I did a lot of work in unassisted vim when I was in university, and I would say the answer is twofold:
- you become a proficient user of tabs in whatever IDE or text editor or window manager you use. you open up header files (or collapsed source files, depending on the language/IDE) and reference the API you use.
- you get better at naming things. You don't need to guess the name of any specific API, because it makes sense within the context of your codebase. I believe this makes you a better programmer.
On the contrary, this is the most important part of the thesis. They are arguing not only that this AI was vulnerable to this specific attack, but that any AI model is vulnerable to attack vectors that the original builders cannot predict or preemptively guard against. if you say "well, a superintelligence won't be vulnerable" you are putting your faith in magic.
This is absolutely wild. In a just society this would be illegal. Why are we just hearing about this now? this is the most rot economy, rent-seeking behaviour imaginable.
PayPal has deep pockets, making it an ideal civil suit target. There are also 50 state AGs who might be interested in pursuing due to this potentially fraudulent activity.
Exactly this. The people in power have been nakedly cutting taxes and cutting expenditures in the regulatory state. This is the obvious, foreseeable result, and we cannot let politicians pretend these things will fix themselves thru magic.
Comments like this are what happen when you are more attached to a narrative that supports your worldview than truth. FDA spending has gone up every year for the last 30 years, growing from under a billion to over 6 billion.
I just want to add that the main issue with retaining inspectors is the amount of travel leading to unfavorable work-life balance. Most people do not want to travel 75% of their working time. I imagine the number of people wanting to travel to or relocate to India and China is smaller than those willing to travel or relocate domestically. Then you need qualified people interested in this domain. I image the pool of ideal candidates is extremely small. Recent vacancies are about 10-15%.
What are the statics for workload over that period? Facilities monitored and locations? Drug submissions, volumes, complication of submissions now verses 30 years ago, etc?
> FDA spending has gone up every year for the last 30 years, growing from under a billion to over 6 billion.
doesn't seem like it based on the FDA Fact Sheets. where are you seeing the annual increases?
"The FY 2025 Budget provides a $7.2 billion total program funding level for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This includes an overall increase of 7.4 percent or $495 million over the FY 2023 funding level" [1]
"The FY 2024 budget provides a $7.2 billion total program level for FDA. " [2]
"The FY 2023 budget provides an $8.4 billion total program level for FDA." [3]
Regulation is necessary to a free market. Otherwise powerful forces in the market will make it non-free for everyone else or make it non-free for honest business by forcing them to do illicit things to be competitive.
If you want to put your local beekeeper out of the business of selling honey, then by all means, complain about an inadequate regulatory state. Because that's who the bureaucrats will go after.
Regulation can ensure that businesses doing things right can actually complete. How the hell is my local beekeeper supposed to compete against people selling jars of corn syrup?
> Regulation can ensure that businesses doing things right can actually complete
Regulation adds fixed costs. That always increases barriers to entry.
The aim is to make that barrier worth it. (You can also directly mitigate it, but this is less common.) But in the cases of food and medicine, regulation has absolutely forced consolidation. The pitch from Big Pharma and Big Ag when buying out biotech and food start-ups (or small producers) is they've mastered the global compliance network, and can thus scale and thus outcompete small producers.
What it does seem we need is liability by large distributors around selling fraudulent products. That still adds a barrier to entry, since those distributors will have a testing programme. But at least you get multiple programs that have an incentive to reduce costs.
Word of mouth. Not the best option, but it's balanced against the cost of regulation. The cost of complying with regulation (not changes in the product, but proving you comply) can destroy any hope of profit from a smaller business; but the cost doesn't increase at the same rate as business size, so the big businesses have no issue.
Regulations are important, but they have a distinct cost.
What Buraeucrats are actually administering for anyone wondering:
Insurance Programs
Market-based risk management tools to strengthen the economic stability of agricultural
producers and rural communities.
Apiculture
Rainfall Index
The Apiculture Pilot Insurance Program (RI-API) provides a safety net for beekeepers’ primary
income sources – honey, pollen collection, wax, and breeding stock. Beekeepers can purchase
RI-API through a crop insurance agent that works for an Approved Insurance Provider.
Whole-Farm
Revenue Protection
Whole-Farm Revenue Protection provides a risk management safety net for all commodities,
including honey, on the farm under one insurance policy. This insurance plan is tailored for
any farm with up to $8.5 million in insured revenue.
Micro Farm
Program
A new insurance option for small, diverse farms that sell locally. The policy offers revenue
guarantees for beekeepers producing honey, bees, queens, and other products of the hive
when facing unavoidable adverse events, such as drought and other weather-related events.
It also simplifies recordkeeping and covers post-production costs and value-added products,
such as bottled honey, to make crop insurance more useful to smaller beekeepers and
agricultural producers.
Disaster Assistance Programs
Offers disaster assistance programs in instances where beekeepers have been hit hard
by natural disaster events.
Emergency Livestock
Assistance Program
The Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honey Bees, and Farm-Raised Fish program provides
financial assistance to eligible honey bee producers for eligible adverse weather events and
losses. Drought is not an eligible cause of loss for honey bee colony losses.
Noninsured Crop
Disaster Assistance
Program (NAP)
Eligible beekeepers can quality for NAP financial assistance when losses incurred by natural
disasters are not covered by other disaster assistance programs.
