It is a bit surprising, I'd have guessed the same. Although in hindsight I could believe that type systems aren't particularly strong as an anti-bug layer. They help. They're a big boon for coordinating large numbers of mid- and low- skill programmers though because it forces them to go further in documenting their function signatures and makes it much more obvious where the problems are when refactoring spaghetti code because things break loudly.
Refactoring spaghetti has become easier in the LLM era because it can just read all the code, and there is now a skill floor on the programmers that kicks in somewhere relatively high. The benefits of type systems might have suffered because of that.
It can't be, because if that was the goal they'd just stop attacking. The strait was open until they sneak attacked Iran. Everyone seems to be in agreement that as part of a ceasefire the strait will open. Iran has shown no particular interest in closing the strait except as a war tactic. The US clearly does not have the power to control or open the strait militarily, its been months now. They appear to be outclassed.
If the goal was opening the strait, then Trump would direct the US military to stop attacking and then the strait would open up. Peace is the only path they have to open the strait and there is every reason to think negotiation would succeed in having the strait open in a matter of days.
By process of elimination, the war goal either seems to be some sort of relatively indirect attack on China's energy security or simple support of Israel in Lebanon by keeping the Iranians out of it. Or maybe Trump has also reached the tipping point into senility; a scenario which seems increasingly likely.
Iran charging tolls is not an acceptable definition of an "open" strait.
All the stuff about China's energy supply... it's not that deep. Y'all are trying to believe Trump is playing 5D chess when he's demonstrably shit at checkers.
What is the alternative here other than acceptance exactly? It seems the options are either accept a toll or accept that the strait is closed.
The toll seems pretty reasonable. Trump doesn't look like he's actually going to compensate them for the sneak attack and all the bombing runs; they have to make the money up somehow as all that destruction looks expensive. And they need a source of funds ASAP to arm up before the US comes back.
But it does imply at some level attempting to achieve them. At every stage of the war the US has taken (and continues to take) action that is more likely to close the strait than open it. To the point where people were pointing it out how this would game out years before the war actually happened.
It is possible that the US military is so incompetent that they can't plan or that Trump has lost touch with reality. But then their goals would just be incoherent and incomprehensible. Assuming they have coherent goals and some capacity to work towards them it is clear that an open strait is at best a very low priority one.
You say Trump has "lost" touch with reality as if he ever had it. He comprehends that opening the strait is important but utterly lacks the mental or emotional capacity to understand in any level of detail what that requires.
Although the argument does look fundamentally reasonable, I think its biggest weakness is it doesn't make an attempt to prioritise - yes taxes always make someone better off. So does wealth. A decision has to be made. Which is more valuable? We've got a highly reliable and effective system for working that out (aka the free market economy) and no alternative in 2nd place that doesn't typically lead to mass starvation because someone underestimated how much food was needed. They people benefiting from the taxes are going to be making very different allocations to the places that the capital is being drained from.
The people behind wealth taxes generally handwave explaining how their system will be better at allocating than the people who make a living of allocating wealth effectively because it is all just obvious that it doesn't need to be justified. Poor people will get more money if rich people have less, duh, QED. So far no compelling cases where they've turned out to be right. If they could do a better job, why even allow private wealth at all?
> Even if the money is used on war—a net destruction of value and lives—there are some people selling missiles better off a result.
Case in point, there is a topical example of Trump going in to Iran like a maniac. Yes there are some people who are better off as a result who wouldn't have been. And yet we can be pretty confident that not forcing US citizens to fund the debacle would have been a better allocation of capital.
> We've got a highly reliable and effective system for working that out (aka the free market economy) and no alternative in 2nd place that doesn't typically lead to mass starvation because someone underestimated how much food was needed.
This is an absolutely wild comparison. The choice is not "everything is purely market forces" vs "everything is centrally planned". We have all kinds of implementations across the world that have different systems.
> The people behind wealth taxes generally handwave explaining how their system will be better at allocating than the people who make a living of allocating wealth effectively
They have different targets though surely? The effective part here is that for one group it's getting more into the hands of the less well off, or funding (say) schools, healthcare, etc. The effective part for someone else is making a single person or family richer.
