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Joined June 2008
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This sort of thing is an unremarkable and everyday occurrence in closely held businesses. That owner/CEO/president/managing partner may freely choose to trade a few points of net margin for charity, whimsy, sentimentality, generosity, honor, or creative flourish.
But for a publicly-traded business, if the market perceives that the corporation is spending money without regard for shareholder value, share price suffers, which means a bunch of people's retirement accounts decline in value.
For financialized businesses—which in relatively recent history have come to dominate our economy—there are way more impediments to sentimentality than for closely held businesses.
This is not the smartest move from a profit-maximizing standpoint btw, but there must be some room in this world for sentimentality or what’s the point?
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Of course, closely held businesses must compete with publicly-traded corporations (as well as corporations owned by institutional private equity), so the pressure and ruthlessness that comes with financialization ripples over to closely held businesses, forcing them to behave more like their financialized peers—or go under.
In the late 1800s, Pope Leo XIII saw this starting to happen, recognized the dangerous widening of interests between owners and workers, and wrote Rerum Novarum as a response.
geoffgraham.substack.com/p/n…
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Yes.
And it’s the worst kind of theft; it is theft by the old and powerful from the young and not-yet-born. It is maximally regressive, a sort of magick.
Money printing is a demon-summoning witch séance that steals the souls of children.
This is one of Saifedean’s most important statements.
Economic growth does not require an expanding money supply as MMT suggests. Growth increases the purchasing power of the money that already exists.
Printing more money transfers purchasing power from those who hold it to those who create and receive the new money first.
That is theft.
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Well, in defense of Karp, for the last decade or two, self-identifying progressives have been consistently supportive of technofeudalism. They are WAY more likely than conservatives to be nodding along with the latest Yuval Harari scheme to end cash, privacy, free speech, etc.
Geoff Graham retweeted
It's been 100 years since the Euclid vs Ambler decision.
The Supreme Court case rationalized takings, justified class discrimination, and set in motion a century of centrally planned exclusion.
It's time to consider what an overturning of the case might look like.
Read my latest onHousing:
▶️viABio
@strongtowns @newurbanism #SCOTUS #housing
A "moat" is an insurmountable competitive advantage that enables one to dominate a market. If you want to become an enormous company, you need moats. If you are a small business (or an aspiring small business) moats tend to discourage you and hurt your prospects for success. If you are customer, they tend to make your life more expensive.
If I understand @kunchenguid correctly, he's suggesting AI is shrinking these moats and that's a bad thing. I appreciate and agree with many criticisms of AI, but that it's breaking up concentrated advantage seems like the very best thing about it.
Another positive is it is underscoring, boldening, and highlighting authenticity and competence. In media and services, authenticity and competence are becoming the new moats, and the concern scale-seekers have with that is those things can only scale so far.
overheard from friends talking about AI in China, and it’s very alarming
- AI short films went massive in China market because of how good the video models are now
- the first wave of people who mastered using AI to generate short films and comics made quite some money because they could produce a lot more content than traditional workflows
- but within just a few months, everybody and their mom could make equally good short films because all the expertise could be written in a markdown file
- when everyone’s more productive, no one actually has an advantage and it’s a race to the bottom. very quickly it became impossible to make money, and everyone’s busier than they were without AI
- the only one making money now is companies like bytedance who owns user demand and distribution. they sell ads to creators who pay to get traffic, and eventually ad spend became 80% of those creators’ operating expense, while AI tokens is less than 5%
so what are the problems here?
1. there’s no moat if you are creating anything with AI
if a human is really good at something, and it’s hard to find more humans who can do the same, they can leverage the scarcity of their skill to get paid very well
but if AI is good at something, it will be infinitely replicated, so there’s no scarcity hence you can’t really expect a sustainable business by creating anything with AI
2. more creators created more content people actually liked. that’s a good thing
but the economical benefit of that all got absorbed by the distribution platforms
there’s a famous chinese poem 遍身罗绮者，不是养蚕人 - it basically says people who dress well aren’t the people making dresses. that’s exactly what’s happening here
if our society doesn’t figure out a better way to distribute wealth, AI will help billionaires become trillionaires while average people become more exhausted than ever
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I wonder why Sargent never finished this.
