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so instead of building useful things like bridges or infrastructure, we decided to gamble on useless greater fool theory “assets”

by ffggvv 6y ago

NoOneNew 6y ago
To be fair, it's not like Twitter is useful to society. You cant expect people who got a positive feedback loop for building useless to switch to building a bridge, water treatment plant or a mosquito net.
adventured 6y ago
Instead? As though some VCs allocating a couple billions of dollars of private capital to crypto investments gets in the way of the government properly allocating ~$7.8 trillion in tax revenue every year. Venture capitalists don't build bridges or infrastructure, fortunately (although they could hardly do worse than the various governments in the US). Government does that by and large. It's the responsibility of government to allocate its tax revenue to infrastructure. The US has among the least responsible governments that has ever existed in world history. That's on the shoulders of the voters and the politicians they elect. It's not the VCs or politicians (insert scapegoat here) that are the primary problem (they're all secondary), it's down to the American people that have behaved like absentee sloven bastards for half a century now.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  I think the opportunity costs here aren't financial capital as much as is it human capital. The amount of STEM talent that goes to work for these crypto shops or hedge funds instead of picking up a nuclear or civil engineering degree and rebuilding the power grid in Texas or California probably has some bad effects. The UK has to increasingly rely on Chinese nuclear expertise because over the last ten to twenty years a lot of engineers have retired and you don't just stagnate but decline because there's just not enough people and also state capacity to keep that process knowledge alive. Musk says a lot of crap but on this he was right when he talked about the real loss of knowledge in spaceflight. It takes a very long time to get an engineering culture back once you lose it.
  - adventured 6y ago
    We are not lacking for the capacity to build infrastructure. We have both a plentiful supply of engineering talent and labor. We're presently bombing Syria because Biden is a continuation of the Obama war hawk stance on toppling everything in the Middle East (which is a program that goes back decades now and fully crosses the political aisle from side to side, they're all doing the same thing when given power). That's the kind of thing we do in the US instead of properly investing into our infrastructure. And we've been doing it across the whole of the post WW2 era. A minimum of $10-$15 trillion has been spent that way by the US just since the late 1960s. That's where our infrastructure money went.

so instead of building useful things like bridges or infrastructure, we decided to gamble on useless greater fool theory “assets”

by ffggvv 6y ago

so instead of building useful things like bridges or infrastructure, we decided to gamble on useless greater fool theory “assets”

NoOneNew 6y ago

To be fair, it's not like Twitter is useful to society. You cant expect people who got a positive feedback loop for building useless to switch to building a bridge, water treatment plant or a mosquito net.

adventured 6y ago

Instead? As though some VCs allocating a couple billions of dollars of private capital to crypto investments gets in the way of the government properly allocating ~$7.8 trillion in tax revenue every year. Venture capitalists don't build bridges or infrastructure, fortunately (although they could hardly do worse than the various governments in the US). Government does that by and large. It's the responsibility of government to allocate its tax revenue to infrastructure. The US has among the least responsible governments that has ever existed in world history. That's on the shoulders of the voters and the politicians they elect. It's not the VCs or politicians (insert scapegoat here) that are the primary problem (they're all secondary), it's down to the American people that have behaved like absentee sloven bastards for half a century now.

Barrin92 6y ago
I think the opportunity costs here aren't financial capital as much as is it human capital. The amount of STEM talent that goes to work for these crypto shops or hedge funds instead of picking up a nuclear or civil engineering degree and rebuilding the power grid in Texas or California probably has some bad effects. The UK has to increasingly rely on Chinese nuclear expertise because over the last ten to twenty years a lot of engineers have retired and you don't just stagnate but decline because there's just not enough people and also state capacity to keep that process knowledge alive. Musk says a lot of crap but on this he was right when he talked about the real loss of knowledge in spaceflight. It takes a very long time to get an engineering culture back once you lose it.
- adventured 6y ago
  We are not lacking for the capacity to build infrastructure. We have both a plentiful supply of engineering talent and labor. We're presently bombing Syria because Biden is a continuation of the Obama war hawk stance on toppling everything in the Middle East (which is a program that goes back decades now and fully crosses the political aisle from side to side, they're all doing the same thing when given power). That's the kind of thing we do in the US instead of properly investing into our infrastructure. And we've been doing it across the whole of the post WW2 era. A minimum of $10-$15 trillion has been spent that way by the US just since the late 1960s. That's where our infrastructure money went.