When my wife was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer earlier this year, she was essentially prepared to die. She didn't even cry once. Her father had died from the same cancer at around the same age as her (early 40s), in the most horrific way imaginable. Her father used to work for the Soviet military in charge of a team of people who worked on propaganda so he was a strong believer in communism and he was devastated by the collapse of the USSR; his entire world had fallen apart. But then bowel cancer finished him off. My wife was in her teens at the time and she said he was extremely angry and not himself for years until he died. The chemo made him extremely sick, destroyed his body, and he had to have a colostomy bag. Years later, after my wife met me, we experienced a lot of hardship together; just one episode of bad luck after another... Like, almost every aspect of our lives which we didn't control. So by the time she got her cancer diagnosis, it's as though she was expecting it.
It turns out that she has a relatively rare genetic condition which increases the probability of bowel cancer by about 10x... These cancers are known to respond very poorly to standard chemo (and likely explains her father's horrible death decades earlier). This is where our luck finally turned though. We got lucky, possibly for the first time since we've been together. Her cancer turned out to be a kind which is highly responsive to immunotherapy. The most recent trial for the relevant class of drugs showed an unprecedented 100% complete response in about 40 patients (Dostarlimab). Moreover, that same class of (very expensive) drugs became available for her exact case, on the subsidized public list in my country, just one month prior to her diagnosis. After her first month of treatment, the tumor had shrunk by like 50% in diameter. Now, 5 months later, there is no evidence of cancer on the MRI.
I feel like the experience has completely changed my wife's perspective of life in a fundamental way. Before this, she lived her entire life expecting that things never get better and all news is bad news. Systems decay, collapse and people die.
These days I often think about the ancient Chinese tale "The old man lost his horse." It's insane how little control we actually have over the most important aspects of our lives and how something terrible (like a tumor which doesn't respond to chemo) can become a positive (but responds extremely well to immunotherapy). Also, it's quite inspiring to think about how people identified this horrible class of the most untreatable cancers in existence and decided to do something about it, and now it seems like they've become the most treatable of all cancers, with the fewest side effects too. It's a testament to the good things innovation can create when people focus on the worst problems, the worst injustices of human existence.
It is good to hear about her changed perspective and that the cancer is currently undetectable. I hope she continues to have health and you both have a good long life together. I lost my wife to cancer over nine months. We had thirty years together, but I certainly wanted more. Best to you both.
We can never know who won any election because it's physically impossible to count millions of votes accurately. This is an unsolved problem. The risk of double-counting or missing votes is close to 100%.
Anyone who implies that it's possible is lying. People could do an experiment; just try to organize just 100 groups of people to count a few hundred thousand votes. You will get a different number every time you count. Too many moving parts.
With this kind of wealth distribution, there's no point doing any job which services regular people. Everyone should become an informant, bodyguard, lobbyist or propagandist for a rich person. That's going to be the only kind of job that pays in the future.
Look at that last bar; consider just the annual yield or interest payment on that wealth; soon, it's going to be more than all other bars combined. If people understood the situation, they would all stop working and start making lists of who these people are and work for them. That's the only logical (legal) thing to do. Every other job or career is a waste of time.
Yes but I'm thinking about just the yield on that last bar.
Given that the Shiller P/E ratio is now 40 (under 3% of the value of the assets), the yield is actually a pretty small fraction of that last bar... but even then, I'm saying one year's yield could exceed the worth of all the others if things continue.
But IMO, it's already the case that the economy is centered around the free money/proceeds received by top 0.1%. This is why we saw all that nonsense with COVID, DEI, Wokeism, etc... This is what happens when a small number of elites decide to spend a bit of 'spare change' on politics and social activism. Imagine how bad it's going to get after that wealth has compounded in 10 years...
The idea of investing my hard earned money to build on land I don't own sounds incredibly foolish. You're completely at the mercy of the counter-party. You don't own it, they own you!
It's a fixed long term lease from the state that often comes with a right to renew, not rent you pay to a landlord every month. They can't just decide to take it back and kick you out (unless the government is corrupt, but then it doesn't matter if you fully own it because they will do it anyway).
Eminent domain exists all over the world, you can be kicked off your land even if you own it if the Vogons in government decide they need it for the hyperspace bypass.
