They certainly could, but what happens if they lose all their Patreon subscribers, Patreon goes down, they are banned from the platform or lose access to the platform, or their account hijacked?
For the purposes of discussion, assume that the Patreon user is operating in good faith and complying with applicable laws and Patreon terms of service, but were banned because of an insider threat, for example.
Patreon is fine and good, but is also a single point of failure. If you lose access to the platform, there is no portability or escape hatch. You're fully locked in, or in the worst case scenarios I outlined above, locked out.
Maybe my brain has been too rotted by listening to Noam Chomsky in my youth, but government spending and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. Everyone in washington is a capitalist, maybe withstanding 1-2 representatives. Large corps are constantly communicating with our leaders, far more frequently than their private constituents. To think that there is some secret, powerful office of the government where they are trying to dismantle capitalism through the use of welfare is a bogeyman. Welfare is there to prop up the ideology of capitalism as it smears against the rough road of reality.
Capitalism is primarily concerned with production, not welfare. Its central dogma is that society's welfare is naturally maximized along with its productive capacity, but there is essentially zero acceptance of that point of view anywhere on Earth, certainly among those in power.
Arguably the optimal operating point for an economic system, from a GDP point of view, is to maintain just enough public spending to keep a Robespierre from arising from the unwashed masses. Public spending beyond that is an unproductive waste.
Most of us would agree that sacrificing everything else on the altar of GDP is not what we want to do, though, so the (perfectly legitimate) question of where the compromises need to be made is always going to be on the table.
What should the government be spending its money on? So in those countries, social services are making up ~25 percent of government spending. But that includes healthcare and jobs programs, which are services that should directly bolster the larger economy by creating a healthy and more mobile workforce.
Meanwhile the US government spends about 35% of our GDP in a good year [1], and it is well known that over half of that goes to social security, medicare, and a smaller amount to housing. [2]
My only point is that it is easy to see that graph you posted and think that things are out of control, but the reality is just that in a post-war, urbanized, liberal society the governments job is to serve the people and sometimes that means spending money on them. I know surely none of us here will ever take adventage of medicare or social security in our old age. We will not be hiring students who went to state-funded schools (ew) or who live in subsidized housing--if they are that poor they can't work for me! But normal pepole actually do sometimes get help from the government and it is fine.
Government spending as a share of GDP is increasing. The main issue is this, not what the government is spending on.
Increasingly taxing people to subsidize other people, through large government bureaucracies with a monopoly on those tax dollars, leads to slower economic growth. Picketty is ignoring the elephant in the room when trying to identity the cause of European economic sluggishness.
And if you want people's quality of life to improve, reduce their tax burdens and lift regulatory restrictions on their business activities, so that they can serve consumers more effectively by investing more of their time and money creating firms that cater to them.
Speculation is productive. All investment is a form of speculation about the future.
Even speculation in the secondary market is productive. It supports the valuation of securities, which allows companies to raise more capital on issuances of new societies, which in turn provides firms with funding for the formation of productive assets.
My bad. I wasn't clear on how I define "speculation". When i use the term "speculation" i refer to things like buying up assets such as housing to extract more wealth from those assets or even to help drive the price up of said asset.
However, buying shares in a startup can be interpreted as "speculation" but I would see it as a good thing, so my choice of terms was not the best.
I dont see Blackrock or Blackstone buying up houses as a good thing. I see that as "speculation". But I realize now my definition of the term is much different from most other people.
I know it seems counter-intuitive, but investors buying up scarce resources like housing, and pushing up their price, is what you want to happen. When the price rises to reflect the scarcity of the product, then the profit motive to produce more of that product increases. That means more houses get built. A high price has a real purpose in the economy, so we should let investors buy up the assets they want so that the price of assets aligns with their respective scarcitym
Now Single Family Houses are a slightly different thing, as much of their value derives from the land that they're built on, and you can't build more land. So the benefit of investors buying up SFHs is going to be much less significant than investors buying up units in high-density developments like condo towers.
