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JimmyBuckets commented on How do you keep up with AI/crypto/markets without drowning in noise?    · Posted by u/alex-vasper
alex-vasper · 12 days ago
Thanks for the link — had not seen that specific channel before.

The Telegram “meta-feeds” are an interesting middle ground: still firehose-ish, but at least someone has done a first pass on what’s worth surfacing. Do you treat that as your primary intake and then go deeper on a few stories, or is it more of a background stream you dip into when you have time?

I’m trying to move from “always-on feed” to “a couple of intentional check-ins per week,” so I’m curious how people avoid turning these feeds into just another scrolling habit.

JimmyBuckets · 4 days ago
Yeah I usually dip in when I want to look at the space. But I am trying to include a more regular scan of the headlines to keep abreast of whats happening.
JimmyBuckets commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds   theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber
spwa4 · 5 days ago
But the reason that when talking about the 1% they suddenly stop looking globally and only look within countries is that everyone in the UK and US is top-1% worldwide. Equalizing would make the average wage $500, or 375 pounds. And when you start discussing what countries are the problem ... immediately you see there are very few poor democracies. There are some, but not much.

To make matters worse, this year's Nobel prize in Economics went to research showing that the problem is governments, and specifically that a lot of populous countries don't create institutions to improve the welfare of people at all, but rather focused on stealing from the population. This makes it an unfixable problem in those countries. More than that, a lot of these countries' populations don't want to fix it, or even want to make it far worse (like Egypt, or Iran, or Pakistan, or Sudan) for a whole host of reasons.

Oh and most of those governments are "captured by wealth" only in the sense that the current rulers exploit the population for their personal wealth. This is what you see from Afghanistan to Venezuela, but those governments didn't come to power with wealth. Various ideologies brought these governments to power, and the governments steal the wealth of the people, even to an extent that people start dying in pretty large numbers like in Afghanistan. I also find it strange that when discussing capture by wealth no-one ever takes Venezuela as an example, despite how obvious it is that that's the problem there. Nobody discusses how Chavez came to power as a "communist" and died a billionaire.

So if you want to fix poverty, one of the things it looks like you'll have to do is to overthrow the governments ruling, actually more than half of humanity, and convince their populations to stop caring more about religion and other ideologies, like pride, or a mostly imagined enemy (like Pakistan), than about prosperity.

JimmyBuckets · 4 days ago
To be included in the top 1% you need a net worth of over a million. So what you said is untrue. The correct figure is something like top 10%
JimmyBuckets commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds   theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber
Jensson · 6 days ago
> Allocating more (not all) value away from SaaS companies and into food security or education is a good thing and would make things better for everyone.

You are already doing that with your votes, the American government is already investing massive amounts into education and food security. Private investments would never do this, even poor people wouldn't invest in poor ROI endeavors, poor people invest in the same things as rich people they just invest less, so the wealth of the rich doesn't matter.

JimmyBuckets · 4 days ago
The American government gets that money from taxes. If wealthy people are using that wealth to avoid taxes and put the burden on to the worker then the worker is being hurt twice - first by the lost power in their vote, and second by paying an unfair share of public infrastructure costs.
JimmyBuckets commented on Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles   eavan.blog/posts/beautifu... · Posted by u/eavan0
haritha-j · 4 days ago
Very related (yet idiotically titled, as always) veritasium video https://youtu.be/HBluLfX2F_k?si=6lVPLvJNc2YH_4go
JimmyBuckets · 4 days ago
It's like reverse clickbait with him
JimmyBuckets commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds   theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber
JimmyBuckets · 6 days ago
Who told you this? It's so obviously false.

It doesn't even make sense. I think you meant to say "efficiently" perhaps but even arguing that is an uphill battle - at most you could say that is true for some types of projects.

JimmyBuckets commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds   theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber
eloisius · 6 days ago
The concentration of wealth isn’t a problem so much for poverty, because without doing something to increase the production of things people need, having more money would just result in higher prices. Like you said, the 0.001% aren’t consuming half the world’s food production, so redistributing there money alone would not solve world hunger.

A bigger problem as that fewer and fewer have any say in the direction of society now. That concentrated investment means they get to shape the world we live in. Years ago I had a more libertarian mindset about that as well. “They’re more likely to make better decisions with it because they made the money to begin with.” I no longer feel that way. It increasingly looks like the most wealthy are happy to destroy the world for everyone in their quest to become ever more elite.

JimmyBuckets · 6 days ago
I agree with your overall position but I disagree on the first point.

