alt Hacker NewsIt's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade.
It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - the same as how they've gotten to choose the winners and losers for the past two decades.
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> correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade
You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.
Looking forward to the OpenAI (and Anthropic) IPOs. It’s funny to me that this info is being “leaked” - they are sussing out the demand. If they wait too long, they won’t be able to pull off the caper (at these valuations). And we will get to see who has staying power.
It’s obvious to me that all of OpenAIs announcements about partnerships and spending is gearing up for this. But I do wonder how Altman retains the momentum through to next year. What’s the next big thing? A rocket company?
Problem with "it will hurt" is that it will actually hurt middle class by completely wiping it out, and maybe slightly inconvenience the rich. More like annoy the rich, really.
Yeah, it started with the whole Wall Street, with all the depression and wars that it brought, and it hasn't stopped, at each cycle the curve has to go up, with exponential expectations of growth, until it explodes taking the world economy to the ground.
How do you guarantee your accelerationism produces the right results after the collapse? If the same systems of regulation and power are still in place then it would produce the same result afterwards
It's like when a child doesn't want something, you "give them a choice": would you like to put on your red or white shoes?
This assumes fair competition in the tech industry, which has evaporated without a path for return years ago.
> you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade.
I'm not hoping for a market correction personally, I'm hoping that mobs reinvent the guillotine
They deserve nothing less by now. If they get away with nothing worse than "a correction" then they have still made out like bandits
Agreed! I recently listened to a podcast (video) from the "How Money Works" channel on this topic:
"How Short Term Thinking Won" - https://youtu.be/qGwU2dOoHiY
The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines.
If those are the causes, then simple regulatory changes to make stock buybacks illegal again, limit the kinds of executive compensation contracts that are valid, and incentivize higher dividend yields/penalize sales yields should return the market to the previous long-term-optimized behavior.
I doubt that you could convince the politicians and financiers who are currently pulling value out of a fragile and inefficient economy under the current system to make those changes, and if the changes were made I doubt they could last or be enforced given the massive incentives to revert to our broken system. I think you're right that it will take a huge disaster that the wealthy and powerful are unable to dodge and unable to blame on anything but their own actions, I just don't know what that event might look like.