> So far no compelling cases where they've turned out to be right. If they could do a better job, why even allow private wealth at all?
Because utility is not linear. It is entirely reasonable to assume that the very extreme ends of a scale are not likely the most beneficial under almost any measure. If wealth getting concentrated is so good, why not only allow one person to have everything? See how odd that seems?
It is not surprising to me that it's a good idea overall to let people benefit from figuring out how to do things that people want.
It is also not surprising to me that it can be a good idea to take some of that benefit, and use it to do some of the following
* Alleviate suffering
* Long term planning/research to benefit all and speed up progress
* Core infrastructure that everybody benefits from but is hard to structure with pure market forces
For example, companies benefit from an educated workforce - are they individually going to fund schooling for young kids?
The goal is to try and hit some of those other things while not discouraging people too much from doing the things we want.
> taxes always make someone better off. So does wealth. A decision has to be made.
Sure. So we could ask, say, can we compare educating 500 children for 12 years vs Taylor Swifts net worth going from $2.1B to $2B? How much would she be hurt and how much would other benefit? What would be the impact if she was slightly less wealthy?
> If wealth getting concentrated is so good, why not only allow one person to have everything? See how odd that seems?
Isn't that fairly close to what we have now? I don't see any theoretical issues. Obviously if we literally mean one person I don't think the market would pick that as an optimum outcome, but there isn't an issue with the idea in principle.
Besides, the alternative is to have a relative small committee that, in practice, decides when to give and when to take away. That is the most practical aspect of wealth control and there is still a small number of people controlling it.
> Sure. So we could ask, say, can we compare educating 500 children for 12 years vs Taylor Swifts net worth going from $2.1B to $2B? How much would she be hurt and how much would other benefit? What would be the impact if she was slightly less wealthy?
Worst case is she gets angry and a bunch of people go hungry and uneducated, she donates quite a lot of money. $26m going out some time soonish according to a recent heaadline. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jul/02/taylor-swift-t.... She's more effective with that donation than getting outcomes like educating 500 kids. It turns out to be nontrivial coming up with good examples in practice.
> Isn't that fairly close to what we have now? I don't see any theoretical issues.
Massive concentration of wealth has a few outcomes you may find disagreeable or sub-optimal
* Huge concentration of power in smaller numbers of people, chosen for unrelated skills, heavily tied to luck
* People with huge amounts of power being able to make extremely sub-optimal decisions and still be entirely fine. Elon can buy and run a business into the ground on a whim and be entirely fine.
* Concentration of direction of human labour - it is more worthwhile to spend many lifetimes of humans to very slightly increase the comfort of one multi-billionaire.
For the last example, Americans earn more typically than anyone else in the world and data is easy to find. Assume lifetime earnings of $3M. Bezos' yacht cost more than enough for 100 full lifetimes of US median worker labour, and requires ten lifetimes every year to maintain.
For one ship, for one person.
You can look at that and say "this is optimal" but I am very unsure as to what you're then measuring.
> Obviously if we literally mean one person I don't think the market would pick that as an optimum outcome
Well it being a daft choice is rather the point, taking the absolute extremes is rarely a sensible approach. Total abolition of private wealth is not the point anyone is making. The argument people are making is to take money from those that have so much that the impact to their lives would be negligible, and use it to improve the lives of many others. It may even make them wealthier!
You said optimum there, but optimal for what? Even if it's just efficient allocation of capital, doesn't that rely on pressure to invest well? The reward for doing so is more wealth, but what if you don't need more, or don't need to constantly try and get more?
The wealthiest could sit with vast sums as cash and be fine, which is sensible for them but surely a terrible use of capital.
> the alternative is to have a relative small committee that, in practice, decides when to give and when to take away.
That's a government.
> Worst case is she gets angry and a bunch of people go hungry and uneducated,
Why would anyone go hungry and uneducated if Taylor Swift is angry? What is the process by which you see that happening?
> She's more effective with that donation than getting outcomes like educating 500 kids.
How do you figure that? And you can simply swap over fully educating those kids for something else if you want, unless the argument is that Taylor Swift specifically is better at allocating resources for whatever outcomes the population wants.
