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Replying to
Here’s a small glimpse of why I dislike what large concentrations of money does to humanity. Say you gave a 3rd gen failson sitting on 100 million with no ideas. So, he sounds on yachts, booze, prostitutes, whatever. You could argue that the “dumb money” gets smart 1 degree out
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Replying to
Well, just like gravitational lensing is a side effect of GR which is not bendable by human will, financial lensing is also a side effect of what we’re programmed to do by evolution - chase status. It’s also not bendable by will. All one can hope for is to keep avoiding it.
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Replying to
Interesting thread but especially how a random book laying around affected your thinking for decades, that kind of thing fascinates me. I wonder what random reading affected others?
Replying to
A Dharmic economy wud've addressed several of the points U make.Starting with education, language, culture, respect for traditions etc, one has to build a society that gives a platform for most to make passion about something they have, a basis for livelihood. Imagine the impact!
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