> IMO high housing prices are destroying civilization.
It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around. You go around and the music stops. Everyone scrambles to their nearest chair. Obviously the person on crutches will be the first to fall out of the game. The rest then talk about laziness, drugs, bootstraps, and all the rest. But add 1 more chair and there's no problem, even the dude with the broken leg can sit.
Someone tried to build the extra chair but the endless required studies and legal challenges from existing chair-sitters bankrupted the would-be chair builder.
Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
> Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
Maybe you need 5 chairs? Here in SF supply has fallen decades behind the demand curve to the point it may be impossible to catch up even if all you did was build build build.
Surely at least part of it is the concentration of wealth and economic activity. There's large masses of decaying rural towns where houses are cheap, but at the same time the whole reason they're decaying is because there just isn't enough economic opportunity to afford even these cheap houses.
I have no clue what the overall balance of housing looks like, but surely it doesn't help that big chunks of the housing market are being deprecated at the same time.
Well, for generations now, exponential growth in all things has been state policy and it was good (tm). Because of population growth, there's always a shortage of housing. Population is projected to peak this century. Whatever will we do when there are already enough houses for everyone to have one?
> Whatever will we do when there are already enough houses for everyone to have one?
In many places in Europe and Asia, the govt will essentially pay you to go live in near-abandoned villages and revitalize them.
In USA it’s just ghost towns. See also Detroit
The problem is better described as "There aren't enough homes where people want to live". We have plenty of houses, even in america. The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby). So everyone resists building.
But it's okay, if you resist building for long enough then your town will eventually collapse and your house will be worth nothing anyway. Many american Towns are essentially insolvent and can't afford realistic upkeep prices for services like sewage, roads, good schools, etc., and are living on borrowed time until infrastructure collapses and nobody wants to buy there. See Strong Towns the book.
> The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby).
Infrastructure is a major deal. You can't really exist as a member of modern society without broadband Internet, unless you're Amish or whatever and even they have begun to shift attitudes. Starlink changed the calculation quite a bit, and it definitely helps, but other things such as cellphone reception and emergency services that arrive in a reasonable time are also important.
> It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around.
Actually, there are. In Germany for example, we have millions of units left empty... the catch is, these are in (extremely) rural areas. Areas that used to be populated, but no longer are because the government has let them fall extremely behind in modern amenities. Some even do not have cellphone service.
Normally, you'd expect people and companies to do a pricing arbitrage and move where housing is cheap, but unfortunately, when there is no local employment or the infrastructure does not support remote employment, or other crucial requirements (safe potable water, electrical grid, grocery stores, schools, some sort of entertainment) are lacking, this does not work out any more.
The solution is deregulation and land-value taxes. Tax land so that it reaches its maximum utilization. Deregulate so that buildings can actually be built.
My favorite idea is that the universe expands because mass-energy in our 4d parent universe is falling into our universe, which is a black hole. We exist as information upon the 4d hole’s 3d event horizon, and experience its inflation as our time dimension (as well as space inflation).
Inflation is accelerating because as the black hole grows it eats more.
Don’t know how crackpot this is. From what I’ve read it actually can be coaxed into fitting observation but there’s just no possible way to test it.
There is a middle ground. This kind of fatalism makes people not want to try.
I think we have made political office and running for it so insanely adversarial and toxic that only three kinds of people will dare sign up for it: narcissists, crooks, and ideologues who think they are on a crusade. (The latter includes a variety of religions and ideologies.)
Competent sane well balanced people with reasonable balanced views of things like ideologies or for whom religion is more personal and spiritual? No way they’d go near it.
People with some of these negative characteristics, like narcissism, but who are also very competent? They can make more money and get often as much prestige in business. So we don’t even get competent narcissists.
Why is it so toxic? The media, the process, and us. The media and the people absolutely roast anyone running, and the winner take all process encourages a brutal slug fest.
Other countries don’t have it as bad. We could start by asking what they do differently.
Not being pure winner take all is one big one. They allow coalitions. That encourages alliances and dialogue. It also limits below the belt attacks since you might have to work hand in hand with these people, so you better not trash them too badly.
> Unless I misread it, are they saying local GPUs use less energy?
You misread it. From the abstract:
> local accelerators achieve at least 1.4× lower IPW than cloud accelerators running identical models
That's "intelligence per watt". They also have IPJ, per Joule.
