I'm seeing an incredible amount of ads for companies that let you gamble real money on your phone. Sometimes it's back to back to back to back commercials for online app casinos. This seems really dangerous and a sign of a tragically unhealthy and predatory economy - I can't think of anything more negative-value-add than gambling. Has there been a regulatory change that allows this, or has this been going on for some time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Casino
It seems harmful to let gambling be unregulated...
Even loot boxes in games are illegal https://boundingintocomics.com/2020/10/30/netherlands-rules-...
There is a Chinese Internet slang "智商税" ("IQ tax"), used to describe products with questionable actual value, like pseudoscience-based health products, luxurious goods with crazy price tags. The idea is that only people with poor judgement would buy such products, and in doing so are being taxed for low IQ.
But a state-run casino... that's a literal IQ tax.
We also have state-run casinos in Québec, as well as state-run lotteries. They have a legal monopoly on gambling, except for some exceptions for bars and online betting which is practically unregulated.
It seems barely any better make a state revenue stream out of it.
We have the same thing on Hungary, there is one state controlled gambling company that's under heavy regulation (18+ only, full with warning signs against gambling, barely any advertisements, has only a few old-school products like scratch cards)
If it's something like a police officer whose funding comes from collecting fines, sure, there are really bad incentives there. But if the government casino department isn't eating what it kills then it doesn't seem like a problem.
No stockholders who expect infinite profit growth, no CxO with bonuses dependent on increasing revenue, and has public oversight by default: government should be the only entity trusted to directly engage in any vice business. They are the only entity I trust to put honest effort in decreasing their user base.
- corporation’s primary revenue stream
- local government’s major revenue stream
- state/federal government’s minor revenue stream
- criminal org’s major revenue stream (prohibition)
Given those choices, state+ size governments are least likely to paperclip-optimize for gambling “revenue”, and federal/national government would care the most about negative externalities since they compete with other nations, on metrics removed from raw “tax” revenue.
And the US has state lottos already.
It was actually less regulated. There were gambling sites for children based on electronic collectibles from video games. It was becoming a billion dollar industry before Steam put their foot down.
A friend was close to launching a venture in the space and their first year revenue projections were around 600k assuming middling/unimpressive growth (he was a teenager at the time, didn't really register how fucked up the business was). Medium-sized ventures in this space raked in several million and the largest were definitely bringing in tens of millions of dollars. I know at some point there were concerns of money laundering...
Playtika just IPO'd for 12B and they seem to mostly make gambling apps. I've seen people play them on planes and it's slightly disturbing. I took an SF -> Miami redeye once and a lady seemingly played it during the entire flight.
I've never seen anything like this in my life and had the exact same reaction.
I'm like, you said that? are you trying to get banned?
It seems like it's gotten a lot worse after COVID, though
Now the NBA is heavily pushing gambling and the revenue that comes with it, In addition the NFL is also pushing fantasy football which is veiled gambling, a few years ago every commerical for an NFL game had 50% of its ads set to either draftkings or fanduel which are both gambling sites. So I see a huge predatory gambling cloud enveloping all sports which is a really sad turn of affairs.
I follow soccer, and right after that mlssoccer.com started publishing vegas betting odds for all the games, and ESPN FC started using UK betting odds for EPL and EUFA competitions.
They're definitely warming up Americans to the idea of normalizing betting and sports betting in the mainstream.
Keep in mind that black market sports betting is/was a multi billion dollar industry in the US so much of what you are seeing now is just more visible.
TV aside, there has been some drama over this on Twitch. Streamers are shown gambling massive (to you or me) amounts of money daily. Kids watch this. It's entirely unregulated (maybe not in theory, but in practice). Some people have done investigations into the companies and they seem very shady. There's absolutely no reason to believe these companies aren't directly supporting or sponsoring the streamers monetarily, or even tweaking the numbers behind the scenes to make them lucky. It's been alleged for gacha games in the past, and I definitely believe people will go further for real money if they can.
When Hollywood was built in the 1920's it was not exactly the backbone of the economy. The article argues that the Chinese Government sees value in the economy beyond GDP goes up and cash flows good. Technology and manufacturing are important to national security.
The article quote Xi Jinping saying “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” I guess the national question for the other super power is how important is this "real economy" to itself. Is too much talent and labor sucked up in profitable activity that is suboptimal for a nation? Are these 21st century company's like Netflix good enough for our nation?
