lol I forgot about this, all the countries you'd have to pass through on the way for rwandan immigrants seeking asylum would have to not stop at to reach the UK and why they might not want to go there.
I still can't believe someone was so stupid as to bring in Dick Cheney. Like, both parties should be able to hear the clicking of the geiger counter the moment that radioactive glowie comes around.
Hey Facebook, how are all those regulations that obligate organizations to protect people's data going in Europe?
"Fuck Europe"
Geez, aren't you afraid of getting the EU mad?
"Fuck Europe and fuck you"
Geez, no reason to get all aggro, Facebook.
"Fuck Europe"
Geez, aren't you afraid of getting the EU mad?
"Fuck Europe and fuck you"
Geez, no reason to get all aggro, Facebook.
One of the core themes of the last election was the fact that most economic numbers are absolute bullshit.
Go ahead and tell gen z that they are materially better off than the baby boomers. According to all the numbers from the government we've never been better off and all those gen z kids are rich be on their wildest dreams.
Funny how by more qualitative measurements they're substantially worse off to the extent that postmodern civilizations are facing a near extinction level event because people don't feel comfortable having kids in an environment where they can't even secure shelter.
If anything, all the graph shows is that much of the wealth of the West has been trickling out to the rest of the planet through globalization. Now if what you care about is global social justice then everyone making a penny more than the poverty line is exactly what you want. On the other hand, for the civilization that used to have a much higher quality of life the fact that someone in Zimbabwe is making a lot more money is cold comfort. A man who ends up living in his parents basement, who is unemployed, who can't buy a home, who can't get married, who will never have kids, that man isn't better off because people in other countries are better off, no matter how many financial products he has.
I live in a region that is roughly equivalent to the rust belt in the United States and it really doesn't positively affect anyone around me having China make all of our shit, or having a bunch of growth in unproductive postmodern financial instruments such as bitcoin. We went from being a wealthy region with lots of opportunity to a relatively poor region with lots of problems like drugs and crime. You can point at your graph, but the graph doesn't capture realities such as the rust belt.
I think that there's a good argument to be made that financialization is one of the last steps of the decline of civilizations. Such rent seeking technologies took hold in Rome and were a major factor in its declined. The Spanish empire was one of the most powerful in the world, but eventually it was bringing in so much silver that having that silver wasn't able to be meaningful because there wasn't enough stuff to go around. Today Spain is considered one of the poorest regions in Western Europe. More recently the English empire was so powerful and so widespread that it was said that the Sun never set on the British empire. That empire was built in large part on the overwhelming advantage in terms of industrialization they had compared to the rest of the world. Eventually they ended up focusing much more on financial products, and so today London is an extremely rich City with all of the banking going on, but most of the country is crushingly poor. The French were in the process of a lot of financialization during the regime l'ancien period, but in spite of making a couple people immensely wealthy and powerful, it was so bad for the common man that the French revolution occurred and completely reshaped you the history of Europe for the next 250 years.
The century of humiliation in China speaks to the potential consequences of disconnection from the world and ignoring your Nations industrial base. At the beginning of the century of humiliation China was still by far the richest country in the world thanks to strong tea, porclean, and food exports, but by ignoring industrialization it ended up prime for exploitation by countries like England or the Netherlands which besides having the capacity to build more wealth out of less resources, also had overwhelmingly greater military powers. I do believe that that is a glimpse into our future if we continue on this path, prioritizing playing money games with money instead of using money as a tool to help facilitate production. If someone has tanks on your doorstep, you can't fire financial instruments at them, and you definitely can't fire people from Zimbabwe who now make more than the poverty line at them.
I do want to mention once again that I'm not against financial products or financial innovation per se, but we have to be very careful not to let it take over our societies and our economies because they don't actually produce anything of value, they're so purpose ought to be facilitating other industries that do produce things of value.
Go ahead and tell gen z that they are materially better off than the baby boomers. According to all the numbers from the government we've never been better off and all those gen z kids are rich be on their wildest dreams.
