monadINtop

Yeah that's a fair point as well.

there's got to be at least one hafiz commenting on HN

which means ownership of U.S. assets by domestic citizens will increase

Which to be clear will be largely domestic oligarchs and other whales since the vast majority of domestic citizens in the US don't have enough capital to own any significant amount of assets, US or otherwise.

Like you say, it's just a more intuitive classical analogy for people who don't want to waste good years of their life (like me) to understand the mathematical detail of theoretical physics.

The electron doesn't actually have a measured radius (in our current theories). QFT describes it as point-like excitation of an underlying quantum field. The only connection between our quantum theories (that is really just slightly hand wavy math) and reality is that our theories can predict the statistics of observing a particle or interaction in a given state. So maybe a slightly more coherent explanation is that for a given region between atoms in solid matter, the probability of observing an electron (or any particle) is extremely small. Its like a quantum mechanical cat who's territory extends across mountains and forests, you're probably not gonna stumble across it on any given day, unlike a (quantum) house cat that lives in someones apartment. More generally there are no big "lumps" in the wave-functions, it's very thinly spread like too little butter on toast.

I disagree, if we're gonna be hyping up machines for their prowess at "thinking" and being artificially "intelligent" in that soft effusive human way then yeah I think its fair criticism. We already knew from the 50s that computers are like stupid geniuses when it comes to following algorithms and crunching computations far too expansive and tedious for any human.

Yeah perhaps, but its really hard to say anything concrete either way

As a theoretical physicist, yes physics could definitely be subjective between different species. Physics is the way HUMANS describe nature to themselves. I don't doubt that it describes some greater nature outside of us that is invariant, but it is only a description - not the thing itself. Like mathematics it is an anthropocentric conceptualization that has many arbitrary and historically contingent choices in its choice of representation and its chosen objects of study.

How could we ever be certain than another intelligence (whatever that means) would be capable of understanding the intended message? Unless of course we are already starting off with the major assumption that the only things that can be intelligent are things like us. I'm not even sure that intelligent has any meaning aside from denoting behavior "similar to us".

No quite obviously cutting costs increases profit which goes into reinvestment to then generate more profit and so on. It has no relation to prices unless the business happens to be losing customers to competition which is unrelated. Prices are lowered only as much as it can increase the rate of profit. Increasing affordability past that point for the good of the consumer is strictly against the incentives of the business since it prevents the growth of capital and thereby hampers them in competition.

Also quantitatively cutting costs qualitatively looks like enshittification of goods and services in practice, and unlike in undergrad economics textbooks consumers rarely have recourse in the form of switching brands since basically all "markets" for necessities are oligopolies (thanks often to government contracts for public works in an increasingly privatized world, if not simply the natural global minimum of any market).

On a basic level the point of putting a commodity on the market is to sell it to the highest bidder. Why is this the preferred way to distribute necessities? It certainly "aligns" with one particular incentive - that of the seller - not that of most people. Doesn't everyone need access to healthcare, housing, energy, etc.? Are poor people to compete with people who can outspend them several times over for food and housing? As the cost of living continues to increase does it make sense to hand over an increasing portion of our wages for the same - or worse - standard of living?

If you want freedom of choice in what you consume and have the means to do so then go ahead and turn to a market to buy a penthouse or gourmet food or whatever. But why is it such an offense to the current hegemonic ideology to ensure that there is basic universal access to essential resources?

And in what world is the incentive of cutting costs and price gouging - of necessities no less - aligned with the incentives of the vast majority of mankind who would just like energy, healthcare, housing, public infrastructure, etc. to be as affordable and high quality as possible.

I don't see how that quote or the article contradicts the title?

https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide...

He's beaten nameless king, pre-nerf radahn, melania etc.

the joke's on all of us as long as we continue letting them get away

Read a couple books

Maybe you should? It might help improve your reading comprehension. The person you're responding to said that most normal people don't care enough to switch to a vastly less popular app, which is obviously true.

In that case it would be similarly be helpful if you focused your initial response on a key point of contention rather effusively and ineffectively allude to several. I will keep my reply as focused as possible.

