The fundamental problem is that we have ceased demanding that our government produce reasonable outcomes.
The reasons for that are many, but it's a core sign of how far we've fallen that there's even a discussion or argument about this obvious fact. We are in charge. We can just ban private equity companies from doing this you know.
There didn't used to be ambiguity about the point of having a society and having that society governed by the people and having those people's representatives solve problems like this.
That ambiguity was created on purpose, for money, by specific people. Not coincidentally, they're the same people making the profits in this story.
The actual truth is far worse. It’s 100 million homeowners, it’s 20 million healthcare workers, it’s an entire generation too online, etc.
There’s no magic bullets. Propagating the idea that there are is how we end up with garbage legislation and regulations that don’t improve anything.
What people need to start respecting and demanding from their government is competence. The ideologues of every stripe need to go sit in a corner for a decade or three while we build back up working institutions.
We have more private equity funds than McDonalds, looking to do this kind of extraction everywhere, because we have huge wealth inequality and therefor those at the top needing to park more money in more places. Then end goal is modern feudalism, with the top owning everything and extracting more and more from every single transaction/event in a person's life.
We can't fix competence when we have one political party working to make the government incompetent so that they can leverage that to tear down government. They have internal politicides such as 'starve the beast', all with the goal to make American government unable to function.
No it really isn’t. That’s just the latest in a long line of boogeymen. The prior ones being banned somehow didn’t lead to paradise on earth. California is the world champion and banning boogeymen. How’s that going for them?
And it’s not just one party that’s working to make the government incompetent. Both are. One for the reasons you cite, the other because it is beholden to public employees that want more money and less work. Just visit nyc or Chicago to see how that goes.
> We can just ban private equity companies from doing this you know.
From doing what exactly? Do you think small businesses are any better about cutting corners for profit? They're often worse because they have worse economies of scale and face more cost pressure.
We have done quite the opposite. We have insisted that the government allow, and even encourage, unreasonable outcomes, so long as they benefit the right people at the cost of... well, if you have to ask, it's you.
This pattern of AI companies describing their own products as so spectacularly effective that they're dangerous really is a remarkable piece of propaganda engineering.
What is happening here would be easily understood and obvious by everybody if it the head of marketing for a food company was on TV talking about how pretty soon everybody will be eating their food, and how it's so unbelievably tasty that it might cause people to leave their families and abandon all other hobbies in pursuit of their delicious product, utterly destroying society as we know it.
I mean maybe it'll happen eventually. Maybe we'll all end up with a wire stuck in the back of our heads, floating in a vat of nutritious goo. But what we've seen so far has been an excellent, highly useful, and certainly groundbreaking industrial automation product.
Maybe they could just write a blog post telling us what the thing does and how much it costs and when we can try it.
This pattern of AI companies describing their own products as so spectacularly effective that they're dangerous really is a remarkable piece of propaganda engineering.
What is happening here would be easily understood and obvious by everybody if it the head of marketing for a food company was on TV talking about how pretty soon everybody will be eating their food, and how it's so unbelievably tasty that it might cause people to leave their families and abandon all other hobbies in pursuit of their delicious product, utterly destroying society as we know it.
I mean maybe it'll happen eventually. Maybe we'll all end up with a wire stuck in the back of our heads, floating in a vat of nutritious goo. But what we've seen so far has been an excellent, highly useful, and certainly groundbreaking industrial automation product.
Maybe they could just write a blog post telling us what the thing does and how much it costs and when we can try it.
Unregulated capitalism inevitably trends towards a mafia state with an oligarchic structure and concentrated monopolistic power. It’s just an empirical fact at this point.
The engine that really drives innovation and wealth creation is regulated capitalism that preserves competitive markets by restraining anticompetitive behavior.
If you’re ideologically attached to capitalism I have good news for you. That’s the approach that leads to its most effective implementation.
If you’re ideologically attached to “market fundamentalism” as I suspect, which is a reflexive opposition to regulation, then this concentrated market structure is what you’re advocating for.
> Unregulated capitalism inevitably trends towards a mafia state with an oligarchic structure and concentrated monopolistic power. It’s just an empirical fact at this point.
Has there ever been a jurisdiction with unregulated capitalism? I'm unaware of any.
Even the most laissez-faire economies have had bedrock legal infrastructure: property rights enforcement, contract law, courts, which is regulation.
Maybe you’re thinking of anarcho-capitalism? But that has never worked at scale.
Yes you’ve hit on the reason. Very few people understand this.
The reason we don’t invest in manufacturing is because of requirements for return on capital.
Ask yourself why GM is doing massive stock buybacks in the era of global transition to electric cars. Why aren’t they using these huge sums of cash to invest in the next generation of products and instead literally just sending the money out the door?
The fundamental problem is that we have ceased demanding that our government produce reasonable outcomes.
The reasons for that are many, but it's a core sign of how far we've fallen that there's even a discussion or argument about this obvious fact. We are in charge. We can just ban private equity companies from doing this you know.
There didn't used to be ambiguity about the point of having a society and having that society governed by the people and having those people's representatives solve problems like this.
That ambiguity was created on purpose, for money, by specific people. Not coincidentally, they're the same people making the profits in this story.
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