261–270 of 554 posts
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How would communism help with that? Make women common property?
It helps if you read the post to understand. He was bummed people pay for boosts.
This makes me like George more. I also liked that he wants to reduce the NVidia monopoly by working on AMD. Simply because it's a monopoly.
I thought he gave up on that when he couldn’t get AMD chips to run for long enough without bugs.
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If everyone gets an equal raise (whatever the UBI is), wouldn’t the entire market simply adjust to price that in, leaving everyone in the same relative position?
Yes, IMO that's exactly what will happen, except companies that can best compete for their share of this $1000 will get a government funded revenue stream (think Amazon, Netflix, rent seeking enterprises, etc). I have not heard a convincing argument the other way, would really appreciate a link to one if you find one.
Naturally, implementing UBI would require the entire financial sector to adjust. We would likely need to significantly raise interest rates (Which, IMHO would be great) and have a period to manage inflation.
But beside the initial recalibration phase, I have not seen any convincing arguments for why prices on non-positional goods would increase. Even with the increase interest rates, we would likely see that prices on positional goods / assets would stabilize as dead-cheap capital is not available.
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It is an allocation to the biggest companies at any time. ETFs need to rebalance, increase, decrease shares of a given stock and even evict them. Buying shares on SPY exposes you to the current companies but also any companies that will join. If a company gets evicted, then there is massive drop in their stock pricing as most movement is mechanistic and done by ETFs. Well massive is relative. For example last week we…
Hedge Funds call ETFs, pension funds, etc. "dumb money". I suspect they also feed the finance media narrative stating how on average they are not good at trading.
Technical analysis might as well be astrology. It treats tickers as isolated when in reality ETFs and growth of any individual stock in an ETF affects the flow in and out of other ETFs. When ETFs purchase stock due to an increase in value, they seek most liquid constituents first, and eventually rebalance. All these create feedback loops. The flow across the ETFs drives 80% of volume.
People would have higher performance if they learned about any particular sector, its movement and long term trends.
Retail has a lot of flexibility but people focus on trading over days instead of understanding trends and events of tomorrow, next year and the next decade.
Retail options “traders” barely understand the mechanics of at all, let alone the disadvantage they are in. They buy overpriced options with absurd premium that tanks during the chop induced by MMs. They don’t understand how MMs move/manipulate(not in the illegal sense)/shape the market to avoid losing money — they wouldn’t be in this position if they lost money. They just copy trades from traders on discord and hope to make some money.
ETFs are a great way to make money in terms of risk exactly of their rebalancing mechanics.
Everyone doesn’t have to beat the market, just beating inflation and leaving it in the bank is an improvement for the average person. Yes it won’t make people rich tomorrow, but they will be in a better situation next year or the one after than today.
For some people, paying the premium to jump the queue is the point. What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again. This is mostly Australian frequent flyers, when it was a high barrier to entry it conferred advantages and now Fly in Fly out work has commoditised club status, there is next to no boarding advantage, and no points flight availa…
Now, anyone anywhere can get a ride, often quickly. I’m not trying to excuse any predatory commercial practices directed at drivers or passengers, which are serious problems deserving of more strict regulation, but I absolutely do not want to go back to the old way.
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There's nothing an algorithm can do against disciplined, intentional engagement. If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
> If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say. Sure it does. The salesman may have information you were not aware of. They could even tell you something which satisfies your needs better and is cheaper. Not all salesman are out to screw you, some really care about a happy customer. I’m reminded of an old Hypercritical episode. If you ever heard John Siracusa, you know he does…
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> Another good sign of a difficult policy to implement successfully/an idea that isn't ready for primetime. It will never be ready for primetime because the system under which we live requires an underclass of people that are coerced into working jobs that no one really wants to do for abysmally low wages. Because the only other option left for them is homelessness and starvation. It is an inherently cruel system, bu…
> It will never be ready for primetime because the system under which we live requires an underclass of people that are coerced into working jobs that no one really wants to do for abysmally low wages. Because the only other option left for them is homelessness and starvation. > > It is an inherently cruel system, but this cruelty is what keep things afloat. Any system that guarantees the basic subsistence of all wou…
I would agree if there were no billionaires in a country where people also cannot afford things such as housing, food, healthcare and basic education. With economic inequality this high, I don't think we are trying hard enough to create a more egalitarian society.
