7 ms·

More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, gov

More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, governments have found faster and better ways to move money from the hands of the many with little into the hands of the few with a lot. The layoffs are an example of this as coders, assitance and other white-collar workers are replaced by AI for low prices so as to save money, hence increasing the revenue for the few at the top.

iAMkenough 3mo ago
The natural result of the populous twice electing a politician know for not paying his contractors for his 30+ years of running businesses into bankruptcy. Benefits go to the top, then actual workers get shafted.
t0bia_s 3mo ago
money is never truly lost In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation.
- dag100 3mo ago
  But, ideally, with each day, more useful products and services are being made and delivered. It'd be useful to have extra dollars around to account for more stuff being made and more things being done. Thus having more dollars in existence doesn't necessarily mean the value of a dollar is decreasing. What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.
  - kingleopold 3mo ago
    problem is majority of the new printed fiat money goes to VC funded labs and few stocks (selected by inv. bankers). new dollar does not mean average person gets more products and services. Your accessability is no longer because wealthy top does not let other companies and people to get benefit of it. aka financial eng. This is a new era. IPOs make you lose money, they push to valuation to trillions so you dont get no real return. they use your retirement funds to hedge their stocks. ALL LEGALLY. back then apple or nvidia or google gave public few 100x or more.
simianwords 3mo ago
This kind of thinking is the root of most populist rhetoric - that money and wealth is zero sum and it just shifts hands. This is false and a dangerous rabbit hole of an ideology to get into.
- goatlover 3mo ago
  Difficult argument to make with the huge increase in wealth disparity the last several decades.
- customguy 3mo ago
  How is money not zero sum? I agree prosperity as such isn't, but money, land, other things are limited. And wealth is only wealth because not everybody else has as much, right? As in, it doesn't matter if you have a dollar and I have 100, or you have 1 trillion dollars and I have 100 trillion dollars, it's the same difference.
  - halperter 3mo ago
    I think that wealth is pretty much comparative, as you said, but I think that money (which I'm interpreting as an indentifier of worth, tell me if that's wrong) isn't zero sum. Price is (generally) proportional to value, measured in how much you stand to benefit by owning/selling/using an asset as compared to doing nothing. The physical dollar bill may have limited circulation at a moment in time, but value fluctuates. Supply up, value---and then price---down, assuming all other factors are constant. Value can be created and dissolve in weeks as it is intriniscally subjective---think fads and trends. One pair of jeans could be worth a couple hundred one day and be worthless the other. Thus, value and thus money is not zero sum.
    - oalae5niMiel7qu 3mo ago
      "Value", being subjective, is just warm fuzzy feelings. You can't measure it, let alone prove that it's proportional to anything (such as price, which is objective), and you can't pay bills in it. They say how much "value" something has is determined by how much is satisfies someone's wants. But you can't sell how satisfied you are. Money is what determines what you can afford, not "value". If you have money, or can get money easily, you are rich, and if you don't have and can't get money, then you are poor. Money IS zero-sum. For someone to acquire money, someone else must spend money. The only exception is when the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing and hand it to their friends.
nerdsniper 3mo ago
Money can be lost - if lots of it are invested in endeavors that don't pan out, a good chunk of it simply gets wasted. As in: we really did have a bunch of money that we could have spent on many valuable things, but we didn't, so instead of food on the table we collectively get bupkis for it all.
- lemonademan 3mo ago
  If you invested money into a trade where you bought and lost, there is someone else or others who sold and won. You may have lost that particular sum at that time, but someone else gained a part or some of that sum you lost. If you invested in building and opening a shop and eventually closed it because it wasn't making money. We can say the workers hired to construct the store made money from that investment, the manufacturers and wholesalers you bought from made revenue from selling you their products, which you intended to sell for higher prices to make a profit. You are right in your assessment that you could lose money, but that loss was someone else's gain, hence money moved from you to them. In this life, two seemingly opposing ideas could be correct at the same time.
  - nerdsniper 3mo ago
    I'm talking about as a society. There's no "1st law of thermodynamics" for the value of the money. If the world spends a shitload of money on something that doesn't pan out, that means we squandered actual finite resources - human labor, materials, and energy that we previously had. Manufacturing ordnance just to blow up caves in Afghanistan that the USSR already just spent 20 years blowing up doesn't yield fruit - the materials and labor on both sides quite literally goes up in smoke. Simply, it is absolutely the case that wealth sometimes gets destroyed rather than merely transferred. Sure, the fiat dollars might "just circulate" but that's an uninteresting, trivial tautology. When people talk about "losing money" in the general case, the meaning of those terms transcend the pedantic, trivial case that you espouse. When the whole world gets feverish over an investment fad that's doomed to fail, "spending money on it" really means "allocating vast resources in the hope that we all get a return on that investment". If we don't get any return, all that investment truly is lost - destroyed, even. There have been cases where we (the humans of Planet Earth) had wealth that we could have done anything with, we chose to put it towards something that didn't work out, and now it's just gone. (To be clear: I don’t think AI specifically is valueless)

iAMkenough 3mo ago

The natural result of the populous twice electing a politician know for not paying his contractors for his 30+ years of running businesses into bankruptcy. Benefits go to the top, then actual workers get shafted.

