EugeneG

The way this stuff works is Amazon requires them they need to get X amount of liability insurance to even be a subcontractor. Amazon requires proof.

The government has its own laws on things like minimum workers compensation insurance.

So the subcontractors are insured.

If there’s no real life harm, and Amazon chose to organize their business in this way, it means they think it’s a cheaper/better/more efficient way of doing it. So we shouldn’t make laws preventing it or undoing it unless we have a good reason.

Burden of proof is on those who want to make new rules that compel others.

I wrote like 10 comments that engaged seriously in this discussion... and haven't really gotten much back except comments that allude to conspiracy. There are people who start with "of course Amazon is evil and they just want to do evil things" and work backwards from there... I tend to start from a different direction of "I get packages quickly, and it's huge value add to my life; lots of people have good paying jobs delivering these packages - and lots of new small businesses started up to do this last mile delivery - and that's good" ...... and if you start there, then I'm just more skeptical of random new laws to fix something where nobody has made a concrete case for actual, real life harm that exists today...

my view is that the burden is on the people making up new rules to show their rules are solving concrete actual harms... not just hand wave and say "well obviously Amazon's a [evil scare tone] TRILLION DOLLAR COMPANY" and let that be the end of the argument

Don't we already have workers comp insurance laws? Other forms of liability insurance? Doesn't Amazon carry the same insurance if it's the one doing the delivery directly? Do we think levels of this insurance is insufficient in general and should be higher?

Bottom line - just because Amazon doesn't directly have this liability - it doesn't mean nobody has this liability - the sub contractors do. And if they do, they need to pay for the insurance, and if they pay for the insurance, then Amazon has to pay them more to pay for this insurance.

So the real question is... what concrete harm/problem are we solving for that isn't already solved for today.

"if people disagree with me, it's a conspiracy"

But what you described isn't a "problem" on it's own. Subcontracting is a thing. It's not a bad thing on its own.

You're describing the "what" - you're not describing the "why" is that an issue...

Is "Joe's delivery company" not already required to have liability insurance? Do we think this insurance is not big enough? Should we make it bigger for all delivery companies or do we need to single out Amazon's liability insurance? Do we think that a delivery company delivering the same package for Amazon vs. FedEx vs. Mary's Flowers Inc. vs. NYC Movers Inc. should have a different amount of liability? (e.g., if that delivery driver injures a pedestrian, should we require that NYC Movers Inc. covers fewer costs than Amazon)?

Ok but I expect more from my government than "here's youtube video; trust me bro - you're an average worker, you won't get it"

Agree. Unclear on what the actual specific harms are, whether they systemic, and how a new set of laws would help fix it.

Also what are the harms that new rules introduce? Are you going to eliminate a bunch of new small businesses that do deliveries and replace them with everything being under one, giant, multi-trillion dollar company?

Honest question: what are the actual concrete issues where Amazon is shirking responsibility they would have otherwise had? Was there a specific court case where Amazon didn't pay what it would have otherwise? A workplace injury that would have been covered but otherwise wasn't? If these exist, are they systemic - i.e., does it happen more often here than it does with UPS or FedEx delivery workers?

There are insinuations here, and a good video, but it would be good to have actual examples and then an actual demonstration of a pattern of harm, before we introduce new rules that are likely going to make deliveries more expensive.

I understand that a YouTube video isn't a policy document... and I don't expect it to have all of these things. But as a citizen, I do expect - that somewhere - there should be an actual policy document that outlines the facts.

This is where Codex 5.5 just feels practically better. It’s fast, thoughtful and just works. It feels like a pleasure compared to Opus/Fable’s endless explorations.

The stock market (and in particular the US stock market) has been an incredibly positive influence on the average American's 401k... Great driver of allowing Americans and beyond to share in the upside of successful companies... big reason why Americans can retire.

Of course, it doesn't always go up...

I think you have an oddly negative bias.

Reminds me of this... During Apple's 1980 Initial Public Offering (IPO), Massachusetts regulators banned residents from purchasing the stock. The state's securities regulators deemed the offering "too risky" and "over-valued," enforcing a state rule that prohibited IPOs with a price exceeding 25 times earnings.

“properties get leveraged, instrumentalized, and securitized, with derivative products, speculation, and all sorts of incentives”

Spoken like someone has no clue what they are talking about and just throwing out jargon

In theory what they are doing of value, is that at any time you can go to an exchange and say "I want to buy x" or "I want to sell y" and someone will buy it from you our sell it from you... at a price that's likely to be the accurate price.

At the extreme if nobody was providing this service, investors (e.g. pension funds), wouldn't be confident that they can buy/sell their assets as needed in size and at the right price... and because of that, in aggregate stocks would be worth less, and companies wouldn't be able to raise as much capital.

The theoretical model is: - You want to have efficient primary markets that allow companies to raise a lot of assets at the best possible prices - To enable efficient primary markets, investors want efficient secondary markets (so they don't need to buy and hold forever, but feel they can sell) - To enable efficient secondary markets, you need many folks that are in the business of XTX ... it just so happens that XTX is quite good at it, and so they do a lot of this work.

Tries to fire, but he doesn’t have the legal authority to fire

Don’t ever pee in the ocean … to avoid accelerating global warming

You don’t have to spend your savings on trinkets.

