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Capital Is No Longer Scarce

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Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#91

Post by yummyfajitas »

ci5er wrote: post #84
yummyfajitas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly a combination of low hanging fruit all being plucked, and also the fact that it's harder to measure smaller deltas in efficacy. I.e., if there is already a drug that cures 75% of cancers and a new drug cures 85%, a clinical trial to detect that 10% difference will require a lot more people (and cost a lot more money). Additionally cost-efficiency is not a valid reason to allow a new drug (according to the…

> if there is already a drug that cures 75% of cancers and a new drug cures 85%, a clinical trial to detect that 10% difference will require a lot more people (and cost a lot more money). That makes sense. Thank you. > Additionally cost-efficiency is not a valid reason to allow a new drug (according to the FDA), you've got to be better than the last one. Really? I did not know that. On the face of it, that seems absu…

You are correctly reading me.

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#92

Post by m1sta_ »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #41
merpnderp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism has never been about making the world a better place. All systems deal with humans and humans inevitably prefer helping out themselves and people close to them over others, which leads to corruption regardless of the system. And capitalism seems the best method for controlling innate human corruption (see China's incredible economic growth once socialism was all but abandoned for capitalism in the 80's pul…

> capitalism seems the best method for controlling innate human corruption Capitalism seems better than past failures. But it is surely a local maximum. We have thousands of years of social evolution in front of us. Experiments have hardly been exhaustive, and material conditions seem to be changing faster than ever.

Capitalism could work if greed was looked down upon. Billionaires should be taking risks. It should be culturally mandatory to try and save the world.

There's also an information problem.

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#93

Post by gherkin0 »

lintiness wrote: post #77
gherkin0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High frequency trading gets shat on frequently. It's stupid. This is only a tool that evens out price differences across geological distance. 1. That's a valuable evening out prices may be a valuable function, but one reason HFT gets shat on is because of the enormous effort put into attempts to arbirage over shorter and shorter time intervals. How does society actually benefit if the prices are equalized over a 1m…

front running is illegal, and flash boys is a book packed full of ignorance. there is no outrage over one consumer buying a house or an apple ahead of another. there's no demand for "fair" auctioning of toyota corollas. speed isn't illegal, and it's been a determining advantage in markets for eternity.

If Flash Boys is full of ignorance, perhaps you could recommend a better book?

It also sounds like the term front running refers to many different practices, this is from the Wikipedia article:

> One common practice of high-frequency traders (HFT) is a form of front running, where they peer into various exchanges and try to detect orders as they propagate from a broker's order router.

> HFT traders place many small orders that indicate buying/selling pressure. Those with the shortest lag in reaching other exchanges then place orders on those exchanges to catch the rest of the order, at a more advantageous price.[6] According to Harvard Political Review writer Austin Tymins, HFT hedge fund Citadel LLC made billions of dollars front-running the trades of large institutional investors, many of which are investing on behalf of middle-class clients.[7]

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#94

Post by cryoshon »

merpnderp wrote: post #55
cryoshon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left medical research science because it isn't survivable... the world cares nothing for curing diseases, and incentivizes people to do so as such.

Didn't Jimmy Carter just go into complete remission from what used to be a death sentence, stage 4 melanoma? It was in his brain and liver, and now it's undetectable. He's 91 years old and a decade ago he would have stood almost zero chance of recovery. I'm sorry the situation is so bad in research, but it does produce miracles.

Yep, the miracles are what draws people to the work in the first place, but they can't sustain people forever, generally. With enough lucky breaks, it's possible.

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#95

Post by badsock »

legulere wrote: post #86
amelius wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to control corruption is transparency. Eventually, IT systems will solve large-scale corruption.

Technology rarely solves social problems. It often changes society but not only in the good way and how it does is mostly unforeseeable.

It may happen rarely, but the positive impacts of things like, say, the printing press are too profound to be dismissed that easily

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#96

Post by Retric »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #90
Retric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk adjusted ROI. The bond market is the classic example, if you look at the class of bonds paying 10% vs 2%. If your risks where in line with the 10% bonds, but the payouts where inline with the 2% bonds it's a low ROI investment. Now, looking ahead you don't know what the risks are. But, you can examine the ROI for 1990 investments and you can see which 2010 investments have already failed.

