The Refragmentation • Hacker News Board

Re: The Refragmentation

#381

Post by zanny » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

mhaymo wrote: post #345

zanny wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is also in contradiction to Grams perspective. Its insane to claim that you need to keep wealth concentration uncapped to incentivize innovation, because a supermajority of novel innovation comes from people at the bottom becoming rich, not the rich getting richer. Its important to distinguish enabling upward mobility through entrepreneurship and incentivizing that with reasonable taxes and stopping billionaire…

> a supermajority of novel innovation comes from people at the bottom becoming rich, not the rich getting richer. Citation needed? As PG points out, most startup founders are not poor. They take the risk of innovating not because they are desperate, but because they see a large upside. Reducing that upside will certainly reduce the motivation to innovate at the margins. The only question is how much does it reduce mo…

Poor is relative. We are talking about the difference between having a safety net at your parents house where they have a combined income of 300k and might have a cleaning maid every weekend versus a billionaire CEO with penthouses in four cities and his own airplane. One is middle class, the other is extremely rich.

Re: The Refragmentation

#382

Post by humanrebar » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 1:52 PM UTC

AstroChimpHam wrote: post #156

PG started off talking about the fragmentation in politics, and I wish he would have wrapped that back in at the end. It feels to me like the two party system in the US is dying now as the oligopolistic system of just a few big companies began dying in the 90s. The two party political system is more unnatural than the few-big-companies system. Libertarians and Evangelicals agree on very little yet they've been voting…

> Libertarians and Evangelicals agree on very little yet they've been voting for the same party for years.

Huh? Libertarians are liberals (small 'l') and what you call evangelicals are (for the most part) social Burkeans. The U.S. happens to have been founded, for the most part, as a liberal state, so the conservative position and the liberal position have historically been on the same side of most issues: welfare, parental rights, religious freedom, education, economic issues, and so on.

There are a few social issues that there isn't general agreement on, but those only seem to affect how libertarian voters feel for an election or two. After some statist behavior actually happens (healthcare reform, the Kelo decision, government surveillance, etc.), libertarians start to realize that conservatives align much better with their goals. At least, they're the lesser of two evils.

I think the problem here is that most people don't actually listen to other opinions on things. Since there is a lack of diversity in mainstream opinion shows, certain positions (libertarian, evangelical, etc.) tend to be only described in caricature. When evangelicals and libertarians start to talk about politics, there's actually a lot of agreement on big issues. Even when they disagree on the ends, they generally agree on the means (big changes should happen with a Constitutional amendment).

Re: The Refragmentation

#383

Post by h2077545 » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 1:55 PM UTC

> The effects of World War II were both economic and social. Economically, it decreased variation in income. Like all modern armed forces, America's were socialist economically. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. More or less. Higher ranking members of the military got more (as higher ranking members of socialist societies always do), but what they got was fixed according to their rank. And the flattening effect wasn't limited to those under arms, because the US economy was conscripted too. Between 1942 and 1945 all wages were set by the National War Labor Board. Like the military, they defaulted to flatness. And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive that its effects could still be seen years after the war ended. [1]

Just another article by a hypocrite capitalist talking about "socialism" without a clue.

Re: The Refragmentation

#384

Post by dangerlibrary » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

ghufran_syed wrote: post #304

zanny wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that only happens because automation and globalization are barely harming the US. And its not like the oligopoly is not trying - why are there so many appeals for more H1Bs? If you need skilled workers and the varying skill of a worker produces magnitudes of difference in wealth created of course you need to both be huge enough to afford them and centralized enough to take advantage of them. The article itself se…

How do you know the race and sex distribution of hacker news users? Or are you just assuming they are like you? (or unlike you? I have no way of knowing what group you might identify with)

There have been a number of informal polls over the years. Here's a link to an aggregation thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397332

Re: The Refragmentation

#385

Post by zanny » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

three14 wrote: post #341

zanny wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining is becoming heavily automated. The work of a dozen men even twenty years ago can now often be done by two with a good computer model. We are pushing very hard for computer vision, which is the real barrier to practical robotics that could replace your electrician, plumber, nurse, miner, driver, etc. There is no sacred cow of labor besides what is mandated by the molasses slow state (because I would absolutely…

Pressure, yes, but I want numbers - what percentage of jobs have disappeared over, say, the past 20 years, and could increased demand realistically replace those jobs in other sectors? You can't simply say "manual labor is over, because... singularity." There's no singularity yet. Until then, you need data before you can really extrapolate from current trends. The easiest things to automate are already automated, and…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/middle-class-jobs-m...

http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking-aw...

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/smart-machines-job-...

Most relevantly to this direct topic:

http://fortune.com/2015/02/25/5-jobs-that-robots-already-are...

Like I said, there are demonstrable mechanisms, and in-lab and even in-market examples of how these technologies are going to replace almost all these jobs. This is not science fiction. This is market adoption at this point. And we are not at the start of the process, we are in the middle of it.

