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.

Awesome.

To put my own money when my mouth is, here is the bash script to start up a nREPL server in Docker: https://pastebin.com/PPmfDPyA

Here is the Dockerfile: https://pastebin.com/ymcUFdYT

And here is a sample deps.edn with the cider alias: https://pastebin.com/2a7vSFD7

To run this, you'd just put them all in one directory, run cider-up.sh, and then connect to the REPL with Cider in EMACS, or in Calva for VSCode with "Jack in to or Connect to REPL Server" and then "localhost" "4444"

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.

Regardless of the fact that he missed by a bit, this type of writing is way more valuable than the standard NYT/Bloomberg "OMG IS IT A BUBBLE???" articles?

This is (unintentionally?) a fairly strong argument against the desirability of democracy, at least as she is practiced in the US.

This feels like a Unix poweruser telling grandma why she doesn’t need Dropbox.

If their actual goal was to build up an endowment to survive lean times, their spending profile would be quite different.

That may be an ancillary goal of theirs, but it’s demonstrably not close to the primary one (in a revealed preference sense).

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that HN is the HR department at your company. Pointing to someone's opinions and shrieking doesn't really fly here.

Particularly when the opinions are fairly defensible. (I.e. the only moral principle by which Breivik (whom I abhore) is worse than Che is "anything done in the service of left-wing causes is ok.")

I actually agree strongly: one of the best things in his writing is his references to primary sources, many of which I found extremely enjoyable to read. The past is a foreign country more interesting than any tourist trip you can take.

If the only thing the Moldbug posts did was link to that material, that would be a service in itself.

To give Yarvin his due though, he does a good job synthesizing it all into a general theory of power being a necessary and sufficient explanation of motivations in most cases.

The reason I found Yarvin’s (awesome) writing in the first place was because of a post like this on Twitter.

I figured that if vinegar-drinking scolds hated him, he might have something interesting to say. Your post will probably have a similar effect for a couple lucky people.

Sure, but it also seems unlikely that anyone would be this dumb.

OP’s point isn’t that Griffith is innocent, just that we’re likely missing some piece of info which would make his motivations/thought process make more sense.

“But now maybe it’s time to get in the studio with some other people, who maybe don’t have your chops, but who are cooler than you, who listen to more hip-hop and dance music, who can balance out your intellect with some guts.”

And then he should become a teacher and teach inner-city kids multiplication tables using rap!

If you’re not able to think creatively enough to find a place in the US or the world to live off a $1-2M starting point, then early retirement probably isn’t for you.

Meant with no disrespect: some people are naturally better suited to be employee types imo. Everyone fantasizes about life on their own, but most aren’t willing to make the tradeoffs to do so.

Source: retired by 33, while making tradeoffs and living places that most of my peers would find unacceptable. To each his own.

Disclaimer: I think his essays are strong.

There’s a lot of selection bias in his upvoting: a large number of people know/knew about HN because they liked PG’s writing.

I'm excited for your coming adventures, in which our intrepid hero breaks into people's diaries and then tells their friends about the naughty things they wrote.

Brave!

This was probably true at one time, but the States are utterly brutal from a compliance/reporting perspective now.

Khmer Rouge killing lots of intellectuals is one classic example, although most socialist revolutions had their own variants.

I suppose you can do a No True Scotsman and say that those weren’t truly enforcing equality of outcome since there were people at the top of that society doing the enforcing, but most would find that argument pretty strained.

It’s very enforceable. It’s just that it really, really sucks to live in a society that implements that enforcement.

So Harvard makes it overly hard for non-athlete/legacy white kids to get in relative to other groups, while also favoring them when they're from those categories?

Speaking as an alum who will never donate or allow his kids to apply there: fuck them.

The common wisdom wrt democracy, for centuries, was that this was basically exactly how it would work, if actually implemented. These aren't unforeseen problems.

How is it fraud? They disclosed everything, people said “this is crap,” and they all had to take a huge bath.

Yes, Softbank and others will lose a lot of money, and Neumann made money off them, but they’re all grownups who knew what they were getting into.

Alternatively, never be too quick to attribute to stupidity when there’s a strong incentive for malice to take advantage of that attribution to hide itself.