This is a valid point, and I tend to agree with it. However I see entertainment as part of the "real" economy. It's an incredibly old industry, provides real value to nearly every human being, creates high-, medium-, and low-skilled employment across a wide variety of disciplines, can allow your culture to punch above its weight, and produces art that endures across generations and centuries (for example, Shakespeare).
Literally all you need to entertain people is talent and a space.
To be fair, the quantity and availability of novels/fictions was pretty low before the fifties, so I guess there is some truth to it... Though the timeframe is definitely longer then only Netflix's existence
I'd happily veggie out on a couch with a favorite book series and live in fantasyland for days (alas, real world interferes...).
Given the option of gorging on books or gorging on Netflix over a long weekend dawn till dusk, I bet most people would choose Netflix. If you randomly divided the people into those two groups and made them read and the others watch, more readers would wash out than watchers.
I tried that. It soon becomes utterly boring, no matter how good the show is.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binge-watching
[2]http://www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/stories/2019/04/kruger-binge-wa...
No, it hasn't. It has been somewhat since the much more recent introduction of “on demand” programming to cable, but that was basically just the introduction of streaming into cable in response to streaming services.
I think "on-demand" is a blessing. We are no longer tied to broadcaster schedules, have to remember to "program the DVR", writers don't have to write a cliffhanger every 12 minutes for an ad break.
I also think including this in the discussion will, perhaps, emphasize the nuance of what I believe you're indirectly referencing -- the economics of how humans choose to spend their time (sometimes referred to as the "Attention Economy").
I believe literally optimizing for something such as GDP fails to take into account freedom / liberty which is likely something most on this website would agree is incredibly valuable in a society.
I think the difficulty is in creating a consensus around what is acceptable relative to the "Attention Economy". It might even be impossible given that this seems almost indistinguishable from culture -- and there will likely never be a single unified culture if and until something as paradigm-shifting as a multi-planetary species is realized.
Video game bashing seems like another moral panic to me. People are spending more time playing video games than slaving away flipping burgers. So what?
As you have articulated, innovation tends to manifest when humans spend their attention on things that also further drive the demand for their attention.
The point being that the context here is significantly more gray than black / white.
The Video Game industry seems like its doing just fine without Government assistance. The Government can focus on investing in creating manufacturing hubs in the US instead.
Shortage of labor? Create a new Visa and citizenship pathway specifically for electronics engineers, while investing in US universities to expand the EE departments and scholarships related to EE.
Its all possible if the US Government wants to.
Which is why everyone capable tries to get into FAANG for AdTech. Nurturing people to think long term and to have a producer + explorer mentality will yield better results. Critical thinking with (endless) ambition is the key.
Even if the USA authorities subsidize EE study it is not certain that new grads will go into EE jobs and not into a bootcamp to respec. Get rich quick incentives like ones given by FAANG are really strong and it would take a lot to counter them. One solution, ironically, would be to do the same as China is doing. Dismantle FAANGs and the problem disappears. Smart people will flock to some other branch and maybe IT people will go to boot-camps to become EE on their own volition (free markets).
That's pretty much a game of predict the future, get it wrong on economy scale and you don't have anyone doing anything not according to plan... you can / will get a disaster even if you get it right here or there.
And I'm not sure that's the point anyway. China could simply ban "clicking heart icons on photos" and wipe out domestic demand outright, and as far as risky financial deals ... China seems to have no problem with that.
What's the equivalent of Shenzen in US?
https://www.brookings.edu/research/global-manufacturing-scor...
US is at 18% of global manufacturing vs China's 20%, but the US only gets 12% of it's overall GDP from manufacturing compared to China's 27%, and with about half the percentage of it's workforce (with a much smaller workforce).
If the US had to manufacture the products that are currently manufactured in China, the amount of dollars generated would be lower, or the share of people employed in manufacturing would explode. GDP would of course decrease.
Not so today
Also, the moon landing.
Our politicians are influence (unavoidably!) by the people who have the most time and money to spend lobbying them. Even if you reformed lobbying, this would still be the case - even if it was all just letter-writing with no money attached. Wealthy people could send way more letters than harried poor ones.
So the more you have, the more influence you get. BUT the more you have, the more you can fend for yourself, so also the less you need much of that influence! And then the government being unaligned with the needs of most people starts making a lot of sense, without even needing malicious conspiracies.
There's neither profit for businesses nor politicians in giving poor people what they need.
There appears to be a real corruption problem in the US that is distorting what politicians can do for poor people.
Successful parents and sage founders define value differently.
They don't see dollars. They see sense.
