aqouta
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aqouta
6hr ago
If you make the bottom workers too poor to buy stocks, then of course most stocks will be owned by the super wealthy. What is this argument intending to communicate?
I'm differentiating consumption from wealth and this is a really important distinction you keep ignoring so I'll go into detail. Consumption is more directly related to the actual output of the economy and better takes into account things like inflation. If the wealthy were spending their share of production on competing with the poor for consumption it would spike inflation up and actually have impacts on how the poor live. If they instead reinvest it in building out more capital capacity then it raises the total supply of things to consume produced by the economy reducing the cost of living for the workers.
Imagine a Dickens sweatshop owner that reinvests the profits of the garments his workers produce in sewing machines vs uses it to buy the clothing produced. In the 'buying the output' case his employees have less clothing to go around for themselves, in the reinvesting case not only is the owner not bidding up cost of the output but actively growing the output through capital investment so there are more clothes to go around for everyone.
The rich are not meaningfully consuming enough beef that their differential wealth has any impact on the worker's ability to buy beef for themselves, same for housing, same for most of the expenses the poor must deal with.
It’s not a preferable outcome for the wealthy to own most of the stocks rather than the poor, neither is it preferable to take wealth that could belong to the poor and place it in stocks.
I think it'd be great if the poor could own more stocks, we have several government programs like IRAs and 401ks to give them some tax advantage towards this goal. But consumption wise we should be basically indifferent to who is holding on to the bits of paper.
No, and it’s important to understand why this is isn’t the case. The demand does not decline commensurate to the decline in supply from the restriction of the labor pool, because the low wage worker does not use Amazon at the high rate of the middle class and wealthy. There are many, many services that are used by the well-off and not used by the poor, and if you have to pay the poor more, you will not see a decline in demand among the lowest income brackets due to the price increase.
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But in actual reality, Amazon is already priced as high as they can make it for the middle class and higher class. If they could price it higher, they would have already. Any cost of labor increase will affect Amazon more than it affects, say, CostCo, or any other warehouse-style model.
If they can't increase the price any further without losing the margin and the rich and middle class will not pay more then they will reduce scope of business. This is the option they have that you consistently miss and it's very important. You don't seem to be willing to recognize that the pie could just actually shrink. Amazon does not have some fat margin on delivery. They already almost certainly lose money on many rural delivery routes.
Fitness centers are a great example of this — a very profitable industry which employs the poor but which the poor infrequently use.
I asked before to define terms here, what percentage of people are "the rich", which percentage are "the poor"? It just does not parse as true to me that poor people don't go to the gym unless you defining the poor as like a very specific group of rural people who don't go to the gym for reasons other than cost savings.
They can’t go out of business, because it’s a profitable industry, eg Lifetime Fitness making the founder half of a billionaire.
Lifetime fitness may not go out of business but that's hardly the only gym company. There are many lower margin and local gyms that run much leaner margins. Restrict labor supply and the marginal leaner gyms, the type the poorer people use, goes under first.
You just have to look at the areas most affected by immigration disruption
My argument has never been that wages don't rise, it's that they're not the whole picture. Wages may rise for some subset of workers, another subset gets laid off and the pie shrinks. After the 1920s wages rose AND the economy went through massive restructuring due to mechanization AND inequality increased AND it ended in the great depression. You can't just isolate the one measure of wages from the whole rest of the economy.
That’s because of the addition of a surplus of workers the following year. This proves my point. The recession began after the period were looking at.
Under your theory this shouldn't cause a recession, it should cause wages to go down, not production which should increase. But production decreased sharply. It doesn't fit your model any way you turn it. Yes, restricting supply of labor in the short term, before the consequences play out, increases the wages of labor. But firms quickly find equilibrium, they retract from less profitable markets and cut number of employees. These employees find themselves back in the labor market reducing the demand squeeze and then wages fall again. Maybe the wage line remains higher than before the squeeze, maybe it doesn't. But total production shrinks so the total amount of stuff in the economy to consume decreases and on average the workers get to consume less stuff.
Do you have any clear evidence you can present that restricting the pool of low wage workers makes their lives worse off? Literally every study shows them having greater wages and QoL when this happens.
