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oliveoil posted:D&D has so many depressing pessimists though and I need to have them poke holes in my thought process and ideas. E g., I think if we make healthcare and housing as common as oxygen then we'll be fine. So why doesn't someone aim for that? Because everyone with real money is too conservative and wants to chase unprofitable social fart app start-ups so they can do a legal pump and dump on innocent savers' index funds and the larger unsuspecting public. I.e., WeWork etc seem to me to be scams and basically the dishonest and harmful ways to "create" (probably more like extract) wealth. Fortunately it sounds like the only people to lose money on WeWork were the people operating the pump and dump... But I'm rambling again. Perhaps you should start by asking yourself why "everyone with real money is too conservative".
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Nov 5, 2019 17:10
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 01:00 |
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Cicero posted:If you can get good at solving leetcode problems, you can probably get into at least the tier of companies below FB/Google, like Amazon and MS. And at that level, saving money to move is less of an issue since they'll cover it. Learning to code is solid career advice for a lot of people and the OP isn't wrong that if you're independent and healthy then it's one of the better established yet reliable paths toward financial independence. What is unclear is why the op appears to attribute great political significance to the fact that an able bodied person with good health, no obligations and little to no debt has a fairly high chance of achieving financial independence if they follow a decent career plan. The OP doesn't really seem to have a good understanding of the difference between what is possible for a well positioned individual and what is possible for society at large, nor do they seem to appreciate that the purchasing power of a well paid worker is necessarily predicated on the costs (including labour costs) of various services that the worker consumes being pushed as low as possible. Were everyone as well compensated as a high level programmer the result would be very inflationary for the economy. Everyone would be using their newly increased salaries to try and buy the same goods and services, increasing prices. Perhaps production would increase as a result of the new demand but its impossible to imagine that the US economy could ramp up production to the point that everyone lives the kind of life that the average super affluent tech worker lives. So after a point the result of everyone having so much more money would be inflation, which is why not everyone can be equally well compensated. Somebody has to make do with less so that someone else can have more. Thus, by keeping most wages and salaries comparatively low you have space for some privileged workers to make much more. After a certain point it thus becomes impossible to improve the life of one worker under capitalism without necessarily making some other worker relatively worse off. If you raise the wage floor then a lot of labour intensive services will become more expensive and now the affluent professionals must pay more to access them, which effectively means a cut in their wages/salaries even if the nominal amount they earn does not decrease. Conversely, if you give huge wage increases to one sector while keeping everyone else's compensation the same then people in the boom sector will use their higher wages to outbid everyone else for scarce goods like housing. That will raise prices, and for people working in the sectors that didn't see a wage increase this effectively means they have less money to spend than they did previously. You can try to achieve a sort of balance of forces through various measures: redistribution and regulation, rapid growth, exploitation of foreign workers, etc. However, you can't just magically give everyone a high paying job (or alternatively, a basic income that is equivalent to a high paying job) at the same time because in order for a job to be high paying there must necessarily be other jobs that pay less.
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Nov 6, 2019 00:25
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redneck nazgul posted:imagine if there was a system of money that was for attention, a renewable resource we all have access to I'm having trouble visualizing this, maybe we can develop an analogy to make it easier to understand. Let's imagine attention as a stream of, oh I don't know, ping pong balls being fired constantly at whatever object you're giving attention to. Yeah that sounds good, it would be a "ping pong ball" economy, so to speak. I'm amazed nobody has ever thought of that before.
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Nov 6, 2019 19:34
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evilweasel posted:as a random aside, first-mover advantage is dramatically overstated and may in fact be somewhat of a negative (you get to spend all the money figuring poo poo out and a competitor can just copy you for free) What are some good recent examples of this?
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Nov 7, 2019 18:34
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evilweasel posted:Facebook and Snapchat is, right now, becoming one - Facebook is basically relentlessly plagiarizing everything that Snapchat does. The new hotness in multiple-access point wifi - I believe eero was first or one of the first to have consumer units, they got knocked off by everyone, and basically got bought for a song because they were going to go under. Android is also a good example: apple developed the whole ios, android knocked it off, and android now dominates the market (though Apple's hilarious phone profits make it work out fine for Apple). These don't really seem like examples of a competitor being able to freely copy an industry leader. Facebook and Snapchat are valuable precisely because they have larger user bases, the more people that use these services the more valuable they are. A new entrant into the social media marketplace isn't able to freely copy that, it would likely be very expensive at this point to start from scratch and build up a rival social network or messaging system even if you did copy all the features that initially made Facebook or Snapchat attractive. The only companies that can compete on this level seem to be extremely large and well capitalized and most of the time they just buy up an existing company rather than starting something new. Also, outside the tech sector most sectors of the economy are dominated by a few monopolistic suppliers. Perhaps there's some room for competition with front end retailers but in very large areas of the economy there doesn't seem to be any real competition at all - behind the front line retailers are gigantic corporate oligopolies that are pretty firmly entrenched. I agree this really is probably usually less about first mover advantage and more of an antitrust/monopoly power issue but I also wouldn't go so far as to say that its easy in the current economy to challenge a competitor by freely copying whatever they do and then doing it better or cheaper. Most recent examples of a new entrants breaking into an already established market seem to involve massive companies dedicating substantial resources and being ready to adsorb lots of short term losses.
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Nov 11, 2019 00:18
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 01:00 |
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Thanks for necroing what is possibly the most shamefully low energy "deBaTe mE D&D!!!!" thread of all time.
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Jan 9, 2020 15:43
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