I am unsure what colloquial definition GP refers to as the counterpoint. Surely you aren't both suggesting sense and dollars are non-overlapping?
The difference is the perspective of time.
A quick buck versus a strategic investment.
e.g. What made sense to Page and Brin in 1998 - the algorithm that would become famous as Page Rank, had only a trivial market value at the time, whilst Yahoo was "worth" billions.
A further productive update to your worldview might be "The degree of centralization of power is proportional to how far out of equilibrium a market can get." This doesn't just function at the macro level (i.e. Google/Facebook/Bezos being able to horribly misallocate capital based on their past successes). It also explains things like bad executives within a corporation: because decision-making is centralized and the results of a decision won't be seen for years, a bad executive can waste billions of dollars and thousands of man-years, but ultimately they're going to get kicked out (or the company goes bankrupt) and the organization will return to market norms. This is also one reason for the liquidity premium (and hence high compensation) for executives: since the consequences of a bad hire are so bad and so future-loaded, companies tend to be overcautious in their hiring, which means only people with excellent pedigrees are considered and they can demand a premium for it.
Also very relevant to historical China, which had this habit of centralizing extreme power with the emperor. Things would go great if you had a good emperor. But occasionally they'd make a blunder (like the cessation of the Ming treasure fleets) that profoundly altered the course of human history. The European powers had much more decentralized decision-making. When Columbus was turned down by the kings of England, France, and Portugal, he tried Spain, and the rest is history.
Would you say that the value of feeding the orphan is zero?
Would you say that the value of chasing those asymptotic improvements is enormous?
Key observation: the market notion of value is very different from what people would colloquially agree is valuable.
Economists would say this is obvious. In one sense, it is -- we've all seen it in a million (hopefully) less-extreme incarnations. However, if you were to watch these economists closely, within 60 seconds of claiming it was obvious, they would kick out an argument that fudges the distinction between the economic notion of value and, well, value (the colloquial notion of value should really need no qualifier -- I applied one above simply to highlight that it had been hijacked).
That's the bit to pay attention to: substituting the concept of "economic value" for "value." This innocent-sounding approximation is actually a trojan horse containing extreme laissez-faire assumptions. With a mere slip of the tongue, they invite you (or you invite yourself!) to assume the conclusion of any economic rationalization, cloaking whatever cockeyed scheme the markets have cooked up today in a veil of artificial legitimacy.
Anyway, the day I plugged this into my worldview and forcibly separated the concept of economic value from the concept of value, something interesting happened. I previously had two competing views of the economy:
1. Gee, it sure seems to always act as a mercenary for the rich and powerful an awful lot.
2. It is a tool for revealing, weighing, subdividing, balancing, and reconciling collective preferences, both directly and transitively.
Before I separated the notion of "economic value" from the notion of "value" in my head, I was willing to accept that perhaps the hierarchies and mercenary behavior of #1 were merely emergent properties of an optimization process that truly did maximize value per #2. (Note -- I said "value," not "economic value." Did you catch that?) I saw this as a deeply legitimizing factor for economics in general, especially because I was keenly aware of failures in the colloquial definition of value (it's really bad at transitivity, for instance).
After I separated the notion of "economic value" from the notion of "value" in my head, I realized that the weighing factor made the optimization process of #2 equivalent to the mercenary process of #1. If a few people have all the money, then "weighing collective preferences" just means doing what those people want. To the degree that's currently the case, the optimization process is a silly ruse. It's a continuum, though. If everyone has some money, everyone gets represented in the decision making. If a large group of people -- say, "the middle class" -- has all the money, their collective interests will be well represented, but those on the bottom get drowned out. "Economic value" begins to diverge from "value." If a few people have all the money, they are the only ones who decide what's (economically) valuable, preferences of everyone else be damned. "Economic value" diverges completely from "value." In short, the divergence between what's valuable and what's economically valuable is proportional to the level of inequality.
The subtle nastiness of this situation is that the system runs away. You start with market forces that truly do represent the collective will of the people but as the wealth starts to concentrate more and more, the weighing factor increasingly disregards the voices on the bottom and pays more attention to those on top. Stocks go up, jobs disappear, rent increases, wages stagnate, poverty skyrockets -- apply the weighing factor and you see that none of these are bugs. They are all features. The predictive capability of our worldview has increased.
