I don't usually praise Y takes, but this one is rather excellent.
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@petrikas That is quite a perfect analogy… but… I really wish it wasn’t this way
@em_and_future_cats Easy to remedy — just invent a time machine, and make sure that Reagan won't have become the POTUS.
(It's not a retroactive advice if it begins with "invent a time machine", you see.)
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I don't usually praise Y takes, but this one is rather excellent.
@petrikas The ultra-wealthy are like the carnival operators in a Phillip K Dick short story, tilting the game and making sure everyone is conned in the end
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@em_and_future_cats Easy to remedy — just invent a time machine, and make sure that Reagan won't have become the POTUS.
(It's not a retroactive advice if it begins with "invent a time machine", you see.)
@em_and_future_cats Basically, for it to not be this way, economic slack needs to be generally distributed throughout a society, readily available for people interested in starting a business. Some forms of this have, with varying caveats, been the case for many subsets of many societies throughout much of the history. In the modern global Western society, an approximation of this used to be the case for relatively broad 'middle classes' of people (modulo excluding several marginalised groups of people, sometimes even if otherwise considere 'middle class').
However, a combination of the fashionability of Taylorism, the rise of Ayn Rand's odes to egotism, the rise of ridiculous economic theories more Austrian than Hayek's or Friedman's, many managers coming to see Jack Welch as a "hero", and, eventually, Reagan's access to power led to a widespread reconfiguration of the global Western economy in a way that directs economic slack to become aggressively extracted and collected to sillionaires.
While modern scientists have some idea of how to delay such a state of affairs from arising, it's unclear how, once it has arisen, it can be fixed. In previous history, events such as the Paris Revolution have, in effect, fixed similar dysfunctions, for some time (but they tend to come back), in ways that are rather unpleasant, and that most people would, at least for now, prefer to not get repeated.
Many current sillionaires and people who identify with such seem to believe that, indirectly due to this state of affairs, a "turning" involving a large-scale calamity, is in our near future, and some people believe in working towards directing the mass death of such an event towards non-sillionaires so that sillionaires would be spared.
Interestingly, a majority of the people believing in the importance of saving the sillionaires at the cost of other humans' lives are merely silly, but not sillionaires themselves.
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@em_and_future_cats Basically, for it to not be this way, economic slack needs to be generally distributed throughout a society, readily available for people interested in starting a business. Some forms of this have, with varying caveats, been the case for many subsets of many societies throughout much of the history. In the modern global Western society, an approximation of this used to be the case for relatively broad 'middle classes' of people (modulo excluding several marginalised groups of people, sometimes even if otherwise considere 'middle class').
However, a combination of the fashionability of Taylorism, the rise of Ayn Rand's odes to egotism, the rise of ridiculous economic theories more Austrian than Hayek's or Friedman's, many managers coming to see Jack Welch as a "hero", and, eventually, Reagan's access to power led to a widespread reconfiguration of the global Western economy in a way that directs economic slack to become aggressively extracted and collected to sillionaires.
While modern scientists have some idea of how to delay such a state of affairs from arising, it's unclear how, once it has arisen, it can be fixed. In previous history, events such as the Paris Revolution have, in effect, fixed similar dysfunctions, for some time (but they tend to come back), in ways that are rather unpleasant, and that most people would, at least for now, prefer to not get repeated.
Many current sillionaires and people who identify with such seem to believe that, indirectly due to this state of affairs, a "turning" involving a large-scale calamity, is in our near future, and some people believe in working towards directing the mass death of such an event towards non-sillionaires so that sillionaires would be spared.
Interestingly, a majority of the people believing in the importance of saving the sillionaires at the cost of other humans' lives are merely silly, but not sillionaires themselves.
@em_and_future_cats Game theory wise, preventing aggressive concentration of economic slack is a metastable state. It can be maintained indefinitely with relatively little effort; however, once it has collapsed, restoring it has the shape of a massively multiplayer prisoner's dilemma. These are some hard games.
petrikas@mastodon.art
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I don't usually praise Y takes, but this one is rather excellent.