Let's take TS as an example. What is it she is being rewarded for, is it efficient allocation of capital? Is that why people buy her songs? Is that what's made her so incredibly wealthy?
Do you think that if she was rewarded somewhat less, that she'd stop making music? Stop touring?
In fact, imagine she never got more money. Do you think she's making music because she's saving up for something she cannot currently afford? Does she have a lifestyle that's unsustainable without earning even more money?
edit -
To be clear, I think the market is an incredible way of constructing a ludicrously large graph of how to use the worlds resources and human labour, tied to what people want as an outcome, allowing fractional voting through the network in a way that's extremely simple for end users (I buy things for prices I'm happy with, the "market" of millions of other people optimise the back end of that) and is self-optimising.
The problem comes when some people have enormously more votes than others, distorting it all, or are able to manipulate the graph, or where hill climbing optimisation cannot reach the more optimal states (infrastructure classically, legal systems are another good example).
While I have no objection to long ranty posts - I write enough of them myself - as a matter of practicality I'm going to ignore most of it and stick to the questions to keep the walls of text under control.
> You can look at that and say "this is optimal" but I am very unsure as to what you're then measuring.
Well, we started back in ~1,000AD with 0 people who own such a boat. Now in ~2,000AD we have >1 person with such a boat. Ideally we'd like to be as close as possible to a world where everyone has such a boat. So 1 person isn't ideal but, y'know it is a start and we're going to need to have 1 person before we get to 2. Probably it is about as good as we can manage right now. Bezos is a good candidate for the 1st person, he's done some pretty amazing things.
> Why would anyone go hungry and uneducated if Taylor Swift is angry? What is the process by which you see that happening?
She might not donate the money. She's choosing to give money away because it won't impact her lifestyle, so if you take money from her on the theory that it doesn't impact her lifestyle maybe she stops. And she's probably more efficient in spending it than the practical alternatives.
> Let's take TS as an example. What is it she is being rewarded for, is it efficient allocation of capital? Is that why people buy her songs? Is that what's made her so incredibly wealthy? Do you think that if she was rewarded somewhat less, that she'd stop making music? Stop touring? In fact, imagine she never got more money. Do you think she's making music because she's saving up for something she cannot currently afford? Does she have a lifestyle that's unsustainable without earning even more money?
Yes to all of the above. I assume. I don't know much about Taylor Swift except she's got a lot of money and she sings.
If you're measuring it as "how many people own superyachts" that's probably different from how most people want to measure "how well is the planet being run".
> And she's probably more efficient in spending it than the practical alternatives.
Why? This seems like an odd statement. Why is a singer more efficient at doing this than a team of analysts?
> Yes to all of the above. I assume.
I have to point out that you are likely looking at the world in a drastically different way to most.
You think that
1. We should be pushing for more superyachts, as an immediate measure of efficient allocation of resources
2. Taylor Swift is being rewarded for efficient allocation of capital and not her songwriting, singing, etc.
3. Taylor Swift, who has been singing for many years at lower amounts of wealth, would stop if her fortune dropped and she had to release songs in order to gain more wealth
4. Taylor Swift is making music because there is something she wishes to purchase that she is saving up for. She does not wish to make music, and is putting up with it to finally afford something.
I think most people believe that musicians who are extremely popular for their music would continue to make music if they could live an extremely lavish lifestyle without a care in the world for money but their net worth didn't increase. I think that most people would prefer some measure of how well things are going that look at their own life, or how many people have food.
> If you're measuring it as "how many people own superyachts" that's probably different from how most people want to measure "how well is the planet being run".
A disturbing number of people are financially incapable to the point where they struggle with concepts like spending less money than they earn. There is a significant tension between what they want to measure and what economic optimal looks like. The economy is there to maximise peace and prosperity, the people who think otherwise should be kept well away from the levers of power.
> Why? This seems like an odd statement. Why is a singer more efficient at doing this than a team of analysts?
I assume she's got a team of analysts working on it. I doubt she manages her own money directly. They're probably pretty good.
