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The Demoralization is just Beginning

geohot.github.io

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Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#231

Post by pastage »

svara wrote: post #226
unclebucknasty wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think people in Sweden or Denmark are upset their countries aren't hegemons? Funny that you chose those two countries. Denmark is a founding member of NATO. Sweden is one of the two most recent admitted, almost a year ago. My point is that it's U.S. hegemony that has protected its own democracy and that of liberal democratic Europe to a large extent. Sweden and Denmark haven't been hegemons because they have…

> Sweden and Denmark haven't been hegemons because they haven't needed to be. That's exactly right, and I used nearly exactly those words in a recent comment. Important to note: The free world - economically advanced democracies excluding the US - is the largest economy in the world, larger than the US by about 30%, with an even larger population. These countries have a historically unprecedented incentive to work mu…

That is not how it works, many of those countries will need to align with China or be conquered.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#232

Post by bloppe »

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…

Too bad we're going to do the exact opposite of all that for at least the next 4 years

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#234

Post by hayst4ck »

ryandamm wrote: post #177
fwipsy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first paragraph is like saying "this train conductor does transportation, so we should let him fly a plane." Perhaps knowing security proves that the author is intelligent, and perhaps some of the same skills apply, but it's not a given that he will have good ideas, especially on fraught topics where it's easy to be misled by ideological bias. The author doesn't deserve any more consideration than any other outs…

Yeah, there's a known problem with smart, technical people approaching fields about which they know very little. The analysis, to a third party, often sounds smart (the author is undeniably smart!), but without having expert context, you miss why it's so, so, so wrong. And I'm not even an economics expert. I've just read more about it, or read more critically, than geohot. And I can tell you he's wrong, not because h…

I agree with your overall point. I think software security in particular is a skillset that is very well suited to deconstructing establishment dogma. The entire exercise of (novel) software security (specifically research) is ignoring what everyone says and asking how things actually work detail by detail. You look for indirect signals that betray other information to help understand underlying structure allowing you to better poke at it with whatever information prodding tools you have access to.

The electricity graph is a very good example of that. A machine plugs into a wall and uses electricity. An aggregate graph of electricity consumption contains the information of how many machines are running in aggregate. You can argue that data is wrong, and I'm open to believing it is since I believe you can have a privately owned power source, but if you don't dispute the data, then a graph of electricity is very much a graph of aggregate manufacturing, also aggregate computing. Aggregate electricity should have a deeply entwined relationship with aggregate economic output. I'm not an economist, so apologies for any misused terms.

Electricity is basically a raw material component for almost any good, even services likely have a relationship with electricity.

I find that analysis cogent and satisfying. I've traveled a fair amount, and the amount of "third world"ism I see in the US is shocking. Before traveling it never occurred to me that San Francisco literally literally has slums. Meanwhile many places in "poorer" foreign countries are nicer than things I can find in the US even if I were to go looking for them.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#235

Post by rvba »

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…

When were markets run by PHDs and Nobel laurates?

They were always run by politicians, oligarchs, capitalists and interest groups.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#236

Post by mullingitover »

ryandamm wrote: post #157
paxys wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not really, no. If China cut off the US, for any reason, who gets hurt more? China gets hurt more. They are an export economy. US will face some temporary pain, sure, but other countries build stuff as well. Meanwhile what does China do with all the materials piling up, millions out of jobs and a half a trillion dollar hole in their economy?

I do think there's some mutually-assured destruction here. If trade truly ends, I suspect it might end in a hot war, and no one knows how that would go. (Though to support some of the comments here, and the implied point of the original essay -- China's manufacturing base becomes much more strategically important in a hot war scenario.) I mean, we've sort of long assumed that increasing trade ties led to peace, and t…

> If trade truly ends, I suspect it might end in a hot war

Have two nuclear powers ever gone to war directly?

I'm pretty sure it isn't going to happen because ultimately the leadership on both sides would be assured of being vaporized, and no leader on either side has the guts to actually die in a conflict (especially where there could very likely be no real winner, and no glory, at all).

As long as that holds, we're actually pretty fortunate in that we avoid these stupid types of wars, and we're forced into these frustrating (for chest-beating tough guys) economic rivalries instead.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#237

Post by ks2048 »

He equates protectionism with stagnation, being boring, the road to poverty, socialism, etc. Yet, the US was very protectionist during it's accent to becoming the world's largest economy. The free market zealotry came later.

(I'm not trying to say Trump's current plans have any merit - which seem to be without any strategic foresight or planning).

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#238

Post by globular-toast »

georgeecollins wrote: post #143

I get tired of people talking about how the US doesn't "make anything". I spent my adult life creating software that was super valuable. Along the way I worked with a bunch of people (from all over the world) who-- because of their brains and their education-- could have made almost anything very well. They didn't make steel or automobiles because that wasn't where their skills were best deployed.

I'm not convinced that software is really intrinsically valuable. We write it to help us make and deliver things that are actually valuable, which are physical goods. The whole service sector would be nothing without the physical. Finance doesn't exist just to see numbers changing on a screen. It's there so we can buy food after we retire etc.

Maybe games are truly software that isn't tied to anything physical. I can't think of much else, though. Can you?

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#239

Post by ipv6ipv4 »

roenxi wrote: post #52
lxgr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, 50 years later, they appear to have lost the title of the world's major superpower. And how is that causally related to the abandonment of the gold standard? Is the CNY somehow backed by gold, or the RUR?

The part I don't like is it confuses the situation to make it harder to tell if goods and services are getting cheaper or more expensive in real terms. But I don't know if I'd say it was causal. I'm more just pointing out that there isn't much evidence that the gold standard failed and there isn't a reason to think that all the economists reject it. They're more probably neutral to it.

The gold standard always fails. Whatever gold standard is established in history, it is inexorably debased.

The conceptual flaw with gold is that it is a desperate attempt to grasp at an absolute, because absolutes feel warm and fuzzy. Nothing is absolute in an economy. The relative value of everything changes constantly and trying to create an artificial peg to gold doesn't achieve anything useful.

In historical terms, by any measure you choose (monthly salary, purchasing power, etc.) gold is worth roughly 1/10th what it used to be worth a millennia ago and prior.

Adjusted for inflation, over the last 100 years or so, the value of gold has remained roughly constant in terms of salary and purchasing power.

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