I cannot deny the observation. I am not from the privileged, ivy league educated, nurtured and after all I am not an American, but I see the same patterns in Europe and cannot come up with any constructive suggestions.
As you can see, I don't search approval. I write from a big distance and react.
And seeing the individuals attacking the character of the messenger without getting the message makes me sad. Really sad.
When I started creating things for the web I had no idea that my web-browser in 2021 will look like Christmas Tree from installed plugins and I will modify countless settings in about:config. All of this to have somewhat private browsing experience.
All of this because, we as society cannot find a way to impose regulations and restrictions over a bunch of greedy advertising corporations.
More than a little hypocritical to complain about crypto scams, when he himself created this "cheap eth" coin, gave himself a bajillion coins in the fork code without telling anyone, and then started shilling it in his stream.
Did you hear about the startup founder who gave themselves a bajillion shares of their company? Now, if I dumped into entry liquidity SPAC style...that's a different story. But please be more precise in your criticism, I'm not sure you are criticizing what you think you are.
I've followed many of these streams and this at least started out as a research project. If you watch the recorded streams on YouTube on CheapETH it's clear this is not meant to be a serious project of any kind.
I don't see this as affecting his integrity on any level.
My view is that the big AdTechs (mainly Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktoks and the likes) are one of the worst poisons that humanity has ever created.
They brainwash you, destroy democracies, create drama in order to shove ads down your throat.
And then they turn around and pat themselves on the back pretending to be good actors "making the world a better place". Leaders of those companies pretending to be good humanitarian beings drive me absolutely crazy.
I hope that we eventually all see them for that they are.
> My view is that the big AdTechs (mainly Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktoks and the likes) are one of the worst poisons that humanity has ever created. They brainwash you, destroy democracies, create drama in order to shove ads down your throat.
In my humble opinion they are worst than that. They are a gateway for ultimate mind control, on a scale and effectiveness never seen before in human history. Selling ads and making money is scratching the surface of this complex and ever expanding machines of power and deception.
My theory is that Governments and Old Perception Gatekeepers are realizing this in full scale, but instead of regulating or stopping, they want full access to the Perception Control Mainframes and Perception Spyware Receivers that we care around and keep alive 24/7. https://bit.ly/3nJmFTH
In the recent years the coordinated attacks from Governments on free speech and encryption increased drastically.
Recent example is Apple's attempt to normalize on device private user data processing and policing with Government approved criteria trough third party private corporation "partnership". Setting an example to be followed by others. https://bit.ly/3nFE2ox
This is the beginning of Big Tech and Big Government convergence that will form the future of mankind. One unified social system presented to the masses as an inevitable implementation for a common good.
The sad part is that we are now working not only for AdTech companies, we are working for the Global Surveillance Apparatus and accept that this is the only way forward.
>And then they turn around and pat themselves on the back pretending to be good actors "making the world a better place". Leaders of those companies pretending to be good humanitarian beings drive me absolutely crazy.
Sounds pretty political to me. To survive and protect their existence and profits FAANG invested tons of money in lobbing and now have Political partnerships and Politicized UX.
Users are like party members, they are not only using the tech, they participate in brand awareness exercises and protect whichever brand they are selected to belong.
For me FAANG are implementing Edward Bernays abusive psychology on steroids, without any remorse or ethical boundaries what so ever. They simply don't care.
Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn. And taking big money from the process.
P.S. As I recently stated, down-voting only makes the message more relevant.
A 500% tax on advertising. It’s a zero sum game with no benefit to society. If you are paying for eyeballs, you pay a 500% tax. Force companies with these trash addictive business models to find a way to work for the average person, not pimp them out.
1% tax on the full amount of every trade. Fuck off worthless HFT mega brain drain. Fuck off short termism in markets.
Separation of church and state. And that includes Harvard, Yale, and all the others. No funding, no loans, no Title IX BS. Separate!"
I'm curious what event or thought process made #3 appear on the list.