Funny how by more qualitative measurements they're substantially worse off to the extent that postmodern civilizations are facing a near extinction level event because people don't feel comfortable having kids in an environment where they can't even secure shelter.
If anything, all the graph shows is that much of the wealth of the West has been trickling out to the rest of the planet through globalization. Now if what you care about is global social justice then everyone making a penny more than the poverty line is exactly what you want. On the other hand, for the civilization that used to have a much higher quality of life the fact that someone in Zimbabwe is making a lot more money is cold comfort. A man who ends up living in his parents basement, who is unemployed, who can't buy a home, who can't get married, who will never have kids, that man isn't better off because people in other countries are better off, no matter how many financial products he has.
I live in a region that is roughly equivalent to the rust belt in the United States and it really doesn't positively affect anyone around me having China make all of our shit, or having a bunch of growth in unproductive postmodern financial instruments such as bitcoin. We went from being a wealthy region with lots of opportunity to a relatively poor region with lots of problems like drugs and crime. You can point at your graph, but the graph doesn't capture realities such as the rust belt.
I think that there's a good argument to be made that financialization is one of the last steps of the decline of civilizations. Such rent seeking technologies took hold in Rome and were a major factor in its declined. The Spanish empire was one of the most powerful in the world, but eventually it was bringing in so much silver that having that silver wasn't able to be meaningful because there wasn't enough stuff to go around. Today Spain is considered one of the poorest regions in Western Europe. More recently the English empire was so powerful and so widespread that it was said that the Sun never set on the British empire. That empire was built in large part on the overwhelming advantage in terms of industrialization they had compared to the rest of the world. Eventually they ended up focusing much more on financial products, and so today London is an extremely rich City with all of the banking going on, but most of the country is crushingly poor. The French were in the process of a lot of financialization during the regime l'ancien period, but in spite of making a couple people immensely wealthy and powerful, it was so bad for the common man that the French revolution occurred and completely reshaped you the history of Europe for the next 250 years.
The century of humiliation in China speaks to the potential consequences of disconnection from the world and ignoring your Nations industrial base. At the beginning of the century of humiliation China was still by far the richest country in the world thanks to strong tea, porclean, and food exports, but by ignoring industrialization it ended up prime for exploitation by countries like England or the Netherlands which besides having the capacity to build more wealth out of less resources, also had overwhelmingly greater military powers. I do believe that that is a glimpse into our future if we continue on this path, prioritizing playing money games with money instead of using money as a tool to help facilitate production. If someone has tanks on your doorstep, you can't fire financial instruments at them, and you definitely can't fire people from Zimbabwe who now make more than the poverty line at them.
I do want to mention once again that I'm not against financial products or financial innovation per se, but we have to be very careful not to let it take over our societies and our economies because they don't actually produce anything of value, they're so purpose ought to be facilitating other industries that do produce things of value.
Bluesky just looks to me like 2017 twitter redux, except nobody gives a shit about bluesky.
A series of long analyses of the financialization of the west I've been written have convinced me that Bitcoin is not the future and it can't be. As it went from something with virtually no value to today where the price of Bitcoin is $130,000 per bitcoin, people are only buying in because they think that at some point Bitcoin will be all of the money and so if you buy it early you can get in on owning a little piece of all of the money on Earth. That's a big problem. You don't want people to get rich solely because they bought money early on. Ideally, you would almost want the money to come to exist when someone does something useful, and for to have a finite life that ends at a certain point. In that sense, the current Fiat form of money while flawed certainly seems less flawed. It isn't better because all of its value gets inflated away, but rather because it is created at the point that someone takes out debt to purchase a thing, and is destroyed when that debt is paid back. Because of that, you don't have the perverse incentive you do with Bitcoin to buy money because one day it will be all of the money.