Reduces economic coordination? Do you mean collusion? Price-fixing?
Yes, there are advantages and disadvantages to financial transaction taxes. I like them because they are progressive and reduce the profitability of share flipping. In theory, they would also reduce high-frequency trading, which seems like it's casino adjacent.
Transactions are not needed for collusion or price-fixing. Those happen through regular communication channels. Economic coordination happens through price signals and commercial exchange. The more friction is attached to commercial exchange, the less people trade, and the fewer opportunities to coordinate for the benefit of all involved parties can be exploited.
In other words, taxing transactions reduces division of labor, which is one of the main sources of productivity:
They're spending everyone's money. How about we don't enslave people to their government and simply leave us all to spend our own money and resources how we see fit. Don't give me any nonsense about the social contract or democracy. The government has grown beyond any reasonable remit it was granted and is enriching itself or investing in failed programs.
Event sourcing is a pattern (antipatern?) that appears useful because it solves an interpersonal problem. It is the kind of thing that middle management salivates over because it appears to decentralize control, which to such a manager sounds like "gives me more control of my own sphere". Every team creates their own event schemas and subscribes to other teams' events and we all live happily ever after. Never again will we have to wait on some other team to spin up an API for us! It promises an engineering solution to engineering itself.
There hasn't been an improvement on software architecture state of the art since SmallTalk and Relational Databases. Everything else is either a rehash or a rebuttal that proves short lived and ends in a rehash.
> There hasn't been an improvement on software architecture state of the art since SmallTalk and Relational Databases. Everything else is either a rehash or a rebuttal that proves short lived and ends in a rehash.
I explained the same thing to my mgr who is non-technical but is exposed to the relentless flow of tech trends and hype.
I explained:
1-There are 2 developments that have been complete successes:
Relational
The internet
2-Every other trend has some value for some problems but is not a silver bullet and typically does not live up to the enormous hype the industry applies to every new thing. Our job is to pick and choose which tools+methods work for the problems we are trying to solve.
Smalltalk got a lot right very early on that got adopted in bits by everyone eventually. The idea of a fully interactive IDE, designing systems as distributed objects that exchange messages, and so on.
Unfortunately parceling it out and fudging it killed a great concept and we got stuck with corporate driven "OOP" that lives on in Java, Kubernetes, etc.
It's a wonder the people at PARC divined so much of great conceptual designs and other companies got to profit from bungled versions thereof.
Smalltalk is not perfect, it had some good ideas, but also some bad ones (in the sense of not being practical in most contexts) like the "image" mixing of code and data.
I have seen this multiple times before. Management chastising good work because some externality of that work shows up on a graph that they have to talk about at some weekly meeting. It doesn't even have to make the graph look bad, just stick out.
In unix the names of things are just based on what stuck and what was used. My favorite example of name evolution is the jump from `more` to `less` (because less is more...)
My biggest insight about recursion came in my graduate algorithms course. I had a great professor who was talking about dynamic programming. I think that most people can agree that DP is one of the hairier subjects. When I'm griding Leetcode I mostly used to skip these problems and then just hope in an interview I'm never asked about it.
My prof cleared everything up though. He said that DP is what naturally happens whenever you take a recursive algorithm and refactor it to put all the recursive calls into their own data structure. When you are doing recursive fibonacci, you are really just using the call stack as a linked list. So instead of making the recursive call, figure out how value N in the list relies on the previous values and then compute that directly.
For more complicated algorithms where the recursive call has N arguments, that means you need a N-dimensional array (worst case) to store your calls in.
After that lecture I was never scared of dynamic programming because I had a meta-algorithm to produce the DP solution.