> You think that
> 1. We should be pushing for more superyachts, as an immediate measure of efficient allocation of resources
I think that a world where one person has a superyacht is better than a world where nobody does. In much the same way that a world in the 60s someone probably owned a really expensive mainframe and there'd be people moaning about how outrageous it was that someone could spend so much money on a big calculator. The market doesn't seem to want to give everyone a superyacht, and I doubt it would be efficient to jump right in to it. For obvious reasons
Points 2 to 4 though seem like an accurate restatement. With the caveat that my knowledge of Swift is patchy and distant.
What budget incentive does a wealth tax create for Congress when considering a non-tax policy that would reduce the wealth of billionaires by allowing more small and medium businesses to compete with them in their industries?
> The people behind wealth taxes generally handwave explaining how their system will be better at allocating than the people who make a living of allocating wealth effectively because it is all just obvious that it doesn't need to be justified. Poor people will get more money if rich people have less, duh, QED.
Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me alongside graphs showing the extent to which our inequality is growing. https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/ see the "The Top .01% Don't Pay Their Fair Share as They Hoard More Wealth" graph in particular.
This is more a disagreement of values than facts, I think. Some people see the richest man's net worth go from $100B to >$1T and think he deserves that for starting these companies, and taking any of it from him is class warfare. Others think that rich people's pissing contests and lifestyles would be essentially the same if their wealth capped out at say $100B instead, we're morally obligated to use that money to try to meet Americans' basic needs, and using other's taxpayer dollars to allow him to reach those heights (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that>) is class warfare.
High marginal income taxes (it was 91% in 1963, 70% until 1981, there's your compelling case where they turned out to be right, inequality was not growing then like it is now) or a wealth tax are not the same as Soviet style socialism. They still give an incentive for entrepreneurs, innovators, and hard workers.
> This is more a disagreement of values than facts, I think.
It's a disagreement over policy. Increasing inequality is bad, the question is what's the best way to do something about it? There are many alternatives with better characteristics than a wealth tax, like antitrust enforcement to break up concentrated industries and lower corporate profits through increased competition, zoning reform to reduce housing costs so that ordinary people keep more of what they earn instead of paying it to banks or landlords, tax reform to remove existing advantages in the tax code for huge multinational corporations over domestic small businesses owned by ordinary people, etc.
> High marginal income taxes (it was 91% in 1963, 70% until 1981, there's your compelling case where they turned out to be right, inequality was not growing then like it is now)
The high marginal rates in the mid-20th century were fake. The tax code at the time had so many loopholes that nobody really paid them. When the rates were lowered in the 1980s, many of the loopholes were closed at the same time, resulting in the "federal receipts as a percent of GDP" chart looking like this:
I'm not at all sure everyone in these discussions agrees on this point!
I agree with you not only that this is bad but also that wealth taxes are not the only way to address it. They are a way that is getting momentum right now, AFAICT more than the other things you mentioned, and we may have to choose between voting for a wealth tax (or candidates who support one) or doing nothing.
fwiw, I'm really not sure which approach(es) I'd choose if I could single-handedly decide how to reduce wealth inequality.
> The high marginal rates in the mid-20th century were fake.
I think "federal receipts as a percent of GDP" isn't the right chart to answer this question. Overall tax rate != how progressive the tax is or how high the "effective" marginal tax rate is. On https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/ the "The Top .01% Don't Pay Their Fair Share as They Hoard More Wealth" shows a clear cross-over point where before about 1980 the top .01%'s share of tax was greater than their share of wealth, and after it reversed. That's consistent with the 1981 change I mentioned.
> Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me...
Wouldn't that make it not a straw man argument? It isn't an argument as pointing out an assumption that voting or committee can be better at allocating resources than a free market. It isn't a very well grounded one and it looks wrong when presented on its own but there isn't much I can do about that. It is popular and people find it convincing.
>> Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me...
> Wouldn't that make it not a straw man argument?
I think the "even" and "..." are doing a lot of work in my sentence. You presented a less strong version of the argument than that given by people who support it, thus it is a straw man, period.