There is hope, though. Chaos is the enemy of skewed wealth distributions, of consolidated power, and ultimately of this divergence between value & economic value. There are exponentially more ways for wealth to be mixed than for it to be concentrated, so any kind of chaos can make it happen. Capitalism is anti-fragile -- it degenerates into feudal exploitative nastiness if you leave it alone, but if you stir the pot once in a while it truly is the marvel that economists paint it to be. How to do that? Well, in the happy case the chaos comes from growth. In the sad case, it comes from violence. Here's hoping the next big upset comes soon and from growth, rather than stagnation and eventual violence.
In housing, that's zoning for single-family houses which limits affordability and provides exclusivity vs. apartments or boarding houses, except in downtown cores which aren't enough supply to really move the needle (and expensive for other reasons).
In US healthcare, it appears there is regulatory capture from insurance companies and private health care providers, both successfully ganging up on the government to minimize real competition or strict price regulation.
Without real competition for a product that consumers can't feasibly opt out of, no heavyweight market participant interested in driving the price down, that's what you get. But yeah, testing is good too. Get the government to try out 10 years of broadly available at-cost housing competition and public healthcare, then evaluate :-P
AKA: you vote with your wallet but some people vote 0 times, some 1, some can cast one million times - if you do the math.
That's a difficult question to answer generally, however it's also clearly not one that markets "solve." That's easy to see with the example of addictive drugs (which the market shows can be very profitable), unless you're willing to argue there's social value in destroying many people's lives through addiction.
That's not to say that financial value and social value aren't sometimes aligned, it just that you can't assume the former implies the latter.
One little thing I find annoying is that whenever someone points out some issue with free markets, someone always seems to reply with something that amounts to "have you considered free markets?" Whatever the problem, markets are the solution, even if the problem stems from markets themselves.
The Soviet Union had serious problems, but it's a mistake to reason from that to the conclusion that markets are in some way ideal. They have their own problems, and we don't have access to an ideal system, so we have to try to deal with individual problems and make tradeoffs.
Maybe Free Markets were the best you could do with the quantitative decision-making tools available to Stalin, and maybe central planning with modern AI/ML/Operations Research techniques would be more successful than a free-market approach.
Or maybe, the Soviet Union would have done just fine if there were no United States trying to thwart it at every turn.
As troksky said "In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat."
Who gets to decide what is allocated to whom? Giving these starting conditions it's no wonder in every single attempt at this has resulted in a death toll in the millions. Nothing the USA did from the outside forced these countries to starve, imprison and murder their own people. Why didn't this happen in the USA? Or the rest of the west? Why only in regimes that tried to control more aspects of an individuals life then ever attempted before? Most of the argument I am making is a poor rehash of "the road to serfdom".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/299215.The_Road_to_Serfd...
Blaming the west for the terrors of Soviet Russia is as mistaken as blaming the allies for what the Nazis did in Europe.
Beyond that, the argument of starvation is flawed, because Russia in the market system had worse famine than the USSR, and crucially, the USSR ended famine in the Russian Empire, not started it. You can argue there were unnecessary famines, and you'd be right, but saying that famine is an inevitable component of the Soviet system is wrong because there were one/two, at the beginning, and then none after.
The actual limit to Central Control assuming that the people doing the central control are willing to let consumer goods follow what people want is data and the ability to process it. In the USSR this was very low - data collection was manual and plans were updated every 5 years. The bureaucracy opposed every attempt to improve the situation as that would usurp their power. Beyond that the freedom that individuals can have as far as what to buy and which jobs to build is only limited by what others are willing to work for.
It's also not true that they attempted to control more aspects of someone's life as ever before. Feudal states had much more control than the Soviet state on their inhabitants. Some capitalist states had more control.
There are arguments to be made here. A poor rehash of a poor book written by an author who openly admitted that he started with conclusions and worked backwards from there is not one.
The reality is much more complex than market=good everything else=bad. Heck, even the Soviet weren't always opposed to markets. Their ideology didn't even explicitly oppose markets, only class distinction in production.
I’d be surprised if there aren't neo-Nazis that argue exactly that, just as modern Leninists argue that Soviet Communism might have worked out great for everyone if it wasn't for the USA.
No. That, along with the rise of Communism in Russia, the rise of Italian fascism, and...was among the indirect causes.
- Arthur Jensen (Network, 1976)
Beyond that, the Soviet economy was solidly middling as far as the world was concerned.
This is not correct. The authority is there, it's just less visible.
Market forces are extremely unequal: a small percentage of humanity, e.g. 0.1% influence 90% of the value of the housing market in all popular cities in developed countries.
No. The GGP's examples are a direct counterexample to that idea.