As I already pointed out, covid, by forcing many to stay home from work, greatly restricted the supply of labor. The result was a massive amount of job loss and inflation.
aqouta
20hr ago
I believe there is a team that does this with the game diplomacy some times.
aqouta
20hr ago
it makes you wonder why no one was looking more closely at the results submitted by various AI companies.
Maybe it's just because you've only really been in the crowds repeating the super low quality criticism but among people who are very much expecting AI to be a big deal it is well known that many benchmarks are saturated and even known which labs are more likely to teach to the test(google and chinese labs are notorious for models that perform very well on benchmarks but fail the vibe check) as it is. Zvi Moskowitz's AI roundup regularly has an "on your marks" section where he goes over the current state of benchmarks. That said, for many benchmarks, like swe-bench, they don't actually just let you run whatever bullshit you want on the test, they run your model themselves using a standardized harness so if the models are cheating on the test then they're doing so by themselves hacking the test, which is interesting in its own right.
That said, there is wide agreement that the best way to determine which model is out front is essentially just to use them and see how they do.
aqouta
1d ago
You know that people invest in order profit later. And you know that the category “frozen assets” includes a lot of frivolous waste (large properties, private jets, art, watches, jewelry). And you know that, were these business owners compelled in their business career to pay workers more, the money they put into frozen assets would have went to these workers.
The frozen assets I'm talking about are bits of paper that say things like "JPMC common stock" on them, compared to which the art and watches are a rounding error. And the effect of reducing the value of the bits of paper changes the capital return curve which makes investing in building out more productive capacity ultimately causing less new jobs to be created. The whole economy shrinks. If putting your money to building new factories doesn't have as good of a return as putting it into less labor intensive areas of the economy then people put their money into those areas instead and factories stop getting built. The economics here are brutal and straightforward. If the workers owned 100% of their companies they'd run into exactly the same problem.
This is essentially saying, “Jeff Bezos would keep increasing the price for Amazon if he had to pay workers more so that he magically makes the same amount of profit as today.” This is incorrect and it should be obvious why it’s incorrect. Amazon cannot raise their prices so much that people stop using their services. At a certain point it becomes too high for the consumer to pay. There is a ceiling to the price of Amazon that cannot increase, and if you pay the low wage workers behind Amazon more, eventually most of his excess profit transfers to these workers. Because there’s a cap on the pricing of Amazon.
Correct, there is a cap on the price, but you're trying to hold the output itself static. The supply has decreased, so has the demand as the immigrants were on both sides of the transaction. The immediate effect will be reducing the scope of the business, providing less services. If you're amazon where do you cut services first? In the expensive places where rich people live and will pay high prices or the run down towns you're so concerned about? When amazon cuts services jobs leave those towns and the options for the residents reduce. Bezos makes less money, sure and the residents who still have jobs might even get paid more, but the whole pie has shrunk. You're only looking at wages which is only part of the picture and you're trying to hold the rest of the economy in an all else equals way that just wouldn't be equal.
Higher wages after the 1918–1919 Spanish Flu
After the 1920s Immigration Quotas.
These coincided with massive mechanization and electrification of the economy and ended in the great depression. Attributing the gains from the scaling up of the ford assembly line to Immigration Quotas is silly and breaks with your whole theory. The capitalists were getting rich in this period, inequality was rising in this period.
You realize that if your theory was right, you should be able to find a real world example where there was a significant artificial restriction in low-wage labor which reduced the wages of the lowest wage earners?
No, because my theory isn't that wages are where we'd see the consumption be curtailed when you shrink the economy. During covid we had big supply shocks because a lot of people were unable to work, this wasn't represented in lower wages for workers, it came in the form of lots of companies closing and jobs disappearing then inflation because in real terms the amount of things to consume were reduced.
It’s not realistic for a low-wage earner today to pick up and move across the country to wherever they can make more, even if they know they can make more. They don’t have the wealth to do this. It’s expensive to do it, they risk immediate homelessness if it fails, employers will not help them relocate and they may not be able to find someone willing to lease to them.
