4 ms·

You gotta optimize everything for the market man! It's magic! Everything will work out if we only make number go up! Who cares about silly stuff like health em

by vrganj 4mo ago

You gotta optimize everything for the market man! It's magic! Everything will work out if we only make number go up! Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!

ikari_pl 4mo ago
correction: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors
fartfeatures 4mo ago
Redundancy is just waste wearing a trench coat etc etc.
philipallstar 4mo ago
You don't need to optimise for the market. The market is the optimising machine. Get in its way with slow regulators or subsidies or bailouts and you get all the problems.
- vrganj 4mo ago
  Heh sure, it's great at optimizing. The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.
  - philipallstar 4mo ago
    This is just silliness. Rich people got rich under capitalism by providing things people want for the best price. They're rich because they owns shares in valuable businesses that people want to buy the products of. Some people get rich, on average by merit. And everyone gets the products they want at a low price. Can you imagine if the only cars available were made in the USSR, like Ladas? They were terrible because there was no capitalism, and so no competition. But if you'd rather have abysmal cars but know that no one got rich making them, I guess that's...a choice?
    - vrganj 4mo ago
      Sure! Like the Sacklers who got rich by... providing the best opiates. Or Zuck, who got rich by... destroying the fabric of our society. Or Big Oil, which got rich by... destroying ecosystems and dooming us all. Or United Fruit Company which got rich by... brutally colonizing Latin America. It's almost as if the profit motive optimized for profit, not any other outcome that was in any way beneficial to anyone but the ones... profiting.
- raverbashing 4mo ago
  Markets optimize for the current gradient, not for the local maxima Markets will make you climb a hill ignoring it ends on a cliff end
  - BobaFloutist 4mo ago
    Sounds like a local maximum to me. Did you maybe mean a global maximum?
- michaelmrose 4mo ago
  Why would this even be so. It's not magic it's just people doing stupid people things often to maximize short term factors. It only gets long-term planning insofar as embedded agents do. One of the things agents do is use incentives to inspire behaviour that is conta individuals short term incentives to achieve behaviour that contributes to long-term success. Not only are many individual agents aligned with short term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.
  - philipallstar 4mo ago
    No one's saying it's magic. This is the same market (or set of markets) that have lifted billions of people out of poverty. If you're arguing central planning does better then I'd love to see some evidence of it, but to my mind the fact that so many companies can coordinate, even across language barriers and legal systems, sometimes hundreds or thousands cooperating to make products, is incredible, and is not going to be beaten by any other system. At least on average - of course an authoritarian country like the USSR can drag value out of its citizens by force and spend it on the space race, but that kills people and even, in that case, the country itself. Far better to have cooperation and value exchange based on the demand generated by real people.
- bsder 4mo ago
  And yet somehow we had no toilet paper in the pandemic. The manufacturers all simultaneously refused to retool. This proves that the market does not inherently work magic.
matchbok3 4mo ago
Well, for the most part this is actually true. Taking care of the exceptions is the hard part. Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.
- vrganj 4mo ago
  >Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing. It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us. Our planet is literally dying. The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3] Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound-impacts-record-ocean-heat-intensifying-climate-disasters https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w [3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-locked-arctic-ice-millennia-unleash-wave-deadly-diseases https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l... [4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disaster-bushfires.html https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
  - matchbok3 4mo ago
    It is quite sad how doomerism has taken so many people. Our planet cannot "die", it is not a person. Take a deep breath!
    - lompad 4mo ago
      This feels like deliberately misunderstanding. Obviously the planet won't die. The current biodiversity and the civilization depending on it however might. In my country, streets are literally melting now, because they were never built for temperatures this high. We had 5000 heat deaths within 2 weeks. Temperatures never seen before in almost 250 years of consistent measurements of weather and temperature. It's bad. And the data is available for everybody, including you, to see. E.g. here, they've got tons of raw data available too (german): https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/zeitreihen/zeitreihen.html https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/zeitreihen/zeitreihen.html Don't know what you see there - but it sure does look like an exponential curve, doesn't it?

