I think it’s not about compensation or passion, but something a bit more abstract.
I’ll give it a shot; I think you’re successful in what you do and very altruistic and open, not only in your discoveries but also your opinions. You also have a higher sense of duty. as oscar wilde once said, we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. compensation is boring gutter talk. It’s hard for people to reconcile your benevolence with your success, and just as the trope of joining a company to change the world is a veil for making money, so is the trope of criticizing the agent of change entering an industry because the industry is bad.
Personally I can’t wait to read about the inefficiencies you find and have a little glimpse into openai tech from your opinionated point of view.
I really enjoyed reading this. it jives very well with my sentiment. When you go to a grocery store and see the stacks of sodas and chips while our country has an obesity epidemic, you need to wonder if the sale of these products should count towards or against our economic wellbeing. If products can have positive value, surely products can have negative value as well.
In an absurd way, if you were obese and bought a 12 pack of soda and a bag of chips, rationally it would be more valuable for you to throw the products away instead of consuming them. similarly an alcoholic that buys alcohol is doing a negative purchase.
gambling has zero silver lining — its straight up negative value.
And then there’s the leverage per dollar aspect of our economy. If the average american is convinced they need an enormous car, gigabit internet, and streaming services, then yes our economy will be growing, but with things that aren’t fundamentally changing our well being.
Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time, not a gambling addiction, larger screens and diabetes.
Surprisingly I tried to look at economic indicators that tried to quantify growth aligned with some subjective societal wellbeing metric and couldn’t find anything serious
So many economic indicators are perverse - economically it would often be better for a family to get divorced, split into two homes, and then pay each other child support. Heck, economically it would be advantageous to divorce your stay-at-home wife and turn around and hire her to take care of the kids. You could even pay her more and charge her for room and board! You could charge the kids! Financialize everything!
We need metrics that are actually tied to human happiness, not human suffering.
You jest, but that's what I suggested to protect my ex's mother twenty years ago. She was a stay at home mom raising four children after an early divorce without alimony or child care, then long term caretaker for her parents until their deaths in their 90s. She managed two households, worked her entire life, and has no retirement, no pension, no social security to show for it.
The money was being spent, but the system didn't account for who was spending it. When her parents died, they had just gotten out of bankruptcy from taking out a second mortgage to cover late life and end of life care costs. She was left destitute and houseless.
Now, her daughters are paying to care for their mother. Per the article, these expenses, perversely, are proof of a successful economy under the current measurements.
The example he gave of GDP metrics going up when banks underpay interest on savings was wild. “Wow, these customers are effectively paying billions to the banks by accepting low interest rates, they must be receiving so much value in return!!”
I have a rolodex of quirky contrarian facts I like to whip out at dinner parties and this one is definitely a new one I'm adding to the stack. I'm still shocked at the mental gymnastics needed to make it sound rational, but from an economist's perspective it's the "rational actor" argument. "Surely they must love the service, why else would someone settle for less?"
.gov requires cars to have so many features that the incentives push them further and further towards higher margin vehicles.
> gigabit internet
Why should this be a guilty pleasure when gigabit internet approaches a basic commodity that's broadly available in developed countries that built internet infra out after us and aren't captured by ancient telcos? Gig, multigig, 10G is going to start being available in places like South Korea. US lags behind on Speedtest charts: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
>Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time
If you stop working and maybe are in the right demographic, this can all be yours and have more provided if you just apply for it. Work with other families doing the same thing and you can get very creative with it.
Can you elaborate? I own an iphone and pay for zero apple services. I imagine you’re thinking icloud? I have my phone backed up on the 5 gigs they give for free. photos is where data gets heavy. I previously ran things on google photos and paid, but recently moved to immich — either way it’s zero bucks for apple.
wrt hostility: they’re the most privacy focused phone provider out there (which is why they can’t produce an llm from user data)
Are you buying apps in the App Store or paying for digital goods (eg. signing up for streaming services) through iOS apps? Apple charges a 15-30% rent on all of that.
Apple also tracks and charges for conversions on ads for mobile games (eg. purchasing lootboxes on clash of clans) which makes them direct competitors with the other big tech ad platforms.
First do a left-right on the link that Aurornis posted [1]. Notice the extra fat in the chin, the elongated ear, the enlarged mouth and nose, the frizzlier hair, the lower shirt cut.
You hate it. You think, intellectually, that this shouldn't work and surely no one would have the gall to so brazenly do this without the fear of being caught and shamed. And then you think, well once the truth is revealed that there will be some introspection and self-reflection on being tricked, and that maybe being tricked here means being tricked elsewhere.
Well someone, in an emotionless room, min-maxed the outcomes and computed that the expected value from such an action was positive.
There is no need to min-max. There is never a large scale introspection after a media correction. Most people will never see the correction and will still believe what they saw first, years later, if not for the rest of their life.
Or they do hear about it, maybe a few days or a week later, but they dismiss it because its old news at the point and not worth thinking about to them.
Truth is, most people are never really thinking most of the time. They're reacting in the moment and maybe forming a rationale for their action after the fact.
FAFO* goes both ways. US is in an interesting spot. We have a 1 one-time reset button: Since we’re the reserve currency we can inflate out debt away at the cost of inflation. If and when we do that the world will pivot away, maybe, to another currency. At that point the great American tailwind will be over and we’ll have to be competitive at the global stage — interesting to see what that means, if anything.