You initially claimed that it was purely technological superiority that allowed Europeans to conquer America. This is not an understanding reflected in the literature. If it were the case, then why was it only much after the colonization of America, which began in the 16th century, that Asia and Africa were able to be colonized, in the middle of the 19th century? The difference between the technologies in the 16th century was not a huge jump, though its obviously true there was a discrepancy. Native Americans acquired horses after contact and incorporated them into their culture and by the 1700s some of the tribes in the great plains had fully transformed into a nomadic horse based life-style. Firearms are a similar story. One can imagine the difficulty 16th century europeans would have faced if they were to colonize an entire continent, without it being conveniently depopulated beforehand by plague.

You appear to recount that my claim was that American (US) slavery was a unique factor in the exceptional rise of Europe in the early modern period. This was a claim made by no-one. You'll recall that slavery in america refers to an entire continent - as I repeatedly pointed out - not an isolated group of states. My claim is that the depopulation and subsequent colonization of the entirety of the continent was a significant factor, along with the shift in political and economic structure that accompanied it.

Up to the 16th century you will find a wealth of european accounts of contacts with kingdoms in the Congo to East Asia, whereby they are described as equals in sophistication and size - most famously with Marco Polo's accounts though there exist many others. The change in perception of relative technological prowess in historical accounts occur much later, but certainly by the 1700s with the advent of the industrial revolution in the early modern period. This is well documented.

Why did the industrial revolution occur? It is a very large and open topic, though I lean towards the explanation that it was due in part to both the change in social structure during the reformation, as well as the colonization of america (the continent) and the development of economic networks with the extraction of resources (mercantilism, chartered trading companies etc.). This system was aided by and intensified by the trans-atlantic slave trade.

I'm sorry about the lack of "falsifiable content", or the lack of brevity. Unfortunately we are discussing history through the most sweeping lens possible, not science.

unloading all of of our own biases

Again, what are you vaguely trying to allude to. Just say it.

were conquered by Cortez and his "army" of 500

Along with the other subjugated groups who turned on their imperial suzerain, as you briefly alluded to.

The fundamental problem is that the Aztecs were armed with basic bows, and primitive melee weapons like wooden clubs. The Spaniards had rifles, plate armor, and longswords.

Yes that was certainly an important factor, though obviously entirely insufficient to explain how an entire continent of various empires confederations and cities fell over decades and centuries, and the vast majority of the population wiped out.

This is what enabled a group of 500 people who didn't even speak the language to gather "allies" and single handedly destroy an entire empire with centuries of military experience

Sure in the isolated and specific context Cortez's victory over the Aztecs probably was largely influenced by their technological advantages along with their deception, ambushes, and the "suprise" of their foreign origin etc. (but not totally determined, since by their own account there was like a hundred different times they could have been slaughtered en-masse if their hosts weren't as initially hospitable).

You're gonna have to provide a bit more justification for how the rest of the continent's eventual collapse and depopulation follows immediately from that though. It takes a lot more to justify asserting that a single factor should be solely recognized as the determining historical cause for an outcome. There were many factors and any one of them must be considered carefully and in relation to all others, and my point was to show how neglected the others are in favor of "europeans conquered everything just cause they were better". There's a lot more to be learnt by recognizing and studying details over broad oversimplifications that require no more insight or nuance.

There were also plagues that spread in the other direction - the obvious one is syphilis.

It seems likely but not entirely uncontroversial though I personally can't speak on it.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.802

In any case would you like to count plague for plague? There is an clear asymmetry in the scale of transmission as well as in the immunological defenses of the respective populations in the old world and new, it would seem reasonable the discrepancy could be due to the asymmetry of scale in large fauna to human proximity - which is responsible for intra-species transmission and by extension the major illness and plagues - but clearly none of these biological-historical conclusions are certain.

Most of every great empire in the world had massive numbers of slaves.

Yes and none of them had the industrial system of slavery extraction and use on a massively depopulated continent in order to extract massive amounts of natural resources on a scale that was hitherto unparalleled historically. Note that I didn't want to talk about the unique social and economic system then emerging in western europe after the reformation since my comment was already meandering and oversimplified enough. I also agree that American slavery wasn't the sole money printing machine that led to European dominance, but a crucial factor in generating capital and material resources as well as a symptom of the more influential underlying mechanism - namely the emergence of the system of trade and economic relations that would later be recognized as capitalism, which proved far more effective in generating wealth and political power than whatever bastard form feudalism you could generally argue it superseded.

colonies (come states) that were most averse to slavery would be the ones that would thrive the most.