So, they find local is 40% "dumber" than cloud for the same power or 40% more power for the same "intelligence".
Tables 13 and 14 summarize their IPW and IPJ metrics.
But, to your actual point, I think the "local is 40% dumber per watt than cloud" message is still an understatement. And maybe this is something I failed to find in the paper but they seem to ignore the "idle baseline" costs and talks about explicitly focusing on the power consumption of just the accelerator under load.
There is a large baseline power consumption just to support the accelerator. CPUs, memory, PS losses, network, fans, general environment cooling. This "cost floor" is different for data centers and a "random local computer" and I think must be in favor of data centers which are designed and built with efficiency in mind.
Idleness should also be considered. My local GPUs at $WORK and home are idle more than they are used. Idle time energy in real world scenarios should be somehow attributed to those brief, punctuated times when LLM functions are actually active on the accelerator. Actual, local LLM usage of a GPU is brief (assuming one user per PC). Even with my heavy usage developing s/w I'd guess I heat up a GPU about one hour per day total, sometimes much less. If that is local then one must pay 23 hours of idleness for that 1 hour of "intelligence". Of course a local PC is used for other things and the idleness penalty must somehow account for that. OTOH, data centers try to maximize utilization so their idle time penalty would be much less, perhaps close to zero, by construction.
> Of course a local PC is used for other things and the idleness penalty must somehow account for that.
I'd argue the idleness penalty only applies if you wouldn't have otherwise had equivalent hardware. If you already have the exact same dGPU for gaming and it doubles up for inference then the only inefficiency is power consumption (both by the GPU and potentially by AC for your living space).
Conversely I think we should consider that privacy, distributed compute that you can access without an intermediary, and a more distributed power grid all provide net benefits to society at large.
You can most definitely batch local models and do unattended inference on a 24/7 basis to maximize utilization on local hardware too. The limits are usually set by some combination of memory utilization for KV cache (particularly on small dGPUs) and overall thermals/power limits (particularly on iGPUs with unified RAM/VRAM). (If you're not near thermal limits, the main alternative to batching is to use MTP or speculative decoding in order to raise arithmetic intensity and speed with the same memory utilization. But batching requests is generally viewed as preferable.) Newer models, especially from DeepSeek, do a nice job of reducing KV cache memory impact for any given context length and/or amount of parallel sessions, so batching on local hw really ought to be quite feasible.
Small models are much smaller than frontier models though, which is how they end up consuming less energy despite low batch count. (Though with local models growing strong agentic capabilities, batching becomes a reality with local models as well).
Yeah, people on HN don't do anything for the pleasure of anything but to be productive and provide value to whoever. So, don't bet on people here understanding this mindset.
The business/money and startup culture is only a part of HN. I'm here because computers are cool and news hits here fast (also the comments can be interesting). I don't care about IPOs, unicorns, celebrities, AI, etc. I like to see the new Asahi Linux updates, Dolphin progress reports, new OpenBSD releases, discussions about vim and emacs or other unix tools, stories of repairing old arcade hardware, that kinda stuff. Some guys on IRC used to post HN links all the time and at some point I became one of them. Perhaps I'm a minority, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
Exactly! AI is just mirroring the slow death of creativity over the last couple of decades. If you have the willpower to live a more analog life free of creativity-killing digital wasteland-type deathtraps, the creative spark that hits in moments of quiet contemplation can be funneled through the accelerator of AI-assisted coding to create incredible things. Why does no one seem to realize this?
There's a lot of hatred for AI in these communities, to the point half of Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit goes ballistic when they learn the developer used Claude or Codex at some point. Media outlets and influencers are doing the same thing too.
Yes I’ve seen this. The hatred is easily as unhinged as some of the stuff from the “AI will soon learn to fold space and access infinite energy from the zero point after it recursively becomes god” delusional AI utopia crowd, or the “nuke data centers” crowd.
AI seems to break a lot of peoples’ brains. It’s like it totally bypasses nuanced thinking and understanding and normal curiosity and goes straight to some kind of overflow state.
The hatred stems from retrocomputing enthusiasts wanting an escape from modern computing. When someone's having fun with their retrocomputing hobby, they don't want what they see as the worst part of modern computing playing any role in that hobby. They're trying to get away from the hype, but it's inescapable.
