5 ms·

I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stret

I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.

WalterBright 5mo ago
[flagged]
- ares623 5mo ago
  "create"
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    ???
    - _carbyau_ 5mo ago
      Me giving you a dollar doesn't create. The rich extracting wealth from the poor doesn't create. Investors buying existing housing stock doesn't create. Mine it. Make it. Improve it. Brings wealth into existence. Note that financially large businesses/individuals are a mix of wealth creation and transference. That one word comment implies a lot of the wealthiest people have not created much wealth in comparison with how much they managed to transfer.
      - WalterBright 5mo ago
        But you aren't going to give me a dollar. The rich will sell you things they created, but it is illegal for them to extract it from you. Buying existing houses means the seller realizes the wealth he created. Transference is called "stealing" and is illegal (unless the government does it).
        _carbyau_ 5mo ago
        Transference in this case can be otherwise known as economic rent. merriam-webster definition: "the return for the use of a factor in excess of the minimum required to bring forth its service" [0] Think of those companies that have % take on the output of others by providing a market. Yes, they provide a service, as you say "The rich will sell you things they created". But the arrangement allows them to extract more than it costs. That extra over and above doesn't provide extra value. It is "rent". To be clear, at no point have I accused billionaires of illegal acts. Mind you at that scale they can influence what is legal or not, regulated or not, tariffed or not. Example, see Apple's award to Trump for tariff exemptions. Their acts impact the economy and how money flows. The accusation being a large chunk of their wealth is via rent than wealth creation that benefits everyone. Now, to a business person, this is simply good business! Maximising profit on output! But from a society wide economic point of view, there can be too much of a good thing. Sentiment-wise, the poor and middleclass want to be able to get rich too. But now it seems as though the multibillionaires will make that impossible as they seek to suck up every last dollar. [0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/economic%20rent https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/economic%20rent Edit: flow and shorter... and then added more sorry.
- tadfisher 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    What's dense about it?
    - wvenable 5mo ago
      If so much wealth is being created, why is everyone so poor?
      - WalterBright 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        wvenable 5mo ago
        Do they really? The poor have castles and servants and hardly work? No, the real poor work 60 hours a week and live out of their cars. My children, who are not poor, with good jobs still can't afford their own home -- where is their castle, sir?
    - jph00 5mo ago
      It's both an illogical question and comes from a place of ignorance about a topic which one would expect folks nowadays to have some basic competence in. First, the illogical part: the statement was about "inequality" to which you asked about wealth generation. These are two separate issues, and inequality is not, logically, necessarily tied to wealth generation. So "How does creating wealth hurt others?" is, at best, a non sequitur. The ignorance part: there is a lot of empirical research over many decades showing the negative impact of wealth inequality on societies. With Google and AI there's really no good reason to ask such ignorant questions when in a moment you could educate yourself, and then ask an informed and thoughtful question instead.
  - eduction 5mo ago
- abuob 5mo ago
  If you're genuinely curious, a few suggestions that I personally found incredibly enlightening: Anand Giridhardas, Winners Take All: The book is fantastic, there's also his now infamous google talk where he talks about dismantling google: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st century: Probably the most comprehensive (but at times also longwinded) outline on how wealth inequality comes to be, why it's not good for society and how it could be adressed
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    How about a summary of Piketty's argument? We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?
    - rileymat2 5mo ago
      It’s a rather public example but DOGE did immense damage and was facilitated by the ability to leverage wealth into power. There is a dangerous feedback cycle.
      - WalterBright 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        fragmede 5mo ago
        https://muskdeathcount.com/ https://muskdeathcount.com/
        WalterBright 5mo ago
        I've seen these figures all over the map. The deaths of people in other countries are the result of their corrupt and evil governments, not Musk. > 1,045,803 people Amazing how specific it is! Come on, dude.
    - 5mo ago
- staplers 5mo ago
  How does creating wealth hurt others? Inflation. If i print $1 trillion dollars, i buy up all the resources you need to live and dangle them in front of you and control every aspect of your life.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    [flagged]
- rickydroll 5mo ago
