jack_h

That's not what CU held. The idea that corporations have legal personhood with some degree of rights is much, much older than Citizens United.

Citizens United was a non-profit corporation that created Hillary: The Movie which was critical of Hillary Clinton. They wanted to distribute it shortly before the 2008 primaries. The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibited corporations from using general funds for electioneering or speech that advocates for the election or defeat of a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election.

The Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from stopping an incorporated association from independently spending its own money for political advocacy of a candidate. To put it another way, if I can spend my money to advocate for or against a candidate, why can I not get together with some friends to pool our money and incorporate to do the same? If this had gone the other way would you be okay with a corporation being forbidden from releasing a video critical of Trump shortly before the 2024 election?

There are roughly two orders of magnitude more microcontrollers in the world running code than application processors. GC is not acceptable on a microcontroller due to the extreme resource constraints. The GP post is correct, Go can replace some use cases for C, but it does not replace all use cases and GC is part of the reason.

Perhaps you could expand upon the parallels you’re seeing as it seems like you’ve fundamentally misunderstood my post.

... there is actually an ever-increasing number of things that used to have an absolute right (scientifically proven) answer that become controversial. Climate change. Vaccines. Whether the earth is round - that kind of stuff.

I think there are multiple things here that need to be disentangled. The first is that just because science "proves" something that doesn't mean the political, civil, or economic path is nearly as clear cut. While there certainly are people who just deny these things outright there's also the camp that accepts the scientific result but disputes how to deal with it as a society.

Second I've seen an alarming rise in what I would characterize as scientism, a belief structure around science itself where the "acolytes" of science do not understand the science themselves, but use it to reinforce their own worldview in the same way that deniers (heretics really) use other sources to reinforce their worldview. I have seen this play out within my own social circle as people will defer to experts as if they are a clerical class with divine authority to determine ultimate truth. To give an example in a much less controversial arena, how often have you witnessed people adopting fad diets because the "science" shows X is good even though the actual backing papers, that no adopter has read, are much more murky at best? This is an understandable consequence of having a limited lifespan where not everyone can know everything therefore heuristics must be used to comprehend the world, but the flexible heuristic which can lead to a change of opinion can be swapped out for a rigid belief that permits no change of opinion unfortunately.

Last I think this ultimately stems from what F.A. Hayek called constructivist rationalism[1], the idea that we can rationally construct our own social order. I share your own concern about mistakes that affect all of us specifically regarding philosophies that adopt constructivist rationalism such as the family of collectivist ideologies (socialism and the like) which are currently on the rise. My conclusion is that civilizations will evolve according to the culmination of all individual actors' actions and I personally have a limited role to play, although I am a classical liberal. Your last question unfortunately can lead some to conclude that a much more dictatorial society is necessary to produce a result that may itself not be possible and instead lead to an even worse result than the alternative.

[1] I highly recommend The Fatal Conceit by Hayek if you want to challenge assumptions your own worldview likely rests on without even knowing it.

UBI would be pure deficit spending which would basically double it. Our interest is already the #2 federal outlay at $1 trillion (defense is #5 last I heard) and we're already in fiscal dominance. So the end result is UBI would trigger much higher inflation which would make those UBI checks worthless.

I also don’t think people should vote like that, the problem is there’s no way to enforce such a pattern[1]. Everyone benefits from voting as you describe, but that’s precisely where the prisoner’s dilemma comes into play. There’s also a size component to it. Small, tight knit communities tend to do well with voting, but as communities grow interactions become less personal, trust drops, and the incentive structure I described above becomes dominant. Voting essentially allows a community to establish its own Overton window distinct from what the official rules create, but that can be changed and constricted until a bubble is established[2]. I’ve seen it happen with countless communities across social media. Despite good intentions I think voting systems are a net negative to fostering good discussions and debate.

[1] Maybe AI meta-moderation?

[2] I don’t mean that this is happening intentionally by bad actors, merely that on average large groups produce outcomes that are dictated by incentives.