> an assumption that voting or committee can be better at allocating resources than a free market
Would you say we had a free market in the 1970s, when the chart I linked showed the top .01% by wealth's share of taxes exceeded their share of wealth? That's essentially what I'd like to go back to, perhaps by a wealth tax. I would say we had a free market then, showing progressive taxation and free markets are absolutely compatible. This isn't Soviet-style central planning.
I'm still a bit lost on what the point of difference is. You seem to be saying that you've seen evidence that makes this "strawman argument" convincing to you, but you don't seem to accept that I've generally argued with people who believe it. If you think there is evidence and it is convincing evidence then the obvious interpretation of what I said seems to be that I'm just being logical and straightforward. I don't see the strawman.
I mean I might not know what a strawman is, but I thought it was claiming people were making an argument that in fact they were not.
> Would you say we had a free market in the 1970s, when the chart I linked showed the top .01% by wealth's share of taxes exceeded their share of wealth? That's essentially what I'd like to go back to, perhaps by a wealth tax. I would say we had a free market then, showing progressive taxation and free markets are absolutely compatible. This isn't Soviet-style central planning.
I mean, sure. I've long argued that the US strategy of printing money and giving it to asset owners is bad. I doubt a wealth tax would help, IMO the real issue is the welfare for wealthy people. Seems kinda dumb and the people claiming that the economy would collapse without it appear to be making up their principles as they go along. But we should all want to encourage wealth. It makes people wealthy.
> I mean I might not know what a strawman is, but I thought it was claiming people were making an argument that in fact they were not.
What I mean is: I expect you originally heard a version of this that was more nuanced and supported by data than what you presented. Your paraphrased form is weaker, which I call a strawman. (The "duh, QED" was kind of a give-away.)
Wikipedia lists (among other things) "Oversimplifying an opponent's argument, then attacking this oversimplified version." and "Exaggerating (sometimes grossly) an opponent's argument, then attacking this exaggerated version." as characteristics of a strawman.
btw the opposite is sometimes called a "steelman": arguing against the most solid version of the opponent's argument that you can imagine.
> I mean, sure. I've long argued that the US strategy of printing money and giving it to asset owners is bad. I doubt a wealth tax would help, IMO the real issue is the welfare for wealthy people. Seems kinda dumb and the people claiming that the economy would collapse without it appear to be making up their principles as they go along.
As in Quantitative Easing? I confess I don't understand it as well as I probably should, but I think it's cyclical? and inequality is increasing even when it is not happening? Would a pinky-promise that we will stop and never do it again achieve start reducing inequality, as opposed to just lessening the increase? If not, I don't think that's radical enough on its own. What serious alternative is there to a wealth tax or going back to 70+% highest marginal tax rate?
> But we should all want to encourage wealth. It makes people wealthy.
To the extent anyone and everyone can become wealthy, I agree. What policies would you suggest to achieve that meaningfully (obviously inflation doesn't count)? What I see in these charts is instead a zero-sum game in which the most wealthy become even more so at the expense of the least wealthy.
> As in Quantitative Easing? I confess I don't understand it as well as I probably should, but I think it's cyclical? and inequality is increasing even when it is not happening?
QE, inflation policy and the fairly regular bailouts. And probably funnelling money away from markets and towards golf buddies through the government.
It's continuous [0]. The US money supply went from something like 16 trillion to 23 trillion since COVID. In percentages, that means nominal wages and expenses should probably have gone up by around 40% all else equal. Typically though, most of the gains are in asset prices first then flow into the broader market second - so I see things like US wages are up around 20% [1], so I'd expect asset prices to be up >40%. And people with political connections probably do better again.
> What policies would you suggest to achieve that meaningfully (obviously inflation doesn't count)?