This is ridiculous hyperbole. The illegal immigrants with literally nothing to their name do it, that's the thing that you're complaining about in the first place. You can do it for two months rent and a bus ticket. There just isn't this huge class of workers who couldn't save up a couple month's rent in the modern American economy, you're making them up for a sob story. There's a lot of wealth inequality in America but absolute poverty has done nothing but decline.
If the wealthiest top 1% of households in America have at least $14mil, and the class as a whole possesses 55 trillion in wealth, then there is necessarily a lot of wealth wasted on things that are not required for the happiness of these 1% of households.
So immediately you've moved off the consumption point. The vast majority of this wealth is is frozen assets that don't do anything to consumption.
And so we can improve a comical amount of lives in America by simply halting immigration. If this wealth were originally compelled to be redistributed annually (because no surplus of workers), we are talking about 1-3 trillion to be distributed. That’s giving the bottom 100 million working Americans (the bottom 60%) between 10k and 30k annually.
??? This just seems like free association. Where are you getting these numbers? Where is the redistribution coming from because of preventing immigration? Almost all of higher labor costs are passed on to the consumers which you can basically model as a flat tax, famously a regressive type of tax.
simply not realistic for many working Americans right now, and they can’t bargain if they can’t afford to quit for a couple months
What are you talking about man? You don't need to take months off to find a job. Most people interview for new jobs while working their current jobs.
Ultimately this whole world view you're espousing is a mess. I guess the cleanest way to attack it is just that your conflation between wealth and consumption is founded on misunderstandings and the mechanism you're expecting to connect immigration enforcement to lead to improving people's lives are very transparently you deciding you don't like immigration and working backwards. Almost none of the wealth of the rich is in the consumption of bathroom tiles. It's tied up in little bits of paper, they are for the most part deferring their right to bid up consumption for the average person. They're not buying thousands of pounds of beef and burning it on pyres so that the hard working American has to go without, they're not buying up entire hospitals and cackling as they sit empty or square miles of in demand real estate that they leave empty. They are having negligible impacts on the consumption of your downtrodden American. Further immigrants that come and do the work that your average American consumes are on net increasing the average American purchasing power. They're on the supply side of the equation. Building houses, working agriculture, all the stuff that reduces the cost of living for the average American.
aqouta
2d ago
They comprise a large part of the consumption of the rich of course, what else would they consume? But a very small amount of total consumption. If you redistributed all the pools and big houses we'd all have a 5 minute time share a year in mansion and get to enter a one in a thousand lottery to have one of flights be private instead of commercial jet. And yeah, I think it's basically fine that the system works out that people who get into a bunch of voluntary, everyone wins and grows the pie contracts get to consume some of that newly created pie. It's not a big deal to me. I think redistribution to a degree is good to a point, we should have some baseline level of consumption that even the least fortunate have access to, good shelter, good food, free time and plentiful entertainment options, but it's just not a big deal to me if the guy who built up a company to provides valuable goods and services gets to debauch it up in a nice big house by his private pool, good for him.
All that even said, your position doesn't even really work out to redistribution, it just shrinks the pie for everyone. The poor get even less in actual terms although maybe a bigger slice in relative terms.
aqouta
2d ago
Whats your cut off for rich here? Unless you're including like the broad middle class then these forms of consumption are just such a tiny percent of total wealth/consumption that it's hard to take seriously as anything but resentment that they have nice things.
aqouta
2d ago
We have more than enough wealth wasted (genuinely wasted) at the top, that we can artfully redistribute it to the poor by simply preventing the addition of more low-wage workers.
What are some of these examples of huge amounts of wealth being genuinely wasted? That'd have to happen in the form of huge amounts of consumption. Most of the wealth at the top is sitting in the form of stocks, at most you get some yachts, which just aren't much of a blip on any measure of consumption.
aqouta
3d ago
What you're seeing is that China was very poor and the rural areas of china were desperately poor. It's like if the US already had most of south america as states so that almost all of the economic immigration didn't count as immigration.
aqouta
3d ago
It occurred to me that maybe the Iran attack happened when it did to burn a bunch while they still could but that might be over determined.
aqouta
5d ago
One thing I'll pre-register ahead of time. I'm sure if this doesn't get satisfactory results you'll declare the whole process pointless, but in the case that the harness fails I have had very good results of explaining to the agent why what it did was wrong and having it update the documentation to avoid that failure mode, over time the harness improves and stops making the same mistakes. Our harness has progressed to the point that I can pretty reliably directly drop a user's feature request email into a jira ticket, give the orchestrator the jira ticket number, maybe answer two of three questions and have a working feature branch building on out CI pipeline in under an hour, any failure is an opportunity for improvement.