  When your part in wealth creation is having your wealth acquired by somebody else. Wealth creation only works when the the money available to buy wealth creating instruments is significantly less than the value of those instruments. How would markets behave if investment accounts had more cash in them than there were investment vehicles? I suspect it would be like what we see today in private equity with illiquid funds and subpar returns. The response of a market in this condition would be to look for sources of liquid funds, get them to buy the illiquid funds so that the original investors could get out leaving the new investors holding the bag of crap. Oh wait, isn't private equity doing just that trying to make PE acceptable investment vehicle for 401ks?
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    > When your part in wealth creation is having your wealth acquired by somebody else. That's called "theft". In a free market, transactions are mutually agreed upon. Equal wealth for equal wealth. > Wealth creation only works when the the money available to buy wealth creating instruments is significantly less than the value of those instruments. Your statement presumes that "value" is some construct independent of the market. The only "value" in commerce is what someone is willing to pay for it. There is no other useful definition of value. As for how wealth is created, I buy a canvas and some paint for $50, and paint a masterpiece that Ritchie Rich buys from me for $10,000. I created that wealth. Taylor Swift figured out how to turn her song skillz into a billion dollars. She created that wealth. Musk figured out how to turn hunks of metal into rockets that are quite profitable. He created that wealth. And so on. > How would markets behave if investment accounts had more cash in them than there were investment vehicles? Now that is a complex topic. But I'll make a simple take on it. When there is more cash than things to buy, then the value of the cash diminishes. We call that "inflation". Wealth creation does not cause inflation. As for private equity, nobody is making you invest in it.
    - srean 5mo ago
      In a hypothetical free market yes. But we don't have one. We have k-polies for small k. I have come to doubt whether free market is even possible. The rich will use their wealth to ensure (by corruption or otherwise) to bend the laws in their favor. Wealth has power and they will exercise this power. Why wouldn't they ?
- wvenable 5mo ago
  > How does creating wealth hurt others? Creating wealth doesn't. Extracting wealth does. We have long switched from a creating economy to an extracting economy.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - wvenable 5mo ago
      All of us. Fees, commercial and residential rents, products that cost the same but are smaller. None of this generating new wealth.
      - WalterBright 5mo ago
        Don't buy something you think is not worth the money.
        wvenable 5mo ago
        Let me more specific. I am talking about wealth that is generated by capturing value from existing assets, transactions, and people rather than by producing new goods, services, or productivity gains. Examples are rent-seeking (making money through ownership, monopoly power, licensing, etc), financial extraction (financial manipulation, speculation, debt, and asset appreciation), housing and land appreciation, middlemen and platform fees, and corporate consolidation. This is contrast to building factories, software, infrastructure, or goods and services that didn't previously exist. What you might define as "creating". I don't know how you cannot buy something. You have to have a home, food, transportation, and even entertainment. The extraction economy has come to all of these things. Maybe fewer and fewer things are "worth the money" and that is a bad thing, don't you agree? I feel like you're not approaching this conversation in good faith.
        wakaru44 5mo ago
- 10000truths 5mo ago
  The inequality doesn't come from the creation of wealth so much as the destruction of it. Inflation and rising prices of staple goods (there is some covariance, but the latter seems to be outpacing the former) impact poor people disproportionately hard because staple goods are more or less fixed costs. The marginal utility of an extra dollar is much higher for someone on the poverty line vs. someone who is a multi-millionaire.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - srean 5mo ago
      Grain prices are today set by derivative markets that have very little connection to actual produce.
      - WalterBright 5mo ago
        Watch what happens to prices when the supply goes up or down. Talk to any farmer about it.
        srean 5mo ago
        Too much latency in information flow. Too high a variance. Worse is that one can double bet on the same underlying asset on different exchanges (like taking out multiple insurance policies on the same car with payout on one policy not necessarily invalidating other policies). This grossly distorts prices.
    - 10000truths 5mo ago
      > Inflation is caused by the government, not wealth creation. The US had zero net inflation from 1800-1914, despite incredible amounts of wealth creation. The inflation since 1914 is caused by government deficits. > Government deficits are not caused by rich people. They're caused by the people you voted for. I do not dispute this, but the deficit is exacerbated by a lack of tax revenue. Scrutiny will naturally move towards the people who are most able to fill the coffers. > No, they're not. Their availability and price is determined by the Law of Supply and Demand. I misspoke. What I meant to say is that the demand is fixed (i.e. inelastic). As you said, you can only eat so much - a poor person's subsistence will make up a much larger portion of their monthly budget than a that of a rich person.
- danmaz74 5mo ago
  Creating wealth doesn't hurt others. Removing wealth from most people to put it all in a few people's hands DOES hurt most people though.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    > Removing ... Explain the mechanism for that in a free market.