Me personally? I'd start by targeting stable prices before technological improvements (stable as in they tend not to change, not the weirdness where people are supposed to use 'stable' to describe exponential increases). Let badly run companies go bankrupt. Tax people directly instead of trying to pay for government policies through inflation. Then once a clearer picture emerges of where the real resources are coming from and going to, start talking about whether there is an actual problem to solve in real terms.
the utility of wealth is not linear. a billionaire getting $100 probably has no use for it and they wont notice either way. but a homeless person getting $100 makes a big difference for them no matter if they use it to buy new clothes and apply for a job or spend it all on liquor. redistribution is actually good by itself because it maximizes the total wellbeing of society.
all the negative effects on economic output come from the fact that there is always some minimum amount of capital you need to start a successful business in each industry, and if nobody has enough wealth to match that requirement the business has no way to take off. but that argument only works if crowd funding or state investment are not practical, which is mostly true in our economic system but its not a law of nature.
we dont have to go all in on soviet style five year plans. in fact we know its one of the worst possible systems because the real world is unpredictable and large scale inflexible plans usually fail. its not always a disaster but its always unstable. but neoliberal capitalism is not the only form of a non-command economy.
"there is no alternative" only makes sense if you ignore all the things in between and outside to create a false binary. there is also tito style market socialism, decentralized commune systems, continuous planning, hybrid systems like china and vietnam, capitalism with worker ownership, and a lot of others i dont even know. not all of them are practical (like anarchy) but the ideas already exist and i think its worth it to try and make them real. a better world is possible as long as ours is not perfect.
Marginal utility tends to diminish as you consume more of a good, but you can't compare utility between individuals. Utility is ordinal, has no common scale and is subjective. It doesn't make sense to try and claim that redistribution will always maximize the total wellbeing of society.
I agree: there is no precise, objective way to compare the utility of two arbitrary wealth distributions, and redistribution does not always maximize the total well-being of society.
Yet I assert it's useful to ask if the status quo—one person has >$1T and many others don't have enough for basic needs like shelter, medicine, and food—is optimal or if it'd be better to redistribute some of this.
* We don't need the ability to quantify or rank all wealth distributions, just compare some of immediate relevance. That's much easier, in the same way that even though the halting problem is undecidable, we can prove some realistic program A will halt and some realistic program B may not.
* We don't need objectivity. Democracies decide many subjective things by majority vote (sometimes 2/3rds or whatever), directly or through representatives. I don't always agree with the outcome, but it's the system we have here in the US/California, and I assert it's better than a dictatorship or requiring 100% consensus to take any action.
The major crime of media is misframing as opposed to being wrong.
> The Economist was convinced by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction
The issue here is not whether or not the Iraqis had any weapons of any type, the issue is whether the US has a basic right to travel to the opposite side of the globe and invade random countries. One of the issues the anti-Trump crowd has right now coming down on his crazy and unprovoked attacks on Iran has been that it is absolutely an established pattern of US behaviour and he's well within normal practice. Trump is even claiming it is because of WMDs! Again! Eventually at least, after he tried a few other excuses first. "He's lying" doesn't cut much ice because that is pretty normal when the US goes to war and it usually isn't particularly subtle. The only difference from the Economist's perspective is how enthusiastically the reporters want to pretend they believe the obvious mistruths.
Anyway, that rant aside, the issue is more that the Economist is pretending that the unknowable is knowable rather than that they get it wrong more often or not than anyone else. It doesn't seem theoretically possible to predict the price of things more than "up", "down" and "assume it does what it always does". Mapping out the supply/demand curve and confidently forecasting how it could shift in the short term requires knowledge of all actors, their preferences, options and operational constraints. Even for a relatively superficial forecast. Who's got that sort of modelling firepower?
Because it isn't very important and the more degrees of freedom the seller has the more likely they are to do something to make the whole process cheaper for customers. Although it does seem appropriate that everyone should know the price of something before they buy it, as long as it happens before the money is handed over that is fine.
a world where profit motive means you have to beat competition in innovation/efficiency and separate money from consumers by providing them value. fraud / intentional deception (broadly) is already illegal.
> the more degrees of freedom the seller has the more likely they are to do something to make the whole process cheaper for customers.
I think this is the crux of our disagreement. In my experience, the more degrees of freedom the seller has, the more chances to fuck you over they have.
I think - and this might be my European perspective and maybe why we feel differently about regulations than Americans - the main source of risk is corporations trying to take advantage of you, not the government. Curbing said risk through regulations is a core part of good governance.
If you let yourself get taken advantage of by corporations the result is substantially higher median incomes [0]. I remain unconvinced that adopting an adversarial stance toward the people who are trying to give you real stuff is the best strategy. Cooperation and forming a consensus with them seems like a better path.