Voting is meant to allow a community to police itself to some extent, although the downside to that is it incentivizes controlling the discussion over contributing to it. It’s a lot easier to vote in accordance with your own beliefs than articulate counter-arguments. The prisoner dilemma takes hold, people stop visiting as they get frustrated by the downvoting, and a bubble forms. It’ll be interesting to see how AI changes the online discussion landscape.

As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that there are no solutions, merely tradeoffs. Saying something is “free” is selling a solution which rhetorically works well with a voting populace that has little, if any, knowledge of economics. Describing the n-th order economic consequences and how you are trading one set of issues for a different set of issues — which may be acceptable on balance but is not without consequence — is a very difficult thing to communicate. In reality the attack ads basically write themselves. Or to put it more bluntly utopia sells a lot better than reality.

The second aspect to this is that specifically when it comes to economics the timescales needed to understand the impact of a policy are generally longer than the collective memory of the people. Politicians inevitably sell and enact good intentions, but by the time the reality of the consequences from those intentions becomes manifest it will be years or decades later and the causal relationship is masked and the politician will generally be long gone. At that point it just looks like a new problem that similarly needs a “solution”.

You’re using multiple definitions of “free” here. One is freedom in the Lockean sense, the other is freedom from the properties and consequences of an emergent system. It’s a bit like saying you are free to choose your own mate and have kids without government involvement but you’re still a slave to natural selection.

The concept of the free press does not guarantee that the truth will proliferate, it merely attempts to avoid the problem of the state defining what truth is. It’s an attempt to select the least worst option because no one knows of a perfect solution or even if one exists.

You’re only considering one part of the system, not the whole. As the GAO puts it[1]:

Intragovernmental debt holdings represent federal debt owed by Treasury to federal government accounts—primarily federal trust funds such as those established for Social Security and Medicare—that typically have an obligation to invest their excess annual receipts (including interest earnings) over disbursements in federal securities.

Debt held by the public represents a claim on today’s taxpayers and absorbs resources from today’s economy, meaning that when an investor buys Treasury securities it is not investing that money elsewhere in the economy.

Intragovernmental debt holdings reflect a claim on taxpayers and the economy in the future. Specifically, when federal government accounts redeem Treasury securities to obtain cash to fund expenditures, Treasury usually borrows from the public to finance these redemptions.

Or to put it simply the excess contributions are lent to the Treasury who uses it for general government expenditures. When it’s time to pay it back the Treasury can either pay it with tax revenue assuming it has excess or has cut spending elsewhere or it will be forced to borrow it. The latter is generally what happens.

I wouldn’t be so quick to call people ill-informed on this subject if I were you.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-107138.pdf

I want to highlight your point because you're correct and this is something that a lot of people don't understand about economic systems. We exist in a resource constrained system. There are finite medical workers, finite time, finite medicine, finite medical facilities, finite medical equipment, and just finite resources in general. There will always be shortages and surpluses in such a system as resource allocation is never perfect. If you have a shortage you must ration supply through some mechanism. It can be by prices, by queue, by need, by lot, by status, or countless other mechanisms or combinations of mechanisms but you must ration regardless. This will lead to people dying under certain conditions who may not have died if some other rationing mechanism was used, but if a different rationing mechanism was used then a different set of people would have died. The only thing that can be done is to select the system that allocates resources more efficiently than other systems to minimize this failure mode. This whole idea of "statistical murder" would just lead to the banning of medical care entirely as no system has perfect allocation at all times, although some are certainly worse than others.

Plus I have no idea what the word "statistical" even means in this context...

I fully admit what I said was simplistic and not meant to indicate the true complexity of the system. I agree with everything you’ve posted as inflation is not immediate merely because the money exists. I was presenting a rough zeroth order approximation because I didn’t understand how the value of money could be completely divorced from assets/the economy.

I don’t disagree with your first point, but your second point may have been a misunderstanding of what I said or I don’t understand what you’re saying. I’m not suggesting when you spend money it goes away and can’t be used again. I was more suggesting the M0/M1/M2 money supplies change in size which is distinct from GDP size, although I admit that is a simplification.