Re: The Refragmentation

#386

Post by wcummings » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 2:34 PM UTC

three14 wrote: post #124

One taboo on HN is pointing out that even though software is a huge lever, there's no sign of the end of raw human labor. In every industry you can point to jobs being lost to automation, yet you still need many, many people in health care, or construction, or manufacturing, or police, or teaching, or mining, or working for utilities, etc. It's complete speculation to suggest that jobs are disappearing faster than th…

>One taboo on HN is pointing out that even though software is a huge lever, there's no sign of the end of raw human labor.

I think people in technologist circles tend overstate the effects of automation and understate the effects of global labor arbitrage (aided by telecommunications).

Re: The Refragmentation

#387

Post by be21 » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 2:45 PM UTC

not even wrong :)

Re: The Refragmentation

#388

Post by cushychicken » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 2:54 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #169

gotchange wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the specific part in question: " People did start their own businesses of course, but educated people rarely did, because in those days there was practically zero concept of starting what we now call a startup: a business that starts small and grows big. That was much harder to do in the mid 20th century. Starting one's own business meant starting a business that would start small and stay small."

> Starting one's own business meant starting a business that would start small and stay small. And what's wrong with that? Besides it being false of course. If anything it's more sustainable and more productive (as these business MAKE something, don't just eat VC dollars or at best sell ads) than today's "startups" model, which is based mostly on a speculative bubble + ad money. All the thousands of major companies,…

>And what's wrong with that?

I think pg would likely answer "Nothing". Whenever he brings up that sort of entrepreneurship, it's generally to showcase the rarity and timescale with which these small businesses (IBM, Boeing, GE) got huge in a time before the internet.

I'd agree that the Internet hasn't made big businesses get any more substantive, but it has allowed them to get bigger faster.

Re: The Refragmentation

#389

Post by yxhuvud » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:09 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #138

zackmorris wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and will ride your coattails for a moment by pointing out that if economics is darwinian, then a possible way out of this situation might be human planning. It doesn't have to be central, it can be a way of living that amplifies the changes you'd like to see in the world. So for example, say a person acquires a certain amount of wealth and wants to make his or her home solar…

"if economics is darwinian" How can economics be Darwinian? The outcome of economic interactions is not a zero sum, whereas a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction. The antelope gets nothing out of it. As a point of contrast, if you buy a car from Toyota, you have not harmed Toyota, nor has Toyota harmed you (hopefully). It is theoretically possible, when humans engage in trade, for…

The only way Darwinism can be considered zero sum is from a energy perspective - there is no beating the laws of entropy. That perspective is not very useful in the context though, as the darwinian perspective fueled the growth from singular cells living off energy from geotermal vents in the sea to photosynthesis to plants and animals living above ground. This has greatly expanded the amount of resources in the ecosystems and the abilities to use accessible resources.

Re: The Refragmentation

#390

Post by bawana » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:33 PM UTC

vzcx wrote: post #102

bawana wrote: post #73

Refragmentation is the result of the fungibility of money. When we wanted to make things (stuff people could use to make war or make a better life) money was spent to make those things. Like the water cycle, money would be transformed from one phase into another so that work could be accomplished that directly impacted humanity. But we have short circuited that cycle. Now money is being used directly to make more mon…

Bold claims. Forgive me for saying so, but your knowledge of finance does not strike me as particularly deep! Do you not think that use of financial instruments is vital for allocating resources in a world of imperfect information? For me, their utility and necessity is obvious. If you think about it, making stuff that people want is actually rather complicated. The world is rife with hazards and risk; the intricate…

@vzcx That is like claiming that the world is better off with heroin. The discovery and manufacture of that drug were a chemical curiosity. Unfortunately, it short circuits the pleasure receptors and people develop all sorts of maladaptive behaviors just to obtain more of that drug. Their behaviors are maladaptive because they are focussed on ONLY obtaining the drug. That drug is no longer useful medically but it continues to be a significant market all on its own. The traditional way of stimulating the pleasure receptors of the brain (which involves work of some kind and usually involves other people and thus imbues those 'other people' with value) is bypassed.

In like fashion, the volume of currency trading has diverted massive amounts of a resource (money) simply into making more money. Those 'priests' managing this activity reward themselves with a trivial fraction (slice off the top) but the amounts are so gargantuan, that these few people become an unattainable anomaly that the 'rest of us' gawk at, and many 'have nots' envy with despair. This inequality is the side effect that people are looking at and writing about, but it is not the real failing of our system. The fundamental flaw is the colossal hoarding of resources (that could otherwise be put to 'good' use - investment in stuff that people need to make and use).

In addition, the measurement and observation of this hoard of money is distorting our perception. When we talk about productivity and GDP, our numbers look passable because we only talk about the dollar amounts. Increasingly, the production and measurement of value is reflecting the 'effort' and 'success' of money multiplying itself. Yet unemployment, average wage, and educational achievement for the 'average American' are falling dismally. How can it be that wages for teachers are so low? How can it be that tuitions are so high? Simple observations like these are the song of Nero heard while Rome burned.