I remember opting into an "entrepreneurship" optional module while I was doing my masters degree (which I saved up for)
The lecturer was encouraging us to ask family and friends to raise initial investment and not go to venture capitalists.
I distinctly remember him saying "you can probably get £6000 from just your parents". This is 30 years ago money, so that's £11,000 today.
And I very very distinctly remember freezing in my seat and thinking "what kind of families does he think we come from?"
It was definitely a milestone in my political education.
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@em_and_future_cats Game theory wise, preventing aggressive concentration of economic slack is a metastable state. It can be maintained indefinitely with relatively little effort; however, once it has collapsed, restoring it has the shape of a massively multiplayer prisoner's dilemma. These are some hard games.
petrikas@mastodon.art
@em_and_future_cats A curious phenomenon, though, is, withdrawal of capital slack tends to automatically increase the economic value — and the political competitiveness — of labour organising. The economic output from the potential rise of such organisations, though, can get directed to projects of wildly varying levels of constructiveness. In particular, many of such projects tend to be openly religious, or at east function in religious ways. Sometimes, new religions have arisen of such movements; oftentimes primarily serving the founders, not the participants.
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@petrikas the poor kids don’t get any darts. They have to hope a rich kid drops one and is too lazy to pick it up.
@passwordsarehard4 @petrikas if the rich kid drops a dart, it will fall on the poor kids eye and everybody will say it’s the poor kid’s fault.
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I don't usually praise Y takes, but this one is rather excellent.
@petrikas What is "Y"?
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@petrikas What is "Y"?
@nerpulus I couldn't explain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator
It has / had a 'news' aggregator, mainly tech-related, similar to 'reddit', where people can comment, upvote, downvote, etc., called "Hacker News".
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I don't usually praise Y takes, but this one is rather excellent.
@petrikas forgive my ignorance, but what is a Y take?
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I don't usually praise Y takes, but this one is rather excellent.
It also isn't very new.
But it's a shame how (financial) equality has been developing since the 1980ies.
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@em_and_future_cats Easy to remedy — just invent a time machine, and make sure that Reagan won't have become the POTUS.
(It's not a retroactive advice if it begins with "invent a time machine", you see.)
@em_and_future_cats @petrikas @riley find Maggie thatcher as a baby and drop her down a well
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I don't usually praise Y takes, but this one is rather excellent.
@petrikas
Yes, accurate, but I think there's a little more to it.
Some people are rich enough so that they can offer money to people who are pretty good at throwing those darts and collect the prize money for them. With which they pay more people to do the throwing.
Congratulations, you are now a "self made" industrialist. -
@petrikas forgive my ignorance, but what is a Y take?
@jesusmargar it’s a post from Hacker News, which is published by Y Combinator
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I don't usually praise Y takes, but this one is rather excellent.
@petrikas just a note to the carnival workers. You can remove the dartboard, and the darts and your labour. Move the rich kids over to the ghost train, and see how well they fare in the "horrors of the French revolution" section. :guillotine:
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I remember opting into an "entrepreneurship" optional module while I was doing my masters degree (which I saved up for)
The lecturer was encouraging us to ask family and friends to raise initial investment and not go to venture capitalists.
I distinctly remember him saying "you can probably get £6000 from just your parents". This is 30 years ago money, so that's £11,000 today.
And I very very distinctly remember freezing in my seat and thinking "what kind of families does he think we come from?"
It was definitely a milestone in my political education.
There are many studies that show that most entrepreneurial startup financing comes from the ‘3 Fs’ defined as ‘Families, Friends and Fools.” Not from venture capitalists or traditional financial institutions.
There’s a deeper ethical question about risking the wealth of the 3Fs when they aren’t so affluent already that the losses won’t have material impact.
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@em_and_future_cats @petrikas @riley find Maggie thatcher as a baby and drop her down a well
@ReasonableMustelid Or magically tele-adopt her out to USA, where they'd never hire a woman as a prime minister.
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