Wealth is ownership, ownership is control of value. Allocating more (not all) value away from SaaS companies and into food security or education is a good thing and would make things better for everyone.

JimmyBuckets commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds   theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber
simianwords · 6 days ago
Rich people having too much wealth is not necessarily that bad a thing because most of the investment is in productive companies.

It’s not like they are using their wealth on frivolous consumption. Which means redistribution would only change who controls the investment and not the actual consumption patterns of people. Implication is that poor people will consume the same as before after redistribution with perhaps some extra assets.

So nothing materially changes other than some security. Poor people will continue to consume the same as before. Bigger problem is it’s not so clear that redistribution is necessarily a good thing because I feel the people who made money are more likely to make better decisions on their own companies.

I don’t know how companies would fare if for example Amazon were redistributed and run like some public company.

(Posting again)

JimmyBuckets · 6 days ago
There are a couple of nuanced issues with what you are saying.

1. In our current political system, wealth translates into political power, which can (and is) used to change laws to secure more wealth - just look at the portfolio performance of members of US Congress. Democracy is about putting political power in the vote.

2. Many if not most of our important problems are beyond the ability of one person (or a small group) to tackle - climate change, food security, etc. Having wealth more distributed means that more economic participants are involved in deploying it, and thus greater predictive power per dollar spent.

JimmyBuckets commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds   theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber
brap · 6 days ago
The usual first-world disapproval over wealth disparity... often oblivious to the fact that you, the reader, were the global 1% all along
JimmyBuckets · 6 days ago
The minimum entry requirement for top 1% inclusion is about 1 million dollars.

So your comment is just wrong.

JimmyBuckets commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds   theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber
norome · 6 days ago
I think it's become popular to talk about the issue of accumulation of wealth, and make this kind of dramatic wealth comparison to point out how uneven the distribution is. I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil. I would like to learn about some specific cases of hyper wealthy people and what they are actually up to. Seems like some very rich people do really useful things with their money. Couple other thoughts that hang around my head:

- Though the bottom half of humanity may be poor, on average they have a quality of life that has risen dramatically over the past century thanks in large part to the deployment of technologies and aid originating from the wealthier nations.

- Historically the only time the trend of wealth accumulation reverses is during massive crises, wars, and civilizational collapse which make life worse for everyone and nobody with any sense would wish for.

- It seems to me a lot of people channel their unhappiness into resentment of the wealthy, based on this same flavor of folk economics as old as time "the rich get richer". And that unhappiness is usually uncoupled from their position in the economic ladder.

JimmyBuckets · 6 days ago
Tell me you don't worry about money without telling me you don't worry about money
JimmyBuckets commented on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds   theguardian.com/inequalit... · Posted by u/robtherobber
adrian_b · 6 days ago
I would not care at all if 1 ppm of the world population would hold 100 times the wealth of the poorest half of the world population, if all of the poorest half would have nonetheless the means to produce their minimum necessities in energy, food, clothes etc., independently of others, so that their survival for the next months or weeks or even days would not be completely dependent on the benevolence of the rich to create places where they must be employed in order to be able to survive.

A half of century ago, my grandparents were still relatively independent of the rest of the world, because they owned a house and some cultivated land, so even if their normal sources of revenue would have disappeared by becoming jobless, they could have still lived quite decently being sustained only by what they were producing in their garden and by their animals. They also did not depend on external services for things like water supply, garbage disposal or heating. They used electricity, but they had plenty of space so that today one could have used there enough solar panels to be also independent of external energy sources.

On the other hand, now I am living in a big city and I absolutely need a salary if I want to continue to live. Where I live there are no salaries for an engineer or programmer that are big enough so that one could ever buy a place like that owned by my grandparents.

I do not believe that this extreme dependency between employees and employers that has become more and more widespread during the last century will lead to anything good.

There are a lot of important technical problems that must be solved in order to ensure the survival of humanity, but the research to solve them is almost non-existent, because those who control the money are too short-sighted so they invest only according to various fads in research that will produce things of negligible benefit for most humans. The unsolved problems that have accumulated are such that only an effort of the kind that happened in the research done during World War II would solve them, but it seems unlikely that something like that will ever repeat.

JimmyBuckets · 6 days ago
I would agree here if our political systems weren't vulnerable to capture by wealth. Inequality drives more inequality, it has to be counterbalanced by laws.

The majority of human civilisation has been feudal. We recently got democracy for everyone. We are not yet out of reach of our local civilisational attractor.

u/JimmyBuckets

KarmaCake day168September 27, 2024View Original