by vrganj 4mo ago

ikari_pl 4mo ago

correction: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors

fartfeatures 4mo ago

Redundancy is just waste wearing a trench coat etc etc.

philipallstar 4mo ago

You don't need to optimise for the market. The market is the optimising machine. Get in its way with slow regulators or subsidies or bailouts and you get all the problems.

vrganj 4mo ago
Heh sure, it's great at optimizing. The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.
- philipallstar 4mo ago
  This is just silliness. Rich people got rich under capitalism by providing things people want for the best price. They're rich because they owns shares in valuable businesses that people want to buy the products of. Some people get rich, on average by merit. And everyone gets the products they want at a low price. Can you imagine if the only cars available were made in the USSR, like Ladas? They were terrible because there was no capitalism, and so no competition. But if you'd rather have abysmal cars but know that no one got rich making them, I guess that's...a choice?
  - vrganj 4mo ago
    Sure! Like the Sacklers who got rich by... providing the best opiates. Or Zuck, who got rich by... destroying the fabric of our society. Or Big Oil, which got rich by... destroying ecosystems and dooming us all. Or United Fruit Company which got rich by... brutally colonizing Latin America. It's almost as if the profit motive optimized for profit, not any other outcome that was in any way beneficial to anyone but the ones... profiting.
raverbashing 4mo ago
Markets optimize for the current gradient, not for the local maxima Markets will make you climb a hill ignoring it ends on a cliff end
- BobaFloutist 4mo ago
  Sounds like a local maximum to me. Did you maybe mean a global maximum?
michaelmrose 4mo ago
Why would this even be so. It's not magic it's just people doing stupid people things often to maximize short term factors. It only gets long-term planning insofar as embedded agents do. One of the things agents do is use incentives to inspire behaviour that is conta individuals short term incentives to achieve behaviour that contributes to long-term success. Not only are many individual agents aligned with short term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.
- philipallstar 4mo ago
  No one's saying it's magic. This is the same market (or set of markets) that have lifted billions of people out of poverty. If you're arguing central planning does better then I'd love to see some evidence of it, but to my mind the fact that so many companies can coordinate, even across language barriers and legal systems, sometimes hundreds or thousands cooperating to make products, is incredible, and is not going to be beaten by any other system. At least on average - of course an authoritarian country like the USSR can drag value out of its citizens by force and spend it on the space race, but that kills people and even, in that case, the country itself. Far better to have cooperation and value exchange based on the demand generated by real people.
bsder 4mo ago
And yet somehow we had no toilet paper in the pandemic. The manufacturers all simultaneously refused to retool. This proves that the market does not inherently work magic.

matchbok3 4mo ago

Well, for the most part this is actually true. Taking care of the exceptions is the hard part. Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.

vrganj 4mo ago
>Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing. It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us. Our planet is literally dying. The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3] Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound-impacts-record-ocean-heat-intensifying-climate-disasters https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w [3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-locked-arctic-ice-millennia-unleash-wave-deadly-diseases https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l... [4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disaster-bushfires.html https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
- matchbok3 4mo ago
  It is quite sad how doomerism has taken so many people. Our planet cannot "die", it is not a person. Take a deep breath!
  - lompad 4mo ago
    This feels like deliberately misunderstanding. Obviously the planet won't die. The current biodiversity and the civilization depending on it however might. In my country, streets are literally melting now, because they were never built for temperatures this high. We had 5000 heat deaths within 2 weeks. Temperatures never seen before in almost 250 years of consistent measurements of weather and temperature. It's bad. And the data is available for everybody, including you, to see. E.g. here, they've got tons of raw data available too (german): https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/zeitreihen/zeitreihen.html https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/zeitreihen/zeitreihen.html Don't know what you see there - but it sure does look like an exponential curve, doesn't it?