It's kind of insane how the higher end Raspberry PIs are almost as powerful as my PC tower. The price is quite low and developer friendly too. Really great products. The lower end products are awesome too.
It's one of the few products I look at with awe and which makes me feel good about the tech industry.
I managed to build a WiFi temperature sensor (which can be substituted with any analog sensor) which streams its data to a web platform (I also built), encrypted over HTTPS (with CA certificate verification), using a $10 Raspberry PI Pico W; built in a single weekend. I can connect it to my phone's WiFi hotspot from anywhere and stream data to my web platform where it displays a realtime chart. $10.
Actually my current machine is 5.5 GHZ with 28 cores but core count only really matters if you have a lot of parallel workloads. Most of my CPUs are idle the vast majority of the time. Raspberry Pi 5's 2.4GHz Quad core doesn't seem so far behind when you consider the physical size difference.
I remember programming ATMEL ATMEGA8s and being amazed as how much I could do with them, so to me, the fact that devices of that size can approach even half the clock speed of a cutting-edge computer, and have multiple cores, is mind-blowing.
Have you actually benchmarked it? If your current PCs boosting up to 5.5Ghz that means you have a pretty modern PC and quite a lot more powerful than a Pi 5. Also, you're completely missing out the IPC differences even given same clock speed.
If you're going after perf per watt, then sure the Pi will likely win. But not possible for raw performance if what you said is true about having a modern CPU with 5.5 Ghaz boost clock.
This article is clearly about Geoism; its traditional interpretation. In its essence, Geoism should be about rents, not about land specifically. Of course they couldn't have known about tech platform monopolies back then, but they are very much about rent extraction and a far greater concern than land is nowadays. I feel like such articles are a distraction and would lead to even bigger problems. Essentially prepping to dispossess middle class land owners who are the last bastion of decentralization.
It's absurd in this day and age to be discussing land rent-seeking when the cause of most of our modern problems is platform rent-seeking. Frustrating how people twist everything good into something bad; of course there was no talk of Geoism when land rents were the main problem and main mechanism of rent extraction; only now that elites have found a different way to extract rents, now it's OK to discuss the (now) lesser evil of land rent-seeking and distract away from the new variant of the problem.
Real estate is 13.7% GDP, finance and insurance 8.7%, healthcare 7.5%, info/tech 5.7%, utilities and mining 3% - rentier capitalism is roughly 40% of the US economy.
George held land value as the only worthwhile rentierism to tax. The problem is bigger than just land value or platforms.
There is a reason billionaires astroturf [1] support for these half-measures. The "moats" they own (the monopolies and oliogopolies) are where they derive their wealth.
tax
Are you trying to argue that finance, insurance, healthcare, tech, utilities, and mining don't produce anything? That's a pretty out there opinion.
Georgism calls out land because the supply is essentially fixed, so there's no economic cost to taxing it. In addition the value of it collectively created.
Every industry you named above absolutely responds to price signals.
Maybe, but at least they're not depleting my access to opportunities like platform rents do! In the old days, I could still find opportunities in my social circles to earn money to cover the rents because they still had money.
Platform rents are worse because they extract wealth by centralizing awareness, centralizing opportunities and literally shrinking the pie whilst concentrating wealth for those in the middle. They prevent me from finding opportunities which would allow me to pay the rents which they extract from me and my social circle! My social circle has no money so I can't rely on them! Only way to make money is a bs bureaucratic job working for a monopolist.
It's worse, satanically worse!
Mark my words, with the current approach we will be forced to go either UBI route or start charging people proportionally to their incomes using universal digital ID to check. And the 'AI taking jobs' narrative is already in place to provide a phony justification!
Opportunities are depleted systematically from the periphery. "I make my own luck" is bullshit when when the entire system is working 24/7 to ensure you don't get any! The average elite ignores more life-changing opportunities in their inbox, every minute, than I'm exposed to in a lifetime!
Literally, elite rent-seekers took all the money and now there is no more to take! The system is now trying to saddle people will useless debts! Getting them to spend it all on their useless junk (pointless gender studies university degrees, ads for their marketing/lead acquisition startups, fake magic internet money, junk bought on credit cards...)! And then forcing them into bankruptcy for a few years, move onto someone else, then when that first person's bankruptcy period is over, repeat!!! They do the same thing with shell companies; saddle them with debt, funnel the money to the beneficiary company, let the shell default on its debt, then repeat. This is the backbone of the modern economy. It's utterly insane! The system is completely broken!