So the fact that Bitcoin has swung so dramatically in value, and the fact that most people who own Bitcoin own it for the sole purpose of holding it while it rises means that it's not a very good currency. I think the way that you would resolve that would be by modifying the supply of Bitcoin potentially well below the 21 million Bitcoin limit and also well above the 21 million Bitcoin limit based on the effective gross domestic product of Bitcoin. What I'm imagining is the way you would achieve this is by having the algorithm provide bonuses for people using Bitcoin for transactions when the GDP of Bitcoin is growing, and perhaps cutting some of the fee paid to miners out of the system (and maybe the system slightly increases user fees and takes money out of that and destroys it to ensure the cost of deflation doesn't land entirely on miners) entirely when the GDP of Bitcoin is shrinking. I don't think we should end up with a scenario where people make a transaction in Bitcoin and end up with fewer Satoshis in the end than they expect, but cutting the amount of Bitcoin at the point of the service fee, and increasing the amount of Bitcoin at the transaction level seems like it would provide an incentive to use Bitcoin as a means of exchange.
I'm thinking that if we were dealing with GDP growth similar to the world economy, you would only be looking at maybe 5% annually in general in either direction, so we might be able to make the rewards small enough that they are there and they have an effect on the total money supply to keep the the amount of goods or service that you can buy with Bitcoin constant, the rewards could be small enough that people aren't going to chase after them since even for a large transaction the rewards would be relatively insignificant, and potentially dwarfed by the transaction fees of running big transactions. It is also the case that perhaps Bitcoin isn't going to be the thing I would establish a cryptocurrency that's actually used because everyone wants to have been the early adopter on all the money in existence. The problem is that the fact that early adopters would end up having a substantial portion of all the money in existence just because they did some Bitcoin mining in 2008 is exactly the sort of reason why the scheme can't work.
To be clear, when I say GDP I'm referring to the total transaction volume in a set period. By using something like that that's extremely deterministic, every miner who is trying to determine which rewards or additional fees would be granted can make the exact same calculation and come to the exact same answer to ensure that nobody is gaming the system with respect to those systems. That way, as such a crypto becomes more and more used it doesn't mean that people who had earlier bitcoins become rich because currency is supposed to be a store of value not a speculative asset that grows by thousands of percent. A currency that is a speculative investment is no longer a currency by definition. It means that is no longer a store of value, it means that it is no longer a unit of account because you can't say what a highly volatile currency is going to charge for a certain thing, and the HODLers accidentally prove that it doesn't become a very good method of exchange either because everyone wants to hang on to their Bitcoin because it's going to go to the Moon instead of spending it on anything. Instead people use their fiat currency for actually acting as a method of exchange, they use their fiat currency as a unit of account, they probably aren't going to be using Fiat as a long-term store of value, it's likely that a lot of people wouldn't hold their savings in Bitcoin either because it could go to 150,000 tomorrow or it can go to 15,000 tomorrow.
By trying to scale the number of bitcoin to the GDP of bitcoin, you'd be trying to stabilize the value so it can be a unit of account, a store of value, and you'd incentivize using it as a method of exchange because using it for exchange would grant the users rewards.
The mechanism of dealing with a rewards doesn't need to be simple necessarily either though. it could be for example a model controller that self corrects to the actual data that comes in to ensure it's something that can be robust enough to achieve the goals despite operating completely autonomously.
Bitcoin was designed in part to have the same benefits as gold as a currency without tying up gold. That's why there's a limited number of bitcoin and they must be "mined". The benefit of a gold standard isn't that gold is special, but that the laws of physics are more immutable than the laws of man. If you need an ounce of gold to produce an ounce of gold worth of currency then you can't produce unlimited currency, and even if nobody trusts your currency they still have gold.
What I'm proposing would be that the value of a hypothetical Bitcoin under my scenario would be as some amount of value of the total trade of the system. You would have say a Bitcoin, and by changing the amount of potential Bitcoin in the system based on the total economic throughput of the system, you end up with a standardized amount of the capacity of the system, and most importantly it would be something that everyone has agreed to in the source code of the cryptocurrency rather than something that can be arbitrarily changed by the government when they decide that they want to print more money to get more services without having to tax more.
This ought to mean that the value of a bitcoin stays relatively stable even as the market cap of bitcoin rises or falls. I'm suggesting we use the total currency velocity as a proxy for that rather than a market cap in dollars because the idea would be to eventually supplant the dollar.