If you're willing to iterate one more time can you try giving it this series of prompts?
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@agent "Please create a standard set of agents, skills and prompt files for this project. I want specifically for there to be an orchestrator that I can give a complex query to that will walk through a planning stage, asking me relevant questions, create a plan md file and then manage subagents to execute on that plan. Two agent definitions that I definitely want are a security specialist that will audit changes for best practice and a reviewer agents that will audit to make sure updates do not break previous functionality. The orchestrator should know to invoke these agents for these tasks"
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@orchestrator "Please scan through and document this project using standard claude.md files to aid agents in navigating and understanding the project. Update agent definitions with relevant information."
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@orchestrator "[Insert your prompt]"
You can tinker to make this much better but doing this should greatly improve your results alone.
Edit: I should have said that you need to execute each step in a new context window. This is very important.
aqouta
6d ago
Solar already works at pretty large scale, it's already deployed and working. You connected it to a large grid with a variety of sources and storage. We don't have to speculate on whether solar panels work at grid scale.
aqouta
6d ago
It's really just people applying the "There must be a balancing downside" just world heuristic. Same reason people think strong people must not also be fast or smart because it violates some kind of int/str/dex rpg assumptions. It just wouldn't be fair if solar had stats in every category vs coal, there must be a trade off, especially because it's politically contentious. And there are the obvious ones like not being reliable when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow, which are real but have had engineers and scientists working on them for decades now with some good work arounds. But fundamentally people are suspicious of something that seems too good to be true.
aqouta
7d ago
But at that point we might decide to trade the oil in yuan instead.
Come on man, at least ask an AI if this is plausible before suggesting it. China exercises capital controls, if they allowed free convertibility then Chinese people could invest overseas and earn better returns than their horrific internal market which would collapse their whole investment model. And you can see how China has treated Australia or Lithuania using their economic influence when the nations displeased them, the devil you don't know is hardly some stable partner.
You could maybe make an argument for a euro swap but it has its own problem, like that there isn't one unified euro bond market, each state has its own so there is no equivalent to a US treasury. And to be a reserve currency you need to have a huge amount of outstanding accounts, There literally are not enough euros in existence to make this kind of thing work and the process of printing and spending them would very likely wreck the European economy.
Finally Who is protecting the rest of the seas? Who owns the other straights? If we're going to enter a US isn't responsible for foreign shipping protection and in fact being able to threaten shipping entitles you to extracting rents from shipping then I know of an entity that is able to threaten every ship everywhere.
aqouta
7d ago
Someone who works for decades in cargo driving has done a lot to fuel the actual economy, but since their job pays close to subsistence wages, they will not have a lot of wealth at the end of a long career. But by the labor theory of deserving, they deserve a lot more than an ex-Googler.
The "I hate knowledge workers theory of value". You've said elsewhere that you are a libertarian, does that cash out to anything? You don't think people are entitled to the wage their employers have freely elected to pay them? You instead think, almost exactly, "to each according to their need"? You can make a case for communism, but this isn't really what it looks like.
I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career.
$1 million? Were they a janitor?
their job pays close to subsistence wages
This is untrue and easily checkable.
aqouta
7d ago
I suspect that, “do not jeopardize American combat operations,” is a much better fit for what is and is not allowed in a de facto sense.
Uh, no, I think the obvious fit is "do not do shit that will get the people who decide if your operations become illegal hate enough to nuke you from orbit". This prediction market can almost certainly not impact American combat operations.
aqouta
9d ago
This was my first impulse too, surely if we can accept there are just some shitty dudes why is it weird to assume there are some shitty girls? But the fact that it felt weird to even call this behavior being a "shitty girl" kind of gives up the asymmetry. We don't really need an explanation for why the shitty guy does it, we all dislike him but his motivations are obvious. The ladies like this are behaving both in a way that is bad for the game theory meta and aren't even getting anything out of it.