What if it's due to neither environmental nor genetic factors but ideas. Europe was backward until it re-absorbed classical learning and absorbed newer ideas from the Orient, which led to the renaissance and everything that followed. Did Europeans suddenly gain 40 IQ points in that time? No. Did their environment change? No.
For some reason a lot of people have a huge problem with this explanation, actually preferring either environmental determinism or racism. This is in spite of what seems to be a lot of historical evidence for it in the form of causal influence: ideas are introduced somewhere (inventions, methods, philosophies, languages, mathematics, literature, etc.) and large changes follow.
Yet there's incentive structures that push it forward.
It's a classic example of us being dragged along by incentives and emergent patterns against our individual wills and better judgement.
People think it's a conspiracy of the elite, but the last part of your message is true and it makes me wonder to what extent everyone is being dragged along by everyone else and nobody can stop because nobody can stop.
I mean if I were a multi-billionaire, I'm not sure I could do anything. I could piss into the wind with a somewhat larger amount of piss.
I've come to believe that our lack of agency over emergent behaviors in our own societies and economies is a central problem of the human condition.
> The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.
But only within their minds. They could change their minds, donate or pay enough taxes that their billions would be distributed far and wide. Then they'd no longer be trapped.
Plenty of people make the choice to stop acquiring, stop increasing their wealth, and stop having more everything (kids, houses, cars, pets, hobbies, etc).
It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.
These people also have much more leverage to change the world in substantial, albeit often short lived ways. My family has been hurt by the DOGE cuts. Hopefully it's not a permanent injury. Yet it's very real.
Isn't it like that old story about catching monkeys. You hollow out a gourd with a small hole, tack it to the ground and put a nut in it. The monkey can get its hand in but not out with the nut in their fist. The human can walk over and leisurely whack the monkey because the monkey can't let go.
They act just like drug addicts. More's the pity. They can change but they don't seem to understand that rock bottom is a tough place to be.
It is looking like we are venturing into harder times these new few years for various reasons, as such one has to wonder what things you are still clinging to that can be let go and what is still worth handing on to. Hopefully we don't have to make those choices but it is always handy to keep in mind.
The 2021 ProPublica tax leak showed the 25 richest Americans paid a "true tax rate" of roughly 3.4% on their $401 billion in wealth growth between 2014 and 2018, because their wealth grew without triggering realization events.
I didn't even see the actual problem with this originally: wealth is not what is or should be taxed. If shares I own go up and I don't sell them, I don't have anything to tax. It's only when I sell them that I should be taxed.
> The government employee at least earns their salary by actual labor.
They may or may not do much useful - government tends to grow regardless of output, because it doesn't need to earn its money. All you know for sure is a government employee pays no taxes, and so contributes nothing to anything like roads, public services, etc etc, and takes taxes away from the people who are net contributors.
“Net” is not relevant, nominal tax rate matters, and billionaires are the biggest tax dodgers by far, stop trying to blame poor people and civil servants for your weird hangups.
If it's not relevant then just give every government employee a million dollars a year raise, but on the condition that it's taxed at 100%. Then you've raised all the taxes you need and the private sector doesn't need taxing.
> billionaires are the biggest tax dodgers by far
Even if this is true (no evidence cited, of course) they still pay the most tax in terms of dollars, and their businesses generate far, far more tax downstream as well.
> stop trying to blame poor people and civil servants for your weird hangups
I'm not blaming them. I'm just judging them by your standard. Get a better standard, and don't call it my "weird hangup".
Sure, undoubtedly. But, also... you don't have to make a ton of money to pay more than 3% of your income.
To be clear, I don't pretend to have preferences. I'm idealistically libertarian, but I think that nukes have ruined the right to bear arms, propaganda has ruined free speech, and central banks have ruined currency. I'm a demoralist, I guess, to coin a term.
> It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.
If we talk about US, your statement is outrageous hypocrisy.
Median income world-wide is less than 50 cents per hour. Average American person "who have no choice" could start working for like 30+ times more at any moment they want and choose any US government they want.
And how much money from this 30+ times more they have "donated or paid enough taxes" that their several dollars per hour "would be distributed far and wide"? Zero. So we are talking about insatiable appetite of Americans, not Billionaires. Because average American person has literally the same choice you are talking about, and literally choosing "having more everything" instead of "distribute far and wide".
