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Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

geohot.github.io

111–120 of 170 posts

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#111
post #83

> But for decades, the American market has not been free. The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic property of free markets in practice.

Antitrust legislation used to be very effective at dealing with this sort of stuff. These laws were designed to put an end to the gilded age (Standard Oil in particular), and accomplished what it set out to do.

Though Ronald Reagan dared asked what nobody else thought to ask, "what if monopolies ... good?", so now we're back with a new set of Morgans and Vanderbilts.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#112
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a free market it would be stop paying drivers so everyone can pay less for taxis. But the market is so unbelievably messed up that this is not what happens in practise.

Disagree. The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done. Now maybe it’s all being done because of expectations of a monopoly (this is a free market consequence, right?), but …

Research has a large asymmetry to it. Once someone shows something can be done. Others can follow quite easily.

And more substantial is that when someone shows something can be done, its orders of mangnitude easier for $ENGINEER at $CORP to get $CSUITEs attention to get a budget / justify the risk.

Your self driving car example is the best example of this. Since waymo and tesla got popular NVIDIA really started pushing their self driving cars for everyone tech.

https://youtu.be/EzAVW1VgzcI?si=gfnOJoaO9hfIFXX1

And NVIDIA isn't the only one.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#113

"But like people who are good with computers, the models want a terminal, not some candy ass iPad UI." Back before the iPhone I used to get into arguments with HCI specialists that phones could be like butlers and should know with all the sensors that they have that you put it in your bag and behaved accordingly. I was told that was impossible then but it seems more possible now. Had the world gone at all that way we…

What's that adage about premature optimization?

“All of my interviews involve premature optimization”?

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#114
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a free market it would be stop paying drivers so everyone can pay less for taxis. But the market is so unbelievably messed up that this is not what happens in practise.

Disagree. The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done. Now maybe it’s all being done because of expectations of a monopoly (this is a free market consequence, right?), but …

> The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done.

I disagree. "Expected" is hiding a lot of the work there, and the reasons for that expectation could be rational or completely irrational.

Hypothetically "work on self-driving cars" would be done if some crazy psychic-trusting billionaire's psychic told him they would be profitable, even if all rational analysis said they'd be a bad business. A lot of major investments, especially in tech, and done based on hope or as a bet, not due to any real foresight.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#115

I think self driving cars are important for a couple of reasons: 1. Demographics - Aging population needs transportation. God knows we certainly don't need really old people driving themselves. We got a taste of the future in West Portal in that regard not long ago. 2. Human Capital - The US has pretty much demonstrated that there is little desire to import low skilled labor. Where do these theoretical Taxi drivers c…

Public transportation solved this before cars were commonplace. Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0]) and you'll save billions from not having to manufacture (and store!) cars. 0: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

For public transportation to be broadly appealing it has to be clean, safe, and fast. Which means that you have to prevent people who are antisocial (playing loud music, etc.), violent, or just have terrible hygiene from boarding. You can't expect the bus driver to double-task as a security guard, so you have to somehow figure out a different way to implement security enforcement on the vehicles. You also may have to be ruthless in optimizing overall transportation value, of which speed is a factor, which may mean cutting some stops.

You have to have the political will and support to do all this even as the almost inevitable controversial videos hit social media: people being manhandled by security guards while protesting their innocence, people complaining about how there used to be a stop on their street but now it's gone, etc.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The market being free would mean that a private person can also hire Indians to call companies.

what's stopping them from doing so?

I don’t want to give private data up to and including my social security number for verification to start.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#117
post #83

> But for decades, the American market has not been free. The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic property of free markets in practice.

Sometimes the real market failure is just that a market exists at all.

Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservations are a derivative on the underlying capacity of a restaurant, you're going to have tables that are "reserved" but unused because the "owner" of that reservation happened to sell it on to a third-party vendor that's now trying to hike the price to last-minute diners.

Meanwhile, the actual restaurant trying to sell food, can't sell food in their own restaurant, because their salesfloor is full of empty tables that are worth more to the market dead than alive. They are undergoing demand destruction as they are involuntarily transformed from a food vendor into a landlord of tiny plots of real estate whose desirability has long since been detached from any surrounding circumstances.

The argument for markets is that unregulated commerce is very good at calculation. Or, more specifically, that price discovery is the process of putting bounties on better information than is currently available. The flipside of this is that everything around the market needs to be regulated or you're calculating garbage into garbage.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#118
post #93
post #55

Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad. Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to. Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot wou…

Rent is charging money for access to an asset or property . The P in IP is Property.

The "rent" in "rent-seeking" does not refer to "rent" it refers to "economic rent."

Totally different concept. But don't take my word for it:

> "Rent-seeking" is an attempt to obtain economic rent (i.e., the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to keep it employed in its current use) by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth.[0]

> In economics, economic rent is any payment to the owner of a factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#119

It's undeniable that technology over the past decades has increased democratization in something every step of the way. YouTube destroyed Hollywood's monopolization of entertainment. Anyone with a smartphone now has a shot at becoming a full-time creator. Prior to this, it was gate kept by Hollywood execs. Smartphones destroyed Microsoft's monopolization of apps. Not a leap to believe this will happen to some extent…

Not really. It's undeniable that technology reset power structures, but ultimately it just ended up with new power structures/new people made the gatekeepers. Just look at the people whose success was broken by Youtube overnight. Youtube/BigTech won over Hollywood, not the people 100% beholden to Youtube. Under Hollywood people still got their residuals. Under Youtube, next day you can be cut off completely.

Power structures still exist for sure. But objectively, there are tens of thousands currently making a living from YouTube who would've never been able to become entertainers if Hollywood was the only game in town.

The barriers to entry for entertainers have never been so low.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#120
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often confuse “free” with “fair”.

People often confuse “free” with “unregulated”, too.

My understanding of the definition of a "free" market is it would have almost no external regulation.

However, a "unregulated free market" is nearly impossible--somw player will eventually drive out competition to maximize profits and some will not be troubled at harming or killing their customers in the name of immediate profit (tobacco, sugared drinks, talc powder, and round-up come to mind immediately but the list is very long).

Is market with enough regulations to ensure competitiveness and transaction transparency (including long-term consequences) truly "free"?

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