Loan Programs
USDA offers a variety of direct and guaranteed loan programs for eligible beekeepers.
See guide for more information.
Farm Loan
Program (FLP)
Beekeepers whose primary business is honey production, qualify as a family farm, and
demonstrate security and eligibility can be considered for FLP guaranteed loans, which can
assist in building overwintering colony storage facilities.
Farm Storage
Facility Loan Program
This program provides low-interest financing so producers can build or upgrade facilities to
store commodities, including honey.
Microloan
Programs
Operating and ownership loans to better serve the unique financial operating needs of new,
niche, and small to mid-sized family operations.
Emergency
Loan Program
Emergency loans to help beekeepers recover from production and physical losses due
to drought, flooding, other natural disasters, or quarantine.
Beginning Farmers
and Ranchers Loans Direct and guaranteed loan programs, ownership loans, operating loans, and microloan
programs for beginning farmers and ranchers, including beekeepers.
Nonresource
Marketing
Assistance Loans –
Honey Program
Marketing assistance loans provide interim financing at harvest time to help beekeepers
meet cash flow needs without having to sell their commodities when market prices are
typically at harvest-time lows.
Grants
Local Agriculture
Market Program
(LAMP)
Multiple grants and programs are available through LAMP to support development,
coordination, and expansion of direct producer-to-consumer marketing; local and regional
food markets and enterprises; and value-added agricultural products.
Small Business
Innovation Research
(SBIR) Program
This program is open to small businesses that support the bee keeping industry in technology
development and transfer.
Sustainable
Agriculture, Research,
and Education (SARE)
Program
Producers and professionals in the beekeeping industry may apply for competitive funding
available through this program.
Diagnostic Testing
Bee Disease
Diagnosis Service
A free USDA beekeeper service to identify diseases, pests, and foulbrood resistance.
A friend of mine in university 10+ years ago wrote a simple utility to feed web request data bytestreams directly to audio output, essentially creating static noise when webpages were doing things. He said it led him to some interesting discoveries.
I know there are large multiplayer shooters that have or are going to be moving off of Linux soon. Anecdotally, the percentage of linux users running cheat software is significant, north of 50% in some cases.
Ultimately, I sympathize with game developers trying to create a good, _consistent_ experience for players across multiplayer titles. The reason players accept anticheat software in large mp games is because the alternative is worse.
I think I saw on HN a while ago someone suggesting that Valve could make a "clean kernel" build that anti cheats could whitelist for Linux/Proton games.
The plan to control what a persistent cheater does to their own device is more than 5 decades of straight failures.
Just one more client anti-cheat measure bro. Just one ring lower bro.
I'm not sure what I find more terrifying: the persistence of the NSA & Disney lobby for subverting root control in all devices, or that so many people mindlessly agree its the right direction to go and their world will be a better place for it.
The takeaway that "content" can be the hard part in making a game is why I think its so important to make games with teams. There are some folks out there who will produce art the way an engineer produces code; all they need is to be empowered.
The best games are developed as a technical-artistic partnership, with both sides pushing and enabling the other.
The author discusses some of these points. One excerpt:
> But even at a much more mundane level there’s a certain crucial relationship between space and time for observers like us. The key point is that observers like us tend to “parse” the world into a sequence of “states of space” at successive “moments in time”. But the fact that we do this depends on some quite specific features of us, and in particular our effective physical scale in space as compared to time.
> In our everyday life we’re typically looking at scenes involving objects that are perhaps tens of meters away from us. And given the speed of light that means photons from these objects get to us in less than a microsecond. But it takes our brains milliseconds to register what we’ve seen. And this disparity of timescales is what leads us to view the world as consisting of a sequence of states of space at successive moments in time.
> If our brains “ran” a million times faster (i.e. at the speed of digital electronics) we’d perceive photons arriving from different parts of a scene at different times, and we’d presumably no longer view the world in terms of overall states of space existing at successive times.
> The same kind of thing would happen if we kept the speed of our brains the same, but dealt with scenes of a much larger scale (as we already do in dealing with spacecraft, astronomy, etc.).
This still misses the biggest question about the nature of time. The problem is not that we perceive the world as a set of space-like frames. The problem is why our consciousness perceives the frames moving from one to another at all and in particular direction.
This does not explain the flow of time nor the direction of how consciousness perceives it. A low entropy is just a low probability state. Such state in the past is just as unlikely as in future as physical models are time-reversible.
Moreover, there is no evolution in physical models. The universe is just 4-dimensional thing. Surely time in physics is different from space as we can predict across time based on on the condition in 3-d space-like surface, while if one make a slice in the 4-d universe with 2 space dimensions and one time-dimension, predicting across the remaining space dimension is impossible.
But that does not explain why our perception flows from one space-like slice to another and in particular direction. Surely some of the slices are less common (low entropy) then others (high entropy), but there is no movement or evolution.
A good analogy is a rod with a color gradient from white on one end and black on another with white turning into black quickly so most of the rod is black. We can arbitrary call the white side first and even say that the color evolves from white to black. Then as the white side is a low probability as a randomly selected slice of the rod will be black, we can even say that the color evolves from a low probability to high probability stare. But this is arbitrary as in reality color does not evolve and there is just the single colored rod.