You're going to have to draw the meaning out a bit more for me, continuing with the assumption that "Americans" means the US then they score 69.8 vs a list top of 73.2. Given that the list sets out to compare the incomparable that seems pretty much equivalent. The US's worst score in its worst scoring category is "Sustainable Trade" which is driven more by their historically dominant military position than anything else and not all that relevant to their corporate governance policies.
And there are a huge number of subjective judgements about what the worth of individual categories is, especially given the political nature of quality. Picking on one of my favourites - the US scores low on "Income Inequality". Income inequality is a weird measure because we'd expect the poorest people in society to have literally nothing (because some people are beyond help). Therefore the wealthier a society is and the more income inequality I'd expect as a baseline. People get worked up about it even though in practice it is a struggle to articulate how it is even a good or bad thing.
Everything is subjective - including which metrics we focus on and how we interpret them - since humans are inherently subjective beings.
I'd invite you to sit out at a cafe in Florence, or on a terrace in Amsterdam, watching the boats go by.
I'd then invite you to take a walk through the Tenderloin of SF, global hub of tech capital.
I've done both. I've lived both. I can tell you that as far as my subjectivity is concerned, there is a clear winner, numbers on a bank account be damned.
One more note: A society in which the poorest are seen as a "beyond help" and left with literally nothing is not a society I would feel comfortable living in. It is precisely those folks that need the most help to make society livable.
They're sitting at the centre of a web of software services that coordinate some unreasonable amount of the internet. They've definitely done something right, California might be hosting one of the most impressive economic clusters outside of China.
But that doesn't tell us much about the relationship between that thing and their regulations. The regulations might be supporting the thing, or the thing might be so successful that the damage being done by the regulations becomes tolerable. It's entirely plausible that if other states attempted that level of regulation they'd crumple like tissue paper because they don't have the economic power of California's IT sector to balance out the excess demands being placed on businesses.
"Past performance is no indicator of future success."
They did something right fifty years ago. Now? No. They're doing nearly everything wrong.
Top-two elections coupled with rigged ballots so voters can't really choose, and no one can prove anything (and it's against the law to try). Government program after government program that fails to solve basic problems because the money seems to up and disappear, and when the public calls for an audit the person doing the stealing gets to say "No."
187,084 homeless in California in 2024. 181,934 homeless in California in 2025 after 2024 spending of more than $2.5 billion (with a B) on homeless programs. They would have done better if they had just given every homeless person $13,363. It's the same expenditure.
Instead they spent $485,437 per person helped (5,150). The median household income in California in 2024 was $100K. So they spent four times the median household per person helped. Those are bad results.
They're driving out businesses. They're destroying the infrastructure that let them build the economic juggernaut of agriculture and tech (reservoirs left dry, water management mishandled deliberately, forest mismanagement contrary to decades of evidence).
Generally speaking, I've liked their food and consumer product safety regulations, and most of those have been emulating Europe, but most of the rest they've gotten wrong. They're still rich because of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but they're driving away tech, and while Hollywood has a long way to tumble, it's on its way to doing that to itself.
California has a significantly better climate to be homeless in, so you'd want a bus ticket from Minnesota or whatever to there too if you were homeless.
Yes but ... knowing the answer to general knowledge questions isn't really an appropriate test of that. General knowledge sounds like it would be, by definition, things known to people of ordinary intelligence. So it could easily be that very intelligent people aren't up to speed about general knowledge topics because they spend their time on topics of interest to people of high intelligence. That is actually something of a trope.
The nature of the questions and why they are expected to know the answers matters a lot here.
> The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem, excess capital is taken out of these companies during good times and then they run to governments seeking bailouts during bad times but governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance.
Sounds like the free market hasn't been tried, a key plank of the free market on the supply side is that incompetent managers have to go bankrupt and lose their capital or otherwise get squeezed out. If the government is going to bail people out then obviously the companies will take adopt a ridiculously risky management strategy because they get the upside and dodge the downside, so they just have to maximise the potential upside at any cost. No surprise if after getting a bailout people do exactly what they did that led to the bailout until they need another bailout. Why change?