Wow its almost as though financial hubs (especially ones based around centers of commerce linking a region of production with external trade) can generate profit from economic activities not in the immediate locality. Did you at least try to use your brain before you decided to insult me?

It's just the neohistorical self loathing nonsense

Also self-loathing might be a bit of projection since I personally have no familial connection to the trans-atlantic slave trade or any nation that benefited from it. I'm sorry you suffer from such conflicted feelings on your own heritage but I'd recommend not lashing out at strangers in unrelated conversation.

History's full of awful stuff, so is the present, and so too will be the future. Be happy it went as well as it did.

Again I'm not too sure why you've decided to read some kind of moral argument into my sweeping over-generalization of history? It's really not relevant to what was being discussed and even if it was I'm not sure that the takeaway is that we should just "happy it went as well as it did" or whatever? I'm not really sure what you think there is for people to be "happy" about or specifically what I've failed to be "happy" about since as far as I can tell I've provided a critical analysis of a historical period independent from any given moral framework. Unless of course you object to any such analysis that doesn't affirm your particular moral perspective.

Be happy it went as well as it did.

lol for who? Wasn't too swell for the native americans... (nor my own people for that matter, if this is really the discussion you'd rather have). It might surprise you to learn that there are other people in the world with a different background to yourself.

But to be honest I couldn't be more disinterested in that useless conversation, trying to analyze history in a discrete set of "right" or "wrongs" that we must urgently assign condemnation or affirmation to at each point. History has happened and is happening, one should seek to analyze it's material basis either for its own sake or to apply it critically to the present, not paint hagiographies or interpretations to justify whatever belief systems or identities they've constructed.

Technology wasn't the primary cause in the genocide of the Native Americans. The initial factor was the introduction of plagues to the Americas from the numerous intraspecies transmission that occurred in the old world as a result of the millennia of large animal domestication alongside high population density that had no analog in the new world (since there weren't the same variety of large domesticate-able fauna, apart form like alpacas or something). This is also why there was no American plague that spread in the other direction.

Western Europe was certainly not so far ahead technologically relative to the rest of the world as people so frequently give them credit for. Not until they had free reign over a new continent and purchased slaves to generate free money (*) and eventually total dominance with the advent of the industrial revolution.

(*) This also led to an arms race between rival empires and kingdoms in Africa and the stagnation of local craft and the eventual the economic collapse and political fragmentation of the wealthy empires that existed throughout antiquity and the middle ages - that have since been written out of history books. When the industrial revolution began spinning up out of the ashes and rubble of Christendom post-reformation, many other regions like the Middle East (for example the palace intrigue and power struggles within the Ottoman dynasties) and China (With the collapse of the Ming and ascendancy of the great Qing from the North) were similarly in crises - in part from indirect economic interaction with the growing powers in the west. It was then the nascent imperial powers found the world ripe for their exploitation and eventual hegemony.

So, which countries did China liberate from oppression?

My friend, what are you babbling about? Did you hallucinate me saying that China is my model of a utopian society?

Again. Which countries has China invaded or toppled, outside of the imaginary ones you yearn for in your head? Is the list close to that of the US?

Your "US bad because invasion" is a tankie frame. Yes, that refers to the Tiananmen tanks. (??)

I'm a tankie because I think invasions are bad?? What does that make you, a frothing bloodthirsty hawk? A despotic militarist?

Or will now attempt to argue the tired and ahistorical trope that those other invasions were good actually because Pinochet or Suharto were actually secretly democratic and the thousands they murdered aren't important, and it was good that Arbenz was toppled because he actually wasn't democratically elected and was infact a rabid communist in disguise and the United Fruit Co. lobbying was just a coincidence etc. etc.

If so don't bother. I'm not wasting anymore time talking to one bereft of ordered thought, spinning baffling word associations and tired tropes. I'm not interested in discovering to what extent daily life presents a sisyphean ordeal to you.

Ah ok, so in other words we have to consider hypotheticals in order to even try and draw a comparison to the other state in question.

I think this misses the deeper relationship between the Falun Gong and western intelligence agencies, that goes beyond just "pandering to right-wing nuts" after a period of "spontaneous" support from mainstream western organizations.

Which countries has china invaded, illegally or otherwise? Which governments have they toppled, covertly or openly?

I never started talking about income, that was you, and if you can't see the relation between wealth and living standards than maybe it's for the best you don't discuss it at all.

