The Demoralization is just Beginning • Hacker News Board

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#161

Post by Nimitz14 » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 5:57 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #21

jfengel wrote: post #6

For his solutions: "Brain drain" is what we had been doing for the past 80 years or so. It worked great. We're specifically driving people away now. "Gold standard" is an idea every sane economist rejected decades ago.

> "Gold standard" is an idea every sane economist rejected decades ago. I don't think any sane economists have ever "rejected" the gold standard, it is known to work. Pretty much any empire ever founded was built on a gold standard. The US jumped away from it because they were going to go bankrupt and picked a system that put the pain off until a later date. Now, 50 years later, they appear to have lost the title of…

If you had spent the time writing this and other comments googling/chatgpting you could have learned why returning to the gold standard is a joke.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#162

Post by stale2002 » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 6:03 AM UTC

ackbar03 wrote: post #2

Huh. I didn't know geohot commented on geopolitics

He comments a lot on politics, actually. He just makes intentional efforts to obfuscate them, likely because they are controversial (yet weird. The weirdness may be a part of the obfuscation).

My VERY TLDR of his political world view is that he thinks the current world politics are f'ed to an extremely serious degree, so much so that we are in "lets get rid of democracy" land, and I think he wants a technocratic authoritarian strongman/"hero" to enforce some sort of libertarian paradise.

Its those controversial, obfuscated, and wacky ideas mixed with a healthy tech focus that leads to an entertaining read.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#163

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 6:03 AM UTC

ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

[deleted]

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#164

Post by csomar » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 6:05 AM UTC

ryandamm wrote: post #16

coliveira wrote: post #10

The big mistake of this kind of analysis is to assume that it depends only on the desires of the US. But other countries have agency too, they can also decide to be first class economies. The current status of China is due to its focus on achieving greatness. There's not much that the US could or can do to derail China from its achievements. Let's stop trying to block other countries and step up to work harder.

China has major structural weaknesses in its economy that are currently overshadowed by the US cr*pping its own and its allies’ pants. Specifically: there is not much of a home grown consumer economy; they have driven growth too heavily on exports and infrastructure build, leading to a massive overhang in building, a housing bubble that is teetering dangerously close to unwinding, and a major shortage of domestic con…

Since the pandemic China on Western TVs is about to "collapse". However, what I saw is new EVs, new Phones, record high exports, record high solar panels installations, new metros/airports etc...

Something must be very wrong in your assessment, right?

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#165

Post by matwood » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 6:08 AM UTC

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #25

ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

> But solution point 1 — brain drain the rest of the world — is an absolutely first rate policy. The fact that the US requires newly-minted PhDs educated here to get a different visa or leave is absolutely self-defeating. We should be welcoming skilled immigration from everywhere. Even better, let them keep their visa and if they revoke their citizenship, we'll relocate their entire family if they come from a repress…

> Brain-draining the world is really the key to cementing American Hegemony in a post-Cold War world.

One of the keys. Others are the USD as the defacto world reserve currency, the ability to project military might anywhere, and the US's ability to keep other countries from growing their militaries too much (making the other items in this list easier to manage). The US is quickly throwing all this away though.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#166

Post by csomar » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 6:09 AM UTC

nextworddev wrote: post #104

Incipient wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China owns a lot of food generation overseas, so while they may "import" it, they effectively own it.

Doesn’t really work that way

They have nuclear weapons and a massive army/navy. They sure can pressure Brazil to not mess with them.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#167

Post by j7ake » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 6:11 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #57

nextos wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea was to provide worker visas to engineers who did well and graduated from good American universities Some EU countries offer scholarships to attract good foreign undergrads and grad students to their universities. The whole point is that they stay afterwards, and they try really hard to keep them. It's been proven to be quite economically profitable, see e.g. [1]. I've never understood what's the point of a…

> I've never understood what's the point of attracting good students if you don't want to keep them later on US schools attract international students because most will pay full tuition, subsidizing costs for local students.

Not true at the PhD level

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#168

Post by ryandamm » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 6:14 AM UTC

csomar wrote: post #160

ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

Ibn Khaldoun said that once a state economics start deteriorating, everyone becomes an expert. The way I see it, if the markets led by PhD and Noble laureates fails, people start looking for alternatives. Since the "establishment" has been proven useless, the door is open for "anyone" to chime in. The reality is that the economist at the top do not want to see the deficiencies because they have their salaries on the…

I don't think economics itself has gone wrong -- I think the US economy in particular has done a poor job of distributing the wealth it has created.

Ironically, that has created a populist backlash that has vaulted even worse economic ideas into power.

Anyone read "Capitalism in the 21st Century"? It's long and dense, but it does make some excellent, well-supported points about the structure of an economy that explains the current situation very well with historical antecedents.

This won't do it justice, but: inequality always increases, by definition, if the returns on capital outstrip the overall growth in the economy. (Think through that if it's not obvious; it's literally a mathematical truth.) The book argues that history is a series of long, slow accretions of wealth, with increasing inequality, until some shock (usually a violent revolution) overthrows the old system, resets inequality, and the cycle starts again. The latter half of the 20th century, for the US, was one notable exception: growth outstripped returns to capital, so the benefits of that growth were widely shared: inequality decreased. That trend ended in the ~1980s, and the widening inequality gap has fueled unrest.

And the book points out that we've seen this show before. I think we're in the "history repeating itself as farce" phase, though.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#169

Post by suraci » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 6:15 AM UTC

'demoralization' is a good word to describe the mental state of imperial citizen

social being determines social consciousness, but social consciousness often lags behind social being.

when the empire was falling, its citizens still indulged in the eternal victories of the past. by the time they realized the empire's glory was irretrievable, it was usually already fallen.

this lagging may cause some consequences.

for instance, overconfident imperial citizens may try to contain rivals and prevent the empire's fall through various ways, tariffs, sanctions, or wars, the worst case

imperial citizens think a lot when they see this:

> In addition, we had and have military bases in Japan. This is not the same situation.

imperial policymakers may be rational, or may not be

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#170

Post by hayst4ck » Wed, Mar 05, 2025, 6:18 AM UTC

ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

I think I disagree, specifically because geohot does security. Security is fundamentally about finding the difference between what people wish or think is true, and what is actually true on a mechanical physical real and actionable level. That involves deep analysis skills and disregarding common consensuses in order to rebuild how things actually work from the ground up.

Questioning establishment dogma is largely forbidden, no matter what your establishment is, so it's absolutely worth considering outsider assessments.

Wars test base assumptions. It seems obvious that in a war, ability to take things out of the ground, turn them into bullets/drones/etc, and then get them to the front line is what matters, not what the stock market says, and not claims made with the backing of a military (such as how much the US dollar is worth, or who owns what IP).

I don't necessarily agree with his conclusions, although I understand where they come from.