Being a little more general: based on past experience, I interpret general complaints about "regulatory capture" without further clarification as complaints about regulation in general and advocacy for "market solutions" as an alternative. However, a poorly regulated market will almost certainly result in a great many monopolies and businesses that convert some negative externality into private profit, which are the apotheosis of the idea that financial value != value to society.
> a poorly regulated market will almost certainly result in a great many monopolies
A market regulated in poorly thought through ways can certainly lead to monopolies. But monopolies specifically are almost entirely due to regulatory capture. Case in point internet service in the US is almost always given either a de facto monpoloy or a straight up legislated monopoly for a particular area. That's why internet service in the US sucks so much. Countless regulatory burdens on businesses are designed to favor large companies, and is one of the many regulatory reasons that companies merge so often and industries in the US are oligopolies.
And that's not to mention the actual government run monopolies like utilities and the post office. It was despicable that the post office killed Outbox and prevents people from using their own mailboxes however they want. https://smallbiztrends.com/2014/05/usps-killed-outbox-mail.h...
If the US had good representation, maybe the regulations it creates would generally benefit the consumer rather than entrenched business interests. Unfortuantely, that's not really the case today.
Together, they power nearly the entire retail transaction market in China. Alibaba heavily drives commercial transactions and Tencent powers the vast amount of personal communication (WeChat).
They are quite profitable as effective monopolies, but are very valuable to society.
China is food-safe in calories. Not in dollars, because China produces less expensive food than they import.
While yes the raw materials are currently imported from Australia, in war-time they would be imported from Russia and Central Asia. Preparations are being made right now to facilitate this.
China is also #4 in iron ore reserves, they just aren't as economical as Australia's. Of course that doesn't matter much in wartime.
Australia is hard to invade because it's a separate continent, not solely because it would be protected by nuclear weapons. It's all the other normal stuff related to the challenge of conducting opposed landings over long distances that would make it very costly to attack. The nukes are a plus but they are not magical. All modern nations have tons of expendable population. It's politically convenient to present nukes as the ultimate deterrent but it's not backed by empirical evidence. The other issue is that due to test ban treaties we really do not know how currently existing stockpiles of such weapons will perform under real conditions. We could have vast stockpiles of antiquated garbage. We just don't know.
It's much simpler, cheaper and faster to simply import the ores via land from Asia. Which is one of the core reasons for the BRI.
China considers Australia to be within its primary sphere of influence (a rapidly expanding sphere as far as China is concerned, as they push outward militarily).
Japan was willing to invade Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and Australia during its Empire days. China is a drastically more potent superpower than the Empire of Japan ever was and China's military reach will be far greater.
In an Asia war scenario (which is what we're talking about here), Australia is absolutely on the table to be invaded by China. It's a prime candidate if China's foes attempt an inevitable resource blockade (which would see the BRI targeted early on). Invading Australia also disables a critical, reliable ally for the US side. The US & Co. would need vast regional resource supplies to sustain for long at all in a conflict with China in Asia; China would know that, and would understand that Australia is one of the most important resource suppliers both regionally and globally. At a minimum China would seek to cripple Australia functionally, and an invasion is ideal toward that ultimately (otherwise the Australians would just keep rebuilding and repairing damage).
European empires would never seek to conquer territory in Asia, it's too far away. Britain would never seek to conquer India, it's too far away.
China sends its vast fishing fleets to illegally plunder South American fishing waters. It has blanketed much of Africa for resource extraction purposes. It certainly considers Australia as a resource target within its reach. And it's more than that, China had already fallen into the mindset of considering Australia to be increasingly within its sphere of influence and control, which is why the CCP has gotten so angry at Australia in the recent political-economic conflict between the two. They had plans for Australia and assumed they would be dictating terms going forward.
There is zero evidence that China is developing the capability of invading anyone except Taiwan for the next 25 years, and heaps of evidence to the contrary.
There is stupid and then there is literally physically impossible.
As far as Britain invading India, it's not like if they had just one day woke up and decided to do it. They built up the capability to invade colonies over literally centuries before being able to start the invasion around 1760. Meanwhile China didn't even start building that capability. They don't even plan to deploy stealth carrier craft, up until today their projects are for export only, nor blue water invasion craft, etc...
Anyways, it's almost impossible to invade Australia in 2021. Even the US would seriously struggle.
It would not take any special creativity (merely an act of will, which would certainly be present in wartime) for the US to scale its steel and other raw materials production incredibly quickly. Sure, there might be a lag time before all the new capacity comes online, but that would not be happening at SF housing approval rates, instead at Liberty Ship construction rates.
