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tl;dr: It seems almost impossible to judge the validity, reliability and authenticity of the goals and states principles of those outside of your circle. Do they actually believe it, do they actually think it's true, will they actually do it? Eg, "No new wars" and the Kamala deadenders who run the D's to pick an example from each ruling tendency.
I come here to-day to humble brag about my money, but in a culture war way; and to share my sure to succeeded investment system. This is financial advice, and you can trust it! (This is not financial advice, do not trust me.)
I've recently made a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money based on starting amounts; took my fuck around money and plowed it into you guessed it, oil futures and related industries before it became clear that no, he really is that stupid. I'm up a lot on top of my previous gains from betting (read: instructing my investment guy who tells me which southeast asian restaurants are for real) to bet as if the various Trump economic policies would:
Not meaningful increase productive employment in the US.
Not help the balance of trade issue.
Not hem china in in any way, and in fact increase their gravity as an economic center.
Not lower the debt at all, public or private; and in fact increase the debt massively. (This one didn't amount to much, there isn't much money to be made here until the US starts to go downhill for real, so it's just positioning for now.)
This compounding my gains during the Biden boom times, I am up quite a bit, so much in fact that It no longer is fun gambling haha stonks money and now I'm worried about what it does; so I'm taking it as far out of the US economic sphere as it is possible (which isn't that far) as a hedge. I would buy gold with it, but I kinda think that it might not be a good idea right now, I don't know.
As to the culture war angle: If by merely assuming that the ruling party will fail at all it's stated goals and betting against them no matter how flimsy the reasoning gets, I make a killing; how does it keep on rolling? How do people wake up and see the all the red arrows, all the "I'm warning you!"s becoming "I told you so!"s and stay hype?
It would be one thing if there was some sort of big social project that the party was ride or die for; but even it's most sacred commitment (deporting non-whites) was limited in scope (non white, but not the ones the boss or his friends or his allies rely on, H1Bs for all and Farm Scut work for everyone south of the border!) and on the optics chopping block after all.
Where is the there there? It is it all vibes, or do people really, truly believe that there is a plan?
And the actual point of the whole post: Would it be possible for such a person to convince me, even if they truly ment, and even if they were right? It's hard to imagine anything but events changing my mind at this point, especially since my fuck around money is too ballin' for the FDIC to handle anymore off of them being wrong so far.
I'm concerned I've fully closed my mind to my opponents here, but I'm also concerned that if I opened it an inch more my brain would fall out.
Attributing one's own win in one of the many money lotteries that exist is a form of the fundamental attribution error. Most of the time, such a win is just a lucky windfall, although most people nonetheless claim they „deserve“ their luck due to being a „predictive genius“ by winning at gambling or a „hard worker“ by spending a lot of time buying figurative lottery tickets, which can take the form of oil futures, polymarket bets, or cryptocurrency. If money were distributed on a „deserving“ basis, the correlation between wealth and age would be near-zero, since existing longer does not make one morally better and therefore more deserving. But lotteries have entry fees and take time to play, so they produce a positive relationship between age and wealth.
Wouldn't it be the opposite? People who have worked longer are deserving of more?
I don't see most work that is done in reality today as being related morally to its wage, and consequently to whatever savings are accumulated from it. For example, a lot of San Fransisco 50 year olds made way too much money in a software boom, often being head button style changer for Google for 10 years. I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career. Yes, it's how they made their money and got it to be legally recognized as theirs, but morally they did nothing to „deserve“ it. Another way of looking at this is that I think the correlation between market wages for an occupation and deserved wage is zero, or maybe even negative. Someone who works for decades in cargo driving has done a lot to fuel the actual economy, but since their job pays close to subsistence wages, they will not have a lot of wealth at the end of a long career. But by the labor theory of deserving, they deserve a lot more than an ex-Googler.
But I reject the labor theory of deserving too, because it assigns preeminent value to people who happen to exist right now. The cargo driver may have fed his neighbors, but why do they deserve that? Why would that entitle the feeder to anything? Through the preeminent value of the people who are alive right now? How do we justify that?
If you do not take egalitarianism as an axiom, then people have different moral worths. And these worths precede anything they do, including labor. And also, serving the labor market does not actually fulfill a duty to people of higher moral worth, since the labor market is a mixture of random (in the case of the Googler's wage) and egalitarian (in the case of the trucker deserving a lot of wealth).
Either moral worth does not change with age, or it does. If it does, I think it seems the most sensible to say that it peaks during the reproductive window. This is when people need the most resources, so they can have children, and when they are the most capable in all aspects of life. So again, it seems off that old retirees would be the most deserving class of people when it comes to having wealth. They are definitely not the highest value age group, and whatever they spent their career doing probably did not increase their moral worth.
Someone submitting code that broke the Google search button would cost the company on the order of a million per minute; it's only natural that Google would pay a lot to minimize that risk. Of course, there are automated processes in place to prevent and mitigate those kinds of mistakes, but that makes the work more complicated than messing around with some CSS. And even that doesn't cover all the work involved in something as seemingly simple as maintaining a button--accessibility, brand consistency, i18n, framework migrations, etc. This work is very lame but also very necessary, and not something a random trucker could do or even (unfortunately) the average CS grad could do.