I think one of the focuses on sound money is because the only way that we know of that money can be forced to not be grown by fiat alone. That makes it the best thing that we've seen in history but that doesn't mean it is the only way to achieve Austrian economics ends with respect to currency. My hypothetical currency would help resolve some of the issues with a gold standard with respect to the supply of gold and not being able to grow at a rate fast enough to account for large amounts of economic growth as well as the downside of economic growth falling but obviously the supply of gold doesn't go down just because economic output went down.
The only way that I can see that such a system could be gamed would be if nation states were to take the hit and try to artificially increase the GDP of Bitcoin by moving a bunch of money around. They would end up having to pay a penalty for all of the transaction fees, but potentially the cost of doing that might be worth the price paid to miners in order to for the GDP and make people feel richer through wealth effect and thereby make governments who do these things appear to be doing better for its people. It's entirely possible, but if we had achieved a sort of Bitcoin maximalism the amount of resources required to manipulate the GDP of my proposed cryptocurrency would be so large and the effects spread over the entire global population I'm not sure it would be ultimately considered to be worth it. If for example you are Donald Trump and you want to use the scheme to enrich americans, you could potentially be enriching the Chinese and Russians and South Americans just the same. That being the case, you would end up with marginal local benefits for overwhelming investments into the system. A sufficiently robust controller may be able to identify some forms of gaming.
So the fact that Bitcoin has swung so dramatically in value, and the fact that most people who own Bitcoin own it for the sole purpose of holding it while it rises means that it's not a very good currency. I think the way that you would resolve that would be by modifying the supply of Bitcoin potentially well below the 21 million Bitcoin limit and also well above the 21 million Bitcoin limit based on the effective gross domestic product of Bitcoin. What I'm imagining is the way you would achieve this is by having the algorithm provide bonuses for people using Bitcoin for transactions when the GDP of Bitcoin is growing, and perhaps cutting some of the fee paid to miners out of the system (and maybe the system slightly increases user fees and takes money out of that and destroys it to ensure the cost of deflation doesn't land entirely on miners) entirely when the GDP of Bitcoin is shrinking. I don't think we should end up with a scenario where people make a transaction in Bitcoin and end up with fewer Satoshis in the end than they expect, but cutting the amount of Bitcoin at the point of the service fee, and increasing the amount of Bitcoin at the transaction level seems like it would provide an incentive to use Bitcoin as a means of exchange.
I'm thinking that if we were dealing with GDP growth similar to the world economy, you would only be looking at maybe 5% annually in general in either direction, so we might be able to make the rewards small enough that they are there and they have an effect on the total money supply to keep the the amount of goods or service that you can buy with Bitcoin constant, the rewards could be small enough that people aren't going to chase after them since even for a large transaction the rewards would be relatively insignificant, and potentially dwarfed by the transaction fees of running big transactions. It is also the case that perhaps Bitcoin isn't going to be the thing I would establish a cryptocurrency that's actually used because everyone wants to have been the early adopter on all the money in existence. The problem is that the fact that early adopters would end up having a substantial portion of all the money in existence just because they did some Bitcoin mining in 2008 is exactly the sort of reason why the scheme can't work.
To be clear, when I say GDP I'm referring to the total transaction volume in a set period. By using something like that that's extremely deterministic, every miner who is trying to determine which rewards or additional fees would be granted can make the exact same calculation and come to the exact same answer to ensure that nobody is gaming the system with respect to those systems. That way, as such a crypto becomes more and more used it doesn't mean that people who had earlier bitcoins become rich because currency is supposed to be a store of value not a speculative asset that grows by thousands of percent. A currency that is a speculative investment is no longer a currency by definition. It means that is no longer a store of value, it means that it is no longer a unit of account because you can't say what a highly volatile currency is going to charge for a certain thing, and the HODLers accidentally prove that it doesn't become a very good method of exchange either because everyone wants to hang on to their Bitcoin because it's going to go to the Moon instead of spending it on anything. Instead people use their fiat currency for actually acting as a method of exchange, they use their fiat currency as a unit of account, they probably aren't going to be using Fiat as a long-term store of value, it's likely that a lot of people wouldn't hold their savings in Bitcoin either because it could go to 150,000 tomorrow or it can go to 15,000 tomorrow.
