In Cuba, the only wealthy people are government bureaucrats. As always, communism becomes dictatorship and the people suffer most. Top down control of economy doesn't work. I went to numerous tobacco plantations in Cuba and they told me the government takes 90% of their harvest and they're allowed to keep and sell 10%. I stayed with an OBGyn who gets paid $80 USD/month. He built his house out of cinderblocks. That's how you get rewarded for your 'free' education. Anyone glorifying communism is a fucking idiot with no life experience.
That share of income from wages started its downward trajectory in 1971, when the US removed the gold standard and money-printing replaced hard money. The result was a man-manipulated interest rate fueled economy. Low interest rates benefit existing asset holders the most since they most definitively increase asset prices. Think about the simplest discounted cashflow, a perpetuity. When you change the discount rate r from 4% to 1%, the perpetuity value increases by 4x.
I've been working on a tool that also filters out the cruft comments from reddit / ugc searches. We just came out with a chrome extension as well. Would love your feedback on it: www.thegigabrain.com
I've been working on www.thegigabrain.com to address this problem. Filtering out the noise from reddit and other UGC sources to get the most useful answers
The amount of people on HN nowadays that are okay with getting nothing useful done is striking. Startup guy, you don't have to accept being part of a bloated hierarchy that rewards politics more than good decision-making. You could check out at the corpo job and start prototyping your own startup ideas. Or join another early stage startup where your performance matters. I'll be starting one soon - let's keep in touch.
dont need all this complexity to prevent airborne illness from going exponential, just masks + contact tracing. the results have spoken for themselves in asia
If central banks weren't on a mission to create 'inflation' by manipulating interest rates, tech would do what it was meant to do...deflate the price of everything. Instead governments try to make interest rates low to create inflation and achieve asset price inflation - pricing anyone who didn't own assets before their ingenious printing out of the market. Hence why millenials control so much less wealth per their age than boomers do. Boomers took us off the gold standard in 1971 and that is when you see the wealth gap begin to explode. Go do some actual research and look at the exponential wealth discrepancy curve starting in 1971.
This author doesn't realize that 'people' don't care if someone is a billionaire if they became one by taking risk themselves. Yes, people will rightfully shit on the ones who inherited their wealth or achieved most of their success through backroom regulatory dealings but elon musk parlayed his whole lifetime earnings into Tesla and SpaceX while the US government printed money to subsidize investment banks and mortgage lenders. Did 'public' sector or 'private' sector generate the more useful innovation? I'm all for the rule of law and at the local level it makes sense to have democratic government. The most obvious trend in this era is that centralization of power is bad but most of it has occurred through politicians who are out of touch with the people they represent who live 1000s of miles away from them + central bankers manipulating interest rates and preventing an actual free market that would let shitty companies go bankrupt. So when people poo on where much of the world has arrived in wealth disparity, they should blame crony socialism in the public sector rather than free market capitalism (which to date only exists on the internet and in crypto). Instead governments are demolishing the currency employees get paid in to subsidize shitty companies and inflate asset prices. And that process is mostly not run by billionaire but by elected and appointed bureaucrats.... This writer has the nuance of a fart joke.
You might want to check out the Honey app, which actually lets you search for items across 100s of stores. Plus gives ‘gold’ bonuses on top of the coupon testing it does
I would add another factor lots of people overlook: the trend towards index investing. In the past, asset management involved actually analyzing the performance of a business, now it’s just trillions of dollars allocated merely by market cap. Index investing makes everyone QEs bitch - the end game for it is what we’re about to experience.
Nope. This kind of shock is how you determine which companies are robust or antifragile to reality. You don't sacrifice humanity for the companies, its the other way around.