dlakelan

dlakelan, 1 day ago

Minecraft built by a few people... But then you look at Meta + Metaverse, and they spent like tens of billions of dollars and got 6 users all of whom were in the testing department at Meta.

In tech, Instead of enormous companies employing 300,000 people, we need like 10,000 companies employing 30 people each. Most tech is public goods that we try to pretend are "property". Most of it should be funded by grants and donations and then be open-source and Free.

dlakelan, 1 day ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell

Ok, so I got a chance to watch that video. Yeah, the guy has drunk a lot of the Kool Aid. But he's not entirely wrong either. I mean, stuff does fall apart when there isn't someone funding it. So his role is to cheerlead that funding... which is crazy to be honest, but at the moment also really important in many cases.

given our current "system" it's hard to fund a lot of non-profit public goods production. But public goods stuff is an enormous part of real economy

dlakelan, 1 day ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell

it's just not measurable by dollars! How much real wealth would you just completely nuke if today you could wave a wand and erase every compiled Linux kernel and its source code? Fucking every Honda vehicle made in the last 10 years runs Android! The entire movie industry relies on video distribution... via Linux. The entire stock market falls apart. The entire internet stops routing.

dlakelan, 1 day ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell

Linux is a piece of software you can download at Kernel.org for free. You can't measure it's importance by the total volume of sales per year... it's not sold!

I could list major projects all day long alphabetically from archive.org's grateful dead archive to Zabbix and everything in between if you nuked it all of the face of the earth we'd instantly be transported to a level of living that was pre WWII

dlakelan, 1 day ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell 90% of vehicles on the road would likely stop working (probably running RTOS or something similar in the engine control unit). Same for lots of airplanes, traffic lights, telephone systems (erlang was designed for phone switches, calls get routed via SIP these days), the entire way we prescribe medications has already fallen apart due to a security breach, imagine those computers just don't have an OS or a functional internet.

dlakelan, 1 day ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Yeah, anyway, dweebs like this hedge fund guy want to take credit for all these cars and telephone systems and whatever but they're all critically reliant on open source software invented by guys like you and me working in little 3-50 person collaborations and the thing that he's really responsible for (at best) is wrestling enough cash together to keep the production flowing. It's not nothing, but it's really not anything amazing either. Sigh...

dlakelan, 1 day ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
It's survivorship bias. Ideas are everywhere, but only ideas + massive infusions of cash lead to large businesses. It's not the fucking ideas it's the grubby green stuff that's different. If I gave any random masters student in engineering a billion dollars they'd have a very useful business at the end of it, and if not, we could do that like 40 times in a row just for the cost of the Metaverse or whatever.

dlakelan, 1 day ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Literally if we had taxed Elon Musk 40 billion dollars and then just given 40,000 grants of $1M each via the SBIR program we'd have vast more useful productivity than what yielded from his Twitter buyout. Like, VASTLY better.

dlakelan, 1 day ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
For sure we could have stuff like Mastodon multiplied by 100x if we just had grants to produce useful public goods... I can't even imagine how much better society would be if in the US 50M people were working for $100k/yr govt grant money to do music, educational videos, open source software, books, movies, etc

dlakelan, 16 hours ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Ooh, those institutions though... They have been corrupted so badly, tripling the administration, replacing full faculty with adjunct teaching staff... Look at how quick they were to send head-breakers after peaceful campus protesters... Universities resemble hedge funds more than learning institutions. So, in spirit I agree but in practice I'd rather see some innovative competition than fund them as is.

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
The concepts separate, because there are definitely people who think govt spending means real wealth creation, but that's conditional on the right conditions being present in the economy. I don't think those conditions are there at the moment and they haven't been really for a while, you have to go back to at least pre 9/11.

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
> per mmt: government debt is private wealth.

Not quite, government debt is private financial assets. But financial assets aren't wealth, we can all get rich (large money balances) without getting wealthy (many real assets). Deficit spending on wars or other immediate coordinated activities is I think a very different thing than 40 years of just pumping up the money supply and encouraging financialization. I don't think you disagree, I just think it's important to keep

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Iike one example we could spend govt deficit on grants to community run nonprofit fiber optic and WISP internet service providers... But they have to compete with giant oligopolies pumped up by previous massive deficit spending and who have purchased laws making the community ISPs illegal! So we have to change that before that would be a successful way to deficit spend

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
When I went back to undergrad for a second degree in 2005 I had to take a public speaking class... My final project was a speech on the critical importance of tax reform. My prof said I could do it but he doubted the audience of undergrads would connect with it... Maybe thats an indictment of the undergraduate education system more than my choice of topic 😅

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
In other words... Civil and environmental engineering 😉 (My PhD topic)

But I realized that the US's problem isn't that there aren't engineers to do it... It's that there's no political will to invest in it.

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@anoneuoid
I agree and actually one of the points I was eventually driving at but got sidetracked a bit on Gelmans blog thread is that the ability of banks to convert marketable assets to cash (eg. by taking stocks as collateral) is at the heart of some of the worst banking issues, such as ultra wealthy avoiding capital gains taxes and volatility in the market mechanically pumping cash into the finance industry through cycles of "panics"
@economics@a.gup.pe @djl

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@anoneuoid @economics@a.gup.pe @djl

57 trillion is a highly problematic estimate. M2 is only 20 Trillion, so saying that "only about a third of dollars are in the US banking system" will require a major explanation. I'm very interested though so I'll take a look.

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@anoneuoid @economics@a.gup.pe @djl

Holy crap that's a great podcast transcript (and thanks for linking to a transcript, I never like listening to recorded audio).

yes, very much it feels like you're right, overseas eurodollars are a major source of dollars, and when something like the Chinese credit crisis and real estate debacle goes belly up it can affect the actual supply of dollars globally through disrupting the various contracts that underly eurodollars

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@anoneuoid @economics@a.gup.pe @djl

100% the details are unknown. I've been specifically working on trying to figure out how to rebalance my investments. The first thing I'm doing is trying to figure out what I'm invested in... I hold various different ETFs but what they hold is largely unclear to me. So I'm building some code to download the holdings and analyze portfolios in terms of industry components at least... This kind of stuff is very relevant to my interests.

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@anoneuoid @economics@a.gup.pe @djl

one of the things I think it can help with though is trying to understand profitability of various sectors. Like, if you look at the US Financial sector: It's clear to me that it's been doing crazy amounts of growth because of essentially money supply

https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239508/#chartDialog

and the tech sector followed suit because again... money

https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239769/#chartDialog

and consumer goods...

https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239505/ishares-us-consumer-goods-etf#chartDialog

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@anoneuoid @economics@a.gup.pe @djl

In every case, it's clear... stocks go up crazy amounts starting in 2009 or so, like a lightswitch was turned on. And I don't think that was real economic growth experienced by individuals. To me much of that growth is asset price inflation... Like the market indexes went up 2.5x since 2009 but GDP went up 1.5x

I feel like I just don't know how to understand investment anymore. Maybe it's because the finance system is so unhinged.

dlakelan, 2 days ago

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Right, I mean that's what I was saying already to my Facebook friends in 2013 or something, but I'm not even clear on how QE accomplished it. I mean M2 growth turned on like a light switch around 1995, and QE just seemed to continue that. On a log scale money supply grew linearly from 1995-2019 despite all the financial baloney, dot com, mortgage, wars, and weird Fed policy.
@anoneuoid @economics@a.gup.pe @djl