The article highlights that it’s not actually that hard for the ultra-wealthy to avoid a massive estate tax bill through proper tax planning and investment strategies. What’s striking here is that this individual wasn’t even the richest person to ever die, yet he paid the largest estate tax in history, likely by choice.
There is an element of competitiveness there. Some rich want to be known as rich and so they can brag about paying the most taxes that in turns implies they have the most money. Others want to be quieter about their wealth and so don't want you to know they have it and wouldn't tell you how much taxes they pay.
If he were doing it competitively, I don't understand the strategy. His name was leaked, not announced, and since he is dead he cannot feel like he won the competition.
Sometimes rich could not find a way out of paying a large tax, so instead they pull at least some good from their bad situation, and make it a PR.
And it's a good thing that government is strong enough to be able to collect large taxes. Contrary to popular opinion, rich people are mostly OK paying large taxes, but only as long as all other rich pay their share as well. The grudges they hold are only about unfairness, not about amounts.
Interestingly a lot of the larger philanthropic organizations are just as administration heavy as the US government and suffer from the same mission creep and the same obfuscated, bureaucratic decision making process, etc. Not to mention the leadership is often richly compensated (i.e. $1M in salary) and non-elected.
In fact we should probably celebrate gifts to the US government more than we do.
> we should probably celebrate gifts to the US government more than we do.
I had the idea that we should put a donation box on tax forms. The 100 top donators get on the “US 100” list (like Forbes) but it’s based ONLY on how much you donate, not how much you claim to be worth.
It’s one thing to claim to be rich to a Forbes reporter, it’s another to have the (tax) receipts to back it up.
reminds me of the way dubai auctions off the 3 digit car license plates, then hotels do things like only letting low number license plates park out front
Brilliant move, then use the money to support those that are less well off. You can have the ultra-rich bragging about how much they paid, while those that need it most are benefitting. A real win-win.
yep, iirc on the huberman podcast on testosterone it even said that the competition that's decided by society has an impact on t-levels. societies that make prosocial / win-win games for men obv end up better off
Most tremendously wealthy people don’t want to be known for being tremendously wealthy. Unless being known for being tremendously wealthy is a part of your wealth accumulating strategy, the attention it brings is almost entirely negative. Being tremendously wealthy without millions of people constantly chirping about clawing as much of it away from you as possible, or demanding an explanation from you every time you wipe your ass is a far better outcome, and most people who are savvy enough to become billionaires are savvy enough to figure that out pretty quickly.
Only the ones at the top of the list would be interested in donating and keep donating. If a rich person calculates that he could only reach the 57th place by donating a large part of his money, then he would have no incentive to donate. 57th place means nothing.
The key though is that you don't know how much everyone else puts in. There's a psychological effect of seeing the amount and saying "That's it? I can do better than that." It's basically a silent auction.
> 57th place means nothing.
It means you're on the board and got one higher than 56th place. I'm a top 50 rails contributor, that means something to me and to others.
It's kinda like F1. Some teams are racing for the constructors championship. Some teams are racing for the midfield. All of them are racing for even a single point and to stay in the game.
Billionaires flaunt their wealth via yachts, mansions, space rockets and super-PACs. Which to me seems way more fun than getting your name on a tax list…
I think it's a great idea. It would generate good press for the donors and some billionaires care a lot about that. Guys like Buffett would do it. It's basically free money for the government.
That's not flaunting it; that's just buying things you like because you have the money. Flaunting would definitely be getting your name on a list that you don't need to be on.
Taxes are not and never will be because no two people have the same priorities. Even if my favorite charity is only 10% as efficient as the government in doing what I want, a donation to that charity does what the charity does. A donation to the government goes to military, welfare (social security, medicare...), roads, scientific research, and a long long list. If I want to put extra money into say Lymphoma research $10,000 to a really bad lymphoma charity will get $3000 to research (finding a lymphoma research charity that bad is left as an exercise for the reader - the ones I'm aware of are considerably better). The same $10000 to the government will add nothing to lymphoma research since the share of the budget going to that is a rounding error.
Most of the right wing who is against taxes still agree to pay taxes on something. They disagree what taxes should go for and how much, but they generally agree some are needed.
Society is about the compromise. However that compromise makes nobody happy.
100% this. This reminds me of what my SO says: if you have to work, you are not in the upper class. I don't think I agree with this statement fully (I personally think that top decile by income is already upper class), but I feel like I'm becoming more open to re-evaluating my opinion...
Most upper class work. They work different jobs, but they are generally not sitting around retired. They might or might not get a paycheck, but they are working. (if you own a restaurant you will probably pay yourself minimum wage when you do work - dishwashers start at double that - talk to your accountant but this is often the best legal way to handle your hours that are trackable) Steve Job's was famous for taking a salary of $1/year - he clearly was working and upper class.
Most middle class don't have to work either - they are just not willing to accept the lifestyle that forces. Even poor people could find enough savings by 30 to not work if they really want to live that lifestyle. (I don't blame anyone for not wanting to live like that)
> they are just not willing to accept the lifestyle that forces
Jeez the pedantry around here.
Let me spell it out: Upper class people don't have to work to maintain their existing lifestyle. Steve Jobs could have continued wearing black turtlenecks and paying fines for parking his Mercedes in handicapped spots for the rest of his life, without doing a lick of work. That he didn't is a credit to his work ethic and passion for the work.