As an analogy, imagine you’ve accumulated enough debt and bought yourself a house, a car, and invested in enough productive unseizable assets (very important), like a farm and whatnot, to sustain yourself. what’s the point in servicing your debt? If the only consequence is no one will lend you again, you already have everything so whatever, right?
I can poke a million flaws in this logic, but I _think_ that’s the megasupersmart move the current administration is gunning for. Hell do I know how it will pan out, but I have a hunch. FAFO I guess.
I think the flaw in your thinking is that you assume the US is self-sufficient. If that was the case there would be a very small trade deficit and given the sherade about tariffs early last year, this is not the case (IMHO).
As an external person which is actually benefitting from Trump's shanenigans (I am paid in CHF, which are worth more and more as they are considered probably the safest currency there is) I think the current US Administration wants to thread the needle by devaluating the currency enough that debt becomes manageable and exports benefit from a weak USD while remaining the reserve currency.
However, I also believe that for this plan to work you shouldn't alienate your closest allies as they will go trade elsewhere, impose tariffs on you, or trade in Yuans just to spite you. So you are left with a weak currency that is not as important anymore and basically unchanged exports.
There is no secondary reserve currency the world can look to. The world is becoming increasingly hostile and unstable, and no one is in this position, or seems fit to serve this position, in the next twenty years. Its also the case that the US still has a goal of maintaining low inflation, and I think its likely we would pursue austerity on benefits before we would intentionally succumb to higher levels of inflation (as we already have).
Or, you grow the pie. Look to history to learn how empires of the past grew their pies.
Any country willing to not be lent to again in future can default on their debts, nothing special there; the actual clever bit is stringing out the ability to accumulate debt at relatively low cost into decades of investment... something they seem to be willing to sacrifice to well and truly own the libs. The sadder reality is that there isn't any megasupersmart strategy, just an ageing buffoon with the foreign policy savvy of a middle schooler who's just heard about the Louisiana purchase and tariffs, and a bunch of grifters hanging on.
The experiment in "is America too big to fail" is probably going to result in a "not quite" answer, but they're really giving it a go.
Spain in the 1500s, the Netherlands in the 1600s and the British empire in the 1800s are good examples of countries considered too big to fail that they eventually crashed and burned and lost their world leader statuses rather fast.
In all three cases over reliance on new debt to fund stuff, disappearance of the middle class, and abusing their dominance (military and/or economic) made them crumble as other countries steered away from dealing with them.
Foreigners don't need to own fixed-interest securities. They can also invest in other US assets, such as the stock market. That's quite a good inflation hedge, so long as the US remains a good place to invest.
Except, apart from tech, there is no good place to invest in the US, especially given the headwinds in the current macro environment. And tech is super overvalued now.
There's a lot of investor capital moving to traditional industries in China, India, Brazil, Korea and Europe, simply because there's better returns to be made with more resilience to American problems.
Remove the top 7 companies in the S&P 500 (which are all extremely overvalued anyways), and you'll find a very unhealthy S&P. Take into account American dollar devaluation and even the most laggardly of these markets (Europe) outperforms the S&P500.
Interesting. I like your body builder example, but I believe it more accurately describes the top seven fluff stocks. Valuation matters and just cause the stock is growing (according to estimates) doesn’t mean it’s worth buying. There are other factors like dividend yield and actually making real physical products that people really want, instead of a circular market dominated by a few players that essentially buy and sell products to each other using debt and rounds of vc capital that is constantly hyped up by media darlings.
But that was my point - in spite of the best efforts of the other companies and the other industries, they are continually failing to raise additional (largely American) capital because everyone is just looking at the buffed 7 and maybe some MAGA-backed companies.
Just to make it even more real: During covid I added a sub-panel and the wire (more like the sausage given the girth) between the sub-panel and main panel was aluminum because of cost. You just need to be a tad careful at the connection points with copper -- nothing a caring literate person can't handle
The incoming drop for a service panel is almost always aluminum (at least the residential stuff I've seen). It's cheaper and lighter than copper while still being ductile enough to work with. Just use the proper antioxidation paste at the connection point.
Did you use antioxidant paste on all of the aluminum terminations? If you didn’t, please pay an electrician to come fix it. If you did apply the paste, you are in the 0.01% of non-idiot non-electrician homeowners and can skip my rant about homeowners doing electrical work in the next paragraph. I sell electrical work and have seen some incredibly poor work done by homeowners.
Do not install aluminum wire if you are a homeowner unless you already know enough to use antioxidant paste and also to use a torque screwdriver or torque wrench for terminations and know where to find the torque values for the wiring devices you are using. If you don’t apply the paste, the surface of the aluminum will oxidize and could catch fire due to increased resistance.
I suggest not even touching copper as a homeowner, but it’s your choice and your house.
I always read relevant sections of NEC, UPC, and firecode whenever I DIY. I find the code books to be very clear and thorough and really don’t understand the culture of fear mongering tradepeople have around code. Almost like the code is some sort of mystic hydra only a tradesperson can comprehend. it’s really not complicated: read it and apply it like a recipe.
That’s kind of how allergies are discovered though. Doctors will tell you to go on a restrictive food diet and tell you to binary search for it if it doesn’t cause anaphylaxis. Based on my experience with allergies if it’s not anaphylaxis then allergies aren’t considered super important to resolve by doctors. Finally the immune system is complicated and your daughter may have an unusual reaction which may not be IGe mediated. In other words it could be a reaction to a foreign protein and not an anti-body histamine spike in which case: yes it’s extremely unpleasant and feels like an allergy, but because it doesn’t lead to anaphylaxis it’s not a medical concern.
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