> I get your stance on the cruelty of the current system, but I want to note that in the span of human time we've had MUCH crueler systems in place.
That scaphism is more cruel than stoning as means of execution, it does not make stoning more humane.
I think you get my analogy.
> I mean that we in the sense that no known society has collapsed because of a lack of UBI (would love to be corrected here). UBI is clearly, objectively not a need
No society collapsed directly because of use of slave labor. Many actually thrived in such a system.
That should not be an argument in favor of slavery.
Just because the lack of UBI does not cause society to collapse ot does not mean that a society as inequal as ours cannot be improved.
> Yes, except that is happening at the same time that we've turned what could be a huge corner on automation of both white collar and maybe eventually blue collar work.
I don't think we turned this corner. But if we did, then perhaps it's fine we head towards extinction. With no humans there will be no inequality eh?
> we need higher taxes on businesses or automation or both.
Agreed.
> The classic refrain to the increased tax is that businesses will leave. I think that's absolute bullshit
I always say the same. If businesses leave, but the demand for goods and services in that society still exists, other businesses will occupy that space. Either existing businesses will seize that opportunity or new businesses will spawn.
> What we lack is politicians who can/want to reign in corporate power.
In no small part because our current system favors capital above all else, and excessive capital concentration allows its owners to distort institutions to their will. Excessive economic inequality is a bitch.
Note that I said excessive. I am not against some economic inequality. I think it's alright for a surgeon to have a nicer house and a better car than, say, a store clerk.
I don't think it's alright for one to have a mutiple yachts and mansions on ski resorts, while the other fights starvation.
Not that I think surgeons have multiple yachts or mansions on ski resorts. But I think you get my point.
The title is a reference to a sketch from a UK show, That Mitchell and Webb Look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h242eDB84zY
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> disengagement. That disengagement metric is valuable, I'm not gonna give it away for free anymore. I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works. > The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle". > People are feeling the manipulation They don't. Even manipulation awareness is a market now. I'm sure there are YouTub…
There's nothing an algorithm can do against disciplined, intentional engagement. If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
That's what we're seeing with Youtube for instance: your choice is to pay Youtube's price for Premium (litteraly paying to not get bullied), sit through all the ads in the world, or get three strikes after playing the ad-blocking cat and mouse game for long enough.
Of course you're still free to go somewhere else, in a world where even public guides and presentations will often be pushed on youtube only, to alleviate for the bandwidth costs on standard web services.
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Yes, IMO that's exactly what will happen, except companies that can best compete for their share of this $1000 will get a government funded revenue stream (think Amazon, Netflix, rent seeking enterprises, etc). I have not heard a convincing argument the other way, would really appreciate a link to one if you find one.
A class of people would have a larger spending power. Naturally, implementing UBI would require the entire financial sector to adjust. We would likely need to significantly raise interest rates (Which, IMHO would be great) and have a period to manage inflation. But beside the initial recalibration phase, I have not seen any convincing arguments for why prices on non-positional goods would increase. Even with the incr…
Spending power with no real alternatives (i.e. in monopoly/oligopoly conditions) isn't actually very useful IMO. It's mostly just more guaranteed money for the current monopoly/oligopoly -- you're just guaranteeing revenue streams.
In a pre-UBI world, you can at least assume that companies can't completely shaft employees because then no one can buy anything. If the government steps in to make sure people can still buy stuff, that has almost the opposite effect.
I think walmart & it's treatment of employees (with employees reportedly needing to ALSO depend on food stamps) as a perfect example of the system kind of working against itself. The fix for that problem is within our reach right now, but it's just unpopular for the usual reasons with the people with the ability to make the fix.
> Naturally, implementing UBI would require the entire financial sector to adjust. We would likely need to significantly raise interest rates (Which, IMHO would be great) and have a period to manage inflation. > > But beside the initial recalibration phase, I have not seen any convincing arguments for why prices on non-positional goods would increase. Even with the increase interest rates, we would likely see that prices on positional goods / assets would stabilize as dead-cheap capital is not available.
OK, so then how about we do this without the UBI bit and just raise interest rates? I'm not seeing where UBI actually has a material benefit here, and there are other real problems with raising interest rates, because losing access to cheap credit also hurts those at the bottom of the economy (arguably even more) -- the solution there is political, likely (i.e. lower income borrowers could somehow be advantaged, but then we have shades of 2008 all over again if excessive greed/moral hazard sets in).