droro

"Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world."

I had always wondered whether there was a missile that was spin stabilized with minimal control surfaces like this one. They mentioned it only had two control fins, but not whether they are independent. It seems possible to steer a spinning missile using a single actuator if the control pulses are precise enough.

How to become a billionaire:

1. Start a company 2. Issue 1_000_000 shares to yourself 3. Find a friend who owes you a favor, then issue another share in the company and sell it to them for $1000

This is an extreme example, but most of the people on the world's richest list have been able to similarly inflate their net worth through illiquidity. Market caps are a misleading way to measure wealth. To take another example, the market cap of Tesla is based less on the company's physical assets than the anticipation of earnings over the next 20-30 years. My own net worth would look a lot better if it was calculated using the same methodology.

I'm not trying to argue that inequality doesn't exist, but I think this obsession with the paper value of the 1-percenters is a distraction from the fact that reducing inequality needs to ultimately involve the redistribution of physical assets and labor. If we get obsessed with confiscating the abstract financial assets of billionaires, we will likely find out they don't have much buying power when being traded for real things like housing or energy.

This makes a lot of sense if you consider that increasing the supply of money is not enough to cause inflation on its own- there also has to be scarcity. Healthcare is scarce because it is tied to the availability of highly skilled labor and has seen significant cost increases in recent years as a result. Housing has been scarce because the amount of land near job opportunities has decreased as our economy has become more service-oriented. And this brings me to the one big item that was missing from the list in the OP: the pandemic has eased the housing crisis by encouraging everyone to spread out. The exodus of upper and middle class people moving into smaller cities and towns will bring more opportunities for service jobs to places with lower construction costs and a higher availability of land. The only question is whether the drawbacks of telecommuting are big enough to push everyone back into offices in a few years, reversing the trend.

It kind of frustrates me that I keep seeing UBI being described as a sort of unemployment assistance. Unless you drop the "U", a UBI is something EVERYONE receives- the separation between givers/takers would not be obvious, especially if the unemployment rate remains low. And I think the unemployment rate would remain low because workers would be willing to accept lower pay if it is bolstered by a UBI. A UBI that is aggressive enough would actually create jobs by lowering the cost of labor in this manner.

The thing that prevents people from having jobs isn't a lack of demand for labor- it's the unwillingness of companies to pay for a worker's full cost of living. A UBI could correct for that.

Back in the early 'oughts, the advent of peer-to-peer filesharing systems inspired a number of projects and companies to be founded with the goal of applying P2P technologies to more general applications.

At the time, P2P architecture offered 2 primary advantages:

1. Since the infrastructure of a P2P system was provided by its users, it would be self-hosting and self-scaling.

2. Having no central point of control, P2P systems are difficult for law enforcement to censor or shut down.

Unfortunately, it turned out that P2P had one big downside, which was complexity of implementation. In theory everything would smoothly scale to millions of users, but it required some serious expertise and investment to achieve that in practice. As hosting prices dropped and AdWords was launched, the conventional client-server website approach reasserted itself as the most sensible way to build networked applications. Thus, P2P's only remaining reason to exist was for the evasion of the authorities. And even this had its caveats- law enforcement may not be able to shut down a decentralized system, but it certainly can shut down the company(s) that pay for the system's ongoing development and maintenance.

While decentralized technologies still have a lot going against them, I think the thing that has changed this time around is the presence of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies offer the possibility to fund the development of decentralized software using micropayments, but considering the amount of work required to design the architecture of such software before even being able to think about usability concerns, I am skeptical as to whether micropayments or even ICOs will result in the investment necessary to make decentralized systems appealing to the general public.