The trick to "mandating" of good corporate governance is not to bail them out. Then at least the corporations will be governed in a way that they aren't likely to go bankrupt. Maybe even make things people want and sell them at a profit.
> here's a few industries where structurally, companies can only exit the market but it's almost impossible for a new company to enter. Airframes, jet engines, CPU manufacturing, lithography etc.
Is there actual evidence for this, or are the companies involved just doing a good enough job that the market doesn't see a need for new entrants? Because it actually seems a bit implausible that these technologies could just disappear or even become less available under a free market. What we actually see is the likes of NVidia or ASML, where other players can't catch up because the market leader is just pushing the cutting edge forward too quickly (spare a thought for Intel, who was the unbeatable colossus once).
The free market works fine - the problem is at that scale, we can only afford a few key players, they're strategic so they end up having subsidies other considerations.
Put differently: if the population of the earth were 50 Billion people instead of 8 Billion - then we'd have markets with enough competition to allow free market dynamics.
In that context, then we'd have 'Space companies' being subsidized.
We'd have a hotel on the Moon and we'd easily be on Mars already.
Those aircraft are on the 'edge of our resource capabilities' - huge companies at the top of the pyramid.
If we had a massively bigger economic pyramid, they would be more like car companies.
I'm not sure if a bigger population would really justify more jet manufacturers.
Outside of general aviation (hobbyists/business jets), the potential buyers for jet aircraft are going to trend towards natural oligopoly.
Military craft, there's basically one buyer per country, at most a handful of different decision makers behind the same basic chequebook.
Civilian craft, does the number of airlines scale with population? There are a finite number of viable routes, airport slots, and market segments, so would it actually support a hundred new airlines, or would we just end up with a Big Southwest buying 1,000 737s instead of 100?
Even if you had more airlines, would they want to diversify their fleets? Running the same few types of planes, especially if they're the same types of planes as their competitors, unlocks efficiencies. How much would it cost a random American or European airline to retrain their pilots to fly the Comac C919, and how much would they spend extra on adaptations (stocking new spares, retraining maintenance staff, retooling processes for different floorplans)? I also suspect there's a very strong CYA/risk aversion mindset that would make it very hard to sell a new player into the market.
Regional flag carriers have political excuses to support a buy-local policy at some cost, but that still only justifies a handful of manufacturers per economic hegemon.
So you think U.S. would be better at airplane manufacturing had Boeing gone bankrupt at some point in the past?
It's a pretty strong claim and I would like to see some theoretical justification, other than belief in the magical free market.
In my country, IIRC, we let Aero Vodochody to crash and be bought by Boeing. We are not better at making airplanes, honestly probably the worst than at any other point in history.
Well, no I think something subtly different. I think if you look at the quality of life in Czechia before and after Aero Vodochody went bankrupt it probably rose, all else equal. And the quality of the corporate governance would have been better than in an alternative. It'd be interesting to check the price and quality of the aircraft that were available for use; those two things probably moved in a helpful direction. That last move isn't guaranteed by basic economics, but it seems quite likely in this case.
It is getting to the point where I wouldn't trust experienced developers to merge code without AI review. The latest generation of models are getting pretty good.
If a dev costs $1k/day that’s $30 to spend 15 minutes looking at a pr. How much review does that in tokens get you? I’d wager you’d easily find lots of low level issues that are beyond basic linting with that reliably, and I feel like latest gen models can do really good work.
> If it were about truth alone, the person who is right could be content with being right...
So... how would someone know if they're right? For starters, if we're going to be serious there are a lot of matters where there isn't even such a thing as "right" because the question is how to decide what to optimise for. But more importantly, if you rely on the inside of your own head to try and arrive at the truth the most likely outcome is slop. One of the best parts of being argumentative is finding out what the holes in a view are really quickly.
There seem to be views in the comments and original article that arguments are to be won rather than undertaken and reviewed. They're a man-vs-self story, not man-vs-man one.
Refactoring spaghetti has become easier in the LLM era because it can just read all the code, and there is now a skill floor on the programmers that kicks in somewhere relatively high. The benefits of type systems might have suffered because of that.
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