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Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

geohot.github.io

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Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#141

Post by justonceokay »

nine_k wrote: post #122
solarkraft wrote: post #86

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They ca…

The market actually is not very free, because large companies increasingly use their weight to pull off things that smaller companies or individual customers cannot afford: lobby to obtain preferences, tax exemptions, exclusive deals, other favors that violate or at least skirt the law. But running a call center overseas is not one of these things.

I cannot understand how any of the things you describe are not free. The government kowtowing to corporations is as free as it gets. No one said that just because the market is free that you personally wouldn’t end up holding the shit end of the stick

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#142

Post by justonceokay »

kibwen wrote: 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.

Any sufficiently robust ecosystem will eventually develop parasites. The more different kinds of parasites per host organism the more robust the ecosystem.

The ideal state of the ecosystem is not the ideal state of any organism within it.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#144

Post by refurb »

kmeisthax wrote: post #117
kibwen wrote: 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 reservat…

A free market is individuals and companies can willing enter whatever transaction they want.

If someone is willing to pay for a reservation and a restaurant willing to take payment, then it’s a free market. It’s not inefficient at all.

You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not free

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#145

Post by refurb »

johngossman wrote: post #4

Like self-driving taxis where the business model is to stop paying drivers so we can pay more to big tech companies. Viva la revolution!

Stopping progress because you put people out of work is a great way to stall all development.

By that same logic we’d stop doctors from using antibiotics because now barbers will lose their job of bloodletting.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#146

Post by Rury »

justonceokay wrote: post #141
nine_k wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market actually is not very free, because large companies increasingly use their weight to pull off things that smaller companies or individual customers cannot afford: lobby to obtain preferences, tax exemptions, exclusive deals, other favors that violate or at least skirt the law. But running a call center overseas is not one of these things.

I cannot understand how any of the things you describe are not free. The government kowtowing to corporations is as free as it gets. No one said that just because the market is free that you personally wouldn’t end up holding the shit end of the stick

Free markets don't exist, or they only do for a very brief period of time. It's the same fundamental force behind why social hierarchies naturally form, and communism doesn't work in practice.

When governments kowtow to corporations, it's the corporations who are then acting as the government. For example, in states like Texas, Alabama, and Wisconsin, laws prohibit automakers from selling vehicles directly to consumers. But these laws only exist because dealer associations wanted and lobbied for them to protect their business. Which is to show that freedom itself isn't a matter of who is kowtowing to whom, but merely whether or not kowtowing is happening whatsoever. If it is, then someone's freedom is being restrained, and said market environment could be argued to not be "free". In fact, this is what Tesla has argued multiple times in court in such states in that these laws are anticompetitive, and violate due process and the commerce clause.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#147

Post by Terr_ »

justonceokay wrote: post #141
nine_k wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market actually is not very free, because large companies increasingly use their weight to pull off things that smaller companies or individual customers cannot afford: lobby to obtain preferences, tax exemptions, exclusive deals, other favors that violate or at least skirt the law. But running a call center overseas is not one of these things.

I cannot understand how any of the things you describe are not free. The government kowtowing to corporations is as free as it gets. No one said that just because the market is free that you personally wouldn’t end up holding the shit end of the stick

Hold up, there are two very different kinds of "free" that pop up, from mutually incompatible ends of a spectrum.

In the first, it's a "free" market because everything moves smoothly and efficiently in ways that make economic mathematicians happy. There's perfect information, all transactions and prices and actor-identities are are known, and it's generally assumed there are no monopolies or monopsonies.

In the second, individual actors are "free" to construct secret deals with special secret prices, non-disclosure agreements, act anonymously through proxies, etc.

At least in US politics, the equivocation is common: Someone appeals to the benefits of the first, while promoting the contradictory mechanics of the second.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#148

Post by class3shock »

Last gasps? The rent seeking class has literally never been more powerful.

"The Chinese open source model running on the box under my desk can pass the Turing Test. When you call, e-mail, text, or show me an ad, you’ll never know if it’s me or my model seeing it."

And the only thing they'll notice when you are replaced with that opensource model is the slight reduction in the required personnel budget going forward.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#149

Post by JuniperMesos »

ares623 wrote: post #110
yabutlivnWoods wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. This has strong self-selection bias. Egohot thinks about this stuff a lot so obviously everyone does! Most people only care about money as they have no choice. Absent a cash-first system money has become a social construct. The valuation of a dollar is entirely ephemeral now. I see that social reality becoming more realized and the existing social system around money collapsing due to generational churns attenu…

Fuck Geohot for lending his hand to Musk during the Twitter takeover. He is obviously "sorted" and successful. But his recent blog posts suggests to me that he has started to realize, despite all his success, that if/when the system collapses, he'll be queuing up in the breadlines just like the rest of us. The sooner the other techbros get the same realization the better.

It was actively good that Elon Musk took over Twitter. Twitter itself is exactly as free a social media platform under Musk as it was under Parag Agrawal (which is to say, it was a privately-owned platform that made arbitrary moderation decisions and engaged in de-facto user lock-in both before and after the acquisition); and the political distaste that a lot of the most active users of Twitter had for Musk actually got them to move off of Twitter and onto to alternate social media platforms, typically Mastodon in the ActivityPub ecosystem or BlueSky in the ATProto ecosystem. Both of these protocols have issues with not being decentralized enough to really mitigate censorship from the system operators, but the status quo now is certainly better than it was before the Musk acquisition.

I didn't know that Geohot had anything to do with the acquisition, but insofar as he did, I'm glad it happened. There's a bunch of different and mutually-incompatible ways "the system" might collapse in a way leading to breadlines, and I have no reason to think your theory that it will be a result of Musk buying Twitter is any better than any other random person's theory about why the world is going to decline in terms of material prosperity in the near-future.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#150

Post by 9rx »

solarkraft wrote: post #86

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They ca…

Neither the cable nor the insurance business operate in free markets.
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