Out of curiosity, how much money do you think is needed to survive ~55 years ("savings by 30" + life expectancy around 85ish = 55yrs) without working? Also, please spell out biggest assumptions you're making.
Eat rice and beans $50/month. Live in a $200 tent with a warm sleeping bag replace every 10 years. every year you get $100 for clothing at goodwill (walmart for underware) No other possessions. don't get sick as you don't have health care, but you should on average live to 70 or so [5-10 years less than average with health care], assuming you are not unlucky. so about $70/ month.
I wouldn't want to live like that and I wouldn't wish it on even the most undeserable (life without parole prisoneers). you could do it. Some do it for a month or two in college as they see the world - but they go back to a more normal life and just fondly tell stories.
You may want to revise the life expectancy estimate on a rice+beans diet, scurvy is a thing and based on my googling you would not get enough vit. C. I'm probably missing some other disease too, so "don't get sick" is probably also out the window on this diet.
One can of beans is ~400kcal and costs ~$1.30+tax in my closest QFC, so you need around $4 per day just for beans (3 cans). 5lb bag of rice (50 servings, 160kcal per serving) is $5.50, & you need 5 servings per day to reach 2000kcal, so +55¢. That's $135/mo just for rice and beans, and I have not checked if that satisfies daily protein intake needs.
Where will you set up your tent without getting arrested? Needs to be walkable from a Goodwill, otherwise you need transport once a year. How are you cooking the rice? Where are you getting the potable water from?
Decent sleeping bag is another $100.
Even your unserious response is underestimating the amount of money required.
Not if you have to pay to set up your tent legally, which you conveniently forgot to respond to. The only place I found so far that is free is BLM dispersed camping, but they allow only 14 consecutive days in 28 day period, and those places are far from civilization, so buying those beans is going to be a challenge.
Sorry, but with such an outrageously low estimate (US poverty line is $15k a year), you have to put in a bit more effort and show some receipts.
Mostly because of a very successful propaganda campaign by people who sought to loot the post-war economic boom
Generally speaking, the sad truth of a complex economy is that coordination is hard, and there's usually a short-term privatized gain to be had by someone willing to poison the future and the commons. No amount of benefit to humanity overall or even the specific society such a person lives in will convince a person who simply doesn't care about anyone else. Fortunately for humanity, a very small minority of people actually operate like that. Unfortunately for humanity, some of them have managed to accumulate a lot of power
I always wondered if there was a way to effectively "burn" one's entire wealth, creating a small deflationary event that would increase the value of existing dollars. How could one do this? Donate to the Federal Reserve? Or would you literally have to cash everything out and burn it?
According to my understanding, burning US dollar bills, donating to the Fed (if such a thing is possible) and donating to the Treasury are approximately equivalent in their effects.
What puts a lid on how much money the Fed creates is the desire to keep inflation to reasonable levels, preferably 2% per year. Your burning your cash allows the Fed to create more while adhering to their inflation target. Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that although the Fed decides how much money is created, the Fed is not allowed to keep or to spend newly-created money, but rather must give it to the Treasury (perhaps through some complicated or non-obvious mechanism) which makes it available for the government to spend.
In fact, dragons are important stabilizing influences in dungeon economics. The hoard of gold isn't inflationary until the adventurers liberate it and start buying wands and stuff.
Reminds me of something I read years ago about how Ultima Online would create "gold sinks", super expensive items that served no purpose other than help remove gold from the economy and prevent inflation.
This is a problem with all kinds of virtual world economies. Players accumulate so much gold that some substitute becomes more useful. Diablo II had the Stone of Jordan, for example.
Couldn't you just not spend or invest the money? I think putting it in a chest and burying it in an unmarked location would be equivalent to burning it.
That does not feel like burning the money, more like propping up the private sector (naively, government's deficit is going to be private sector's surplus if you don't actually reduce the amount of money in circulation).
How does that burn the money? If the government is spending the money, it's going to federal employees and purchasing good and services from the general economy.
If the taxed dollars ended up with say hurricane victims or other struggling Americans, those dollars would chase goods and services domestically driving up the price of those goods.
Now consider if instead you helped fund Israels socialized medicine program or paid off some of Ukraines debt or paid interest to Chinese creditors. Those dollars wouldn't have much effect when it comes to increasing the price of eggs in the US as they are being spent far away in another economy.
A similar effect could occur if the money ended with the wealthy folks, say wealthy owners of private defence contracting firms, as those dollars might chase building a super yacht (inadvertently employing some people but also consuming foreign made materials and labor) instead of trying to rent an apartment in Iowa. Less dollars chasing Iowa apartments, considering supply and demand, lower prices, lower CPI.
Take dollars from the middle class who will drive up the cost of the American dream and instead give them to people who will drive up the price of luxury goods.
It's never explained this clearly beacuse people would riot, but with this framework the choices of government in the last few decades or so suddenly makes more sense.
I'm yet to meet anyone that actually understands MMT and doesn't endorse it. You might be the first, but I doubt it. Which bit of MMT do you have trouble with?
"implemented"? What does that mean? MMT accurately describes the monetary operations and fiscal constraints of a sovereign government (i.e. with their own currency) and from which you can predict outcomes with a high degree of reliability.