One thing is watching some dumb action movie once a week, another thing is filling one's free time with entertainment every day.
It feels like there can never be a trustable implementation of a "value or rentseeking?" oracle, since the system implementing it would also be under selection and pressure from the virtual gains to be had from corruption.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_economy
"The real economy concerns the production, purchase and flow of goods and services (like oil, bread and labour) within an economy. It is contrasted with the financial economy, which concerns the aspects of the economy that deal purely in transactions of fiat money and other financial assets, which represent ownership or claims to ownership of real sector goods and services."
Perhaps it's about selfishness?
The obvious losers would be landlords (the literal definition of "rent-seeking"), because without that piece of paper, there's just a tenant that lives in that apartment and you have no claim on any of their money. A carpenter who actively builds a house, however, is creating value: even without the state, people still need houses, and he has useful skills for things people want. Financial assets would crash, trademarks would become worthless, there'd be open season on patents. Medical care is still creating value. People who grow and prepare food would be very useful. Software engineering is in the middle: new software that people use is creating value, but just sitting on a service that you own exclusive rights to because it's protected by copyright & trade secret laws is rent-seeking.
This also illustrates a lot of the confusion between the two. Without the state to enforce contracts, there's no way to tie "the value you create now" with "getting paid for it later". When a carpenter builds a house, he now owns a house that he can pay for later - but without the state to enforce his right to the deed of his house, he's got nothing to sell and no reason to invest the labor in the first place. Same with the service that the software engineer creates and the drug that the biologist discovers.
You could look at rent-seeking as "property rights that have extended beyond the public's attention span".
One thing to note is that governments themselves are, by definition, rent-seekers. This is inherent to how a government - a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within an area - works. Once you are sovereign within a territory you can extract rents in the form of taxes, and if you don't extract enough you will be deposed by someone who does.
Most governments also tend to encourage their own industries to rent-seek as well. If your country needs heavy industry or scientific research or cultural behemoths, it's far easier and politically defensible to construct new narrow property regimes (e.g. copyright, patents, PDOs, etc) for those companies to exploit rather than just paying them subsidies. These regimes can be selectively weakened when you need to build your industry domestically (what the US did to the UK, or what China did to the US) and then strengthened later when you need to protect it internationally (what the US forced into WIPO).
Very little of capitalism is actually adding value, in the sense that you have a business that hires people, buys materials, and turns them into goods and services at a prevailing market rate. At the lowest rungs of the chain, sure - you might have, say, petite-borgeouis crustaceans hiring workers to cook food and sell it to people who need it. But that's not where most of the actual profit is. Compare that to, say, a fast-food franchise; which doesn't usually run any restaurants or sell any food. They instead sell trademark rights and supplier relationships. In particularly egregious systems like McDonalds, they even rent their franchisees the land that the restaurant must be housed in.
Left-wing critiques of capitalism are typically extra-cynical about this, and would consider even the small profit Mr. Krabs makes on burgers to be rent, not value. This is usually in the context of the employee-business relationship, however; not the business-customer one. Small businesses generally don't extract a premium on the goods or services they sell just because they're the only company that happens to own a stove or know some secret recipe. But in the context of employees, they are getting paid less for their labor, albeit in exchange for not having to bear up-front capital costs or deal with inconsistent revenue. Whether or not this constitutes rent or value is most likely a political opinion, not something that you could actually devise some economic criteria for.
* Someone who literally figures out a new, cheap way to make a drug which cures a real disease
* Someone who, as soon as they get the right to, imposes license fees which serve no valid purpose, and profits in status & wealth from these new duties.
The original idea with these sorts of things, at least in the US, is that we'd have administrative procedures and court adjudication to limit the harm that could come from that behavior. In practice, the administrative procedures are only a bar to the least knowledgeable plaintiffs, and the mere threat of litigation over a marginally valid claim is often enough to coerce most defendants into a settlement. Nobody wants to actually litigate whether or not a patent is obvious, or a copyright owner has been surreptitiously seeding their own works on BitTorrent.
There's also a question about whether or not your two examples are, in practice, always different cases. What if the person in the first example decides to not license their drug at all, so they can do the manufacturing themselves and control the price? That would be identical behavior to the second example... but they still made a useful invention. They're the same person.
You could legally restrict "non-practicing entities" from enforcing patent rights, but that's only a subset of all rent-seeking patent owners. Remember: the entire point of the system is to enable rent-seeking in lieu of up-front payments.
