I read the article, and while it touches on a common issue, I don't think it goes far enough. When looking at these problematic incentives that are mentioned, notably the author doesn't really address the incentives like for example where does the money come from.
When you talk about venture capitalists, you often are referring to a bank associated with a venture capitalist. Everything in business after all, incentive wise, trickles down from the banking system.
We can't change the way we do business when the incentives are fixed, and banking in general is only marginally overseen by government; most of the regulation and praxis is done by the Fed which is not government; but a private institution.
Its because politician's have allowed the methods for receiving signals from the people they're supposed to be representating to be jammed.
Look at social media, if there's a narrative that's unflattering someone will create a large number of bots and shout it down in a way that distorts reflected appraisal signals. You see the same on here with anything that mentions certain keywords like China, central planning, socialism, etc.
Representatives already spend most of their time beholden to their donors after passing through the money filter, they may have sworn an oath but the most common form of incompetency is doing nothing, and worse if they're hopelessly corrupt.
Ask yourself what happens when people with guns go up against people without guns. Its pretty clear, if you are in the latter group and you are confronting the former, you are choosing to die, and you are failing your ancestors and descendants by ending your genetic line through choice.
If you have detente or parity (i.e. both sides can defend themselves), the choice you often have in those cases is, will you, your spouse, and your children choose to become slaves for all time. All it takes is obedient consent, will you fight for your family or choose to die instead. The societal mechanics involved don't allow a third option. Slave or Fight/Die, that is the choice.
Basically, first they come for <someone who they say has done horrible things>... then they come for <your neighbors> ... and finally they came for you and there was no one to speak against them on your behalf.
You clearly have never heard of Sophie's choice, otherwise you wouldn't have said what you did.
Its a common setup with coercion, and used by corrupt entities to coerce behavior that ultimately causes suffering. People that suffer or who are put into an unstable psychogical state are more malleable and vulnerable to certain psychological attacks and tactics designed to indoctrinate. Look up the term struggle session, and what that entails.
Saying you have a choice is extremely naively and misguided. It lacks a true understanding of how the world actually works with regards to coercion.
Here's a form of Sophie's choice. An evil person/group has captured you and is holding you and your three siblings (brother and two sisters) captive. He gives you the choice of choosing one of your siblings who will not be killed, and he will kill the rest. They are present when he says this, and he emphasizes that failure to make a choice by the time specified means he kills them all. What is your choice, you always have a choice.
Regardless of what you choose, any survivors will hate you until their dying day because you killed the others, by choice. Failing to choose one, means you chose to have all of them die, and they realize you didn't love them enough to choose; in their final moments.
Do you really always have a choice? Is a coerced choice a choice?
These are important questions which you seem to not have thought through at all. They are normally covered in an intro to philosophy course, though coercion is not touched on normally until later coursework.
Some entities are perfectly fine with killing you, chopping you up and selling your organs, or using you as slave labor, or re-educating your ideology.
Choice is an illusion, in many cases, anyone saying otherwise as a generalization is naive; misguided, and uneducated, and a danger to anyone that would potentially believe it because they are inspiring a false/limiting belief in those people that would/could persist over their lifetime or beyond (a greater evil). It negatively impacts the fitness of all future descendants as an ideological contagion, until the resulting forces of natural selection and lack of adaptability ends their line (extinction).
If you inspire a false belief, you are responsible for all the suffering and negative outcomes that arise as a result of teaching that belief to others, both directly and indirectly. This is true even if you have no intent, or knowledge of what you do; because you should have known and done research, especially after someone brought it to your attention.
Unfortunately, until congress passes legislation requiring companies that operate as a place of public discourse to follow certain conventions this will keep happening because technically they own you (or rather they own the words that you say as data).
They have basically reached the monetization phase, where most smart users bail either just before or shortly after. You get the same dynamics with tyrants, only you have more risks and more options available to you in the real.
Kelnos, there are a few things you seem to not understand about these things in general. Fundamental things.
I've heard your point before, many years ago with regard to Blu-ray protections.
From a security/threat perspective, that is true, which is why the threat model is turned into an iterative process that can be updated arbitrarily.