If a company wants to expand and build a new factory (say to provide more, cheaper pharmaceuticals to more people), it needs capital. If you have cash but there’s deflation, you might just keep your cash under your pillow because it’s worth more every year. If instead we have an inflation, and so you have a disincentive to leave the cash under your pillow, you invest it (give to that company to fund its factory). That’s good for society.

I kind of agree. Money (e.g. the dollar) only has value because (1) we implicitly agreed as a society to have faith that it can be accepted by others for goods and services (2) the government requires us to pay a material part of our earnings as taxes which can only be paid using money.

If people lost faith, it would lose value.

Mild inflation (say 2-3pct a year) is considered generally good by economists. It’s an incentive to go and invest the money productively or spend that money on goods and services (which is good for growing the economy). Deflation in contrast would create an incentive to hoard money (just keep little papers with no productive value).

Financial derivatives like a call option have a value derived from a stock (which is a real thing that gives real world legal claims on actual assets/profits). So it’s still not like a crypto coin.

People are most definitely buying stocks for the reason I mentioned. There’s a reason why the pension fund of the teachers of California, the pension fund of the teachers of Texas, and your 401k holds stocks. It’s not because they are collectibles with a lot of hype. It’s because they get a claim on future profits at (expected to be, on average, over the long run) a discount. Of course there are people who have no clue what they’re buying or why it works and just buy something… but that doesn’t mean the thing they’re buying doesn’t have a fundamental value connected to reality.

Stocks and crypto are fundamentally different.

Stocks give you a legal right to the assets and future profits of a company - a legal right enforced by the government (i.e. men with guns).

Crypto gives you no such right. In crypto you just hope someone else will pay more for it later. In that sense crypto is similar to baseball cards, and slightly similar to gold (gold has some industrial “actual” uses, but its high price is really driven by cultural perception of value.)

Which is why the pro-Trump tech folks are playing with fire. Exchanging potentially faster approvals/lower regulation for favored projects, for an environment where rule of law and institutions are weakened.

After Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany said it permanently won’t support the opening of Nord Stream 2. NS2 has been Putin’s number one priority for opening so he could deliver gas to Europe while sidestepping Ukraine.

Conveniently after the explosions, NS2 became one of the few working ways to get gas to Europe, and Putin offered to deliver gas via it. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2022/10/12/putin-offers-t...

That’s way he blew up what he blew up. To force Europe’s hand on NS2.

I believe the accurate answer here is twofold: - money is perpetually not supposed to be a great perpetual store of value relative to goods and services. Government policy aims for some inflation, fears too much and fears too little. Why? Because a bit of inflation is an incentive to use your money on more productive asset - eg don’t hold on to it but instead invest in a startup or go use someone’s services or goods (go to a restaurant!). The issues happen when inflation is so high that the money melts away before you have time to figure out how to use it productively. Deflation is also bad because then people stop spending on services, stop investing - and just hold onto money. (“No I don’t want to invest in this startup! I have the best investment I need, just holding onto my cash!”) That slows down the economy. - either way Bitcoin doesn’t solve inflation in any way. It’s just another asset - that can go up or down or whatever, and happens to have gone up for a long time (just like Facebook stock) and then dropped a lot. Just like any stock or any asset, Bitcoin can have higher-than-inflation real returns or lower-than-inflation. And more recent returns have definitely been lower. What will happen in the future? Who knows. Same answer applies to the S&P500 and to Gold and to the new condo in my neighborhood.

That’s obviously true. And once you accept that then the whole premise behind crypto is gone - if centralization is the only way to make it work, then traditional banking is preferred. All that’s left are use cases that are in the gambling and money laundering category.

Yeah there will be a spread, won’t go from LIBOR+0 to SOFR+0, but to SOFR+0.20% for example

Yeah I think there’s a difference in cardio fitness between people who do 10000 and 17000. Less fitness makes the latter more difficult.

In other words, people who can’t walk or can barely walk are likely not that healthy - is probably a more intuitive theory than walking causes better health.

The question is can you really make it simultaneously cheap to trade and decentralized and always on. Or is the overhead of all that just make blockchain tech very awkward and suboptimal (especially since ultimately there's a centralized winery that honors the "claim" with actual wine - so no real need for decentralization). Instead why not just have a little centralized company that lets companies create ledgers of asset ownership for $300/month. If it's a real use case, any winery can sign up, etc.

Issue is blockchain tech doesn't actually solve anything

Yep. Blockchain says I own this case of wine... but the other guy wont give me my wine! Who do I call? The physical, centralized police and the centralized legal system that back it. Without that legal system recognizing and honoring it, it's worthless. And if it all depends on my centralized legal system, then who cares about the decentralized blockchain. Might as well put it in a table in a database instance running on AWS, or in a written contract.

Tether isn’t some new innovation that is it’s own animal. We know what to compare it to. The right comparison isn’t “the US Dollar.”

The right comparison is money market funds - they are very highly regulated. If a money market fund said “we are backed by very highly rated short term debt,” but they weren’t, that is 100pct a scam that has huge fines.

Just because Tether is in the crypto world doesn’t mean it’s now a magical novel currency. Still just a money market fund in a slightly different form.