t0bia_s 3mo ago

money is never truly lost In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation.

dag100 3mo ago
But, ideally, with each day, more useful products and services are being made and delivered. It'd be useful to have extra dollars around to account for more stuff being made and more things being done. Thus having more dollars in existence doesn't necessarily mean the value of a dollar is decreasing. What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.
- kingleopold 3mo ago
  problem is majority of the new printed fiat money goes to VC funded labs and few stocks (selected by inv. bankers). new dollar does not mean average person gets more products and services. Your accessability is no longer because wealthy top does not let other companies and people to get benefit of it. aka financial eng. This is a new era. IPOs make you lose money, they push to valuation to trillions so you dont get no real return. they use your retirement funds to hedge their stocks. ALL LEGALLY. back then apple or nvidia or google gave public few 100x or more.

simianwords 3mo ago

This kind of thinking is the root of most populist rhetoric - that money and wealth is zero sum and it just shifts hands. This is false and a dangerous rabbit hole of an ideology to get into.

goatlover 3mo ago
Difficult argument to make with the huge increase in wealth disparity the last several decades.
customguy 3mo ago
How is money not zero sum? I agree prosperity as such isn't, but money, land, other things are limited. And wealth is only wealth because not everybody else has as much, right? As in, it doesn't matter if you have a dollar and I have 100, or you have 1 trillion dollars and I have 100 trillion dollars, it's the same difference.
- halperter 3mo ago
  I think that wealth is pretty much comparative, as you said, but I think that money (which I'm interpreting as an indentifier of worth, tell me if that's wrong) isn't zero sum. Price is (generally) proportional to value, measured in how much you stand to benefit by owning/selling/using an asset as compared to doing nothing. The physical dollar bill may have limited circulation at a moment in time, but value fluctuates. Supply up, value---and then price---down, assuming all other factors are constant. Value can be created and dissolve in weeks as it is intriniscally subjective---think fads and trends. One pair of jeans could be worth a couple hundred one day and be worthless the other. Thus, value and thus money is not zero sum.
  - oalae5niMiel7qu 3mo ago
    "Value", being subjective, is just warm fuzzy feelings. You can't measure it, let alone prove that it's proportional to anything (such as price, which is objective), and you can't pay bills in it. They say how much "value" something has is determined by how much is satisfies someone's wants. But you can't sell how satisfied you are. Money is what determines what you can afford, not "value". If you have money, or can get money easily, you are rich, and if you don't have and can't get money, then you are poor. Money IS zero-sum. For someone to acquire money, someone else must spend money. The only exception is when the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing and hand it to their friends.

nerdsniper 3mo ago

Money can be lost - if lots of it are invested in endeavors that don't pan out, a good chunk of it simply gets wasted. As in: we really did have a bunch of money that we could have spent on many valuable things, but we didn't, so instead of food on the table we collectively get bupkis for it all.

lemonademan 3mo ago
If you invested money into a trade where you bought and lost, there is someone else or others who sold and won. You may have lost that particular sum at that time, but someone else gained a part or some of that sum you lost. If you invested in building and opening a shop and eventually closed it because it wasn't making money. We can say the workers hired to construct the store made money from that investment, the manufacturers and wholesalers you bought from made revenue from selling you their products, which you intended to sell for higher prices to make a profit. You are right in your assessment that you could lose money, but that loss was someone else's gain, hence money moved from you to them. In this life, two seemingly opposing ideas could be correct at the same time.
- nerdsniper 3mo ago
  I'm talking about as a society. There's no "1st law of thermodynamics" for the value of the money. If the world spends a shitload of money on something that doesn't pan out, that means we squandered actual finite resources - human labor, materials, and energy that we previously had. Manufacturing ordnance just to blow up caves in Afghanistan that the USSR already just spent 20 years blowing up doesn't yield fruit - the materials and labor on both sides quite literally goes up in smoke. Simply, it is absolutely the case that wealth sometimes gets destroyed rather than merely transferred. Sure, the fiat dollars might "just circulate" but that's an uninteresting, trivial tautology. When people talk about "losing money" in the general case, the meaning of those terms transcend the pedantic, trivial case that you espouse. When the whole world gets feverish over an investment fad that's doomed to fail, "spending money on it" really means "allocating vast resources in the hope that we all get a return on that investment". If we don't get any return, all that investment truly is lost - destroyed, even. There have been cases where we (the humans of Planet Earth) had wealth that we could have done anything with, we chose to put it towards something that didn't work out, and now it's just gone. (To be clear: I don’t think AI specifically is valueless)