Very large quantities of concentrated capital can bend truth rays and warp epistimology and ontology. There is a financial lending effect by which you can detect the presence of large cold masses of money that otherwise can’t be seen
-
-
1 degree out, the $ goes to yacht designers, bartenders, etc. So damage seems low. One person living a life I would not want for myself. But who am I to judge. Except it’s not just one person. Hundreds of people are living lives shaped by the logic of 1st order failson spending.
Show this thread -
Would they do something else more fulfilling with their lives if their best option hadn’t been pandering to unimaginative failson’s miserable idea of a good life?
Show this thread -
The economy is often compared to a large distributed computer (correct). It is often assumed to be an efficient computer under some narrow conditions (also kinda correct). What is not often talked about is — who programs it and for what. And the answer to that is not pretty.
Show this thread -
It is programmed by the stewards of the largest, slowest piles of money. Each dollar you hold is like a right to one cpu cycle. Even governments can’t alter this landscape wholesale. Only reshape it in certain known ways.
Show this thread -
It’s like if your family had one tv and the tantrummy 5 year old insists on controlling the remote and will only allow the tv to play his favorite kid cartoons on endless repeat. It’s a powerful device but can do only a fraction of what it is capable of.
Show this thread -
That’s what even an ideal efficient market controlled by large capital piles is like.
Show this thread -
I don’t mind spending a reasonable fraction of my time thinking about my personal finances. Cost of doing the business of living life. But i grudge every minute I have to devote to modeling and predicting consequence of existence of large piles of tens/hundreds of billions.
Show this thread -
If I’m consulting for a company that makes widgets its because I am interested in widgets. Not in the psychology of a dozen bores who own the PE company that bought the widget company and don’t give a shit about widgets.
Show this thread -
I hate that any sufficiently important and interesting project turns into a “money psychology of boring people” project if you give it long enough. Kinda like how any social media product turns into a messaging app if you give it enough time. So everybody has to think about that.
Show this thread -
One of my weird influences is Alberto Moravia’s Time of Desecration, which I randomly read as a teenager because it happened to be around. Not the sort of book I’d pick myself. But the theme of desecrating money stayed with me. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1980/08/14/moravias-victims/ …pic.twitter.com/htlluIydMV
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.