It is understood the amount of labor required to break the model is specialized labor and limited, and there are mechanisms that can be used to isolate and target the sources of that limited labor when they communicate about forbidden knowledge like the internals which are kept as trade secrets, and then punished under the law.
They already embed mechanisms that cause devices to brick. There were several devices where they had to issue a firmware update to get around a fault caused by one of their updates with regards to an internal battery that caused bricking when it lost power. This is very common, and if you can't prove they did it; its just natural end to the lifecycle where you'll have to payup again for a worse product.
Its immoral and horrific. My grandpa's wife (remarried) passed not too long ago. She passed because they kept juggling her back and forth between skilled nursing, hospital, and hospice. She couldn't speak or communicate effectively because of a medical condition.
Hospital marked her as NPO (no food, trouble swallowing), discharged her without resolving that back to skilled nursing (still NPO), and she went more than 10 days without any food or drink aside from saline IV, just waiting. It took a family member visiting and researching what NPO was on the chart, the gaunt look, and threatening a lawsuit before they finally took action and gave her a feeding tube (back to the hospital) before the talk "its not about the Quantity, but the Quality of Life"...
She didn't survive long after and passed within a month. Likely because of the sharp spike of no food, followed by food in her weakened condition.
During one of my visits for another family member (different facility) I overheard one of the staff on a smoke break outside insensitively joking with co-workers that the standard care is "skill em till they kill em".
I asked a friend who happened to have worked in medical/hospice, and they said its not uncommon to hear that among staff but they shouldn't have been saying that openly with patients or relatives nearby.
Absolutely horrific, there are no words that do justice or communicate the horror that awaits older people in these places.
Of course they are, all the money the boomers were planning to leave to their kids are now going to pay for quality not quantity of life in the remaining time they have.
I never said fiat, I said usury (interest), and that goes on any underlying asset.
I see where this is going though. Its not a new idea, it runs very close to similar lines of thought put forth by the authoritarian socialists.
It all sounds like a magical utopia until you get into the details. Promises are put forth, but once power is ceded, abuses happen. Those in power will claim "but those only happen because there is not enough of power and we face oblivion, anyone not with us is against us, they threaten our future", and the fools that are scared will believe it, and they are the ones that allow everyone else to become slaves. Its part of a common authoritarian playbook, and has happened many times throughout history.
When you look at the requirements for clearing at a national scale, it requires a centralized system with coercive control, and absolute information (future sight). For the most part those systems only operate efficiently because of corruption, and there is no future sight thankfully.
It doesn't address a number of issues with any centrally planned economy and without incentives it must be centrally planned to produce goods. Having assets without being able to use them means no property rights. The borgeioux/monopolists take over and the common man only needs bare subsistence. That's fine in a pre-limits of growth world but we'll be at 9B people soon and predefined currency pool without expansion doesn't take into account population growth. So given contention, who decides who lives and has children, or dies and doesn't. In that kind of system, the people at the top.
You end up with no investment, no companies, and no future within a generation or two (20 years = 1 generation).
Inevitably shortages occur, and when they do it causes death when its a strategic good (i.e. food). That death also won't be coming to those at the top while there's such a larger pool below. The people at the top need the good more since they are responsible for decisions that impact the whole. Sometimes its necessary to cut off a leg so the body can survive. Its important that the designated people can continue to make these important decisions in times of crisis... so they would say.
You can tweak those systems any number of ways and end up with the exact same outcome when you don't address the core problem of economic calculation which doesn't have a solution in centrally planned economies. Its not new, its old, there's quite a large body of material from the 1920s-1940s on it.
While nothing is without risks, generally speaking investing in private business that produce actual goods where the supply chain is stable, or real estate so long as it continues to enjoy its advantageous tax loopholes. Those are the only comparable things that currently have a rate of return on inflation that I've found that come to mind with manageable risk assuming proper due dilligence.
Real estate requires a certain level of income to take advantage of those tax loopholes in the first place. Its also still at the height of the market, so opportunities will be coming available as that bubble deflates but you generally don't want to catch a falling knife. I'm personally expecting about a 15% correction, factoring in a minimum of 12% inflation over the next several years based on the 1983 methodology for calculating inflation.
