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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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As the debate kids would say: “cap solves.” Leave the problem for someone else, so long as we can be reasonably confident their incentives are aligned correctly. Our best way of doing that is by letting them make money on the free market.

It’s interesting that @jeroboam mentioned Taleb, because I was thinking of his other works. Companies have their plans for the present. With a sufficient time horizon, they’ll also hedge against the “known unknowns” of the future. But how do they deal with “unknown unknowns?” Black swan events which defy the models and do incalculable damage before anyone pivots. The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.

So how much of that risk is correctly measured by agriculture companies? Modern farming is capital-intensive and low-margin. I would expect this to pull their time horizon closer. Every dollar spent on contingency plans is one not spent on something more urgent.

There’s a fun little story which I also encountered via Scott. Vincent Kosuga managed to ruin onion futures for the entire country. It turns out what’s good for stock prices isn’t necessarily beneficial for everyone—or anyone—else.

As the debate kids would say: “cap solves.”

Debate kids no longer say this, they say stupid race bullshit with no relation to the topic at hand and then call you racist for pointing it out.

Kritik is much funnier when I don't have to encounter it firsthand, yeah.

I’m old enough to remember when I was in debate, Kritiks were debates about the effects of capitalism and could at least be argued relative to whatever the topic was.

I stopped volunteering with the special debate league for inner city kids when I was having to judge stupid race nonsense they didn’t believe and couldn’t explain.

But how do they deal with “unknown unknowns?”

How do pre-modern subsistence farmers deal with the "unknown unknowns"? How much of that risk was correctly measured? My sense is that they mostly just died.

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