By trying to scale the number of bitcoin to the GDP of bitcoin, you'd be trying to stabilize the value so it can be a unit of account, a store of value, and you'd incentivize using it as a method of exchange because using it for exchange would grant the users rewards.
The mechanism of dealing with a rewards doesn't need to be simple necessarily either though. it could be for example a model controller that self corrects to the actual data that comes in to ensure it's something that can be robust enough to achieve the goals despite operating completely autonomously.
Bitcoin was designed in part to have the same benefits as gold as a currency without tying up gold. That's why there's a limited number of bitcoin and they must be "mined". The benefit of a gold standard isn't that gold is special, but that the laws of physics are more immutable than the laws of man. If you need an ounce of gold to produce an ounce of gold worth of currency then you can't produce unlimited currency, and even if nobody trusts your currency they still have gold.
What I'm proposing would be that the value of a hypothetical Bitcoin under my scenario would be as some amount of value of the total trade of the system. You would have say a Bitcoin, and by changing the amount of potential Bitcoin in the system based on the total economic throughput of the system, you end up with a standardized amount of the capacity of the system, and most importantly it would be something that everyone has agreed to in the source code of the cryptocurrency rather than something that can be arbitrarily changed by the government when they decide that they want to print more money to get more services without having to tax more.
This ought to mean that the value of a bitcoin stays relatively stable even as the market cap of bitcoin rises or falls. I'm suggesting we use the total currency velocity as a proxy for that rather than a market cap in dollars because the idea would be to eventually supplant the dollar.
I think one of the focuses on sound money is because the only way that we know of that money can be forced to not be grown by fiat alone. That makes it the best thing that we've seen in history but that doesn't mean it is the only way to achieve Austrian economics ends with respect to currency. My hypothetical currency would help resolve some of the issues with a gold standard with respect to the supply of gold and not being able to grow at a rate fast enough to account for large amounts of economic growth as well as the downside of economic growth falling but obviously the supply of gold doesn't go down just because economic output went down.
The only way that I can see that such a system could be gamed would be if nation states were to take the hit and try to artificially increase the GDP of Bitcoin by moving a bunch of money around. They would end up having to pay a penalty for all of the transaction fees, but potentially the cost of doing that might be worth the price paid to miners in order to for the GDP and make people feel richer through wealth effect and thereby make governments who do these things appear to be doing better for its people. It's entirely possible, but if we had achieved a sort of Bitcoin maximalism the amount of resources required to manipulate the GDP of my proposed cryptocurrency would be so large and the effects spread over the entire global population I'm not sure it would be ultimately considered to be worth it. If for example you are Donald Trump and you want to use the scheme to enrich americans, you could potentially be enriching the Chinese and Russians and South Americans just the same. That being the case, you would end up with marginal local benefits for overwhelming investments into the system. A sufficiently robust controller may be able to identify some forms of gaming.
Even the fuhrer Trudeau is pretending to move right. I'm praying to God that is not enough to trick people into thinking that the liberals don't need to stop being an official political party.
I wonder though if this framework helps explain the difference between "progressive" and "woke". The former is a spectrum that most westerners are somewhere on, the latter is where you reach a highly dogmatic, highly self-assured spot on the spectrum.
Most people, even a supermajority of ideological conservatives, want social progress in some form. Anyone can see things aren't perfect and want things to be better. It's when you know exactly what needs to be done and it makes you a better person than everyone else and anyone standing in your way is the devil that it becomes (to use a bad term in context) problematic.
Most people, even a supermajority of ideological conservatives, want social progress in some form. Anyone can see things aren't perfect and want things to be better. It's when you know exactly what needs to be done and it makes you a better person than everyone else and anyone standing in your way is the devil that it becomes (to use a bad term in context) problematic.