Ok, fair enough, but today's Risk Adjusted ROI is quite low. And comparing returns from a couple of decades in the past with current returns seems unhelpful to me. My point is that your standard has to be for your choices of the capital today versus historical returns. So if you compute for expected value of a million dollars sitting in a bond fund today, versus sitting in a basket of startups, are the returns less i…

You can't compare things to today’s bond market, because you don't know what the risks are. It's all historical data vs. other historical data.

As to solid returns today, regulated public utilities companies have ok returns and low risks. It's not zero risks and the upside is limited, but many people consider them the benchmark for low to moderate risk investments. (Though you still need due diligence as leverage can still kill them.)

Effectively zero risk investments on the other hand have a huge price premium.

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#97

Post by merpnderp »

jazzyk wrote: post #87
merpnderp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Jimmy Carter just go into complete remission from what used to be a death sentence, stage 4 melanoma? It was in his brain and liver, and now it's undetectable. He's 91 years old and a decade ago he would have stood almost zero chance of recovery. I'm sorry the situation is so bad in research, but it does produce miracles.

I am very happy for J. Carter, he is a class act. But it is just one case. My friend, a Ph.D. with 100+ publications in cancer research told me recently there has not been much progress in the last 30 years.

The drugs that helped President Carter has a 33% success rate for people in his condition. It's only been around since 2011 and brought the survival rate up from near 0%. That's some real progress.

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#98

Post by legulere »

badsock wrote: post #95
legulere wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology rarely solves social problems. It often changes society but not only in the good way and how it does is mostly unforeseeable.

It may happen rarely, but the positive impacts of things like, say, the printing press are too profound to be dismissed that easily

The printing press was one of the main factors making the reformation possible, which later on led to the thirty year's war. So it's actually a good example of how technology has unintended consequences.

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#99

Post by vannevar »

lumberjack wrote: post #43
cryptica wrote: post #20

Misallocation is a massive problem. I think a significant amount of money is going into advertising, pointless startups, entertainment and social media. Basically, we are spending huge amounts of money getting numbed out of our minds instead of solving real fundamental problems. In general, I think it reveals a deeper problem about capitalism; none of us understand value anymore (we have more junk in our lives than w…

Exactly and then people wonder why the economy is not growing enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10686732 I think two big contributing factors are the so called "active investors" and corporate taxes. Active investors force companies to optimize for short term gain which of course hurts growth. Corporate taxes are too low. The private sector is not generating enough growth and to fix that the government doe…

Yes. Water, water, everywhere but only a handful are allowed to drink. We live in a contradictory age where more capital has accumulated than ever before (and thus can be said to be plentiful), but where it has at the same time become increasingly concentrated within a relatively small socio-economic network. Capital continues to evaporate away from the 99% to the 1%, but no longer precipitates back out.

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#100

Post by ArkyBeagle »

cryptica wrote: post #20

Misallocation is a massive problem. I think a significant amount of money is going into advertising, pointless startups, entertainment and social media. Basically, we are spending huge amounts of money getting numbed out of our minds instead of solving real fundamental problems. In general, I think it reveals a deeper problem about capitalism; none of us understand value anymore (we have more junk in our lives than w…

The number of people who Do Things That Matter is just dwindling - most people are basically seat-fillers. This is especially true of say, a Congrefsperson or other equally high-profile functionary like a CEO. Even high status professional work like medicine and law is just rubber-stamp boredom with moments of sheer terror.

Things That Matter are more or less on autopilot - see "How It's Made". So the differentiator becomes rent-seeking in nature. This makes things volatile - how is there anything like a "fundamental" to Snapchat - and this increases uncertainty. But “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - B. Pascal.

Preferences are real and we don't understand them ( in the sense of "I cannot understand myself" in Zen). But we can certainly see their aggregated effect.

and in a way, it's worse even than that - cure cancer. Now something else comes along to replace it. Maybe that's Alzheimers. Cure Alzheimer's? Something else.

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