I think its more than "we just found some math that fits the data" in the sense that its not just a case of adding some terms to match an observed curve - for example like with Rayleigh-Jeans' law vs Wein's Approximation of blackbody radiation and eventually Max Planck's solution by quantizing energy to the curve match experiment, without actually having anything else to say about it.

Spiritually it feels more like what happened later, when people took the idea of quantized energy seriously and began finding ways to make it a theoretically consistent theory which also required a radical new approach of disregarding old intuitive assumptions about the way the most fundamental things worked solely to obey a new abstract, esoteric, purely theoretical framework (an approach which was sometimes controversial especially with experimentalists).

But of course this new theory of quantum mechanics turned out to be immensely successful in totally unprecedented ways, in a manner similar to Relativity and it's "theory first" origin with trying to ensure mathematical consistency of Maxwell's equations and disregarding anything else in the way (and eventually with Einstein's decade long quest to find a totally covariant general theory that folded gravity into the mix).

With physics the more I dug into "why" it was rarely the case that it was "just because", the justification was nearly always some abstract piece of math that I wasn't equipped to understand at the time but was richly rewarded later on when I spent the time studying in order to finally appreciate it.

The first time I solved Schrodinger Equation for a hydrogen atom, I couldn't see why anyone could've bothered to try discovering how to untangle such a mess of a differential equation with a thousand stubborn terms and strange substitutions (ylm??) and spherical coordinate transformations - all for a solution I had zero intuition or interest in. After I had a better grasp of the duality between those square integrable complex functions and abstract vector spaces I found classical QM elegant in an way I wasn't able to see before. When basic Lie theory and representations was drilled into my head and I had answered a hundred questions about different matrix representations of the SU(n) and S0(3) groups and their algebras and how they were related, it finally clicked how naturally those ylm angular momentum things I saw before actually arose. It was spooky how group theory had manifested in something as ubiquitous and tangible as the structure of the periodic table. After drudging through the derivation of QFT for the first time, when I finally understood what was meant by "all particles and fields that exist are nothing more than representations of the Poincare-Spacetime Algebra", I felt like Neo when everything turned into strings of code. And there's no point describing what it was like when Einstein's field equations clicked, before then I never really got what people meant by the beauty of mathematics or physics.

I guess its not really the answer "why" things are, but the way our current theories basically constrain nearly everything we see (at least from the bottom up) from a handful of axioms and cherry-picked coupling constants, the rest warped into shape and set in stone only by the self-consistency of mathematics, I feel like that's more of a "why" than I would've ever assumed answerable, and maybe more of one than I deserve.

I will reply to the rest with more links when I get time but I'd like to point out your fixation on the bottom 10%. The bottom majority that i specifically mentioned is not that 10%. Wealth inequality is not just a matter of homeless and destitute vs middle class or war-zones vs first world but the vast majority of normal working people vs an absurdly small concentrated minority.

I suppose people becoming wealthy is concentration, but this is a good thing.

Would you apply the same logic for oligarchs in a failed state? Or robber barons in the oil rush? I suppose you wouldn't be the first. When the average person of this generation finds themselves in an increasingly more financially precarious situation than the one previous that analogy feels less hyperbolic. Especially when we actually try to consider the class of people with the most leverage and influence over political and economic decisions and their role in this process of wealth accumulation, instead of pretending economics is a natural phenomenon like the weather.

It means the system is delivering

The truest thing you've said so far. Shame about who its delivering for.

So far your only criterion of a healthy economic system is if the most destitute in the world are worse off than before and insofar as it can be met you dismiss the more significant trend of wealth concentration as an insignificant happenstance rather than a fatal flaw.

"National wealth" is not a vague notion, it's the product of lots of government workers doing a lot of statistics

Wow what a convincing justification for the need to equate the measurement of rising capital within national jurisdictions over an analysis that acknowledges the distinction between revenue among fortune 500 shareholders and the average person who is not exposed to such returns.

Income for the bottom 10% is rising. Wealth for the bottom 10% is rising.

If income for the bottom majority increases at a rate slower than the income of the top minority then "income" is being concentrated upward. Money determines the distribution of resources, it is not a resource itself. If the concentration of the ability to determine resources is increasingly concentrated upwards then people are getting poorer, regardless if overall production has increased.