John Singer Sargent's 'Two Soldiers at Arras,' (1918) was study for a painting but never completed; the soldier on the right is wearing a gas mask while the figure on the left has his hand over his eyes, underlining the dangers of exposure to toxic gas during WW1.
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Pretty much 100% of data centers are subsidized and benefit from special tax treatment.
It’s the most American thing ever to subsidize construction of a building while also making it punishingly difficult to get a building permit.
Geoff Graham retweeted
An evermore cumbersome regulatory climate is a huge factor driving the decline in construction labor productivity, but an underappreciated-and-maybe-bigger factor is Talent Pool Competence.
If you mount a hundred year long, society-wide campaign to discourage every ambitious, motivated, and competent young man from making a living by working with his hands, you're going to end up with industries that depend on manual labor becoming filled with the sorts of people who can't find work elsewhere. They will become filled with illegal immigrants, people who don't speak English, people with criminal records, people with drug problems, etc. These industries will become our employers of last resort.
Construction requires humans to do complicated things with their hands while collaborating with others IRL. In other words, it's extremely resistant to automation—much more so than manufacturing and agriculture—and so a less competent workforce will lead to plummeting productivity that can't be reversed by innovation.
Had we not spent the last century discouraging young men from entering the trades, I don't know that worker ingenuity necessarily would be able to offset our sclerotic regulatory burdens, but the situation would certainly not be as dire as it is.
Add up the fully-loaded cost of the productivity decline and you have a HUGE part of the explanation for why housing costs are so high. Yes, regulatory climate is a big part of it as well, but it's difficult to overstate the cost of our culture-wide, century-long war against the skilled trades.
What a disaster that war has been for America.
Why do people value imperfect homegrown tomatoes more than unblemished ones from the store? Handwritten letters more than emails? Manuscripts more than paperbacks? Original paintings more than prints? Live performances more than recordings? Crafted more than manufactured?
This is another important part of the history, though where Basel says "but", I would say "and".
With the feds tilting the paying field as they had been for over two decades, it made financial sense for automakers to make those sorts of investments.
From "Who Framed Roger Rabbit":
"No one's gonna take this lousy freeway when they can take the Red Car for a nickel!"
"Oh, they'll drive. They'll have to! You see, I bought the Red Car so I could dismantle it!"
youtube.com/watch?v=PtaHNAaD…
This is broadly true for freight and inter-city passenger rail. But there was also a concerted effort by GM, Standard Oil babies, and other corporations in the 1930s-1940s to destroy light rail systems and light railcar manufacturing around the country. xitter.twitterapi.xyz/musharbash_b/status/20…
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In 1916, the federal government began borrowing and taxing Americans to spend on road construction in a meaningful and sustained way. At the time, the United States had the best passenger rail system in the world, and it was, for the most part, privately funded and operated.
Following 1916, federal spending on roads steadily increased. In the 1930s, those subsidies expanded to passenger air travel. Following WWII, municipalities began responding to federal funding and loan guarantee standards, and implemented auto-oriented land use regulations (zoning had been legalized in 1926 via Euclid v Ambler).
Facing competition from federally subsidized alternatives and abridged practicality from changing land use patterns, passenger rail quality began to decline and the rail industry began focusing increasingly and then exclusively on freight. In 1971, the federal government quasi-nationalized passenger rail via Amtrak.
Today, all forms of transportation in American are federally subsidized—cars most of all. Transportation, as with all things that become dependent on federal support, has become painful, dysfunctional, and riddled with waste.
It doesn't have to be this way, but enormous federal intervention makes it so.
Geoff Graham retweeted
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so i can do my art. NOT the other way around.”
- JJ Zanetta, Illustrator
Geoff Graham retweeted
Who do you reckon are viable prospective candidates unbeholden to multinational corporate interests?
Geoff Graham retweeted
Do we have a party that doesn’t worship the government as the answer or doesn’t worship multinational corporations and billionaires as the answer? I don’t think so. Two sides of the same coin. Lack of independence and opportunity for the masses.
Any Atlantans going to see the discussion between Paul Kingsnorth and Carl Trueman this weekend?
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I don't think I'd ever read anything by Trueman before this morning. I can see why he and Kingsnorth are friends.
firstthings.com/playing-god-…
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