Where did you get that 50 cent statistic from? The closest I could find was a dataset from 2006-12 where the median per-capita income was $4k. Even if you extrapolate to working 40h a week and 52 weeks/year (which you can’t, because there’s some correlation between having lower income in this dataset and working part-time), that is still around $2/hr.
The average American struggles to pay rent, utilities, and food, actually. They can’t just go donate 99.999% of their wealth and still survive like billionaires could.
> The average American struggles to pay rent, utilities, and food, actually.
Do you think your average Billionaire do not struggles to pay for their 500m yacht or flock of supermodels and Hollywood stars?
> They can’t just go donate 99.999% of their wealth and still survive like billionaires could.
They totally can. An average American worker with 12 dollars salary in terms of excess cash is way closer to Elon Musk than to a tantalum mine worker in the Congo who earns 22 cents per hour.
Not 99.999% obviously, but they can easily pay 80%, 90%, 95%, or even 98% of their incomes as fair share to people, who really need it. But they choose not to. They choose to get more rent, more utilities, more food (even if they will literally die from that amount). Or even new iPhone, that has been created by those highly underpaid tantalum mine workers. From the point of view of the average human on planet Earth, average American just as much exploiter as any billionaire.
> but they can easily pay 80%, 90%, 95%, or even 98% of their incomes
Not american but I'd presume food, protection from the elements and healthcare costs arefor the vast majority higher than what's left over even if they only afford themselves the minimum no?
Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing is proportionally more expensive and the price inflexible because smaller or shitier quite frankly doens't exist or is illegal.
> I'd presume food, protection from the elements and healthcare costs arefor the vast majority higher than what's left over even if they only afford themselves the minimum no?
Obviously no. What a hypocrisy and shifting of blame. "The minimum" you'd get if you are working for less than 20 cents per hour. When you are working for several dollars per hour, you are drowning in luxury comparing to the rest of the world and refusing to pay your fair share to other people, whose work you are appropriating.
> Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing
That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living". I mean, duh. Your bottom segment of housing (food, protection from the elements, healthcare) is literally a function of your bottom segment of income, it is not the "minimum".
>Obviously no. What a hypocrisy and shifting of blame.
Obviously yes. Your effort to equate the ability to scale down of billionaires to people who struggle to afford a shoebox appartment and lifesaving procedures if they were to fall ill is ghoulish. "
A lot of those a bit above the minimum do indeed spend more on what were historically luxuries because those luxuries now cost a fraction of their historical price whilst housing and such has typically gotten more expensive.
>That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living".
It is not in any way shape or form the same because billionaires can go lower.
> it is not the "minimum".
The alternative is no housing (or often moving in with parents) so i'd argue it is.
i'll remind you that a tent on the sidewalk isn't exactly legal everywhere.
If you’re going to go after Americans then I guess anyone around the world not living in a run down shack in the middle of nowhere without water and electricity is also taking advantage. Americans are well off compared to a lot of places but not the whole rest of the world, not even close. Get some perspective.
And yet they still hold immense power to make our lives shittier. It is far easier to destroy a functioning system than it is to build one from the ground up
There are plenty of people on this board that aren't $200K+ software engineers. The median pay for my local area in the US is $35K at best, assuming it has risen the last few years.
Do we live in different worlds? I can't think of a single meaningful way my comfort has increased in the past 25 years. In fact, with the rise of the homeless and mental health crises, the encroachment of more and more people who have no business touching computers into cyberspace, the increased relevance of flash mob power on the internet, I would say my comfort has been actively degraded on a fundamental and significant level.
On a broader timescale, we can take a look at the fact that goods which were designed to be affordable and mass-produced have been elevated to refined luxury goods, like the Herman-Miller Eames, as an indicator that material standards have fallen very far. Not the least of which because of an ever-dwindling labor share of capital (beginning in the 1970s), which silently impoverishes working households and degrades their comfort while being completely invisible to an uncareful eye on paper.
Much of the major boons of comfort were established prior to the transition to shareholder capitalism. Things like e-commerce, IoT, online banking, these are for the birds. Meaningful advances are things like HVAC and refrigeration, ubiquitous motorized transport, electrical lighting.