    - ndsipa_pomu 5mo ago
      Explain how a free market can function with huge asymmetry in bargaining/purchasing power and access to information, and legislation intended to deter new entrants to markets? Equal access to purchase politicians?
- hparadiz 5mo ago
  You are 100% correct.
- deejatsplit 5mo ago
  > How does creating wealth hurt others I feel a lot of the arguments being made here (one way or the other) are rooted in different ideas of what is needed to make a good society. There is some objective data (e.g. The Spirit Level) which I, personally, find persuasive. But often I think folks just have different ideas of what the ideal state is. For some people, the best society is where everyone is approximately equal (within some range). For others, they’re happy in a very unequal world, perhaps even one where there are no bounds on that inequality. I think the arguments of the former amount to: wealth creation in and of itself is not the problem, the problem is with its concentration in someone’s hands and the resulting inequality it causes. In the latter’s case the arguments are more “why should anyone object if I try to climb the ladder as far as I can?”
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    It sounds like the inequality "problem" is one of envy. And creating a better life for yourself by creating value - that's how life works. Inequality is an incentive to create more.
- illiac786 5mo ago
  Money is being created. Land and other resources are not, hence they end up being concentrated in the hands of the super rich.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    > Land and other resources are not Actually, they are being created. For example, people create more land in cities by building towers.
    - illiac786 5mo ago
      Nothing, compared to the pace at which wealth is being concentrated into the hands of a few.
- intended 5mo ago
  > How does creating wealth hurt others? There is a sleight of hand in your words there. You focus on wealth creation, when the issue is wealth concentration.
maxdo 5mo ago
You just named symptoms not cause. 1. People vote for old idiots . 2. Local politics is all about milking any potential work with permits. Sky rocket housing due to that . 3. American lost engineering culture everywhere except software . Now software is dead as industry we used to know
- jjtheblunt 5mo ago
  > American lost engineering culture everywhere except software microprocessor design : Apple Silicon and lately Intel Panther Lake and later?
  - maxdo 5mo ago
    Both companies created in the previous century and running on old fuel of past success
    - hparadiz 5mo ago
      Yea that's why the only three orbital grade reusable boosters are American. Lmao.
      - iancmceachern 5mo ago
        But our bridges and infrastructure are crumbling
        esseph 5mo ago
        Those are issues of priority and revenue generation, not capability.
        iancmceachern 5mo ago
        Soon we won't have the capabilities. See the nuclear industry and how we don't have the people and training to do the work anymore.
tim-tday 5mo ago
The new mortgage backed securities are the instruments trading the debt used to build AI data centers (the AAA rated debt that is anything but). The music will stop when there’s a blip in liquidity. Everyone will rush for a chair and there won’t be enough for everyone. I don’t know when that will be but if the big ipos coming down the pike cause an everything squeeze that might do it. Or maybe nothing is going on. What do I know?
Grum9 5mo ago
[dead]
andsoitis 5mo ago
> wealth inequality Can you explain what is wrong with people having different levels of wealth? Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?
- 305superuser 5mo ago
  Like anything some is good too much is bad, a gradient work for a complex society, a brutal difference like kings and dark ages poor eventually bring collapse
  - andsoitis 5mo ago
    Wealth inequality was not the defining aspect of the relationship between kings and peasants. It was also not the reason for the collapse. The defining quality was the mechanisms by which kings extracted wealth from peasants (indirectly, through layers) which doesn’t resemble what we have in western liberal democracies today. Things like tallage and arbitrary taxation, labor dues, mill/oven/wine press monopolies, heriot, merchet. Serfs were legally bound to the land. The Black Death killed 1/3 of Europe’s people, giving peasants leverage because without enough workers, lords could not enforce arbitrary dues because peasant could walk out or revolt, such as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. That’s when the Dark Ages extraction model started to break down. Not because of wealth inequality, though it can see why they get conflated. If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance), and it is clear that they have created more wealth than they have “taken”.
    - FpUser 5mo ago
      >"If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance)" Yeah, right. Soviet level propaganda
      - andsoitis 5mo ago
        If you can explain the mechanic, I’m all ears and open to change my point of view. > Soviet level propaganda I’d be careful not to conflate billionaires in Russia with those in western liberal democracies. Totally different.
anovikov 5mo ago
JFYI, consumer debt to GDP ratio is at the lowest level in a generation. There's really nothing at all concerning about household debt load and of all principal types of loans there is only one that is problematic: student loans. But it's just one out of many. Every other kind of debt is at historically low levels.