You touched on a paradox I found, that in a lot of ways wokeness is deeply, deeply conservative. There's an orthodoxy, and all that matters is that you follow the orthodoxy. Everything outside the orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced, and anyone who isn't strictly following orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced regardless of their alignment otherwise.
If progressivism is truly about challenging norms and fostering dialogue, then an orthodoxy should not exist. Instead, the rigidity undermines progressiveness by creating a new form of conservatism: a defense of the orthodox beliefs and existing hierarchies within the movement itself.
The foolish justification for this behavior they came up with of Popper's paradox of tolerance relies on answering a paradox with one answer or another without realizing that the nature of a paradox is such that there is no cut and dry black and white answer.
My criticism here of paradox also applies to the paradox I recognized, by the way. You can't change anything to resolve it in a simple black and white manner because the components that make up the paradox are required to have the thing in the first place and thus the question is complicated. Without some form of orthodoxy, progressive ideology that questions societal norms would immediately have to start questioning the societal norms it successfully installed, potentially just resulting in paralysis.
If progressivism is truly about challenging norms and fostering dialogue, then an orthodoxy should not exist. Instead, the rigidity undermines progressiveness by creating a new form of conservatism: a defense of the orthodox beliefs and existing hierarchies within the movement itself.
The foolish justification for this behavior they came up with of Popper's paradox of tolerance relies on answering a paradox with one answer or another without realizing that the nature of a paradox is such that there is no cut and dry black and white answer.
My criticism here of paradox also applies to the paradox I recognized, by the way. You can't change anything to resolve it in a simple black and white manner because the components that make up the paradox are required to have the thing in the first place and thus the question is complicated. Without some form of orthodoxy, progressive ideology that questions societal norms would immediately have to start questioning the societal norms it successfully installed, potentially just resulting in paralysis.
"Aru you makingu zu babies Turumpo?"
damnit Abe I told you last week I already have lots of kids.
"Maku zu baaabiiieessssuuuu"
damnit Abe I told you last week I already have lots of kids.
"Maku zu baaabiiieessssuuuu"
"And thus we powered our civilization for a thousand years just on redditor body fat"
Arguably most societies over millennia existed without financial products, particularly the current conception of them in forms like bitcoin and global prediction markets. Financial products in our current conception of them are, at the most charitable, only about 400 years old when the Dutch invented stock markets. Before that we might have had banks, loans, currency, and contracts, but that's when modern (in a literal sense) financial products were invented. Since World War 2, we've seen the invention of postmodern financial products; financial products totally disconnected from creating any sort of tangible good or service.
Bitcoin in particular is a poster child for this problem. You have a currency with a multi-billion dollar market cap that you can't use to buy most tangible goods and services in existence today.
Tesla is another example. While you might be tempted to believe that Elon Musk's Tesla is a company that became valuable by making cool things, you'd be mistaken. Tesla is the smallest car company on a public stock exchange by sales, and while most companies have multiple product categories, Tesla became incredibly valuable selling only passenger cars. Only in the past year did they even get a pickup truck model. Despite that, it's a company more valuable than the rest of the auto sector combined. Elon Musk didn't create an auto company, he created a financial instrument that routinely goes up.
When money ends up chasing games that play money instead of things that produce tangible goods and tangible services that people require, and actually starts to become a cancer, eating up good people and good resources that could have been spent on real wealth. Money going into things because they make money and nothing else is like an ouroboros trying to grow fat by eating its own tail. It may feel sated because it's belly is full, but in reality it slowly starves itself to death because while it consumes itself it uses up resources that are no longer being added to the system.
For this reason, a society that is so focused on financial products and so derisive of real manufacturing or other forms of production of tangible goods or services cannot last the Long haul, and I think we're seeing that right now because the actual quality of life of individuals is worse today than it was 25 years ago. Real incomes have been stagnant for a very long time, but moreover the lack of real tangible productivity has meant that the tangible things that we have left has become increasingly expensive. Because we have entire industries full of people working at desks pushing piles of beans around metaphorically, we aren't building enough homes and so an entire generation, arguably multiple generations of people are completely priced out of the housing market for the rest of their lives. Food is going up in price, which has caused instability in developing nations. Energy has become scarcer, and people always focus on the idea of energy as frivolous but people need to eat their homes or they die. Perhaps most importantly, the spiritual toll that comes from a civilization that knows that they don't actually do anything is cataclysmic.