Business risk due to inflation is going to become problematic if you can't control input cost. The operating budgets for many businesses also typically are funded on a variable interest rate loan which will stress many businesses which may present some opportunities in the near future.
Most budgets I've seen have not been factoring in the rate of inflation, but with two years of excessively high inflation and more expected in the future, anyone that knows what they are doing will be factoring this into their prices moving forward for the near term.
Edit: Regarding computational models (AI) and investing, they really aren't a good fit for a lot of things, primarily because there is no determinism properties (system's theory). Any time you have inputs with multiple potential outcomes, this property breaks; and Automata & CS Computation theory say computers will never be able to solve these fundamentally due to the halting or decidability problems. Anywhere human psychology plays a significant role in the outcome, you often have these issues which may not be immediately visible.
Approximations can be made, but there is no guarantee they will be accurate. You also can run into synchronization issues when you have many interconnecting systems (i.e. Dragon King Events).
Standard Disclaimer, not financial advice or accounting advice.
> Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes around hackers being less common?
I've seen it as well.
I don't agree with what the author says are reasons for it. They just don't fit.
From what I've seen, hackers (in the truest sense) don't advertise. They have deep knowledge, but you only find how deep when you get into discussions with them, and most of the time they have no goodwill to engage in that because of two things, people who are dunning kruger; and social media.
Many of the learning paths have also been removed and are harder to find, the internet used to be freer than it is now. You have companies that dictate what stays up simply by using the court system as a coercive measure. The recent Quad9 thing shows just how bad this is getting across the board internationally. Copyright is being used to coerce, compulse, and limit actual innovation.
Hackers used to get by with their skills via certifications and jobs, many times they can't get certified now that only a single company handles testing in most places. I can't tell you specifically how they fail you, but its certainly not based upon whether you just have the knowledge.
The number of real hackers out there are significantly less because there has been less opportunity, and less resources that are easily found to get into it.
Many have worked very hard for their knowledge and some volunteer and help others, but there's an active trend to harass those that contribute like that, and volunteer psychology says you stop giving when it starts costing you. Dealing with a high number of deceitful people leads you to test them before providing any goodwill. If the hacker's don't like what your response implies they don't engage, and you are none the wiser.
Its not about life grinding them down, there are a lot of intelligent people who have stopped giving back because they see what providing that support is doing for society in general, its going in a direction that will inevitably fail because life will be intolerable, and volunteering is at a much higher cost to them personally than it ever was before.
Its like that adage that most people know, what you do in small things that don't matter shows what you will do in large things that matter. If you lie cheat and steal in friendly games, do you want them managing your company's finances? A smart person wouldn't.
There are also a lot of crazies out there that are really indoctrinated now too and they don't even realize it. They like the idea of something, but ignore everything else that would be needed to make it work. Completely irrational in some cases and can't even reason or think critically. Its sad.
There's some interesting reading about how the taxes should and should not work in the 5th book of the Wealth of Nations. Most copies only include the first 4 volumes.
While its not complete, you are somewhat limited in what you can do with the tax code incentives, and generational wealth or concentration into a Bourgeois caste is one of many issues that affect socialism more dramatically than our mixed system (though there still is an effect).
The inheritance tax is nonexistent. They kept it in entity vehicles until a law was passed excluding it then they dissolved the entities in a year where there were no tax implications (the entire amount was untaxed).
Fiat and debt have their own implications when the money printer runs above capacity. Have you seen the derivative exposure for banks listed at the FDIC website?
> Human language always drifts in terms of word definition.
While that is true of general day-to-day speech or vernacular (vocal), that fails with regards to anything that is reasonably technical, or written, and making a comparison between the two overgeneralizes and is apples to oranges. Both are flawed ways of thought.
If you've ever tried to communicate the structure of a binary tree, abstract syntax, what makes up determinism, syntactical vs lexical parsing, systems properties, or anything else that is highly technical there are specific technical words which are used fundamentally to describe the structure, or behavior, and these meanings do not vary.
They have specific meaning to describe specific things. Communication is the sharing of meaning, and its receiver based. If the receiver has no words to describe it, or the words used have so many possible meanings; they won't understand. Its the all is nothing. There is a signal or there isn't.