Also, just informationally, as others have pointed out it's pretty much impossible for any SWE (not even the head button changer, who's probably some L7 taking home a million per year) at Google to take a decade to accumulate a million. Maybe five years or so, depending on your career progression, especially with the bull market of the past decade.
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The "I hate knowledge workers theory of value". You've said elsewhere that you are a libertarian, does that cash out to anything? You don't think people are entitled to the wage their employers have freely elected to pay them? You instead think, almost exactly, "to each according to their need"? You can make a case for communism, but this isn't really what it looks like.
$1 million? Were they a janitor?
This is untrue and easily checkable.
You read into it too much. This is not Marxism. I like knowledge workers at least as much as truck drivers. I am a knowledge worker, and I am trying to make Google-tier funny money. But I would never justify my entitlement to that money with the mere fact of acquiring it. A lot of people acquired it who did not deserve it, and some people who deserve it did not and will not acquire it.
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You seem to be using "entitled" and "deserve" interchangeably, but I think the distinction is very important. You can have your judgements about the desert of someone who got a lucky position at the right time, but if they had an employment contract they're damn well entitled to what that contract stipulates.
Are you operating under the assumption that our economic system should be set up to give people what they deserve? We have a system that (sorta) entitles people to the products of free exchange of goods and labor. This is a good system to have in place, as it provides prosperity and forms the foundation of a complex interactive society. I don't care if people deserve it or not. The reason the Googler makes more money than the trucker is because of the value they provide above the next-best guy they could hire to their employer, regardless if how much the truck driver "fuels the actual economy" (and you're kind of question-begging here: if people are paying for the Google guy's work, how's that less real than the cargo driver?)
Your argument is is one that proves too much, unless you are a skeptic about morals in general. Does a person who just happened to be taught good morals and suffered through just enough adversity and had the natural disposition to go out and be [your definition of a saint] deserve praise for the good they've done? Or were they just lucky in the same way the Google employee or even the cargo driver was?
They are interchangeable. You seem to confuse being entitled to with having. They certainly have what the contract stipulated. Are they morally entitled? Not necessarily. A lot of people are overpaid morally speaking, a lot are underpayed, a lot make money doing something morally wrong.
I suppose so, it seems to follow from the meaning of should. I certainly don't think it is set up that way.
Tangent; nobody is that good at hiring. Hiring is messy, noisy, arbitrary, feels based, not a science. Googlers were good enough, not the best just because they were paid the most. To think otherwise assigns supernatural abilities to hiring personnel, which they clearly don't have. They don't even use the best scientific techniques available for measuring talent, much less are they supernatural. But this isn't core to the main issue of moral economics, since software engineering skill isn't necessarily a moral quality anyway.
Why should a heroin trafficker go to jail if people naturally pay him more than the Googler? How is his work less real or important than Google's?
How did it prove too much? I'm not skeptical of morals in general, I'm applying morals to the economy. It seems obviously that the current system is not a moral one.
Yes, someone born with superior moral qualities deserves praise (and wealth) while somebody who merely wins a lottery does not deserve their winnings.
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Since this seems like the subthread for this sort of thing, I'll point out that if they only saved $1M from 10 years at Google, they were absolutely terrible with money.
But also, if you don't think people deserve the wages paid for their labor, you're basically at odds with almost everyone. Even Marx wouldn't say workers didn't deserve their wages.
I think Nietzsche would agree. But yes, I definitely hold a minority view. Isn't it the more logical view, though? It seems obvious to me why cognitive bias would lead most people to be wrong on this topic.
I think I agree with you; given my experience making basically nothing doing productive labor, then making lots and lots actively making the world a more hostile place to the average human, and now making at least a bit of my money eg from people ruining their lives gambling.
At no point in my life have a felt there was a meaningful positive connection between what I did, the societal value of what I did, the economic value of what I did, the moral value of what I did, and how I was compensated; if there was any correlation it was the anti-type.
A bitter pill for me, I got indoctrinated early into the cult of hard work and moral capitalism, it was a real shock to the system when I realized I was the only one who actually believed it.
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No. First of all, the idea that those with the most "moral worth" should be the wealthiest is bizarre. You then connect moral worth to "need", which is also rather strange (I guess this borrows from Marx). Then the resulting system is incoherent; as long as you're working you should be wealthy, but if you dare to retire you should not be. You could certainly build a (totalitarian) system based on these ideas, but I don't think the thing would be called "wealth" -- it would be a form of status granted by the state, not an accumulation of value.
It is need in the since of something being required for reproduction of moral people, so that there are more moral people afterwards. It's not borrowed from Marx at all. Not need in the socialist sense, as in feeding the hungry.
I did not say that, but it is also not incoherent. „He who does not work, neither shall he eat.“
It would not be any more totalitarian than the income taxes and old age pensions of the current West. It would simply tax different people and afford pensions to different people.
Actually it would be more like wealth than now. Many wealthy people today are weak and rely on the state to defend their wealth from the strong through granted ownership status. Under my idea, wealth would shift to a degree from the old and weak to the young and strong. My idea would be more libertarian because it would involve the state recognizing the natural order to a greater extent, which requires less energy to defend from exogenous shocks like individual crime and market crashes.
How so?
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Perhaps (past life)1 × (expected future life)3.
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