Your idea that everyone is actually getting richer and upwardly mobile is not reflected in reality.

http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2015AER.pdf

https://wid.world/news-article/whats-new-about-wealth-inequa...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10888-010-9155-y

I don't doubt that quality-of-life has declined for a lot of people - but those people are a minority and the data does not support anything else. Most of their pain is almost certainly housing prices, which have been the Great Sin of the Democratic party and notably have very little to do with federal policy.

How do skyrocketing housing prices not factor into your judgment that people's quality of life isn't declining?? I don't care who you want to blame it on (!?), not being able to afford a house makes people's lives worse and more people can't afford houses...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/asse...

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/11/housing-affordabilit...

Most of these takes are bad because that's not how the stock market works. Elon Musk cannot go out tomorrow and buy $3XXB of stuff. He probably cannot even come CLOSE to realizing the full paper value of his net worth in cash. None of the world's rich can. Yet there is a daily, breathless headline about wealth inequality that waves those dollar figures around like they're real.

Who's saying that Elon Musk is walking around with a trillion bank notes in his pockets like Scrooge McDuck? You're arguing with shadows, and if you think that wealth is not being upwardly concentrated in the top 1% - which is justified by any metric regardless of the stock market or unrealized assets - then I don't see what I'm going to get out of a discussion with someone so utterly removed from reality.

https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...

https://web.archive.org/web/20161225142704/https://www.white... (page 60)

Stop disregarding on actual, economic data in favor of hyperbolic headlines about wealth inequality.

It's always a pain talking to someone who is delusional enough to think that the hodge-podge of synthetic economic markers or data visualizations cobbled together by "visualcapitalist.com" is even close to being remotely objective or scientific.

Do you think a decades long trend of upward concentration of wealth is remotely equatable to my next door neighbor winning the lottery? Where do you think that money even comes from?

because what other people are making or can afford says absolutely nothing about my financial situation

No offence but I don't care about your financial situation. I care about the financial situation of most people, and if they increasingly can't afford necessities like housing or food I also really couldn't care less that the numbers going into their bank account have gone up since last year.

My point is material goods and economic markers can increase on paper whilst people can increasingly be restricted from the housing market, career prospects, and other factors not easily reflected in said markers. If you are interested in defending the fact that those markers are indeed doing fine then you're in a debate with yourself. The relevance of those markers is not obvious, or trivial to justify in relation to the actual world people are living in

I think income inequality is at least part of the story in overall standard of living along with other markers of material wealth, purchasing power, productivity, wage-stagnation, etc.

What numbers in particular do you think could be more useful?

To keep my reply brief, wealth can refer to many things including material goods but let's restrict ourselves to money, since both of the articles you've cited does the same. Money is not a resource. You cannot eat or build with it. Money is a tool used to determine the distribution of resources. If total wealth has increased but inequality has also increased, it means the majority of people are increasingly losing the ability to decide the distribution of resources. This is bad even if you ignore the fact that the majority of people are also responsible for the production of said resources.

Side-note but the articles you cited are funded by various non-profits including Bill Gates' foundation, departments of the british government and so on. It's a discussion for another day and I'm obviously not accusing it of outright fraud or anything but in my experience such "non-profits" and think tanks are tend to be most guilty of unhelpful or outright obscurest analysis of wealth inequality, unequal development and so on (as you one would probably expect of any institution funded by capital benefiting from such dynamics)

Cherry picking problems that have been solved in the last few decades are not relevant to a discussion focused on declining standards of living in relation to the economy and it's structure and how the average person experiences it - it's a specific problem related to wages, inflation, productivity, inequality, and how revenue has been chosen to be distributed etc.

For someone interested in "rigor" I'm not sure how useful it is to weigh an arbitrary collection of goods like the EPA, eradicating smallpox and polio, etc. to a time before them in order to encourage me to answer that "I would rather be alive now". Angels on a pinhead etc. Seems a lot more useful to actually acknowledge the problems people complain about and think carefully about the specific dynamics that generate them rather than try convince them that everything's fine actually and they should just think about how good the polio vaccine is compared to Victorian work-houses.

But it’s not like you’re not doing the same thing in the opposite direction.

Huh?

Thomas Piketty's book on the matter should have enough for you.

http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2015AER.pdf

https://wid.world/news-article/whats-new-about-wealth-inequa...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10888-010-9155-y