schmidtleonard

5 ms·

1.
by schmidtleonard 9d ago
About 100 years ago, American capitalists drunk-drove the US economy into a ditch and the government had to jump-start it by allocating capital itself. The jobs were in national parks, schools, housing, and rural electrification. If you&#x2
2.
by schmidtleonard 9d ago
Yes, they can print, but they can also tax capital. It's not actually impossible. We already do it a tiny bit, we've done it more in the past, and contrary to the dogma blasted from the billionaire-owned media outlets and drilled
3.
by schmidtleonard 13d ago
Can we stop with pushing all of the taxes into the work-consume economy and out of the invest-return economy? The latter is eating the world, would it really hurt it to help clean up its own messes for once?
4.
by schmidtleonard 13d ago
Not if the gaggle of shell companies was difficult to invest into or had enough rights to make it a strategic threat. But sure, wave those infomercial-hands some more and maybe you'll convince me that I can't use a screwdriver.
5.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
And I'm sure these two goobers would call me a luddite for alleging that OpenAI had agency in allowing the terminator to get out and should therefore be held accountable. Is it some kind of mental block?
6.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
No, LLMs would be overkill for arguing with you.
7.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
Progressive corporate taxation could make it happen for reasons other than dodging the ghosts of chemical sins past!
8.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
Progressive corporate taxation would give the market an incentive to do spinoffs and undo the merger wave. Or we could just roll antitrust policy back to what it was before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork installed the Consumer Welfare Standa
9.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
No, the people with assets are the adjudicators. They investigate themselves and find nothing wrong. An honest process with an honest conclusion, if ever I saw one.
10.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
I agree with your point, just not with your numbers. Even your new numbers: $10M NW, half of it goes to luxury housing, the rest gives you $500k/yr of passive income and that's pretty damn nice by any standard that doesn't in
11.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
Quite the opposite. Whatever they did to earn the income with which they originally bought those assets was 100 times more honest than the relentlessly self-serving politics through which they pumped those assets by creating a living hell f
12.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
$10M at 10% returns is $1M/yr passive. That'll pay for an expensive apartment before you consider working. In fact, that's sort of the problem: the massive "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich
13.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
It annoys the heck out of many Americans as well. Once you realize that 10% of households are getting $200k+/yr of unearned income and 1% of households are getting 1.3M+/yr of unearned income by virtue of owning lots of assets in
14.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
He is the living, breathing stereotype of what I would expect from an "economics professor for almost 30 years": "I got in early to the ponzi and life is good can't see what the ungrateful young'uns are whining abou
15.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
Yep, in mid Febuary. The incident kicked off early July.
16.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
Not faked. Intentionally reckless, in (probably correct) anticipation that the recklessness would be rewarded rather than punished as it ought to be.
17.
by schmidtleonard 14d ago
The timeline is mighty suspicious. 4-5 months after moltbook and they cook up a plausibly deniable but extra hype "moltbook at home." The rapid advances in model capability lead to constraints that could have caused this coinciden
18.
by schmidtleonard 16d ago
No, that's not the usual response, because people in this situation have evaluated those alternatives and will be easily able to articulate what is wrong with them (pay). Also, the 4% figure treats doordash as employment. In a parallel
19.
by schmidtleonard 5mo ago
Can all the king's agents and all the king's men stop Teams from frequent silent failures to deliver a short message in Year of the Lord 2026?
20.
by schmidtleonard 5mo ago
Yeah, but the "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are" parts of the economy do tend to exponentially run away until a big enough shitshow incinerates enough capital to reset the clock.
21.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
Pool's closed.
22.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
As opposed to posting on HN complaining about reddit, which is where the real money's at? Nah, this shit was dank enough to make it into popular culture. We have: 1. The shamelessness absurdity of using "market is up" to defl
23.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
I've heard a few traders refer to it as "The Bondi Top" -- she really top-ticked it to perfection. We all wish she hadn't.
24.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
This is a story of other careers having salaries pushed down relative to inflating essentials and the resulting economic surplus being squeezed into asset portfolios. It's a story of rich people getting paid for being rich in proportio
25.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
> arguments against mercantilism It has been funny to watch the rise of "China is beating us" rhetoric against the steady backdrop of "mercantilism is obsolete/bad" dogma, because the elephant in the room is that
26.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
Overinflated relative to the wet dreams of the ownership class.
27.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
The open source tooling got quantization support 3 years ago! It was a lesser type of quantization, but more than enough to prove that the savings just go to bigger models.
28.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
Hey, that's not fair! It's also used for degenerate gambling.
29.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
> more nuance Not enough to diffuse liability. 15 years ago when recommender algorithms were the new hotness, I saw every single group of students introduced to the idea immediately grasp the implication that the endgame would involve
30.
by schmidtleonard 6mo ago
Also, if I was a corporate simp conspiring to destroy Linux, this is exactly the type of stupid hill I would try to bait the open source community into dying on. If they add a stupid compliance feature that everyone bypasses in practice, th

More ›