smgit

I think its to recognize the role of Middle Men. With the tech (and globalization), Middle Men have been getting real fat.

Lina Khan types need solid support and fire power to make a dent.

Have you heard of Karl Marx? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmcUcHZciFM

I don't think this is the future or anyone is boxed in.

Trump & Co are by no measure the sharpest tools in the shed. In Trumps own words they have been up against some really inept people, who have all lost credibility.

Therefore the counter-reaction, which is building, will come, and it won't look like what Trump & Co are used to dealing with in the past. I think that's what interesting about where the story goes next. Whose is going to lead? What are they going to stand for? How are they going to organize? Its an opportunity for the best in America to shine.

Its the environment that compounds the complexity. Go down the list of Largest companies by revenue in the US and 8 in top 20 are related to "health" - are they running hospitals? are they pharma companies? No.

They run pharmacy benefits management, health insurance and drug distribution.

The estimate is 4-5 Trillion flows throw these firms. Which is larger than the GDP of India. So this gigantic structure has emerged that doesn't really make too much profit btw (very similar to Amazon Platform Economics) but is layer upon layer upon layer of cash flow passing through middlemen.

Drastic change requires new ideas about what do we do about all these middlemen who shape the environment on top of which everything exists.

Its like expecting farm animals to keep track of how the farm works, as the farm gets more and more sophisticated in animal domestication and exploitation. The individual action argument was weak 10 years ago and its worthless today.

The is a Systemic problem. Doesn't matter what the individuals do.

Its the McDonaldization problem[1] that sociologists used to talk about when McDonalds was conquering the world.

And then they stopped talking about it, cause no one has come up with a model that not just survives side by side, but replaces the McDonalds model.

Everyone just ends up copying that model, cause it did produce results no one had seen before. Laws and regulations evolve to help that model out. Investing more and more in that model becomes automatic.

Restaurant count kept multiplying, franchises were willing to spend more and more on the best real estate with highest foot traffic UPFRONT. Costs of running things kept falling, thanks to all these accumulating network effect/economies of scale. Price stays low. All fantastic right? To the point people started asking why can't the McDonalds model feed the world? And naturally anyone who was very happy with their profits and fries would start assuming it could.

Only once you start digging into that question, do you start seeing how their success at optimizing for a few specific variables really well, comes at the cost of all the other things they don't optimize for. Their success is not possible without rising external costs.

As a reaction there are nows lots of restaurants that survive with alternative models that optimize for other things. But no one has taken down the McDonalds model yet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwvL6XDq0BQ

He has to announce some bullshit every day to Capture Attention or someone else is going to get the Attention. And that puts pressure on him to keep announcing things, more than anything else.

Given how the Attention Economy works Content keeps exploding, but eyeballs and time to consume it all don't grow at the same rate, so post frequency and absurdity of the posts shall grow with time. Keep count.

Product is usually a risky cash sink if your experience is services. You haven't mentioned how big your business is, but if its small split the costs of the experiment with larger firms. Pitch your plan to them. If you can raise 3-6 months of funding for a team then go for it.

Not really. See what Claude Shannon has to say about channel capacity of what your brain can digest if Grok finds 8 million things that are happening currently that might be interesting to you.

You can also thank the arrival of social media for amplifying delusions - "You think I am wrong or stupid?? Then how did I get so many Likes/Views/Followers"

With that population scale delusion amp working 24x7, we get the most over ambitious attention craving people rising up the food chain faster than they usually could. But speed is useless in ecosystem evolution. Anything moving faster than the rest of the system will run into issues faster too.

He was in a different location initially. He eventually got access to the sim. So every process requiring sms verification became a roadblock.

I have an Indian colleague whose dad was in some kind of coma for few months after an accident. He had a real crazy time keeping the house running. His dad's number was attached to all kinds of bills - electricity, gas, milk, water, internet, cable, newspapers etc. Most of the services would send a verification sms to his dad's phone for any kind of interaction. No one knew the password. And it turned into a major nightmare. It wasn't just a question of paying the bills. Lot of these services had to be shutdown or have settings changed temporarily. And each one had a different set of documents/processes required to prove he was a relative.

Don't have to hope - https://sociology.plus/glossary/circulation-of-elites/

This is all pretty crazy cause Americans don't buy Ads on American platforms to influence Americans or anyone else. It's really deep stuff as always on Rogan.

Whats educational here is to look into how Howard Hughes unraveled. Its not just a story about Howard Hughes, but how all the people around him who were mesmerized by him just went along for the ride.

The only difference is Howard Hughes was an introvert.

While Elon is an extrovert and in lives in the age of social media where likes/follower count amplify self delusion of the entire herd.