WalterBright 5mo ago

[flagged]

ares623 5mo ago
"create"
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  ???
  - _carbyau_ 5mo ago
    Me giving you a dollar doesn't create. The rich extracting wealth from the poor doesn't create. Investors buying existing housing stock doesn't create. Mine it. Make it. Improve it. Brings wealth into existence. Note that financially large businesses/individuals are a mix of wealth creation and transference. That one word comment implies a lot of the wealthiest people have not created much wealth in comparison with how much they managed to transfer.
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      But you aren't going to give me a dollar. The rich will sell you things they created, but it is illegal for them to extract it from you. Buying existing houses means the seller realizes the wealth he created. Transference is called "stealing" and is illegal (unless the government does it).
      - _carbyau_ 5mo ago
        Transference in this case can be otherwise known as economic rent. merriam-webster definition: "the return for the use of a factor in excess of the minimum required to bring forth its service" [0] Think of those companies that have % take on the output of others by providing a market. Yes, they provide a service, as you say "The rich will sell you things they created". But the arrangement allows them to extract more than it costs. That extra over and above doesn't provide extra value. It is "rent". To be clear, at no point have I accused billionaires of illegal acts. Mind you at that scale they can influence what is legal or not, regulated or not, tariffed or not. Example, see Apple's award to Trump for tariff exemptions. Their acts impact the economy and how money flows. The accusation being a large chunk of their wealth is via rent than wealth creation that benefits everyone. Now, to a business person, this is simply good business! Maximising profit on output! But from a society wide economic point of view, there can be too much of a good thing. Sentiment-wise, the poor and middleclass want to be able to get rich too. But now it seems as though the multibillionaires will make that impossible as they seek to suck up every last dollar. [0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/economic%20rent https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/economic%20rent Edit: flow and shorter... and then added more sorry.
tadfisher 5mo ago
[flagged]
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  What's dense about it?
  - wvenable 5mo ago
    If so much wealth is being created, why is everyone so poor?
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - wvenable 5mo ago
        Do they really? The poor have castles and servants and hardly work? No, the real poor work 60 hours a week and live out of their cars. My children, who are not poor, with good jobs still can't afford their own home -- where is their castle, sir?
  - jph00 5mo ago
    It's both an illogical question and comes from a place of ignorance about a topic which one would expect folks nowadays to have some basic competence in. First, the illogical part: the statement was about "inequality" to which you asked about wealth generation. These are two separate issues, and inequality is not, logically, necessarily tied to wealth generation. So "How does creating wealth hurt others?" is, at best, a non sequitur. The ignorance part: there is a lot of empirical research over many decades showing the negative impact of wealth inequality on societies. With Google and AI there's really no good reason to ask such ignorant questions when in a moment you could educate yourself, and then ask an informed and thoughtful question instead.
- eduction 5mo ago
abuob 5mo ago
If you're genuinely curious, a few suggestions that I personally found incredibly enlightening: Anand Giridhardas, Winners Take All: The book is fantastic, there's also his now infamous google talk where he talks about dismantling google: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st century: Probably the most comprehensive (but at times also longwinded) outline on how wealth inequality comes to be, why it's not good for society and how it could be adressed
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  How about a summary of Piketty's argument? We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?
  - rileymat2 5mo ago
    It’s a rather public example but DOGE did immense damage and was facilitated by the ability to leverage wealth into power. There is a dangerous feedback cycle.
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - fragmede 5mo ago
        https://muskdeathcount.com/ https://muskdeathcount.com/
        WalterBright 5mo ago
        I've seen these figures all over the map. The deaths of people in other countries are the result of their corrupt and evil governments, not Musk. > 1,045,803 people Amazing how specific it is! Come on, dude.
  - 5mo ago
staplers 5mo ago
How does creating wealth hurt others? Inflation. If i print $1 trillion dollars, i buy up all the resources you need to live and dangle them in front of you and control every aspect of your life.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  [flagged]
rickydroll 5mo ago
When your part in wealth creation is having your wealth acquired by somebody else. Wealth creation only works when the the money available to buy wealth creating instruments is significantly less than the value of those instruments. How would markets behave if investment accounts had more cash in them than there were investment vehicles? I suspect it would be like what we see today in private equity with illiquid funds and subpar returns. The response of a market in this condition would be to look for sources of liquid funds, get them to buy the illiquid funds so that the original investors could get out leaving the new investors holding the bag of crap. Oh wait, isn't private equity doing just that trying to make PE acceptable investment vehicle for 401ks?
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  > When your part in wealth creation is having your wealth acquired by somebody else. That's called "theft". In a free market, transactions are mutually agreed upon. Equal wealth for equal wealth. > Wealth creation only works when the the money available to buy wealth creating instruments is significantly less than the value of those instruments. Your statement presumes that "value" is some construct independent of the market. The only "value" in commerce is what someone is willing to pay for it. There is no other useful definition of value. As for how wealth is created, I buy a canvas and some paint for $50, and paint a masterpiece that Ritchie Rich buys from me for $10,000. I created that wealth. Taylor Swift figured out how to turn her song skillz into a billion dollars. She created that wealth. Musk figured out how to turn hunks of metal into rockets that are quite profitable. He created that wealth. And so on. > How would markets behave if investment accounts had more cash in them than there were investment vehicles? Now that is a complex topic. But I'll make a simple take on it. When there is more cash than things to buy, then the value of the cash diminishes. We call that "inflation". Wealth creation does not cause inflation. As for private equity, nobody is making you invest in it.