Most of the Ivy League, in addition to being the "Ivy League", were all founded as Christian institutions and have deep ties in their upper hierarchy due to theologians within the University having significant influence on their board of governors.
Post author is ranting incoherently, but Title IX is a legit minefield; in particular, its implementations at universities have been pretty problematic. The root of the cause is a notorious "Dear Colleague" letter that came out in the early Obama administration. Due process around sexual misconduct allegations suffered greatly as a direct result of what it asked universities to do.
Aside from individual opportunities for unfairness, it turns out when schools have policies that can get you fired or expelled without a chance to defend yourself (let alone have an attorney) then this gives rise to abuses of the system — many of the same kinds of abuses with similar unfortunate racial impacts that we see when off-campus justice systems are abused.
Ironically, many of the successful lawsuits about unfair expulsions are themselves Title IX lawsuits.
Wokeism shows all the hallmarks of a cult or organized religion, and it's being spearheaded by academia:
- Strict adherence to dogmas (_eg all whites are racist, not dating trans is transphobic_), under penalty of excommunication (_banished from academia and/or society_).
- Dissent is not permitted (_if you deny it, you must be racist/bigot/transphobic_).
- Cult of the leader as individual (_eg BLM founders, the Squad_), while at the same time arguing the group is paramount.
- Sacraments (eg _struggle sessions, street performances_).
- Colleges as main places of cult. Pilgrimages to holy places (_eg police brutality incidents_).
- Saints (eg _George Floyd_).
Academia is funded by the state via:
- Grants to projects not necessarily resulting in any benefit, apparent or not, to society. Projects lead by professors not teaching.
- Loans to students, knowing well many won't be able to pay in years, if at all, which end in the pockets of colleges.
I looked into it. Moldburg rants against 'established universities and established press', does not assign importance to their faith affiliation so that's not it. If I had to guess #3 is probably tied with #1 and him not being in the 'circle of trust'.
Personally, and I have no idea how to implement this, I think any charity that attempts to influence the political opinion of its members should lose their charitable status.
In the UK, Eton, the most expensive, exclusive public school in the country, is a charity, largely because it was set up to educate the poor, something it hasn't done, modulo a few bursaries, for some time. That needs to end.
Perhaps it's a reference to the Yale and Harvard Divinity Schools? Federal school funding paying for things like this, then that leads to... anti-sexual discrimination rules being enforced?
I am now very interested in what event happened as well.
> I don't think a tax is going to fix the underlying problem, which is that ad publishers have no responsibility for the ads they show.
The tax would get passed on to the entity paying for the advertisement. Then "advertising" would probably turn into a dirty word, we'll have "suggestions" and some sort of legal ducking and diving to avoid paying the tax at all.
>1% tax on the full amount of every trade. Fuck off worthless HFT mega brain drain. Fuck off short termism in markets.
I think a much better solution would be to mandate "slower" exchanges, i.e. exchanges would accumulate orders in a hidden queue and resolve them for example every 1 second, after that it would publicly publish all orders submitted to the last tick. For most market participants this change will be virtually unnoticeable, but it would eradicate HFT and all microseconds shavings associated with it.
Why not? You pay taxes on every deal you make in the real world. And since you buy a part of a company that should be tax-worthy too.
Tick-based exchange would probably just increase the problem (better prediction for ~HFT..or better call them HF-prediction then), but hey i really don't know, both solutions are better then none, i guess.
If we can put a sales tax on bread then we can put it on stock. Totally agree. I think, in general, taxes/credits are much better solutions to problems of economic incentives because they only change the incentives as opposed to the structures of the market.
That would create more opportunities for all sorts of gaming (e.g. place orders before update, remove them right after, etc). Since fast players would still exist, they would react first to each slow update, which means all other participants would always see a book that's pretty much always outdated, and very heavily so.
HFTs are not a universal evil, they increase market efficiency and they pay for it.
I completely dislike his tone but I like these three words he wrote "Perception is reality".
