music fanatic, computer nerd, media tech, C++, using Arch btw, rationalist, individualist, globalist, capitalism enjoyer
Germany
Joined November 2017
- Tweets35.8K
- Following4.1K
- Followers983
- Likes18K
damian101 retweeted
At last, an explanation for why philosophers struggle to see wisdom:
P1. Philosophers love wisdom (source: definition)
P2. Love is blind (source: common knowledge)
P3. The blind cannot see (source: definition)
C. Therefore, philosophers cannot see wisdom.
damian101 retweeted
There's a certain type of person who needs to convince himself that everything he's jealous of is a trade-off
This is the opposite of how it works. Someone with the traits to succeed in one area very likely can succeed in another!
damian101 retweeted
GRAND RIVER, MN - Residents Rally Against New Dada Center
"No one knows what the hell it is. It's not Modernist. It's not Brutalist. It's always making weird noises."
"We don't want our children growing up in an environment full of semiotic deconstruction. Who asked for this?"
damian101 retweeted
Wir müssen halt einfach weniger Züge einetzen, der induzierte Bedarf den mehr Züge verursachen können wir uns nicht leisten.
damian101 retweeted
Zielwerte EEG deutlich verfehlt sagt schon alles. Es wird immer mehr installiert, aber es kommt kaum mehr dabei raus. 200 TWh mehr installiert + es kommen nur 3-6 TWh mehr dabei raus. In % gerechnet hat die Zeitung die Wahrheit geschrieben, also nix gelogen, du Faktenverdreher.
damian101 retweeted
There's a common misconception that Brutalist buildings were unpainted, but thanks to microscopic analysis of the exteriors we can now recreate what they looked like in their prime.
damian101 retweeted
4chan has invented a highly offensive slur for a certain group of people. the problem is the slur is very funny to say
if you say the slur, you’ll be cancelled and fired from your job. but if enough people say it, it becomes normalized and nobody cares
do you say the slur?
75%yes 😈
25%no 🙊
5,317 votes • Final results
damian101 retweeted
Arbeitswerttheorie ausgedribbelt...
A Chinese live streamer falls asleep, people keep watching and giving her gifts teapaw.org/Shenxiao123971/status/…
damian101 retweeted
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted that unchecked population growth would cause mass starvation.
Instead, the global death rate fell by over a third, and famines disappeared outside of war zones.
How did he get it so wrong?
In short, he ignored humanity's ability to innovate.
damian101 retweeted
Marx: “Nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labor contained in it; the labor does not count as labor, and therefore creates no value.”
damian101 retweeted
If low-level, performance-oriented people understood types and PLT we wouldn't have this problem (because they would also become competent high-level people).
If academic success would be measured by other metrics than publication count we would also not have this problem because contrary to popular belief PLT people care deeply about practical programming languages. They just don't have the time to work on them.
@Jonathan_Blow regarding software bloat outpacing hardware progress: found my 18y old Pentium II 400mhz laptop and fired up MS Word 98...
damian101 retweeted
Landwirte, die ohne staatliche Subventionen nicht überlebensfähig sind, üben keinen Beruf, sondern ein Hobby aus. Landwirte, die aus Angst vor Konkurrenz gegen Freihandelsabkommen agitieren, schaffen keinen Nutzen, sondern machen die Welt für den Endverbraucher teurer.
Landwirtschaftsverbände, die unterwürfig um staatliche Knete betteln, anstatt die staatliche Abgaben- und Bürokratielast zu bekämpfen, sind nicht Teil der Lösung, sondern Teil des Problems.
damian101 retweeted
Piketty is wrong about the past and the future. My forthcoming book, while not directly about Piketty, shows exactly that. It shows that the era from 1870 to 1910 in America -- when markets were quite open, contestable while people and capital could move around -- was the first era of egalitarian growth.
The living standards of the bottom 90% rose as fast as the top 1%. And that fast was really fast (more than 2.5% per annum year in year out).
The point we must start realizing NOW is that markets are naturally egalitarian forces. State-solutions might here and there promote growth for people at the bottom but state-solutions often open the door to rent-seeking, political specialization and patronage that may create inegalitarian growth and slower overall growth.
With contestable markets, elite wealth is not sacrosanct. With secure property rights, innovation can have spillovers for the many but still be sufficiently rewarding for the innovator to undertake and adopt. With open markets, you can escape bad situations and move to areas or industries of opportunities. With strong protection of property comes (as a tool for it) barriers to political specialization and rent-seeking which atrophies crony capitalism (which slows growht and is inegalitarian). Yes, some functions of the state can be egalitarian but they are modest complements to what I just described.
Open and contestable markets are the ultimate egalitarian force we have ever deployed to generate a growing society.
New blog post w @pawtrammell: Capital in the 22nd Century
Where we argue that while Piketty was wrong about the past, he’s probably right about the future.
Piketty argued that without strong redistribution of wealth, inequality will indefinitely increase. Historically, however, income inequality from capital accumulation has actually been self-correcting. Labor and capital are complements, so if you build up lots of capital, you’ll lower its returns and raise wages (since labor now becomes the bottleneck).
But once AI/robotics fully substitute for labor, this correction mechanism breaks.
For centuries, the share of GDP that goes to paying wages has been 2/3, and the share of GDP that’s been income from owning stuff has been 1/3.
With full automation, capital’s share of GDP goes to 100% (since datacenters and solar panels and the robot factories that build all the above plus more robot factories are all “capital”).
And inequality among capital holders will also skyrocket - in favor of larger and more sophisticated investors. A lot of AI wealth is being generated in private markets. You can’t get direct exposure to xAI from your 401k, but the Sultan of Oman can. A cheap house (the main form of wealth for many Americans) is a form of capital almost uniquely ill-suited to taking advantage of a leap in automation: it plays no part in the production, operation, or transportation of computers, robots, data, or energy.
Also, international catch-up growth may end. Poor countries historically grew faster by combining their cheap labor with imported capital/know-how. Without labor as a bottleneck, their main value-add disappears.
Inequality seems especially hard to justify in this world. So if we don’t want inequality to just keep increasing forever - with the descendants of the most patient and sophisticated of today’s AI investors controlling all the galaxies - what can we do? The obvious place to start is with Piketty’s headline recommendation: highly and progressively tax wealth. This might discourage saving, but it would no longer penalize those who have earned a lot by their hard work and creativity. The wealth - even the investment decisions - will be made by the robots, and they will work just as hard and smart however much we tax their owners.
But taxing capital is pointless if people can just shift their future investment to lower tax countries. And since capital stocks could grow really fast (robots building robots and all that), pretty soon tax havens go from marginal outposts to the majority of global GDP. But how do you get global coordination on taxing capital, when the benefits to defecting are so high and so accessible?
Full automation will probably lead to ever-increasing inequality. We don’t see an obvious solution to this problem. And we think it’s weird how little thought has gone into what to do about it.
Many more thoughts from re-reading Piketty with our AGI hats on at the post in the link below.