I recently heard this explained () in the following way: three is the smallest number where you can set up an expectation (with the first two) and then break it. This is why three is such a common number, not just in jokes but in all sorts of story-telling.
() In a lecture by the mathematician & author Sarah Hart.
Is the US as it operates today a free market (how free?) or a weighted control economy where the larger players have a greater weight of control of media and the political landscape via owned outlets and subsidised senators?
Do small players in the US economy have equal access to the market, or are they overshadowed by near oligarchies?
the "control" of a "weighted control economy" is usually enforced through government (including those politicians you reference). so when we bring in more government then it's less free market. how close we are getting to a free market depends on who is in power and calling for reduced government intervention/regulations for businesses.
as far as control of media, traditional media is becoming increasingly irrelevant and when free speech is allowed on social media the economy becomes more free.
and small players seem to disrupt all the time. openai being the most obvious recent example. twitch being another notable example before that.
i usually don't respond to distracting personal questions, but your use of bicameral confused me a little. did you mean to say binary?
> the "control" of a "weighted control economy" is usually enforced through government
It is extremely common for large private firms to have weighted control in an economy. Sometimes their control is bolstered by government and sometimes it is hindered by it. But in a completely unregulated market it would be common for monopolies to pop up which could then control large sections of the economy. There simply is no simple linear relationship between "free markets" and government intervention.
> when free speech is allowed on social media the economy becomes more free
Sadly the loudest "free speech proponents" who run social media firms are actually just interested in allowing the speech they want. They will still do everything they can to limit the speech of those they disagree with.
> when we bring in more government then it's less free market.
Let's go to the extreme with your logic. If you completely remove the government you end up with the mafia textbook. The easier way to win at the game is taking out the competition with lethal force. Once that's done there's no one to compete with you, no "free market", congratulations you won.
Why compete in bringing value when you can just use your money to takeout the competition.
Bicameral was used by Jaynes in the sense of distinct seperate chambers of the mind, rather than political chambers; I can't say I agreed with his thesis but I always enjoyed his argument and the apropriation of the word.
> i usually don't respond to distracting personal questions
These were specific questions to tease out why you're presenting free market OR planned economies as the only choices- it smacked of certain type of central north american libertarianism that uses Heinlein's early teen reader simplifications.
OpenAi being described as a small player is laughable, small players don't appear with one billion US pledged in backing and sheperded by core established technocrats.
BTW, the question was: "Is the US as it operates today a free market?"
i don't think anyone has a clear answer for "winning the argument" since definitions can be endlessly debated.
i think a more useful question is "what about the existing US economy is what makes it work/effective?" another useful question is "what about other economies make them less effective than the US economy?"
to answer the first question, the US economy works better when it's a freer market. magatte wade gives a convincing answer to the second question about africa when she points out it's generally very difficult to start a business in african countries.
i'm curious about what alternative you are interested in promoting and how. are you against free markets or do you have ideas on how to make markets more free?
I don't: that is a different question which isn't as useful as the one actually asked. Like the person you responded to without answering, I, too, am interested in hearing your direct and clear answer to the question, "Is the US as it operates today a free market?"
If you can define what a free market is (to you), you have a higher likelihood of your question being answered, rather than continuing to ask it without any clarification. This is similar to what the parent was saying.
there are parts of the American market that are free and there are parts that are not. We'd have to get into specific details to classify said parts.
While I don't think the existing economy is so binary (bicameral?), you are free to assume either a free market or not and make your arguments accordingly to explore the principles of free markets versus planned economies. I don't think a critique of the general principles of free market versus not relief on my specific answer. We are talking about ideals espoused in a self-proclaimed manifesto, so it's appropriate to speak about the ideals.
> there are parts of the American market that are free and there are parts that are not.
That has been my observation, too: it is not a free market, but rather a composite.
Why do you think Americans chose to implement the "non-free" parts? What do you imagine they want out of government intervention, and why? Why do you think that Americans believe intervention is better than no intervention?
Those are the questions I think are worth discussing along the lines of the initial question, if the goal is to change what people want. You first must understand, empathize with, and internalize their motivation for what they currently want.
> While I don't think the existing economy is so binary
As a call back to how this started you yourself partitioned global(?) economies into
> you have free markets (which the manifesto supports) or planned economies
so you did in fact think that economies are this OR that.
For those of us in the real world many G20 and othe economies are hybrid with a mix of both features and "free market" is a loose term of idealogy that can mean one thing to readers of Adam Smith in his contemporous context and other things to various flavours of modern US libertarians.
How would your "ideal" market then look like? I'm not getting what it "means" for small players to have equal access to the market than large players, of course greater resources will lend itself to greater reach.
The ideal free market is one where that exact effect doesn’t exist. Why would it be optimal for more wealth to naturally accrue more wealth? That is definitionally anti-competitive ergo suboptimal in the capitalist’s worldview.
indeed but sometimes abstractions are useful. i would argue that in this case the binary is useful because of the PP's use of the word "totalitarian" (as in "totalitarian neofeudalist").
i am arguing that the word was misapplied to the essay since the essay was promoting free markets and it's central planning that offers opportunity for totalitarian control.
