maehwasu

Fiat game mechanics force them to "invest" in "productive" assets in order to stay ahead of inflation.

Scare quotes used because a ton of the price of those assets now reflects a monetary premium. I.e. a portion of the price of a house is its value for living or renting out in a given area, but a lot of it is its value as a scarce asset that is somewhat resistant to inflation.

Needless to say, this is not a great allocation of resources and is an incredibly inefficient way for saving to work.

> Although I'll admit that since my employer is looking at 100% remote, it opens the door to moving to a nicer/cheaper house outside of the office-commutable bubble.

This is the key part--many people desire a home they can build a life in, but limiting it to the commuting orbit of a few select cities really limits the possibilities of what that home can be.

The selection at a price point is worse, and the extra financial resources it consumes lower what the home can be.

This is before you get into being part of the captive tax base of a poorly-run city with little incentive to change...

Wait, the government gives investors essentially infinite cheap credit, resources get allocated in an incredibly perverse manner, and it's Friedrich fucking Hayek who has it wrong????

I certainly don't think Hayek is above criticism, but this author definitely is not making the point he thinks he is.

This isn't some kind of "no true Scotsman" thing either. The current market is exactly what someone like Hayek would expect given the monetary manipulations of the past 10+ years.

Theoretical articles like this ("proving" that X won't work) are almost always doomed to be wrong, because you can't enumerate all possible ways that something COULD work, but won't.

A shorter way to say that is that something can fail thousands of times, but only has to succeed once. If the right technical, social and business factors come together, you get working micropayments.

I’m surprised Google et al. haven’t been forced to make more contractual disclosures at the time of a user submitting an extension or app.

Absent blaring warnings like “you understand that if you build any type of business on this platform we reserve the right to destroy it at any time for any reason”, it’s pretty hard to see how users had any ability to understand the implicit and explicit contracts they were entering into.

This isn’t much different than “Nathan for You” style hiding of onerous terms deep in hilariously small fine print, and judges tend not to look fondly on such games.

I’m torn here.

1. I agree as to the need to get off the Google lands.

2. Being able to create business relationships to build on other people’s property and work without fear of their yanking the rug out is an incredibly important part of a working society.

Yes, and usually the people they worked with or learned from were also extremely talented.

As someone who uses Clojure a lot:

It would be a lot better for language adoption if people would write more blog posts showing best practices for tooling, and less vague stuff about how awesome the language is.

For example, the startup time thing is completely irrelevant if you use Emacs/VSCode with a standalone REPL that you connect to.

It's non-trivial to set this up (more because of lack of consolidated info rather than time it takes), but it can easily be standardized across machines/envs (I Dockerize all projects in a simple way to allow team members to get started up with REPLs easily).

Now ask the airplane engineers about the F-35.

Voting apps are basically political money laundering schemes. Using them to make comments about software vs other industries suggests either stupidity, laziness, or malice.

Employee compensation does indeed raise the price the company has to pay. However, it doesn’t end up in government coffers, making it not a tax. This isn’t rocket science.

It effectively raises the price the company has to pay and thus lowers profits.