Bank accounts, bonds, stocks, crypto are all in the perception category. The first three try to model a real world process but they are not the real world. The latter is perceived to be outside the bounds of the real world.
In fact, people try to abuse flaws in the simulation (the model). The real world decays but money does not. So during a recession people flood into the security of money, that money is supposed to be the perception of the real world, people are flooding into a perception of security that doesn't exist. Strangely enough, the real world keeps getting worse but its perception keeps getting better.
> I don’t think they see themselves as scammers, I think they actually think quite highly of themselves [...] “Perception is reality”
Wilfully deceitful people are rare, the rest of us are exceptionally good at justifying our actions to ourselves - Undiluted honest self judgement can be self destructive, but eating gobfuls of bluepills is also extremely dangerous to society - I believe there is a middle-ground, awareness of this "cognitive bias" is the first step.
I read it. Its at best unhelpful and misguided and at worst actively harmful to the stated goals.
Ultimately he is advocating for a political solution for what he believes is an economic problem.
The issue here is that the cause of the problems he wants to resolve is not an economic problem at all, but a political choice.
The proposal of preventing companies from purchasing property, for example is a clear cut example. I want to be clear here, any shortage of housing anywhere in the developed world is the direct result of government policy intended to drive that shortage, not due to physical space limitations, or limitations driven by corporate greed (beyond where that intersects with politics)
>Ultimately he is advocating for a political solution for what he believes is an economic problem.
>Three policy proposals:
>A 500% tax on advertising. [...]
>1% tax on the full amount of every trade. [...]
How is that a "political solution to an economic problem"? What would a non political solution look like to you? Why is it bad that it's a political solution to an economic problem? If it works, it works.
A non political solution would be the transition away from capitalism to a different kind of relation between labor and society.
It should be clear at this point that capitalism can tolerate a pretty broad spectrum of political arrangements, from 'socialist' countries to dictatorships, and especially everything in between.
You can change your frontend to be all kinds of ways, and that will create vastly different user experiences. But at the end of the day we are still tied to the backend, the infrastructure, the "business logic".
I'm not sure how you transition away from capitalism without government involvement? Some kind of "people's movement" to embrace, oh, I don't know, coops?
> any shortage of housing anywhere in the developed world is the direct result of government policy intended to drive that shortage ... or limitations driven by corporate greed
And that government policy is a direct result of corporate lobbyists operating upon member of congress, while their advertising and news media partners spray the public mindset with some rational why whatever they are lobbying is good.
It is either a political solution or violent revolution, because any economic solution is operating on a rigged playing field they Capitalists control 100%.
> Ultimately he is advocating for a political solution for what he believes is an economic problem.
I think the larger point he is making is that if someone doesn't do something about unbridled "Corporate Capitalism", there will be blood in the streets. Government might be the only actor capable of going toe to toe with such a behemoth.
There are a lot of people who got screwed over by the the 80s reformation of the economy away from government intervention and the strange part is that these people believe that this move is actually a form of government intervention and it was the government that is making their lives worse. So getting to an even "free-er market" will solve the problem so they keep voting that way.
The free market is an empty ideology because there is no such thing in the real world. When the law and order of governments no longer applies, then we don't fall back to a fair and just utopian world free of governments, we fall back to the law of the jungle. [0] The law of the jungle involves a lot of pain and from the perspective of those living lives sheltered from pain through law and order of governments, the primary source of pain is the government. After all, governments have vast police and military forces.
They have the monopoly of violence. Therefore people perceive governments = violence and no governments = no violence. If the amount of violence increases by decreasing the importance of the government then people will insist that it's the government that inflicted the violence and will want to keep decreasing the importance of the government. What they don't realize is that they will experience an even harsher reality.
> The free market is an empty ideology because there is no such thing in the real world
Meh. If you can say that about "the free market" you could say that about just about anything. But in practice, people are able to recognize substantial free-market properties in markets that are substantially free, just as easily as they can recognize the properties of communism in systems which are substantially communist, even while Real Communism Has Never Been Tried™.