I believe the parent is implying that we sit uncomfortably at home, silently, rather than uncomfortably marching through the streets, demanding. Yet, I say that while uncomfortably sitting in my home, typing on a screen
Mass demonstrations are common and frequent, more than ever. The thing is that these are mild pressures at best. What came from Occupy Wallstreet? The George Floyd protests? The No Kings marches? Anti-ICE demonstrations? They're not nothing and we should continue to have them and participate in them, but we have to recognize them as what they are: background radiation. On their own, they don't affect change or bring about course correction. We clearly need something more, people inside of these institutions, sharks who are going to fight and win against the entrenched powers on their home turf. There's a very limited pool of people who are capable of doing that.
Plenty has come from all those things. But it's those in power who want you to feel like those are fruitless endeavors. That's why their strategy is to overwhelm. Good news takes time to be received and by then your focus will be on something else. But I promise you if you look them up you'll find real progress. It may not be as much as you want, but that's a different thing. Progress is made by small and successive steps. So the strategy to upend progress is to interrupt those steps and make them feel as small as possible. Don't fall for the trap
> We clearly need ... sharks
I am afraid of sharks, just as I am scorpions. It is in their nature to draw blood. Bloodshed should be the last resort. By putting sharks in power is the problem with the current administration. Replacing with a different shark doesn't reduce attacks, it just changes targets. If sharks must be used, they must be well contained.
You have a strong point, and it's probably not the one you want to make.
Non-violent (peaceful, loud, signs) protesting does little to nothing. Historically speaking, what does work is violence, and a lot of it.
Even in the USA, our own labor battles were effectively wars, with the US military fighting against the people. It's where the Pinkertons were created. And it was bloody as hell, until FDR had some sense in making the NLRB to *curb the violence* with peaceful grievances.
When those in power forget the peaceful paths were a compromise, don't be too surprised when violence rears its ugly head.
This is how you get healthcare CEOs gunned down, or ol Scam Altman's house firebombed, or city council person get their house shot up after voting for a data center, or Flocks (YC17) getting destroyed en masse.
I'm just sitting here. And it definitely is getting worse and worse, for everyone. And some people, when you corner them, do unimaginable things.
Agreed, Viable nonviolent protests are a useful signal that society has not (yet) converted to outright authoritarianism. This is their only use IMO. They cannot effect meaningful change. But their existence signifies we can still effect such a change without resorting to violence.
There is a threshold beyond which change can only come about via violence. I don’t wish to speculate how far away from that threshold we currently find ourselves. I think we’re closer now than we were 10 years ago.
To add to your point, I'm struggling to think of any non-violent movement in history that wasn't backed by a more violent movement that made the non-violent movement the more palatable option.
Unconditionally embracing nonviolence is not, properly, a goal. Nonviolence is a strategy. It must be conditional on its effectiveness.
A useful thought experiment is which 80 year period of history would you prefer to live in other than now, with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time. It’s easy to pick a single brief moment in history that is in some important ways better than right now. But many of those time periods are bookended by their own periods of strife and struggle. If you had to pick a different time period in history in which to live your life for 80 years birth to death, would you pick any other time than right now? Would you try to thread the needle such that you weren’t eligible to be drafted into the Vietnam war, but still benefit from the economic growth of the 50s-70s? Knowing that the AIDS crisis was still around the corner? And the unrest of the civil rights movement? The impending doom of the Cold War? A world where you rent your phone from AT&T, where your ability to learn about and communicate with the rest of the world list limited largely to passive consumption of limited news sources and books that might be decades out of date if you aren’t in a major metro area? Where your whole town might be dependent on a single employer who might be closing up factories and moving over seas in the 80s, or just plain closing down and taking your pension (and your local economy) with them?
Would you go further back in time and risk the Korean War or the World Wars and the Great Depression? A time when electricity was new and you might very well be using an outhouse as your toilet? When modern sanitation and health laws were in their infancy and debilitating diseases like polio ran rampant?
Would you go back further?
I for one, despite a lot of the issues with today can’t really find a different period of time I would prefer my life to span. I can absolutely identify parts of different times I would prefer to now, but I can’t see myself giving up everything I would need to to actually live in that period of time, and deal with the strife and struggles of the period at the same time.
>with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time.
The premise sort of gives it away, doesn’t it? If you don’t know how things turn out you can’t say how you’d respond. Everyone is a product of their time. Some people are miserable, some are resilient.