If one could have a "free market" in the sense that there were no state to begin with (which one can't) then you wind up with anarcho capitalism, in which a single entity wins because returns to capital accelerate. This single entity can then do whatever it likes.
In reality, you start with a state and then have increasing regulatory capture by large private entities who turn the state into a system that exists purely to enforce their property rights. As they do so they eliminate public purpose.
Whether you have planned totalitarianism or anarcho capitalist totalitarianism the result is the same. If you have 100% returns to either labour or capital, or you try to eliminate either public or private purpose, then you must have totalitarianism.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto imagines that you can have no state AND no regulatory capture, it's garbage. There are only 2 things in the economy: labour and capital. You have public purpose and private purpose. You balance those things, you have social democracy and innovation. You let it slip to any extreme and you're gonna have a bad time.
> anarcho capitalism, in which a single entity wins because returns to capital accelerate. This single entity can then do whatever it likes.
You could have a natural monopoly form in anarcho-capitalism but unless they also grabbed a monopoly on the use of force and barred competition (basically became the state) then if they did abuse their monopoly position they would inevitably have competition arise even if it was required to route around whatever their monopoly was.
> unless they also grabbed a monopoly on the use of force and barred competition (basically became the state)
That's absolutely inevitable.
That's why I call it feudalism. What you just described is like the middle ages with various independent scattered kingdoms, or like a collapsed state where rival warlords compete for control, with the occassional uprising.
Well, that is any modern (or even pre-modern) nation-state too, vying for control over land and resources. Just because we don't have wars as much today over these things does not mean that they were not historically the norm. It's not feudalism, it's is the nature of humans to conquer and be conquered, regardless of whatever system they're in, political or economical.
In the article they are talking with students who haven't graduated yet, a couple of PMs, and one software engineer who took a three month break between gigs and has been looking for a month.
Ten years into my self-taught software engineer career I ran across a statement "if you aren't seeing problems in your work that can be solved by graphs (or any advanced algorithms really), then you are likely avoiding those problems."
I thought he may be right, picked up an algorithm book and started a "coding club" at the company I was working at where we'd meet and go over the details of a specific algorithm.
This is a great comment. I was self-taught and then went back to school, so I have pretty good experience with both paths.
I hear a lot of time from developers "I never use those fancy algorithms!" or "I've never needed any math beyond HS algebra!" but I find that very often it's precisely because programmers aren't familiar with those solutions that they don't see the areas they can be applied to.
One of the biggest insights from my after-self-taught CS degree was that one class in particular stands out as a the dividing line between feeling knowledgable and not: Compilers.
To anyone wanting to improve their CS background: If you can't get back to school full time, try to audit a course on compilers (this is one area where having a structured course really helps). Pretty much all aspects of Computer Science are touched on in that one area: algorithms, data structures, graph theory, theory of computation etc. Plus it's just a lot of challenging programming to be done.
But once you see a high level program that you wrote compiled to assembly by a compiler that your wrote every piece of, you really feel like you understand both CS and software.
Also, check out all the free MIT OpenCourseWare CS classes. I listened/watched through a bunch of them a few times and then did some online exercises (leetcode, advent of code, hackerrank, et al) and it really helped me understand algorithms better and I also became a much better programmer for it.
I'd also suggest going through Network+ and Security+ study guides too. IDK if the certs are worth it because I haven't actually taken the tests, but the books alone taught me a ton of the important concepts at a high level.
"money doesn't grow on trees and runways are very real and scary, so without deadlines companies fundamentally cannot function."
Runways being real doesn't mean you need deadlines. Deadlines are useful to motivate the unmotivated.
The better path to dealing with shrinking runways is early and continuous delivery of valuable software. This is facilitated by making sure the team is aligned and onboard with the solution (for motivation) then giving them the environment, support, and trust to get the job done.
This is further enhanced by self-organized teams since the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
With that emergence, the team will deliver valuable and working software at regular intervals (measured by weeks or months at most, preferring the short timescale) and the stakeholders will determine when that valuable software is valuable enough for customers to pay for.
This early and continuous delivery is the primary measure of progress. It also facilitates a welcoming of changes to the requirements at any stage (as the focus is delivering value, not getting a roadmap done).
Roadmaps and deadlines will often get in the way of this system of efficiency in software delivery precisely because the estimation game gives team permission to use all the time negotiated in the estimation, which is already padded enough to ensure an "under promise and over delivery."
Do you know what this median annual household income of $71k means outside of the USA? Inequality is a global problem, unfortunately. Cheapest Tesla being generally affordable in one country doesn't mean it's not fairly expensive.
Side notes:
- the World Inequality Database is full of interesting data (https://wid.world/)
- I'm not sure the median income is always relevant (I mean, if half of a given population couldn't affort to eat correctly, I wouldn't say food is "generally affordable")
- fortunately, not everybody needs a Tesla, let alone a car
Well, what's "generally affordable"? $30k for a car isn't even that expensive these days (in the US at least), relative to the competition. The average cost of a new car in the US is almost $50k. Except for the very cheapest new cars you're almost certainly going to pay over $20k.
