Historically, American millionaires had a much higher rate of prior bankruptcies than the general population. A good way to squelch entrepreneurship is to make failure so onerous that itâs not worth the risk.
Everyone from the top to the bottom plays along when the pie is expanding, and endemic corruption can be treated as a predictable cost of doing business.
However, when the pie stops growing, there isnât the level of contract assurance that other rich countries offer. The Pareto optimal competition between powerful interests once growth fully stalls will be very interesting to watch. Xi will have his hands full, picking winners and losers, and lots of billionaires and centimillionaires will head for the door, taking significant capital with them. Worse, foreign investment will tail off, and decreased predictability will cause foreign companies to look hard at production in other places. At the bottom of the economic ladder, corruption will be much more apparent and challenging.
Xiâs bet seems to be that he can use technological repression tools to manage discontent in a downturn. Weâll see; he may be right. If the Stasi had had access to Palantir, Israeli spy software, and Chinese hardware, Checkpoint Charlie might still be in place.
I was reading several months ago that there was a time in the mid â90s that there were a few gay clubs in Russia that were relatively unmolested by the cops, as long as the local âroofâ was paid off.
âUnhousedâ troubles me. It feels like it denudes the impact of a person having no place to call home. Is it supposed to destigmatize âhomelessâ in some way?
Youâre thinking in the right direction. And, employers are going to increasingly insist on what I like to call repressionware, hardware and software installed in your home workspace that effectively leashes you to work, vitiating many of the advantages wfh gives today.
There used to be a business joke youâd hear in the â60s, often attributed to John Wanamaker, a pioneer in marketing:
âHalf the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I donât know which half!â
The joke highlights the dilemma many businesses face in evaluating the effectiveness of their advertising spend. Itâs remained relevant in the advertising and marketing industries, reflecting the challenges in measuring the impact of advertising efforts.
This sounds very knowledgeable. If the reporting is to be believed, why do you think the OpenAI folks might be so impressed by the Q* modelâs skills in simple arithmetic?
I know jack shit, but actual mastery of first principles would seem a massive leap in LLM development. A shift from talented bullshitter to deductive extrapolator does sound worthy of notice/concern.
I like your take. Altman is a Valley hustler, albeit a talented one who ran YC. But, heâs not technologist or a theorist, and I suspect heâs not that interested in attempting to de-risk AGI anymore, particularly now that heâs experienced the market hype. The staff who want to be billionaires clotted to him; the staff who are committed to the original ethical vision stuck with Ilya.
I had a teacher in high school, many decades ago, who had owned an orange juice processor. He explained that the generic store brand got the start and end of production runs; name brand got the middle.
Hereâs a terrible rec for price considerations: Penrose.
They make the best-smelling waxes I have ever encountered. If youâre someone who is sensitive to the complexities and subtleties of smells, their waxes are god tier. You will find something to adore.
But, theyâre not cheap, so a poor answer to your question.
I like this cat.