As in, allow entities to make a handsome profit, far outstripping their original investment. Just don't allow them to profit off of it forever. Patent and copyright expirations are a proxy for this, but they don't take into account the actual money & time invested, instead they replace them with a hard-coded magic number which will work for some products and fail for others.
In other words, once it becomes feasible to 'follow the money', it'll be somewhat trivial to see who's doing what and to what ends.
Notice that this problem doesn't exist in smaller communities, because everyone knows what everyone else is up to.
This is a data access problem that persists because it is profitable for people who have the power to keep everyone else in the dark regarding their machinations.
I'm old enough to remember the general optimism we in technology had about the unlocking of human productive potential as automation and globalization freed us from the constraints of scarcity. Marshall Brain, Clay Shirky, and many others write extensively on this zeitgeist.
But that's not what ultimately happened. the zombification of our attention that began in the 1950s has accelerated in the last two decades. We're not volunteering our free time to space exploration collectives, life extension self-experimentation in biohacking hackerspaces, or even traditional enterprises like Habitat for Humanity.
We're clicking heart icons on posts bemoaning billionaires conducting private space exploration, getting angry at CRISPR researchers on Twitter, and passively consuming "marathons" of Hollywood renditions of dystopian future worlds.
This is to say nothing of the fact that we don't even have all that much more free time to begin with. Not because we're all working for SpaceX or in cancer research laboratories, but because the vast majority of the very people CAPABLE of doing so (IQ is in limited supply and not evenly distributed) are actively recruited to make iphone apps more addictive, make pornography engagement higher, and make front-running retail options order flow faster.
Apropos of Netflix (or in this specific example, Amazon Prime Video): There are likely 40 million hours passively poured into marathons of The Expanse in North America, by people with an average IQ in excess of 115 (just by virtue of the type of audience). What if half (approximately the NA/Asia split) of those hours were instead poured into activities that actually got us closer to the technologies depicted?
Well, the Chinese are doing it. We're not.
But even there, you're wrong about the activities/technologies you're complaining about. HfH, food banks, shelters, and other non-profits with limited capacity for volunteer work have wait lists several months long in my area. Only billionaires can explore space right now, so why would the rest of us be forming space exploration collections for something that is still a decade or two away? Tons of people self-experiment or participate in bio-hacking; this simply isn't the forum for them to discuss their projects.
Well, the Chinese are doing it. We're not.
Really? Citation needed that millions of Chinese are working in the free time on any of what you talked about.
Sci-fi has a long history of inspiring technology, eg Tsiolkovsky
I agree that ad tech and social media are net negatives, but what are the alternatives? A dead economy, where most of the money circulates on necessities?
Not asking this sarcastically or rhetorically - genuinely want some good insight on what people who say the current direction of the US is poor think the direction should be.
Removal of free (costless) social media. Everyone who uses social media must pay for the employee and hardware costs by the minute. End of ads and end of engagement. End of push notifications. If people gain time by working 15 hours a week but lose the gained time on social media then no good is created. There is some value in Social Media but it must be consumed a little otherwise it is poison. Similar for Netflix and TV.
Once people are free of bullshit work and of bullshit free time (facebook and instagram feeds) and all boring physical work is automated, we should look to the stars. The final frontier.
That is my hopefully doable utopia. Actually this is John Maynard Keynes year 2000 utopia expanded a bit. Society failed as we are 2021 now and 996 is the norm instead of 15 hour work weeks. Working more is not the solution. Working smart is. Also not everyone needs to have a job.
I think you have this backwards. These social networks are predicated on the businesses that are generating enough revenues to spend on ads with them.
EDIT: To add some more context USA GDP in 2019 was 21.4t . Facebook's revenue is 0.004 of that number.
It's not so clear to me that this is true. The fundamental question is - if not this, then what? If you accept that people can only work a certain amount, then a "perfectly" "productive" society involves people working just that amount, and then going home and entertaining themselves the amount that is necessary to recharge, safely, and then repeating. If not Netflix, then what? Alcohol and drunk driving?
I'm not saying watching Netflix is what we should aspire to, but compared to the alternatives, it seems reasonably likely to contribute to economic growth. A passive workforce works.
I don't really see Netflix as being as much of a problem compared to other "attention" companies because they screwed with the media cartels, have fantastic infrastructure, mostly sell long-form content, and denormalized ad-breaks. Compare to YouTube or TikTok.
IMO, large parts of the tech industry are artificial and fueled entirely by monetary policy.
If reserve banks in the west stopped expanding the money supply, large parts of the tech industry would be wiped out; they would quickly be revealed as negative-value industries.