Insomuch as "implemented" means using the policy prescriptions (specifically, the job guarantee), there are no countries doing that, but various real world experiments have touched on it.
Japan had done things differently (albeit from a different perspective of mainstream economics) and is a good test case for the MMT model, especially given how many bet against the yen (and lose), implying the mainstream models are struggling there.
I said the political will does not exist (in several different ways) now you say:
> Insomuch as "implemented" means using the policy prescriptions (specifically, the job guarantee), there are no countries doing that, but various real world experiments have touched on it.
Something that you can't implement, doesn't work. In practice MMT is a smokescreen for politicians to print money for their friends.
The point is, you don't "implement" MMT. It's a useful framework for analysis regardless of what policies you choose. If we could get to the point of discussing monetary and fiscal operations from a sound basis, then we can start debating policies, but we're so far from that at the moment.
I'd argue a less correct framework that you could actually sell to voters and politicians would be more successful by the virtue of its policy actually being implemented (not just the fun bits).
I can find you far more people who wish to abolish the fed and return to the gold standard than people who are willing to have the levels of taxation required to limit the inflation caused by funding the government with unsound money.
MMT's advocates policies would work if it wasn't for that pesky democracy and realities around campaign finance.
It helps to conceptualize the circuit of money as it flows from government(G) to the private sector(P) back to the government as G-P-G. The outlays(G-P) and receipts(P-G) can both be increased or decreased to affect aggregate demand. MMT's view is that inflation can be a result of aggregate demand outstripping economic capacity, though not the only one. Supply-side constraints, resource shortages, or structural bottlenecks can also lead to inflation.
MMT emphasizes that taxation (P-G) is not necessary to "fund" government spending. Instead, taxation primarily serves to control inflation and create a demand for the currency. Taxation creates a value for the currency since taxes are payable only in the government's currency.
When we hold the P-G-P view of government spending, we assume it operates like a household - that a government has to collect taxes before spending and this is viewed by MMTheorists as an antiquated perspective. The misconceptions of "The government as a household" were based on the gold standard or fixed exchange rate systems, which since 1971 no longer apply.
Please everyone read this comment. Any disagreements should come with relevant references showing how it's wrong.
An additional point to add is the mechanism by which taxation controls inflation. Tax serves to suppress demand in the private sector, freeing up resources that can then be bought at non-inflated prices. This is why super wealthy people are irrelevant to a sovereign government's ability to spend; their marginal propensity to consume is too low to be seriously impacted by normal levels of taxation. It's also why tax has to be broad base to be useful.
> MMT alone may not provide sufficient guidance on how to adjust outlays and receipts to manage employment and inflation.
The primary policy prescription of MMT is the job guarantee, which explicitly addresses the question of how to manage employment and inflation. The job guarantee defines the value of the currency, with other spend floating relative to that, whilst simultaneously providing full employment. In any case, the current model is pretty broken in which fiddling with interest rates is assumed to have a direct casual link to both (and depressingly in opposite directions).
> MMT may not be politically feasible. Politicians may not be navigate politically unpopular but economical necessary.
Insomuch as descriptive MMT is what happens in most sovereign currency areas, this is just a problem of communication. You are right that getting the politics correct is both hard and important. I'm not sure the policies will in aggregate be very unpopular though once a non-made-up description of what limits spending is understood better by the population.
> MMT may be domestically sound, but challenging to implement regarding international trade. It may result in devaluing compared to other currencies.
A floating exchange rate is a feature not a bug. Current attempts to maintain a soft peg are deeply damaging domestically for many countries. In any case, countries that are confident in their monetary and fiscal policies and that have a sound economy seem to be more robust than those that try to maintain a soft peg (see Japan).
> MMT may suggest that interest rates can be kept low indefinitely. It's unclear if this would result in excessive risk taking.
Excessive risk taking needs dealing with at the political level with actual laws and regulations. Interest rate policy is a crap tool to deal with such problems.
> MMT may not be applicable to developing economies.
Why not? It explains what their actual constraints are and the risks of taking on foreign debt or pursuing an export led growth strategy etc.
> MMT may work in the short term to manage employment and demand but fail to cultivate long term economic development.
I'm not sure what this has to do with MMT. The post war period with much higher employment and stronger government intervention had much higher growth than the following monetarist/neoliberal era, so perhaps the status quo is the problematic position.
> MMT's implication as having a larger governmental impact on investment may crowd out private sector investment.
Again, the historical evidence shows when governments stop spending, private investment collapses.
> MMT if implemented could be constrained by international investors. If international investors dislike a policy, it may have domestic implications.
What domestic implications? If you're thinking about direct foreign investment, this is problematic in its own right. It might increase domestic employment and potentially increase local skills, but it is also extractive and drains the nations' equity. This possibly has stronger implications for low income nations that don't have a good education base and well developed industries, but MMT at least makes clear where the trade-offs lie.
> MMT depends on having a government effective enough to implement it. If a government is too dysfunctional, MMT may fail in practice.
True, but then so do all political systems. MMT "failing" is also a strange concept given MMT describes the system since the fall of Bretton Woods. What's remarkable is how stable (notwithstanding the obvious "shocks") the system has been despite most governments operating as though they were still inside the Bretton Woods system.
Government spending being deflationary is not a claim MMT makes.
> and putting it towards (wasteful) government programs to "burn it" in a sense.