The experience for guys looking on is as if your leg were stuck under a rock in the desert and you saw one man walk by with a flask of water that he could have given you a desperately needed sip of but he selfishly drank it himself just to quench his thirst. You might rightfully hate him for his selfishness but you understand him, the world make sense. But then you see another man come by with a flask of water and he uses it to "water" a rock uselessly, even burns himself on the rock doing it. This behavior justifies discussion, it demands an explanation.
aqouta
10d ago
Iran isn't Syria. It's really not clear that an Iran war causes Iranian refugee waves. Iran is a big place with a more middle income economy, so far we've been seeing internal migration to more rural areas
aqouta
11d ago
I take the critique of the American model fully, I've never liked it very much and have seen it as mostly downstream of other things I don't like, namely a refusal to just administer IQ tests and deal with the disparate impact. But when I look at whatever europe has had as an alternative I don't really see anything better. If I wanted to judge a system by its fruits I'd look to the east, which unfortunately also has some notable problems with how its elites are selected. I think perhaps the best method would be to leave it up to capitalism to incentivize refinement and reward merit with power, a very libertarian direction of thought.
At work we're stuck with VS code/github copilot which is not ideal but allows customizing/spawnimg subagents and tool calls which is the big requirement. Agents themselves aren't a big deal, they're essentially just custom prompts, they become important for being created as sub agents to isolate tasks to narrow contexts. There's some customization to your own env you should do but you can just start by asking Claude/gpt to spin up some basic ones that you can tweak over time. Basically any time I notice it get stuck or need to guess and check a bunch I have it makes some tweaks to the documentation. I'm cooking up a method to automate that process. Where I'd spend my time first is making some guide files for your code base. Putting together some easily greppable documents outlining our database schema greatly improved its ability to interact with it.
Today was our biweekly demo day. One of our engineers showed their work in putting together a harness for aiding in translating a winform app to a rest site + web front end. They built an orchestrator, an array of custom agents designed to handle the specifics of our environment, custom skills for understanding and interacting with our db ect ect, dozens of files. And as they walked through their prompting it became clear to me that they never actually invoke the orchestrator so they were in fact just using the vanilla agent.
It's obvious to me that we're like a couple more releases from all this work not being necessary, the future tools will simply as a matter of course customize themselves to the environments they're exposed to. But there is as of now an art form to getting really good results from current models. I'll say the most important concept is something like optimizing for "context density", you have ~1million tokens to work with but every marginal token long before that degrades performance while relevant context improves it. So you need to balance it out, using sub agents to offload discreet tasks and provide maximally dense reports. I have oracle agents that simply returns true or false, a single line, or a full report depending on what is asked of it. Of course this works even better if you can have the thing go through and summarize your code ahead of time with the intention of minimizing the guess and check nature of looking through your repo, every wrong search pollutes context. Or you can just poorly write out an ambiguous two lines, throw the vanilla nerfed agent in the deep end, have it go through 5 iterations of "compacting context"(i.e. throwing away important bits of information because you've hit the hard limit) and get back a sub par response then laugh about how dumb these hype monkeys are, maybe they're just so terrible at coding that this half assed demonstration is impressive to them?
Whatever dude, enjoy 6 more months of ignorance before it's impossible deny, you'll deny it anyways, not my problem, I tried to warn you.
Too short if there was any chance at an actual deal, but it seemed pretty obvious that the Iranian demands weren't even better than what the US would get from walking away. Did anyone really think them keeping control of the strait, their only(if substantial) bargaining chip was going to be accepted? Let alone reparations and a green light on developing nukes. The reparations were probably brought up as the droppable bargaining chip but if Washington wants a status quo where Iran controls the strait then they can have that by just going back to bombing Iran and hoping for some miracle collapse. I don't really see a stable equilibrium available.
edit: And I'll note I think this war was a terrible idea from the start and am finding myself drifting further into despising Trump for what he's done to our position in the world. I'm not saying this as a supporter, it just seems obvious to me that now we've stepped into it there isn't some reasonable deal to get us out.
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