With limited autonomy over their own global monetary policies, this was the only way China could fix this problem.
But regardless, China's downfall will be the fact it tries and picks to "winners and losers". It's a semi-planned economy. Many other countries have tried this and I'm not saying that China will collapse or won't continue to be an economic power, but even the mighty power of the CCP won't make consumers buy their products from you if they aren't what consumers want.
Long version: when you are facing internal party conflicts, alliance between US-UK-Japan-Australia-India-Taiwan-South Korea-EU which accounts for 90% of worlds wealth and war power 10x the magnitude and is against you, floods that gets worse every year, extreme heatwave that will eventually make Shanghai unlivable, delta Covid lockdowns, capital flight, demographic crisis, supply chain moving out, internal resistance from Hong Kong and tibet and xinjiang, and young generation lying flat. You are paranoid as hell and afraid to lose control so as to not get killed.
I'm not sure I believe it, but it's a bold prediction and worth thinking about.
I do think that every country in this world, whether it be the US, China, or my country, are experiencing the same effects from the current configuration of global capitalism (environmental destruction, extreme inequality, housing crisis, cutthroat job competition, long working hours, alienation, depression), and the only thing it's different is how state governments are responding to the crisis. Out of all the governments in the world, China seems ahead of some Western countries in a few aspects (as a one-party state being able to control and crack down on a lot of things and enable strict policies against over-financialization and deindustrialization). However, I still do think that China's strong state measures are only a stopgap measure for the more fundamental political and philosophical problems that the entire world has right now.
Also other countries prob don’t have the problem of “what if the dictator was killed or dies early, and civil war and political struggle ensues”
Now, you can come up with counterfactuals about why it would have happened anyway, and that's a pretty reasonable position to take. But acting like the $1k/month figure is somehow damning of the CCP totally misunderstands the domestic situation in China.
And the $1k/month folks are still having a hard time buying a $300k house to get married and have children, while taking care of the elderly parents. Meanwhile they know about the party princelings driving around in lamborghinis and buying fendi bags to show on social media. Oh yeah, the $100/month folks know too. And they know about the yearly flooding that kills.
You think people struggling now is going to remember the bad times before? Nope. That’s not how human natures like envy, anger and disgust works.
How much is actually happening? Fuck knows. The government controls the press and the metrics coming out.
By at least one metric, the PRC has managed to eliminate 'extreme poverty' (even Brookings agrees: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2021/01/25...)
We've seen plenty how democratic countries can go through civil war and political struggle, this isn't something that only happens to dictatorships. And I am just so tired of the dichotomies most people have in their minds for the current form of state governments, both China and the US's political systems are complex and nuanced enough that you can't really call it communism/capitalism or dictatorship/democracy anymore. I was just comparing about which government is actually more competent than the other for dealing with the current problems in the world. One seems just a little bit more competent than the other, but that's as far as it can get.
I can see the disadvantage of the saccharine part of our economy and the advantages of focusing on nuts and bolts.
It’s the difference between letting people decide what’s right for them and having a more planned society. Obviously planned societies have been a recurring theme in history, most notably socialism and its chronological counterpart national socialism. Neither made good faith efforts and both resulted in millions of deaths. But we also experienced unnecessary deaths from unregulated parts of the economy, though not as many deaths and at least it involved more free will.
It’s less so in Asia. On the other hand we keep on shipping jobs overseas so people on the bottom keep on getting sold out for even lower prices.
People used to be able to get by as a janitor or landscapers. Janitors and landscapers have been replaced by low cost labor. We can have foreign workers and have economic viability for people who don’t go beyond high school. We still have mechanics, but not sure how long that will be an option with electrification of autos where there are diff requirements.
Netflix is not draining capitol and not sapping mental health. It was a massive innovation that saved people lots of time (wasted watching TV ads) and money ($10/mo rather than $100/mo for TV). It worked so well every other major media company has copied it's model.
Facebook is often shit on, but it was useful in it's time. It's a tool people can decide to use oe not use, and how to use it if they do. We're learning as a society how to do this.
But it's very clear the solution is not for a government to smash those companies. That is very clearly an evil action.
Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason.
The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add activities like clicking heart icons on photos, repackaging financial securities into products with impossible-to-detangle risk profiles, advertisement and addiction optimization, and political outrage, will not remain any definition of "global superpower" for long.
Facebook and Netflix are excellent examples of companies that contribute greatly to our GDP whilst simultaneously draining our reserves of actual capital and mental health.