This claim isn't congruent with the idea of MMT.
One way to look at MMT is asking, does our government have to operate like it has a checking account, or can our economy act like an MMORPG economy?
For example, Blizzard has no obligation to collect coin before distributing coin. Blizzard thinks in terms of coin sources and coin sinks and adjusts source and sink policy in response to aggregate demand and player engagement goals.
Friedman was a charlatan and monetarism was trivially debunked when he came up with it. The 60 years since have not been any more kind to it. Don't confuse stocks with flows. The whole idea of money supply as a useful metric needs to be put to bed; one would have thought the 13 years post GFC would have made that apparent.
(Of course, the Austrians have a peculiar notion that inflation can by definition only be considered as such if it's associated with increased money supply. Another reason to ignore them completely)
Between 2008 and 2020 M2 pretty much doubled and prices barely moved anywhere. This was intentional policy for the purpose of increasing inflation which stayed doggedly around zero. What does this tell us? Pretty much nothing because money supply is a useless measure.
What would happen if we halved it? Dunno, but to achieve that, stuff has to happen, and depending on that stuff, you might get price changes. I expect if the gov engaged in QT to achieve it, very little would happen.
And yet the price of a cabbage stayed exactly the same. Oh, we also had close to zero interest rates, might that have something to do with peoples' appetite for higher mortgages and shares over bonds?
But that doesn't suggest that the critical variable is money supply. It just suggests there's a correlation. There are plenty of ways of increasing the money supply that does nothing at all. Pursuade the fed to give me a trillion trillion dollars and I'll show you by not spending it (though I might spend a few mil for keeping it safe, but that's not going to do much).
The point is that lots of monetary operations are consumption neutral, including buying bonds. The only thing that actually matters from a price perspective is when a real resource gets consumed. People having more money can push the price of real goods up for sure, but the marginal propensity to consume by individuals goes down with higher relative wealth.
There's another very important effect which is the spending on things that matter induces taxation (employment taxes to deliver the thing, sales taxes etc). This is a geometric series reducing the money supply on every transaction of real goods. What matters is the flow, not the stock.
Why is that obscene? Presumably the person created something very valuable to the world. Sure there are zero-sum ways to generate wealth (e.g. suing people, theft, front running trades) but generally that kind of wealth comes from actually generating something that people value.
The word “Presumably” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. That Econ101 justification is harder and harder to keep up as you learn more about both economics and the real world.
For detailed counter arguments, see Branko Milanović Global inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, James Kwak Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality, Walt Bogdanich & Michael Forsythe When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm, and many other books.
Damn, that guy is citing sources, must mean he's wrong and there is no need for you to examine any of the vibes-based assumptions you are making about the real world then.
He's not "citing sources." He's outsourcing his argument to textbooks. The point stands: if you want to refute an argument, do so yourself, possibly with reference to corroborating sources. Don't just say "you're wrong. Go read this stuff to figure out why" -- that's no way to have a discussion.
The GP never said they were wrong because they gave sources, they said they didn't give any rebuttal at all and instead only cited sources that presumably contained a rebuttal. If they said "such and such author did a survey that found that only 5% of money held by rich people got to them via productive pursuits", that would be one thing, but they just said "such and such author says you're wrong"
The point is, there’s no way to evaluate if this commenter is wrong, since nobody is going to read 7 books to verify the validity of an internet comment.
It’s a classic logical fallacy; appeal to authority. There is no reason to believe any of these writers have a better understanding of how the world works than any other “authority” of the past like Karl Marx.
Just because someone says something in a book doesn’t make it true.
> Presumably the person created something very valuable to the world
Or they are a rent-seeker, or a straight-up thief that sucked a lot of value out of the world. (Or one of their ancestors did, etc, etc.)
Or they robbed Peter to create value for Paul, and took a share of the difference.
These are all tried and true mechanisms for wealth generation. Without any information, you shouldn't assume that their contributions were net-positive.
The article says that he made it by stock trading. It is, at best, difficult to articulate how that could be creating value rather than capturing it. Many of the world's billionaires made their money that way.
Doing something positive-sum is a way to become a billionaire, but many people are very handsomely paid to ensure that their clients are on the good side of zero-sum transactions.
Taking money away from mismanaged companies, and giving it to well-managed ones, is a net positive of stock trading. Another net positive of stock trading is making buyers and sellers available all day, for anything on the market. Yet another benefit of stock trading is to make it more difficult to manipulate the market - there's a reason why pump and dump scams only occur with assets that see very little attention (i.e. are low-volume).
> Taking money away from mismanaged companies, and giving it to well-managed ones, is a net positive of stock trading.
Where "well-managed" means "good at delivering money to its shareholders", which is at best obliquely related to a positive impact on the world. (Also, I'm skeptical that the stock price in itself makes that much of a difference to what the company is able to do.)
> Another net positive of stock trading is making buyers and sellers available all day, for anything on the market. Yet another benefit of stock trading is to make it more difficult to manipulate the market - there's a reason why pump and dump scams only occur with assets that see very little attention (i.e. are low-volume).
In other words, the benefit-to-the-world of stock trading is that it makes it easier to trade stocks? And both of these are the result of unprofitable trading as much as profitable trading, so they can't be the proof that the money comes from the value delivered!