If you corrupt language and communication calling something its not, and doing so in a way that can cause loss under any circumstance on someone else, you then are arguably so much worse than a liar, engaging in crazy making behavior, and definitely lack credibility. This is true even if you do not intend this which is why one must be careful in what they say and not bandy words (and their meanings) about irresponsibly.
To be clear, that includes the loss of time and confusion resulting from misleading others. There's enough deceit in the world without adding to the noise or legitimizing corrupt acts.
Corruption of language has no place in civil and rational conversation.
While I agree with some of what you say, with respect, that latter part I think you've fallen into a flawed association trap through the use of corrupted language.
Anyone that's educated in this area knows just because someone says something is true, it doesn't make it so, and discussing that wasn't even part of the comment so you are getting into the weeds.
For your own edifice, can you (for yourself) tell what are the differences between socialism, communism, fascism and fabianism; and which ones are mutually exclusive? A google search surface view won't be much help with answering that; best resource is historical texts and essays.
To me, you seem to have mixed objectives or have been seriously misled. You claim its new, but this in fact is a very old 'baddie' wrapped up in new clothing.
I deploy VOIP solutions professionally as a System Admin/Engineer, I happen to see all the problems that you haven't yet noticed.
Reliability wise, I'm talking about messaging improperly handling timestamps, not sending messages but saying their sent, and silently discarding messages sent to you. Timestamps and other dated items are necessary for non-repudiation; or proving to a specific level that is acceptable as evidence in a court of law (to hold business accountable).
I've seen messaging apps, text messages (which are a messaging app), not display errors and silently update fields later or disappear the messages when compared with a separate device on the same network. You only see it if you happen to have equipment to monitor what the baseband modem is sending and it fails at the cell tower (which may not be official). Phone providers open a ticket, then auto-close them within 30 days without resolution.
The way these systems work, there's heavy coding theory so if a transmission fails, it gets resent. Its not a result of interference but of failures at infrastructure nodes.
So what might happen to the relationships in your life if you stop getting messages from your friends, and from their perspective they stop getting messages from you. You miss things because you don't know about them. You think they'll be your friends long? If they aren't having the same issue, do you think they'll believe you when you notice it without provable times just on your say so, and they discount date and timestamps since they get updated?
If someone did that maliciously to isolate you, you wouldn't know and wouldn't be able to do anything about it. People would look at you like you were crazy. You do it long enough and isolation does interesting things to your psychology, and if your thinking there's no reason for someone to target you like that, you would be wrong.
Political warfare, or the destruction of the national will, in part involves priming people's psychology so they polarize into groups that are complacent (don't respond), or lash out at anything they see as remotely triggering (similar to your attachment to a cell phone). This allows a smaller group during a destabilization event to seize power; historically.
There's a great book published and freely available on the USMC University website about political warfare and what it exactly entails. Bezmenov isn't that reliable.
GDPR and DSA are only reactive. What happens when the violators are moving targets (nefarious non-business).
Your email provider has access to read, and more importantly prevent you from sending email to others. Preventing communication without alerting the sender is how this is weaponized.
WhatsApp regularly uses your microphone in the background; maybe its location finding from your local power hum (50/60hz) did you agree to that or did they update the terms after the fact and continued use is acceptance?.
All these things happen regularly. The fact that you think they don't happen, and have discounted it so completely and are so attached to a device that literally can make you go crazy under the right causable circumstances looks like an addiction spiral to me or impossible levels of extreme ignorance about how you are manipulated on a daily basis (sheep-le) with no real thought because thought requires risking being wrong to learn what's right.
A non-attached person would simply say, I go with what works and leave it at that, and take a critical eye towards reliable methods being deprecated. It certainly appears you are attached whether you know it or not.
Reminds me of the 2001 movie 'conspiracy' with how that all played out.
First you follow the vision, then when its untenable, and left you in a inescapable position, you redefine words and talk about what you aren't talking about.
Arguably you can't let robots take over a large portion of the jobs because rational pricing goes out the window, and you end up just like non-market socialist economies did at the turn of the last century. A lot of people generally get culled when food shortages occur.