It's a necessary restriction. Part of what drives modern anxiety is you don't know the future, so it's necessary that while you get to pick a time period where you have perfect visibility into its future (for example, you know that the cold war doesn't lead to the nuclear apocalypse) the person who lives through that moment can't have that knowledge. If you picked the cold war period, it is necessary that you pick it knowing your cold war self would NOT know that, and would be as anxious as their time and circumstances would make them with the information they would have had then, not the perfect* information you have now.
Well if you don't know anything then it is just a numbers game. Most people pre-industrial has a high likely hood of you being a random subsidence farmer. And provided you didn't pick a standout point in history you would most of the time land on and live an uneventful life as a farmer.
And I know plenty of people that would take that kind of life. They would do it today if it didn't completely isolate themselves from society. But atlest in pre-modern times you could trade some random grain or booze for some other goods and pay your taxes with it. But today neither walmart nor the IRS will accept handspun yarn or a sack grain in lieu of money.
However, overcoming these forces is something people did successfully in the past. I think right now we are just in a cycle of mass confusion caused by the technological revolutions, which prevents us to see clearly (as it happened in the past as well).
Without alignment we just drift by natural forces of a system in place in whatever direction. When we adapt and if the world survives, this should not be an issue.
The problem of billionaires is that they are one level below from the top in abstraction of a society. They are required to play by the rules of the state designed by someone else, and they lack the knowledge and experience to go one level higher and think about the policies and rules for society itself - and this is much harder than doing business, and requires completely different skills.
Because of these factors, we see them being able to hoard wealth but unable to influence the system in any positive way, except for the ones which the system was already designed for (create jobs, innovate, etc.)
Honestly, my worry is that the longer we put it off the more likely any revolution or change will happen more chaotically. It should be organized, with strong leaders. But if that fails, I think Reverend King has a famous quote about the unheard. And I think that ends up being chaotic and bloody. I don't want that, I hope we've evolved enough to do transitions of power peacefully, or at least as peacefully as possible
As a class, they steer things through emergent behavior and overlapping self interest in certain areas. As individuals, they can’t afford to trust each other without leverage.
As a class, they have a set of similar incentives (grow/retain resources and power networks) that lead to similar actions (avoid taxation, buy influence, weaken regulators, etc). They may cooperate at times, but they are not a coherent organization with a roster, votes, and leadership.
As individuals, they are dangerous competitors, and they can’t afford to trust each other too much without some kind of mutual leverage. This could be in the form of mutual equity holdings, blackmail, complex arrangements where each party has exposure, whatever. But even then, trust has limits.
There’s no cabal that runs things with rules and elections at this level. It’s all individuals who are immersed in the systems that made them wealthy. Those systems tend to lead to certain behaviors. That’s it.
> You could make this statement about any group at all.
Yes, that's the point
> And then once you realize people are in multiple groups, the whole thing devolves into chaos.
You have bad priors. That would only happen if groups could only have singular and simple goals. It requires those goals to be mutually exclusive. Because as soon as they overlap, even just a little, cooperation becomes an effective strategy.
Hell, history shows us enemies often cooperate. Mostly to defeat a mutual enemy, so they can go back to fighting each other, but that's still cooperation
Nobody is suggesting nobody or group cooperates on anything ever. This comment could go in the definition section of "strawman". My comment was in response to the idea that there is "a conspiracy of the elite". It's just an absurd idea to anyone who has spent time in the world working with people, both "elite" and non "elite".
In the bay area you'll find thousands and thousands of people who have worked at a company run by a billionaire founder. They will tell you said billionaire founder can't even get everyone in the company to conspire to row in the same direction.
But the comment above wasn't about an explicit conspiracy, with billionaires meeting in dark rooms colluding. It was about implicit, uncoordinated conspiracy, where objectives align. My comment is defending the latter
Exactly, there is no conspiracy, there’s just multiple actors moving predictably in the same direction, and sometimes coordinating weakly. I don’t know how my comments could have been read otherwise.
True, but these are generally limited agreements among a few individuals (at most a small handful at the top). Pulling off a big conspiracy between many powerful competing actors carries too much risk of defection. It may be possible but it’s certainly rare.
I do think that these limited agreements may be copied by other people in similar contexts, for instance there were other tech firms who made similar agreements with their own competitors. And the big tech anti-poaching agreements may have themselves been copied from similar agreements made in other industries, such as finance and fast food. The illegal conduct probably spread organically through word of mouth, as execs and board members informally exchange this sort of “best practice” with each other.
