anonporridge

If you care about the car not rapidly losing value, you definitely don't have lambo money and you're too poor to be dabbling in supercar silliness.

This is what used cars are for.

This is the natural flow of things. People with disposable income buy nice new stuff, suffer the rapid, early depreciation, and then they trickle down to the next tier of consumer who can't afford or doesn't want brand new things.

Cars and houses all work like this. Very rarely have the lowest income tiers ever gotten brand new, expensive things.

And if you're high income and smart, you still get used things because you recognize this is the most fiscally responsible thing to do and a great way to build and preserve wealth.

I hope one day that you too find love for yourself and another that you also want to propagate.

The world you imagine is a fragile one.

Waste and inefficiency is the cost of anti-fragility that's necessary to not go extinct when the unexpected happens.

Your world would also slow down innovation. Those old machines were much more energy hungry and only rapid iteration has made them dramatically more efficient.

Currently in the process of germinating as many of my own offspring as I can, because I want the world to look a little bit more like me and my wife.

Plenty of time to die later once they all launch and continue punching through the future with our genes and memes.

It's not just modern finance.

A tree experiences compounding interest. The longer it lives, the more ground it owns and the more its tall branches and leaves blot out the sun below, making it extremely difficult for any juvenile of its species to take root and mature beneath it.

This is why some conifers have pine cones that only release seeds when burned in a fire. For these species, evolution has determined it's not even worth trying to germinate unless it's likely a fire killed its parents and made space for them to grow. This is part of how we discovered wildfires are a critical part of some region's ecology. We managed to halt most forest fires and it ruined the natural rhythm of life there.

Imagine still having helicopter parents at 50 years old.

That goes both ways.

Lack of experience is critical for risk taking. Even great successes like Jensen Huang have said that if they knew how hard it was going to be, he wouldn't choose his path again.

Memory blocks you from experimentation as much as it protects you from making recurrent mistakes. A species or civilization with too much memory will eventually wither away towards complete inaction and decay.

It's probably a bit of both.

Maintaining order and fighting entropy is hard, but also planned obsolescence is a good thing for systemic resilience.

You have to regularly clear out the old for at least two reasons...

a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.

b) prevent old things from monopolizing resources due to more time to compound interest. Otherwise, you end up with Saturn devouring his son.

A US wealth/unrealized gains tax might trigger it, because it would likely create a cascade of forced selling, with the proceeds of sales getting burned as tax revenue for entitlement programs or debt payments rather than reinvested.

Ditto Russia.

No, it's just game theory.

When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.

Why should they?

The United States honors international IP law and doesn't cheat its way into threatening domestic production of other countries like China does.

The rise of China has done a lot to destroy the neoliberal, globalist dream.

Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?

And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.

Cybertruck is a great case study in how people confuse form for function.

In a world where technology is advancing exponentially, aesthetics increasingly offer a poor signal for performance, and only those who obsessively look under the hood and disregard form will see through it all.