Now I don't want you to get me wrong here, I'm not saying that we don't need financial products or that I want Bitcoin or prediction markets to disappear, and certainly not just because they're part of a certain product category. What I am saying is our priorities are completely misplaced. I think that it will mean the end of our society and our civilization if we don't course correct. We're already starting to see it where other civilizations that aren't like ours are starting to be much more dominant culturally and in terms of tangible power of us. The amount of sleep lost over the island of Taiwan (that actually manufactures important stuff) should be an eye-opener for all of us.
The realignment would require focusing less on postmodern financial products that are removed entirely from tangible goods or services, and instead focus on financial products which enable efficiency, innovation, or risk mitigation in ways that indirectly support tangible industries. In the case of something like bitcoin, it would require actually solving the problems it has to make it a viable alternative to fiat or commodity currencies in day to day use. This would inherently free up resources tied up in postmodern financial products and would lead to a reallocation of resources towards things with tangible productivity, which ought to be the final goal of financial products in general.
There are two types of change we need to see: Cultural and legislative.
Culturally, we need to see a move away from valuing making money by making money and towards making money by doing something of tangible value in the world. Bitcoin's current market cap is based entirely on people gambling that they will own a piece of all the money on earth when more people use bitcoin, and that's not a healthy attitude or a moral one. The reason China is so powerful and Taiwan is so important is that they make tangible goods people around the world use, and that's because of a cultural philosophical difference in the way Confuscian thought which even in Communist China dominates the mindset in the region. That philosophy holds doing real stuff as important for a harmonious society. We need the same viewpoint in our society or the ouroborus will starve eating its own tail.
Legally, we need to make moves to reintroduce natural forces that would limit the size of a company. Part of the reason everyone is trying to create monopolies they can price as if they'll own the market always and forever is that huge megacorps are so competitive despite being so damn inefficient. Eliminating corporate personhood would be one good step, as well as setting up fines or punishments for crimes to be proportional to the size of the company's market cap so as your company's size grows the risk of gaps in compliance and the like grow disproportionately. We might want to consider for particularly heinous crimes a "corporate jail sentence" where all the assets in a company are frozen and cannot be used for a certain period of time, and a "corporate death sentence" where a corporate charter is revoked entirely and the company assets are individually put up for auction. The idea would be that as companies grow, the risk of running the company grows so much that it doesn't make sense to bother taking on multiplied risk for additional gains.
In a sane world, Tesla should be priced for what it is -- a barely profitable lower tier auto manufacturer. In a sane world, Bitcoin should be priced for what it is -- a rarely used computer science experiment whose actual utility is fairly minimal -- I'd be surprised if more than a few million dollars a year in bitcoin is used as an actual currency, so its market cap should reflect that reality, not the guess that one day it will be all the money.
Bitcoin in particular is a poster child for this problem. You have a currency with a multi-billion dollar market cap that you can't use to buy most tangible goods and services in existence today.
Tesla is another example. While you might be tempted to believe that Elon Musk's Tesla is a company that became valuable by making cool things, you'd be mistaken. Tesla is the smallest car company on a public stock exchange by sales, and while most companies have multiple product categories, Tesla became incredibly valuable selling only passenger cars. Only in the past year did they even get a pickup truck model. Despite that, it's a company more valuable than the rest of the auto sector combined. Elon Musk didn't create an auto company, he created a financial instrument that routinely goes up.
When money ends up chasing games that play money instead of things that produce tangible goods and tangible services that people require, and actually starts to become a cancer, eating up good people and good resources that could have been spent on real wealth. Money going into things because they make money and nothing else is like an ouroboros trying to grow fat by eating its own tail. It may feel sated because it's belly is full, but in reality it slowly starves itself to death because while it consumes itself it uses up resources that are no longer being added to the system.