It’s likely that big shareholders or board members could hold private meetings to advise the CEOs of their companies on how to pull off this sort of trick, if they think it would help the stock price. Given how many people sit on multiple boards, this could be seen as a sort of conspiracy. It’s still very informal and of course it’s nearly impossible to prove.
Maybe I'm overindexing on "they steer" and "effective strategy" - it still reads that this group has way more control and deliberate planning than they do.
And, "implicit, uncoordinated conspiracy" is an oxymoron. The word "conspiracy" has a definition.
If all you are saying is "sometimes billionaires are aligned" - sure. Sometimes politicians are aligned. Sometimes teammates are aligned. If one wants a platitude with some predictive power "people are self interested" is going to work more often.
“People are self interested” works fine as long as you extend the analysis to include the class dimension. People in a specific class are generally going to advocate on behalf of that class, because it benefits them to do so. No conspiracy needed.
To a degree, yes, it’s why looking at people on the level of groups is not that useful for predicting individual behavior and beliefs, only aggregate behavior and beliefs.
However, some groups do have identifiable leadership, rules, membership rosters, etc. Political parties for instance, or governmental bodies. Decisions from groups like this often have an identifiable lineage (from proposal to vote) and are considered binding. This contrasts with the sort of emergent decisions I was discussing in the context of the very wealthy. There was no vote, there was no formal coordination, and the “decision” is not binding, yet everyone can see its effects. Opposing something like this is like boxing with a shadow.
Or, someone who knows the books and hot takes on "systems thinking" are pop-science, and the actual good ideas have been around for a long time and taught in operations research, control theory etc.
It doesn't need any intelligence at all. There's mutually beneficial things to any group of people. So it doesn't require explicit coordination. Even fairly unintelligent animals have symbiotic relationships with other species. So your argument is what, that billionaires are less intelligent than an ant?
In the real world it's hard enough to get 5 people on the same page about anything. The idea that dozens/hundreds of people with billions of dollars who are in business against each other in many cases are secretly colluding with any effectiveness is a joke. If they were, zuckerberg, larry and sergey would have been squashed in the 90's/00's by the elite of the time. Sam Altman would have been crushed years ago. Obama or Trump would have been put in their place, probably both. Look at all the billionaires all of a sudden kowtowing to Trump. The billionaires just got beat real bad in NYC.
Billionaires just don't have much power. This isn't a movie.
This seems to contradict itself. You first claim that there's no organization but then you claim billionaires have no power because of the more powerful above them. Hierarchy is organization, so which is it
It really sounds like you're trying hard to define a square circle. Your argument isn't even self consistent because what you described sure sounds like someone has power...
Nope. It's perfectly consistent. No one has much power at all. No one is in charge, there is no greater power sitting above us all calling all (or even most) the shots. To use someone else's term, there is no cabal.
You seem to conflate "no one is powerful" with "no one has any power in any situation at all".
I never said nobody hoped to be powerful, or increase the level of power they have. They just don't have much, and they can't/don't coordinate like some conspiracy theorists believe.
Is that a first amendment violation though if they voluntarily complied?
It’s a private company. Free speech doesn’t mean I’m entitled to use your property to post and amplify my speech.
I also find the context of the whole thing suspect since Trump in his second administration has openly used the FCC and other federal pressures to attack speech he doesn’t like and Musk’s X has not been “free speech absolutist.”
I always thought it was just the far right being mad their side wasn’t in charge, and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated.
>Is that a first amendment violation though if they voluntarily complied?
The entire point of the case was to determine exactly that. Read the judgement. If it were an open and shut case, it never would have made it to the supreme court.
>and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated
How in the world did you get to that conclusion from Murthy v. Missouri and the "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" order?
From the open use of the FCC to threaten television networks for saying things the president doesn't like? Among many other examples? That's just a particularly overt one.
I'm just saying overall behavior -- outside this specific case -- is not consistent with a regime (or a larger political movement) that believes in free speech. It's consistent with "we want to be the ones in charge determining speech," with opposition to Twitter's previous moderation being motivated by that rather than principled belief in free speech.
The net effect of the Twitter takeover was not to make it a free speech absolutist platform but to shift the pattern of selective boosting and selective de-boosting and moderation to one that favors the far right's message.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
IMO high housing prices are destroying civilization.
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