There's something that happened during ZIRP & Negative Real Interest Rate Policies that completely divorced the value of money in the real economy from the value of assets & future cash flows

I’m not sure I follow. The USD is just a medium of exchange. 100% of the dollars commands 100% of the wealth of the economy. If you increase the number of dollars but the size of the economy itself doesn’t increase then the underlying prices would go up and the value of individual dollars would go down.

It's no different than the South in the US which does not include Texas, New Mexica, Arizona, or any other states that are geographically South in the modern day US. Once you understand the historical aspect of the naming it makes sense. The category itself, regardless of its label, is useful.

In terms of Latin America being a part of the West or not, that's more interesting. I'm currently reading Samuel P. Huntington's "A Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" and in it he talks a lot about civilizations which he defines as the highest cultural grouping of people short of what makes us human. Language, law, and religion in Latin America largely derive from Europe, although there are other aspects like economics that tend can differ. Some people consider Latin America as part of the West, others believe it's peripheral to the West or its part of its own civilization as Huntington does.

As others have pointed out Russia is not part of the West and at least according to Huntington would be placed in the Orthodox Civilization. Interestingly Huntington also argues that Greece, despite being the center of Classical Civilization which is the bases for Western Civilization, is not a part of the West, rather they too are Orthodox.

Regardless of whether you agree with these groupings, I think distilling it down to skin color is incorrect and not useful. The West itself is not even remotely homogenous in this aspect. You wouldn't go to sections of the Deep South in the US and declare it as not being a part of the West anymore than you would include Belarus as part of the West.

Sorry for the double reply but I think a concrete example might elucidate what I am discussing.

I have had to deal with close friends being addicted to heroin. I believe the free market is harmful when it comes to hard drugs because of my experiences. I am all for the complete ban of these hard drugs. However, that does not mean no one will OD on heroin even though it is banned. Such a law will create a black market, crime due to its illicit nature, incentivize horrific cartels to smuggle it into the country, and cost a lot of tax money to enforce. These are all negative outcomes from legislation whose goal is to prevent people from having access to heroin. I think this trade-off is worth it personally although some would disagree. The point is I’m not comparing the negative outcomes of hard drug use to the intentions of “fixing” it through legislation. Rather I am comparing outcomes to outcomes because there are some serious downsides to such a policy solution.

I didn’t miss their point, I challenged the foundation upon which it rested.

You are asserting that a free market is unstable and will inevitably lead to a monopoly. Even if I take this as a fact for the sake of argument, it doesn’t nullify my point that judging the intention of political action (antitrust laws to prevent monopolies) against the outcomes of a system (free markets devolve into monopolies) is comparing apples to oranges. You must judge the outcomes of both systems. As I stated in my original reply, regulations can actually lead to monopolies, so the outcomes matter a lot more than their good intentions.

If I don’t take your assertion as a fact though[1], then what you’re doing is judging what you believe to be the outcome of a free market with what you believe will prevent that through legislation. This is entirely too theoretical and doesn’t even begin to answer which is a better system. Ultimately we need to understand the actual trade-offs that are being made between these systems in order to select the system with the most desirable characteristics.

[1] It is not at all proven that a free market will naturally devolve into a monopoly. This has been a contentious debate in economics for centuries and is absolutely not resolved. People tend to assume a static market and extrapolate into the infinite future, e.g. if a horse drawn carriage manufacturer has 99% market share then will it forever be a monopoly in a broken system or will a fledgling automotive industry dethrone this “monopoly” with a better alternative that is not even a direct competitor? This is a really, really deep subject in either case.

A free market actually requires a lot of surrounding regulation to work

While I am not a free market absolutist, I think your assertion is based on judging negative outcomes of a free market vs the positive intentions of regulations trying to prevent those negative outcomes, i.e. you’re not considering the negative outcomes of regulations. I don’t think any free market advocate would state categorically that they produce perfect results, merely that any attempt to prevent certain negative outcomes through law will produce different negative outcomes elsewhere.