Not GP, but if I recall correctly, "taking money away from mismanaged companies" only occurs if the companies choose to do another issuance of shares in the future to raise equity, or stock options in the future to compensate people, in which case they would have to issue shares at a lower valuation, or issue more stock options to provide a similar benefit, than if they were a desirable company.
But stock trading also penalizes well-managed companies in slow-growing or more mature industries by giving them a higher cost-of-capital, just as it would if they were poorly managed. It seems a haphazardly blunt instrument for allocating liquidity to value generation. It piles on where rewards seem ready to be reaped, and makes it harder for mature sectors to renew or reinvent themselves.
He did it through offering a _money management_ service to large institutions and wealthy individuals.
That money management service includes, amongst other things, picking stocks. But that's the tactical "what". The value-added element is that he preserved and grew that wealth instead. It turns out that is hard to do, and is indeed a positive sum service to customers. They get to relax _and_ make money. Great outcome.
Yes, he was capturing value for his clients, and getting paid some of that. That isn't the same thing as doing something that increases the amount of wealth in the economy, which was my point.
The entire point of the stock market is to get capital to companies to allow them to do things that may increase wealth (could be local, state, country or globally). Successfully doing this means the companies he supported did well.
> The entire point of the stock market is to get capital to companies
Only if the shares are newly-issued, though.
Usually your counterparty is just someone with different cash flow needs, or who disagrees with you about the future. No benefit accrues to the company.
Do you really think a single individual could make $7B of profits from stock trading? They'd need to be trading $30-100B. Point72 manages $35B and has almost 3,000 people on staff.
>The gift tax is a tax on the transfer of property by one individual to another while receiving nothing, or less than full value, in return. The tax applies whether or not the donor intends the transfer to be a gift.
It's not real money. They aren't holding all the gold like a dragon. Or maybe they are, but that isn't hurting anyone, it's wealth not consumption. They consume the same number of calories as a poor person. They breathe the same amount of air. Maybe they have a few extra bedrooms, but their consumption could easily be less than a millionaire.
Idk man, I'm pretty sure I consume a lot fewer labor hours than a billionaire with a super-yacht. The thing to focus on is how many labor-hours someone is consuming. When a billionaire allocates ~20 people of labor-hours every day to maintaining that super-yacht, that means there's ~20 people fewer labor hours for services for everyone else. And building that super-yacht also consumed a lot of high-skill labor hours.
That means there are 20 MORE labor hours, not less. The typical person reading this is only working a couple hours to do anything related to the basics (you don't need nearly as large a house as you live in - even if you live in a tiny house)
> For the transformation of money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must find the free worker available on the commodity-market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization of his labour power.
> Why this free worker confronts him in the sphere of circulation is a question which does not interest the owner of money, for he finds the labour-market in existence as a particular branch of the commodity-market. And for the present it interests us just as little. We confine ourselves to the fact theoretically, as he does practically. One thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history, It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.
It's draconian to have some upper limit on wealth? what if a small number of people managed to, legally, extract wealth to the point where we all became vassals? (Or is that what we've already gone very far towards?)
You may think it's no biggy since the limit will be so high.
1. First of all, when party A contracts with party B, party C (that's you) does not have a moral right to dictate an upper limit on how many times they can do that or what the terms can be as long as the transaction is legal and A and B are willing participants.
Thus, either A or B can build up an arbitrary amount of wealth and you have exactly zero to say about it. Would you have similar concerns for people who have a disproportionate number of friends, or sex partners, or hit songs, or hell, even votes?
2. If there were to be an upper limit, what is the limit? Today it's a billion dollars. What if it's 100m next, then 10m, then 1m, then 100k? What happens after a couple of decades or centuries of inflation? I suspect you don't care about this because the limit seems far out of reach to you. And so it might be - for now.
3. If there was a limit, who will decide what it should be? What are their incentives? Do you really want a jury of your peers reviewing your financials and drawing lines through it?
4. If there was a limit, who will enforce it? And how? Hand over a check or you go to prison?
There's no way to implement this without an authoritarian regime that has unlimited power over its citizens.
Feudal systems are better described as local organised threat of violence.
There are castle strongholds, control of choke points, a lower strata that are required to work the land and pay tithe upwards to the military heirarchy.
Feudal systems have existed in times and locations where there was little need for military defense against external forces, they persist in form as a polite, polished, chivalrous bikie club on horses, mafia with great houses.
A farm is a system with many living beings, but most of the benefits accrue to those we call the farmers.
A farmer farm is a called a fief (feudum in latin), so it's no surprise that under feudalism most of the benefits accrue to those who have control over heaps of feuda.
Would it be true that under capitalism most of the benefits accrue to those who have control over heaps of capital?
[to the original point: capitalism works very well when it allows people to trade and specialise in their comparative advantages; under what conditions might it work less well?]
EDIT:
> little need for military defense against external forces
I think they were also successful even where there was need, as long as those external forces were also based on a warrior class.
What Napoleon managed was to "scale" the nature of warfare; two poorly remembered quotes from a book one of his cavalry generals wrote:
— 10 mamluks could beat 30 french, but 100 to 100 was even, and 300 french could beat 1000 mamluks
— our troopers' horsemanship was pitiful, and their officers' not much better, yet with this cavalry we made the tour of Europe
I'd say both point to innovation in the use of mass over class.