1. Write a recursive algo (probably exponentially inefficent)
2. Figure out how to store recursive call data in a data structure
3. Figure out how to populate field (a,b) of the data structure, normally by combining/minimizing/maximizing (a,b-1), (a-1,b)
4. Figure out how to get the answer out of the data structure once you have filled it in
A similar "data structure," that made recursion easy for me, is a set that's populated by an inductive proof in math. I think it's pretty much what you're talking about.
I spent two years during the pandemic working at a hand-made beeswax candle factory. I spent most of my day either running the wax filtering machine or dipping taper candles.
When I received an email saying that my job was going to be work-from-home for the forseeable future, I knew that I had to quit. At the time I had really been relying on office friendships and work for too much of my socialization and self-image, so moving to a remote environment took too much away from me.
I found the light factory work really enjoyable. It was so rewarding to make simple, high quality products wit my hands. It was also nice to have a job where I was interacting with a wider cross-section of people, as I tend to not really enjoy tech culture very much. I had forgotten what it was like to work in an environment where there is comradery among the staff and a healthy distrust of management. I feel like in tech people are always grovelling to their bosses and the C-suite, which rubs me the wrong way. A bunch of temporarily-embarrassed billionaires I guess.
I'm back in tech now, but with the perspective that I am working to achieve some mid-term monetary goals. After I pay down my mortgage considerably so I can cut down my monthly expenses, I will highly consider going back to a crafting job of some sort. Life is too short to spend it on the computer.
I can see that. At my medium-sized company the management is taking the position of mostly hiring senior people right now, because we don't have many openings and they feel like they can be picky. I know my company isn't the only one with this mindset. That leaves a lot of arbitrage for people willing to bet on junior staff.
I completely believe that somatic therapy can be helpful. I have over the last few months been taking an SSRI to help with genralized anxiety. There has been a small effect in my mood/thinking, but for me the largest change that I noticed was actually in my body. I no longer get tension headaches, I don't have horrible gastro problems, my skin has cleared up. I went from being the most ticklish person I knew to being barely ticklish at all.
I feel strongly that these changes in my bodily function are affecting my mood more than the reverse.
> I feel strongly that these changes in my bodily function are affecting my mood more than the reverse.
Depression isn’t just a “mood” disorder. Everything you described (headaches, digestion, hormonal effects, alertness to touch) is controlled by your nervous system and modulated or controlled by your brain.
It doesn’t make sense to separate them and try to draw an arrow of causality because they’re one in the same.
Medical science has known this for a very long time, which is why standard depression inventories include questions about things like gastrointestinal problems.
Interestingly enough, many SSRI-treated patients don’t notice their mood improvements very much because the changes are gradual over many months. Usually if you interview their family members they’ll say the change is more dramatic than the patient self-rates.
Oh I completely agree that they are connected. I just noticed before starting that I would regularly feel the effects of stress in my body and that would put my in a defensive, exhausted, irritated mood. It is hard to have a good time when gas makes it hard to walk straight.
The thing that made me start the drugs was actually this realization that physical anxiety was preceding any anxious thoughts. For years I had done talk therapy (which was very helpful) but that therapy was mostly based around making me realize my anxious thoughts weren't "real". As soon as I stopped having the physical symptoms now I don't have anxious thoughts to begin with.
SSRIs absolutely destroy sex drive and ability to enjoy it for a frightening large fraction of people. For people that take them for extended time that sometimes becomes permanent! People should know the tradeoff they're making and not make the decision lightly.
I recently learned a possible mechanism that could explain this especially in men. Some SSRIs can make men's prolactin levels skyrocket to multiples of the normal value for men and this effect seems to sometimes persist for months after. I've found inconspicuously worded allusions to this in open medical literature, but it doesn't seem widely known or studied. Much of my knowledge is anecdotal from seeing friends and families before and after bloodwork. If they weren't privileged people with great health insurance they would never have gotten the labs to know that the havoc wreaked on their hormones.
Yeah. I don't have as much of a drive, but I haven't really had any problems with sex. I think it helps that my lovers and I have pretty crazy sex so it is rather easy to get excited :)