For instance regulations tend to incentivize very large corporations to advocate for more regulation as it raises the barrier to new competition entering the market place. Another example would be over burdensome regulations that slow the production of housing which constrains supply and prices a lot of people out of the market. I would have loved to take public transit where I lived a few years ago, but they spent a decade on environmental impact studies while traffic and the environmental impact from it got significantly worse.

There’s also a time component where the effects of regulations can take decades or even generations to really play out, but people tend to only remember the well-meaning goal of the regulation if they remember it at all. This tends to be very beneficial for politicians who end up being judged not on outcomes, but intentions.

There's a real folly in capitalist countries thinking they can be self-sufficient walled castles. Capitalism by its nature will seek out the lowest cost be it in labor or manufacturing. That means often means outsourcing.

It can mean outsourcing, but I think your broader point is undercut by the fact that the USD holds a very special place as the world reserve currency. This creates high foreign demand for the USD which pushes up the exchange rate and leads to US exports being less competitive on the international market (i.e. our manufacturing base gets hollowed out because it cannot compete). This is a large market distortion that the US actively defends because it benefits us in other ways. Tariffs and general protectionism is not a good thing in a free market, but that's not really what is happening at the international level.

or replace them altogether.

Before AI companies were usually very reticent to do a rewrite or major refactoring of software because of the cost but that calculus may change with AI. A lot of physical products have ended up in this space where it's cheaper to buy a new product and throw out the old broken one rather than try and fix it. If AI lowers the cost of creating software then I'm not sure why it wouldn't go down the same path as physical goods.

The standard as decided in Brandenburg v. Ohio is "imminent lawless action". You're correct that context matters; the speech must be tied to an imminent violation of law. This is a very high bar and in practice is very hard to reach.

It’s not about making zero mistakes, it’s about learning from previous languages which made mistakes and not repeating them. I decided against using go pretty early on because I recognized just how many mistakes they were repeating that would end up haunting maintainers.

Where does this idea come from?

It seems to be acquired through social osmosis, i.e. hearing people talk about it and then repeating their assertions as if it were a fact - usually with subtle changes colored by the speakers own world view - until some version of "truth" permeates society. I guess you could consider it like a game of telephone at a societal level. The Citizens United case is another great example where what people think it held is very different from what it actually held. It's also frustrating given the fact that we live in a time where the barrier to verify these claims is incredibly low or even non-existent because of the internet.

A few presidents ago, the chairman of the joint chiefs publicly said that 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for.

You're likely referring to the fact that the pentagon can't pass an audit even though there have been requirements going back to the 90s. That's more about tracking where the money they spent is going as opposed to the total quantity of money they are spending though, i.e. the $800bn is "accurate" but some portion of it may have vanished due to bad accounting, corruption, waste, fraud, etc...

Having said that any accounting for an entity the size of the US government is non-trivial. The numbers I stated above are not the final numbers. Firstly because it's YTD but also because of the complexity in the accounting. We have decades of trend lines and a lot of public data on tax receipts, bond auctions, and the like to know that defense spending isn't drastically different than what is being reported though. If you have any analysis that concludes otherwise I would enjoy reading it.

If you're truly curious I would say the best way to start is to get a basic understanding of economics and how our current system actually operates. It's also important to look up the data as it actually exists rather than consuming conclusions from commentators without investigating further.

For instance your initial post seems to imply that we aren't balancing our defense vs social spending and are spending way too much on the former. However, that doesn't align with our current outlays. If you check out the latest US Treasury report the outlays for the current fiscal year shows $1314bn for Social Security, $841bn for interest payments on the debt, $823bn for medicare, $805bn for health, and $758bn for defense. The primary driver of debt in the future will be the entitlement programs and interest.

Of course the unfortunate reality is that most people do not have the time to learn about everything and do their own research so we will always rely on others to some extent for our information. The danger is when your world view fills in the gaps of knowledge you lack combined with the facts you believe you know taken from someone else who may be mistaken, misleading, or outright lying.