  - srean 5mo ago
    In a hypothetical free market yes. But we don't have one. We have k-polies for small k. I have come to doubt whether free market is even possible. The rich will use their wealth to ensure (by corruption or otherwise) to bend the laws in their favor. Wealth has power and they will exercise this power. Why wouldn't they ?
wvenable 5mo ago
> How does creating wealth hurt others? Creating wealth doesn't. Extracting wealth does. We have long switched from a creating economy to an extracting economy.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - wvenable 5mo ago
    All of us. Fees, commercial and residential rents, products that cost the same but are smaller. None of this generating new wealth.
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      Don't buy something you think is not worth the money.
      - wvenable 5mo ago
        Let me more specific. I am talking about wealth that is generated by capturing value from existing assets, transactions, and people rather than by producing new goods, services, or productivity gains. Examples are rent-seeking (making money through ownership, monopoly power, licensing, etc), financial extraction (financial manipulation, speculation, debt, and asset appreciation), housing and land appreciation, middlemen and platform fees, and corporate consolidation. This is contrast to building factories, software, infrastructure, or goods and services that didn't previously exist. What you might define as "creating". I don't know how you cannot buy something. You have to have a home, food, transportation, and even entertainment. The extraction economy has come to all of these things. Maybe fewer and fewer things are "worth the money" and that is a bad thing, don't you agree? I feel like you're not approaching this conversation in good faith.
        wakaru44 5mo ago
10000truths 5mo ago
The inequality doesn't come from the creation of wealth so much as the destruction of it. Inflation and rising prices of staple goods (there is some covariance, but the latter seems to be outpacing the former) impact poor people disproportionately hard because staple goods are more or less fixed costs. The marginal utility of an extra dollar is much higher for someone on the poverty line vs. someone who is a multi-millionaire.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - srean 5mo ago
    Grain prices are today set by derivative markets that have very little connection to actual produce.
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      Watch what happens to prices when the supply goes up or down. Talk to any farmer about it.
      - srean 5mo ago
        Too much latency in information flow. Too high a variance. Worse is that one can double bet on the same underlying asset on different exchanges (like taking out multiple insurance policies on the same car with payout on one policy not necessarily invalidating other policies). This grossly distorts prices.
  - 10000truths 5mo ago
    > Inflation is caused by the government, not wealth creation. The US had zero net inflation from 1800-1914, despite incredible amounts of wealth creation. The inflation since 1914 is caused by government deficits. > Government deficits are not caused by rich people. They're caused by the people you voted for. I do not dispute this, but the deficit is exacerbated by a lack of tax revenue. Scrutiny will naturally move towards the people who are most able to fill the coffers. > No, they're not. Their availability and price is determined by the Law of Supply and Demand. I misspoke. What I meant to say is that the demand is fixed (i.e. inelastic). As you said, you can only eat so much - a poor person's subsistence will make up a much larger portion of their monthly budget than a that of a rich person.
danmaz74 5mo ago
Creating wealth doesn't hurt others. Removing wealth from most people to put it all in a few people's hands DOES hurt most people though.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  > Removing ... Explain the mechanism for that in a free market.
  - ndsipa_pomu 5mo ago
    Explain how a free market can function with huge asymmetry in bargaining/purchasing power and access to information, and legislation intended to deter new entrants to markets? Equal access to purchase politicians?
hparadiz 5mo ago
You are 100% correct.
deejatsplit 5mo ago
> How does creating wealth hurt others I feel a lot of the arguments being made here (one way or the other) are rooted in different ideas of what is needed to make a good society. There is some objective data (e.g. The Spirit Level) which I, personally, find persuasive. But often I think folks just have different ideas of what the ideal state is. For some people, the best society is where everyone is approximately equal (within some range). For others, they’re happy in a very unequal world, perhaps even one where there are no bounds on that inequality. I think the arguments of the former amount to: wealth creation in and of itself is not the problem, the problem is with its concentration in someone’s hands and the resulting inequality it causes. In the latter’s case the arguments are more “why should anyone object if I try to climb the ladder as far as I can?”
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  It sounds like the inequality "problem" is one of envy. And creating a better life for yourself by creating value - that's how life works. Inequality is an incentive to create more.
illiac786 5mo ago
Money is being created. Land and other resources are not, hence they end up being concentrated in the hands of the super rich.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  > Land and other resources are not Actually, they are being created. For example, people create more land in cities by building towers.
  - illiac786 5mo ago
    Nothing, compared to the pace at which wealth is being concentrated into the hands of a few.
intended 5mo ago
> How does creating wealth hurt others? There is a sleight of hand in your words there. You focus on wealth creation, when the issue is wealth concentration.

