlikely that the system where people work for 30-40 years and then get 30-40 years of pension will last.