All these feel good articles are very ideal in nature, I feel. Not to be the doomsayer, but without a solid backup of resources (be it money, power or some such thing), I find it hard to imagine to be this 'careless' towards returns. World indeed feels like a Red Queen race.
Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
131–140 of 496 posts
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#132There are zero-sum games you can't realistically escape. They're really common. Credentials is a zero-sum game. Political power, influence of all sorts, are zero sum games: if you have more of it, someone else has less. Land ownership is basically zero sum, too.
Yes, but in practice land-ownership is only zero sum in places like Europe where every square-kilometer has 300 years of documented ownership etc, or other high-density areas.
The Asia, Africa & the Americas have so much unused space that isn't as inhospitable as central Australia
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans Sorry, I don't know the full story behind Hyperloop. But I really doubt he is trying to play a zero-sum or negative-sum game as the article hinted. Setting aside all the disputes — the deals he made with people are positive-sum. Nobody is forced to buy a Tesla, or invest in, or work for SpaceX. And in my personal view, all the article brings is decon…
> In fact, to make money, you have to play a positive-sum game and bring value to others. That is simply untrue; the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.
> That is simply untrue;
Fair point — updated to "most of the time."
> the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.
Rent-seeking is real, and you're right that it can be very profitable — while creating very little value for others. But even so, it remains the best available option when nobody else steps up to offer something better in free markets.
There are always two sides to any deal — the deal maker and the taker. The more competition on the maker side, the more value the taker can get. And the more takers demand real value, the less room rent-seeking behavior has to survive.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. You can still get fucking angry at how they’re capable of fooling others because of the skewed incentives we built in our capitalistic society
Of course you can, you're just way closer to being them. If you're in positions to take decisions that prevent others from doing it, do it without getting mad, actually improve things. If you're not, your getting mad will just make you more likely to join them later on. The cliche version is "hate consumes you".
Oh nonsense.
Reverse the argument, does it make any sense?
"Every time a (whaling ship crew, police force, oil executive, etc) gets angry at protestors and sprays them with (water cannons, rubber bullets, lawsuits), they are more likely to join them!"
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#135It's easy to create value for others and not worry about returns when you have enough money to not worry. Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do. I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
I think there’s a strong bias towards hacking and cool side projects from the hackernews crowd. But I’m not so sure much of the general population would use their free time afforded by UBI for productive and useful endeavors. At least from my observations there’s a significant portion of the population that uses their free time to be idle and veg in front of the TV and/or get wasted. My concern with UBI, even if it was financially tenable as it would underwrite a whole lot of that - including the more criminal, antisocial sub-population.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can never just use existing resources as long as those end up in places they're no longer accessible to the market anymore. Cash just about never sits just around as long as whoever holds onto it has no current need for extremely liquid assets. Like insurances. I doubt that the ratio of cash that ends up bound up that way to the one that doesn't changes a lot overall. The real problem to UBI is governments creati…
> The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO. The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - whi…
I've often thought of state debt as an accruing tax collection deficit. Selling bonds (creating more of this debt) is more politically convenient than raising taxes but it digs a deeper hole and obliges the state to pay interest largely to the same class of people they have failed to tax.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. > stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system That verse is quite famous and the general interpretation as I understand is this. You have control on your actions but not on its results. The results depend not only on your actions but on many other factors outside of your control. Now, one can interpr…
you realize that the caste system that currently exists is completely different from what it was conceptualized as right? you most certainly want to read the conversation between yudhistra and nahusha that talks about caste https://vedabase.io/en/library/mbk/1/30/
I don't think we actually know who conceptualized the caste system. Even Manusmriti seems to be not as old as we thought before.
However, even in Mahabharatha there are examples of Karna and Ekalavya who despite having qualities (as Yudhishtira claims) of Kshathriya, they were rejected by the society as being lesser.
It is possible that caste system is an extension and crystallization of nepotism. Typically professions and trade secrets are handed down the families and it is conceivable this was codified at some point far in the past.
To claim that caste system has a more philosophical foundation would be a bit of a stretch in my point of view, especially when it has been throughout the history being used suppress.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In fact, to make money, you have to play a positive-sum game and bring value to others. That is simply untrue; the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.
> That is simply untrue; Fair point — updated to "most of the time." > the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others. Rent-seeking is real, and you're right that it can be very profitable — while creating very little value for others. But even so, it remains the best available option when nobody else steps u…
Agreed on all points; and I think that's precisely what this post argues people should do.
> The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players. If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be. This is the real driver of the layoffs, the big players consolidating the rent seeking to them.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#139> it will continue to improve, but it won’t “go recursive” or whatever the claim is. It’s always been recursive. I suspect "going recursive" often colloquially means that AI systems achieve their exponential growth without human software engineers in the mix. This is a moment whose sudden apparent nearness does justify some of the ramping rhetoric, in my opinion.
I mean at this point, for that to happen it definitely isn't a matter of intelligence (it can fix errors later and learn from them), it's only a matter of memory and proper harness. Once memory it's solved for good, then recursive self-improvement is inevitable.
Once all the problems are solved we will be there. Sounds a lot like zeno's paradox. We might be closer than ever but still as far from the goal as ever.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can never just use existing resources as long as those end up in places they're no longer accessible to the market anymore. Cash just about never sits just around as long as whoever holds onto it has no current need for extremely liquid assets. Like insurances. I doubt that the ratio of cash that ends up bound up that way to the one that doesn't changes a lot overall. The real problem to UBI is governments creati…
> The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO. The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - whi…
It's fine if you're leaving something to those future generations. Like a bridge or a dam built to last 100 years.