maxdo 5mo ago

You just named symptoms not cause. 1. People vote for old idiots . 2. Local politics is all about milking any potential work with permits. Sky rocket housing due to that . 3. American lost engineering culture everywhere except software . Now software is dead as industry we used to know

jjtheblunt 5mo ago
> American lost engineering culture everywhere except software microprocessor design : Apple Silicon and lately Intel Panther Lake and later?
- maxdo 5mo ago
  Both companies created in the previous century and running on old fuel of past success
  - hparadiz 5mo ago
    Yea that's why the only three orbital grade reusable boosters are American. Lmao.
    - iancmceachern 5mo ago
      But our bridges and infrastructure are crumbling
      - esseph 5mo ago
        Those are issues of priority and revenue generation, not capability.
        iancmceachern 5mo ago
        Soon we won't have the capabilities. See the nuclear industry and how we don't have the people and training to do the work anymore.

tim-tday 5mo ago

The new mortgage backed securities are the instruments trading the debt used to build AI data centers (the AAA rated debt that is anything but). The music will stop when there’s a blip in liquidity. Everyone will rush for a chair and there won’t be enough for everyone. I don’t know when that will be but if the big ipos coming down the pike cause an everything squeeze that might do it. Or maybe nothing is going on. What do I know?

Grum9 5mo ago

[dead]

andsoitis 5mo ago

> wealth inequality Can you explain what is wrong with people having different levels of wealth? Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?

305superuser 5mo ago
Like anything some is good too much is bad, a gradient work for a complex society, a brutal difference like kings and dark ages poor eventually bring collapse
- andsoitis 5mo ago
  Wealth inequality was not the defining aspect of the relationship between kings and peasants. It was also not the reason for the collapse. The defining quality was the mechanisms by which kings extracted wealth from peasants (indirectly, through layers) which doesn’t resemble what we have in western liberal democracies today. Things like tallage and arbitrary taxation, labor dues, mill/oven/wine press monopolies, heriot, merchet. Serfs were legally bound to the land. The Black Death killed 1/3 of Europe’s people, giving peasants leverage because without enough workers, lords could not enforce arbitrary dues because peasant could walk out or revolt, such as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. That’s when the Dark Ages extraction model started to break down. Not because of wealth inequality, though it can see why they get conflated. If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance), and it is clear that they have created more wealth than they have “taken”.
  - FpUser 5mo ago
    >"If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance)" Yeah, right. Soviet level propaganda
    - andsoitis 5mo ago
      If you can explain the mechanic, I’m all ears and open to change my point of view. > Soviet level propaganda I’d be careful not to conflate billionaires in Russia with those in western liberal democracies. Totally different.

anovikov 5mo ago

JFYI, consumer debt to GDP ratio is at the lowest level in a generation. There's really nothing at all concerning about household debt load and of all principal types of loans there is only one that is problematic: student loans. But it's just one out of many. Every other kind of debt is at historically low levels.