I remember an interview with Mr. Hotz describing his negotiations with Tesla about the acquisition of self-driving technology he said something to the effect of "I don't need a bigger piece of the pie - I just want the pie to taste really good."
This reads like a spoiled brat who just realized something is going on in the world, but is wholly unable to understand the real world repercussions of his “genius” suggestions.
As someone who (partially) relies on online advertising to make a living (in eCommerce, not tech), I think kneecapping the industry does make some sense.
Modern online ads are a tool for selling low-quality goods to impulsive people at high prices. Do we really need them?
Yes, in reference to a comment in the linked post, I asked myself whether advertising was in fact in any way beneficial to society and I confess I come up empty.
It would also mean that it's impossible to gain power in goverment by money or by owning "things" (factories etc.).
Afaik historic greek democracy was more like that. People got into goverment by lottery. If you were chosen, you had to attend a 2 year training and then your spent 4 years in goverment.
It's called sortition[1] and I think it'd be a wonderful method of choosing the 2nd house in a bicameral legislature like the UK's. Imagine replacing all the lords and bishops who've been placed there by heredity or backscratching with people chosen by sortition. That'd really hold the elected politicians to account.
For example, working in certain positions of government for a few years can often land very lucrative jobs in finance companies like Goldman Sachs. There is a corrupting influence of finance companies on government civil servants to sway legislation towards the companies by hinting they will be rewarded later for it by employing them later in senior positions.
A way to limit this corruption is to ban government civil servants from being able to take private jobs after their service.
WTF? That guy is literarry a capitalist himself with a company full of shitty gatekeeping tactics ("solve a programming challenge before you even apply") and now he writes some communist shit?
Please - take his money away till he finds to himself again.
His complaint wasn't about capitalism existing (he explicitly mentioned that he "liked capitalism"), but the fact that people are getting very very rich from zero-sum (HFT) or negative-sum (advertising) games. Most justifications for capitalism rely on the assumption that commerce is an overall positive-sum game.
This isn't referring to housing. Rent-seeking is a broader term related to charging people for something that they have no reason to pay for and no ability to avoid.
I see why the confusion arose though, "actual" housing is also mentioned in the article in a different context.
"Rent" as a word here refers to "regular payments to use something", of which rents for housing are only one specific example. For example, printer manufacturers who force you to buy only their (incredibly expensive) ink, or razor makers who benefit from regular purchases of blades.
The term "rent-seeking" has an even broader scope:
> Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth-creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline.
In the case of the razor manufacturers they can at least claim that it's completely natural (I'm not sure how far they go to prevent cheaper blades to be made available for their particular razors?), but often the regular payments are artificially forced through contract clauses, laws, patents, copyright (I guess?), and/or through technical means. In the case of printer manufacturers, they started adding electronics to the cartridges that force you to buy only cartridges made by that specific printer manufacturer.
Basically, it is a goal of many businesses to end up as a "rent-seeker". Have a wall that keeps out competition and a large number of customers forced to regularly buy from you ("regularly" is key, for constant predictable cash-flow and an easy life free of competitive pressure and uncertainty - for the rent-seeker).
"Rent seeking" has nothing to do with housing. It is about manipulating the environment (legislative, market, etc), so you get a cut from a transactions. E.g. make a state-mandated standard, that others have to license and profiting from such a licensing is the "rent".
He's saying that the ad space is an oligopoly and Google has such a big portion of it that they might as well be a monopoly. Humans have limited attention so getting a prime spot is important for your business. This allows Google to charge above and beyond the value of the actual advertising they provide.
As you can see, I don't search approval. I write from a big distance and react.
And seeing the individuals attacking the character of the messenger without getting the message makes me sad. Really sad.
When I started creating things for the web I had no idea that my web-browser in 2021 will look like Christmas Tree from installed plugins and I will modify countless settings in about:config. All of this to have somewhat private browsing experience.
All of this because, we as society cannot find a way to impose regulations and restrictions over a bunch of greedy advertising corporations.
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/08/06/consu...