Yes they (land rents) deplete access to opportunities (don't know about _your_ situation in particular) -- the "housing theory of everything" is one articulation -- far greater than platform rents (which I'm also not a fan of; look at my comment history and you'll occasionally see me calling for ad taxes). Even platform (or more broadly tech) rents are often taken by landowners, who are not as subject to competition.
When a country main form of getting rich is thru rent (land, platforms, or any other). That country becomes economically sick. The middle ages were dominated by land Lords. War to increase land ownership, no social mobility, and economic stagnation were the norm.
Platform rents are really bad. And for land rents, it would make more sense to be a public good that finances the government that privately owned and creating a owner class that gets all the profits from society production.
> Literally, elite rent-seekers took all the money and now there is no more to take!
There is more money to take, that is why they push for conservative governments that reduce taxes for the rich and eliminate laws that protect the working-class.
Creating new things should be incentivized over platforms that take a cut on the work of others.
This is true but I don't see that alternative approaches prevent an owner class from developing. It just creates a different kind of owner; a more politically-oriented one, with an incentive to manipulate the political system to their benefit to increase their stake in it. People then strive to become stakeholders of the state itself. I don't think that's a better form of ownership.
I'd rather capitalists be distracted pursuing land ownership rather than pursuing ownership over the machinery of ultimate power and control.
If you remove tangible forms of ownership, people will try to claim ownership over intangible things instead, like state power.
Georgist from the beginning did care about other form of rents, like resources.
Land rent-seeking is still incredibly important. Saying all modern problems are from platforms is silly considering that most people spend far more of their budget on their living situation, compared to paying money to apple or google.
And its much easier to switch from apple to google or other platforms.
> of course there was no talk of Geoism when land rents were the main problem
There was the whole time. Who are you talking about?
They probably did it on purpose so that the professors would sue Anthropic later and make a lot of money.
How about all the copyright MIT licensed open source software? When does it become discovered that they were scraped for training without authorization and without giving attribution?
I avoid participating in any market unless I have to, these days.
Crypto is a scam within a scam. It was created to act as a 'good cop' to the 'bad cop' which is the mainstream system. But they are two sides of the same scam. Same kind of game of Republican vs Democrat. Everywhere you turn, there is a scammer waiting to take your money.
What sucks about these situations is that middle managers want arbitrary things. Their imagination is tainted by existing inefficient processes and systems; they cannot see past these flawed abstractions. So when you ask them what they want, they say stuff like "faster horses" and then spend months debating the color and genders of the horses and what shape the carriage should be... The person who wants to sell them a "car" has no hope.
It turns out that she has a relatively rare genetic condition which increases the probability of bowel cancer by about 10x... These cancers are known to respond very poorly to standard chemo (and likely explains her father's horrible death decades earlier). This is where our luck finally turned though. We got lucky, possibly for the first time since we've been together. Her cancer turned out to be a kind which is highly responsive to immunotherapy. The most recent trial for the relevant class of drugs showed an unprecedented 100% complete response in about 40 patients (Dostarlimab). Moreover, that same class of (very expensive) drugs became available for her exact case, on the subsidized public list in my country, just one month prior to her diagnosis. After her first month of treatment, the tumor had shrunk by like 50% in diameter. Now, 5 months later, there is no evidence of cancer on the MRI.
I feel like the experience has completely changed my wife's perspective of life in a fundamental way. Before this, she lived her entire life expecting that things never get better and all news is bad news. Systems decay, collapse and people die.
These days I often think about the ancient Chinese tale "The old man lost his horse." It's insane how little control we actually have over the most important aspects of our lives and how something terrible (like a tumor which doesn't respond to chemo) can become a positive (but responds extremely well to immunotherapy). Also, it's quite inspiring to think about how people identified this horrible class of the most untreatable cancers in existence and decided to do something about it, and now it seems like they've become the most treatable of all cancers, with the fewest side effects too. It's a testament to the good things innovation can create when people focus on the worst problems, the worst injustices of human existence.
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