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America doesn’t make anything anymore. Core issue is the dollar as the global reserve currency. Petro dollar system means all oil is priced in dollars which gen

America doesn’t make anything anymore. Core issue is the dollar as the global reserve currency. Petro dollar system means all oil is priced in dollars which generates strong demand for dollars. Other countries export to the US to get dollars so they can buy oil. End result is the US can buy imports cheaper but our manufacturing base is hollowed out. What do the most ambitious do in the USA? Go into software or Wall Street. Becoming the best widget maker is noble, and many go into it and earn a fine salary, but the truly ambitious sniff out the money and go there. If you want to reduce inequality, stop incentivizing money pushing. But to do this will require a ton of pain as we get out of the current global system and reorient towards actually doing stuff. Inflation is finally getting bad for cheap shit imported from foreign countries. But inflation for all manner of things that are conveniently ignored in CPI like how much it costs to make skyscrapers, how much it costs to make subways, how much medical care and education costs, etc. etc. has been rising forever because foreigners can’t manufacture that and ship it on a container to the US. No amount of tax dithering will solve this fundamental misalignment of our currency. Until this is solved expect those closest to money printers to keep winning.

iancmceachern 5y ago
I 100% agree. Somewhere over the last 50 years we went from telling our best and brightest young minds to make the world better to make as much money as you can. We've even aligned our higher education institutions to that goal and not necessarily the greater good. Institutions like Harvard lead the way. They set an example by priorizong financial gains and the health of the endowment and not the greater good. I've heard it several times here on HN before. The greatest minds of a generation are working on adtech. It's important to also note that the best minds of previous generations spent their careers working on war machines. I think that is the greatest part of the whole Kennedy Apollo story. It's easy to assume that the decision to go to the moon was the difficult one. There were many reasons leading the US to need to do something during that time to stay in the space race. The big thing Kennedy did for us all was to choose to make it a civilian program and not a military one done in secret. We are at another inflection point in history now. We can choose to do something great together, as civilians, to bring us together (climate change comes to mind), or we can build more war machines and re arm all of Europe, again. It seems as though we are going to go down that path.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  The whole adtech making as money as it makes is just insane when you think about it... How come advertising makes so much money? I understand Amazon and Microsoft or even Netflix. They provide services or massive logistics or just software. But Google and Facebook and so on is just strange, do they really add so much value to world?
  - iancmceachern 5y ago
    Indeed. And the relative code base size of Google relative to say, the f35, space shuttle, OSs, etc is staggering. What does all that code do? Source: https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-biggest-codebases-in-history-a128bb3eea73 https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-biggest-codebases-in-h...

iancmceachern 5y ago

I 100% agree. Somewhere over the last 50 years we went from telling our best and brightest young minds to make the world better to make as much money as you can. We've even aligned our higher education institutions to that goal and not necessarily the greater good. Institutions like Harvard lead the way. They set an example by priorizong financial gains and the health of the endowment and not the greater good. I've heard it several times here on HN before. The greatest minds of a generation are working on adtech. It's important to also note that the best minds of previous generations spent their careers working on war machines. I think that is the greatest part of the whole Kennedy Apollo story. It's easy to assume that the decision to go to the moon was the difficult one. There were many reasons leading the US to need to do something during that time to stay in the space race. The big thing Kennedy did for us all was to choose to make it a civilian program and not a military one done in secret. We are at another inflection point in history now. We can choose to do something great together, as civilians, to bring us together (climate change comes to mind), or we can build more war machines and re arm all of Europe, again. It seems as though we are going to go down that path.

Ekaros 5y ago
The whole adtech making as money as it makes is just insane when you think about it... How come advertising makes so much money? I understand Amazon and Microsoft or even Netflix. They provide services or massive logistics or just software. But Google and Facebook and so on is just strange, do they really add so much value to world?
- iancmceachern 5y ago
  Indeed. And the relative code base size of Google relative to say, the f35, space shuttle, OSs, etc is staggering. What does all that code do? Source: https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-biggest-codebases-in-history-a128bb3eea73 https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-biggest-codebases-in-h...