For this reason, a society that is so focused on financial products and so derisive of real manufacturing or other forms of production of tangible goods or services cannot last the Long haul, and I think we're seeing that right now because the actual quality of life of individuals is worse today than it was 25 years ago. Real incomes have been stagnant for a very long time, but moreover the lack of real tangible productivity has meant that the tangible things that we have left has become increasingly expensive. Because we have entire industries full of people working at desks pushing piles of beans around metaphorically, we aren't building enough homes and so an entire generation, arguably multiple generations of people are completely priced out of the housing market for the rest of their lives. Food is going up in price, which has caused instability in developing nations. Energy has become scarcer, and people always focus on the idea of energy as frivolous but people need to eat their homes or they die. Perhaps most importantly, the spiritual toll that comes from a civilization that knows that they don't actually do anything is cataclysmic.
Now I don't want you to get me wrong here, I'm not saying that we don't need financial products or that I want Bitcoin or prediction markets to disappear, and certainly not just because they're part of a certain product category. What I am saying is our priorities are completely misplaced. I think that it will mean the end of our society and our civilization if we don't course correct. We're already starting to see it where other civilizations that aren't like ours are starting to be much more dominant culturally and in terms of tangible power of us. The amount of sleep lost over the island of Taiwan (that actually manufactures important stuff) should be an eye-opener for all of us.
The realignment would require focusing less on postmodern financial products that are removed entirely from tangible goods or services, and instead focus on financial products which enable efficiency, innovation, or risk mitigation in ways that indirectly support tangible industries. In the case of something like bitcoin, it would require actually solving the problems it has to make it a viable alternative to fiat or commodity currencies in day to day use. This would inherently free up resources tied up in postmodern financial products and would lead to a reallocation of resources towards things with tangible productivity, which ought to be the final goal of financial products in general.
There are two types of change we need to see: Cultural and legislative.
Culturally, we need to see a move away from valuing making money by making money and towards making money by doing something of tangible value in the world. Bitcoin's current market cap is based entirely on people gambling that they will own a piece of all the money on earth when more people use bitcoin, and that's not a healthy attitude or a moral one. The reason China is so powerful and Taiwan is so important is that they make tangible goods people around the world use, and that's because of a cultural philosophical difference in the way Confuscian thought which even in Communist China dominates the mindset in the region. That philosophy holds doing real stuff as important for a harmonious society. We need the same viewpoint in our society or the ouroborus will starve eating its own tail.
Legally, we need to make moves to reintroduce natural forces that would limit the size of a company. Part of the reason everyone is trying to create monopolies they can price as if they'll own the market always and forever is that huge megacorps are so competitive despite being so damn inefficient. Eliminating corporate personhood would be one good step, as well as setting up fines or punishments for crimes to be proportional to the size of the company's market cap so as your company's size grows the risk of gaps in compliance and the like grow disproportionately. We might want to consider for particularly heinous crimes a "corporate jail sentence" where all the assets in a company are frozen and cannot be used for a certain period of time, and a "corporate death sentence" where a corporate charter is revoked entirely and the company assets are individually put up for auction. The idea would be that as companies grow, the risk of running the company grows so much that it doesn't make sense to bother taking on multiplied risk for additional gains.
In a sane world, Tesla should be priced for what it is -- a barely profitable lower tier auto manufacturer. In a sane world, Bitcoin should be priced for what it is -- a rarely used computer science experiment whose actual utility is fairly minimal -- I'd be surprised if more than a few million dollars a year in bitcoin is used as an actual currency, so its market cap should reflect that reality, not the guess that one day it will be all the money.
I will say, really depends what that bolt is.
In heavy industry sometimes something can be insanely pricey because it's very specific and made of exotic materials. 45 dollars seems like a lot for a bolt, but if it's for a particular aerospace application maybe it actually makes sense?
In heavy industry sometimes something can be insanely pricey because it's very specific and made of exotic materials. 45 dollars seems like a lot for a bolt, but if it's for a particular aerospace application maybe it actually makes sense?