I tend to be in the camp that believes capitalism will generally produce better results than socialism but it will not produce anything close to a utopia. However, I don't believe capitalism is a stable economic system within a democratic society. It will inevitably lead to some results that are repugnant to the electorate who will advocate for political action to prevent such outcomes from occurring in the future. This will lead to stronger government authority and increasing market manipulation which will (potentially) prevent those outcomes but simultaneously it can produce different negative outcomes[1]. In the end it seems as though despite good intentions we end up with a system that nobody understands, nobody is satisfied with, and nobody can fix. I suppose it's like software engineering in a way, we want perfection but instead we are constrained by trade-offs and we never reach a state that everyone is happy with.

[1] A classic example is rent control which tends to lead to shortages.

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Market economies, command economies, mercantile economies, and any other economic system must deal with these scarcities somehow. Even in the animal kingdom this must be contended with, albeit at a much lower level of abstraction. We deal with scarcity in a number of different ways, e.g. higher prices, waiting lines, by need, or some other metric or any combination thereof. Animals tend to deal with resource (food) scarcity through violence, abandonment, and a few other processes because not eating means death. That isn't to say cooperation doesn't happen, it absolutely does, but it is still constrained by resource scarcity.

But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly

All economic systems are a set of trade-offs and capitalism in general tends to outperform all other economic systems we know of. That isn't to say it's a perfect system, it isn't, but I've noticed people who profess your opinion implicitly assume the alternative is a utopia that which simply does not exist. We may find a better system in the future but it will still be constrained by the law of supply and demand, resource scarcity, and human nature and hence will have trade-offs.

As I’ve grown older and witnessed history in action I’ve begun to understand that reality is much, much more complicated than the simple narratives of history we lean on as a society.

Just think of how many different competing narratives are currently in existence surrounding this tumultuous point in history and realize that at some point some of these narratives will become dominant. Over time as the events leave social memory the key conclusions will likely be remembered but a lot of the reasoning behind them will not. As it exits living memory most of the nuance and context is lost. Over time we may change the narrative by reconsidering aspects that were forgotten, recontextualizing events based on modern concepts and concerns, misunderstanding what happened, or even surreptitiously “modifying” what happened for political ends. Or to put it more plainly, history is written by the victors and can be rewritten as time goes on and the victors change.

but I honestly have never worked in such an environment where developers couldn't learn to duplicate the functionality of shitty dependencies while at the same time fixing the problem.

I have absolutely seen this. It’s not a matter of them being bad developers, but no one is an expert in all things and gaining expertise takes time which costs money. All dependencies have a lot of trade-offs baked in that must be re-evaluated if you decide to go the NIH route, and that’s usually where expertise is needed. If you lack the expertise you will still be making trade-offs, but you will lack the knowledge to foresee the long term consequences of these decisions.

In my own opinion core business differentiators are where engineering resources should be used. That’s not to say a dependency that is more generic than the problem your business is trying to solve should never be pulled in house, but the decision to do that shouldn’t be taken lightly as it will increase the burden of learning, maintaining, documenting, testing, etc for a team that is being judged on the success of business objectives. To put it another way, the business will be hesitant to give you time to work on something that is only tangentially related to their objectives and quality can and usually will suffer which will put you in a worse position.

I think software development has some unique characteristics that makes NIH a problem. If you’re an electrical engineer you will never be given the resources to make a custom microcontroller or a new way of manufacturing a PCB unless that is what your company is selling; the upfront costs would be staggering and that would not be allowed. The limitations of the technology available is simply that, a constraint on what the business can do given current tech. Perhaps there is an opportunity for something better, but that would be best served as a new company focused on providing that solution if it can be done in an economically viable way. Software doesn’t have these massive upfront manufacturing costs that are obvious like the example above, but they still exist.

AI may change this calculus.

If five companies competing is anti-competitive, then how many competitors does it take to suddenly become competitive and why? What is the significance of this larger-than-five number? Is it the same across industries? How do you derive it?

This seems to rest on the mistaken belief that a corollary of monopolies being bad is that more competition is always better than less competition. If everyone was a competitor in the restaurant food delivery market we'd all starve to death as no one would be growing food. An efficient economy wouldn't waste resources competing over less important things like restaurant food delivery over something more beneficial.