Morally speaking, is ((profit<->negative externality) <-> (speculation<->liquidity provision)) a tautology i could get any of u curious about?
It motivates a search for the mystical beast: Marxist financier (not the pastry?)
(Not to mention elucidates the boney/HF-inspired principle of intertwining* (wrt scaling — CENDEC, decentralizing by centralizing — marxist-financing-in-itself))
Defo! (but not necessarily a tautology: there are models where it's false, it just happens to be true both for Marxists and for financiers — or have we some axioms which would make these models inconsistent?)
[the distinction between ownership and benefit in both code and common law jurisdictions has its roots in roman law, but unless either of you are really interested I'm not going to delve in that graveyard]
EDIT: HF? Our Ford?
EDIT2: for an SAP advertorial, I like TLTF! pigs acorns etc.
I think anti-trust laws are generally more effective at dealing with that than wealth limits. When capitalism is functioning well, what cones up must go down, and the main trick is to make sure the ultra-wealthy can't leverage their wealth to prevent anyone competiting with them.
What goes up accumulates and is effectively removed from circulation, allowing money to be printed at a minion level while still struggling to avoid deflation.
I recommend this question as an interesting conversation starter at parties: Is it in the self-interest of the most successful capitalists to have a well-functioning capitalism?
Obviously not. Which is why we have antitrust laws. If it was in the self-interest of the most succesful capitalists, we wouldn't have to have laws about it.
> I don't think anyone disagrees that monopolies and other anticompetitive behaviour is a thing that exists.
There are people who never learned this or have essentially forgotten it. Some ideologies bury such truths.
Among business/tech circles, there is a fairly common disdain of regulation. People can conveniently forget that self-interest taken too far can destroy the conditions that make competition work.
It is one thing to criticize a powerful monopoly that isn’t you. It is another thing to say “Oh. Maybe what I’m doing is part of the problem.”
No. But it is a slippery slope of having limits on people, from wealth to anything you can think of (random example: limit ownership to a single car). In the end if it is all legal, it is nobody else's business. If it is illegal, setting an upper limit is not the moral solution.
Where $1 billion is about 40,000 Honda Civics, I think most people would support limiting ownership of cars to 39,999. It doesn't even have to be a hard limit, just a luxury tax on cars that cost more than, say, $1 million, and on owning more than 40,000 cars. If you want a 40,001st car, your can do it but it means you're going to have to pay an extra fee that goes towards helping people with less.
"most people would support" is mob rule or tyranny of the majority. Not morally right. People have no right to tell you how many cars (or something else) you are allowed to own.
how many slaves do you own, how much cocaine do you own, how many guns do you own? how many crocodiles or tigers can I keep as a pet? there are lots of limits on what I can own
You can make just about anything a slippery slope if you wanted to - “they’re putting limits on guns, what’s next, kitchen knives?”
Morally you should probably be spending more time figuring out how to get everyone their first car instead of worrying about your legal rights in owning your second.
Why yes, there are countries with limits on kitchen knives.
And if your focus is on providing that first car, then the system currently doing that en masse for billions of previously-poor people is called “capitalism” and your moral imperative is to speed it up, not slow it down.
Capitalism only works when you have a middle class. Protecting billionaires’ abilities to hoard wealth is not in the interests of the middle class.
To be charitable I’ll point out that in general that’s not what you’re arguing for. There is a real sense in which personal freedom is essential to people making it out of poverty. Protecting one person’s and not another’s would defeat the point.
Here is the compromise. It should be easy for people to do things that billionaires would have no point doing (i.e. take out a business loan of $10K) and difficult for billionaires to do things that people would have difficulty doing (hoard the global supply of some good). That’s if your goal is to have an equitable society where everyone is on the same difficulty level, more or less.
Approached this way there would not be a slippery slope because the delineation is quite clear. Moreover there’s no squashing of personal freedom, a billionaire is always free to do things a regular person is able to do. In fact the system we have now basically squashes the freedom of the average person because they are not free to do things (buy a house, have a chance in court) by virtue of not having money while other people have a ton.
"Capitalism only works when you have a middle class" - I never saw a scientific demonstration of this. It is always in the "everyone knows" fallacy class of statements pulled out of the landing gear.
well, see, it's embarrassing to admit, but you see, I'm a billionaire. I mean, I'm not one right now, it's a temporary thing. Once I'm back on my feet, I'll have a billion dollars and then, see, I just couldn't have restrictions like that placed on me. I think everyone should be able to get that. So even though it's hurting me now that the rich don't get taxed more, it's just this temporary embarrassing thing where I'm not currently a billionaire.
"Mutual" implies lack of coercion, which doesn't exist under capitalism, since the ownership class leverages significantly greater political power than the working class.
Peak HN. (I feel comfortable saying that considering the link to a pg article and “you are in the wrong forum”)
In the face of calling out someone else’s ignorance by saying we are all ignorant then going on to assume the thing you like is wonderful while assuming the thing you hate is terrible.
- you become a proficient user of tabs in whatever IDE or text editor or window manager you use. you open up header files (or collapsed source files, depending on the language/IDE) and reference the API you use.
- you get better at naming things. You don't need to guess the name of any specific API, because it makes sense within the context of your codebase. I believe this makes you a better programmer.
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