The market economy in fact solves many problems of 'helping other people' that we have just become so used to that we don't appreciate its complexity.
The fact that food is produced in abundance and is distributed in time to population centres for convenient consumption is a marvel of the modern world. And we're only getting better at it over time.
"That's helping people" doesn't really say anything. It's extremely vague. Moreover, it's clear that not everyone helped since abject poverty and hunger are a thing, regardless of where you live.
You might be conflating "helping people" with "convenience" whereas what you truly want to say that "market economy" has made products/services "affordable". But, that's, again, not an inclusive statement. Markets only offer access to goods/services to the extent that actors are able to afford them. And clearly not everyone can afford to buy enough sustenance on a daily basis to not go hungry.
The same is true for being able to afford to attain equitable prices as a seller. If you can't bring enough leverage to the table, you will have to accept price levels as they are determined by bigger players who dominate market supply. It might mean that you get out priced, and that your business proposition - no matter how good the idea was - simply won't generate revenue because someone else can provide the same thing for less then peanuts.
Both cryptocurrency and food are the epitomes of that.
Massive amounts of food are being produced to the extent that there's massive amounts of waste across the entire supply chain. None of that happens out of charitable or altruistic intentions. It's not even produced for your personal convenience as a customer.
Flooding markets with massive amounts of supply is a strategy aimed to drive the prices down to a point where competitors have to call it quits. The aim/risk is to generate a razor thin margin which is still worth the investment. At the scale of global markets, that's still billions of dollars worth in profits.
The same is true for cryptocurrency. The price on cryptomarkets isn't determined by the many hands who hold fractions, it's determined by those who have invested the largest amounts of leverage. And they will use that to influence the prices if the incentive for scalping profit and/or acquiring/controlling a larger share of a scarce/finite resource becomes too enticing.
"Market economy" only helps certain groups in certain circumstances. It's definitely not an equitable way of "helping people". On the contrary.
> "That's helping people" doesn't really say anything. It's extremely vague. Moreover, it's clear that not everyone helped since abject poverty and hunger are a thing, regardless of where you live.
this is less true than it has ever been in human history; the only places with true famines in the modern world are those cut off from global markets by war, or dysfunctional states that are cut off from global markets like NK. your statement is either willful blindness or some kind of bone-deep cynicism -- "nothing good has happened because bad things still exist".
I could continue on. There are entire libraries filled by countless research and public policy programs with studies and monographs on the subject.
And that's just the United States.
Hunger is a massive issue anywhere in the world. And I will bring this to the table as an established fact whenever someone praises the virtues of a concept as vaguely defined as "market economics" while omitting the realities.
> your statement is either willful blindness or some kind of bone-deep cynicism
I'm unwilling to discuss this any further having being called "blind" and "cynic".
That argument is a golden hammer. It can be used to render any point moot.
"People die in car crashes", "People don't have access or can't pay for healthcare", "Student debt is a massive problem", "Home ownership has become prohibitively expensive"
"Nothing good has happened because bad things still exists."
Sure, good has happened. But I'm pointing out that the "good" part shouldn't be prioritized as an absolute, nor used as an excuse to look away from the "bad things".
Read my comment again. I concluded with:
> "Market economy" only helps certain groups in certain circumstances. It's definitely not an equitable way of "helping people". On the contrary.
The first sentence literally acknowledges the "good part", the second sentence points out that this isn't an absolute and that glaring issues are facing humanity eye-to-eye.
Beyond that, I could intepret "nothing good has happened because bad things exist" as another way of you, for whatever reasons, just trying to outright hand wave the very real concerns I've put on the table.
In which case, I, for my part, am entirely unwilling to continue this discussion.
there are plenty of valid, piercing critiques of capitalism or markets, ways to highlight that things they have degraded and destroyed -- and yet you chose a critique that is not only less true than it has ever been, it is increasingly untrue as time goes on. you are shouting at the rising tide for leaving the beach dry. every system of production besides globalized markets has decisively, harshly more murderous and brutally malthusian than the present arrangement. i can only interpret this critique as a rationalization for feelings you are unable to interrogate rationally. your ability to evaluate truth is diminished by your emotions; you have a despair or hopelessness searching for its cause.
The current Bitcoin narrative and actual usage does nothing for the "market economy" though. It might have some indirect positive effects by forcing governments to adopt more open policies lest they suffer from capital flight and forming of parallel economies, but that's about it. Decentralized stablecoins on the other hand have great potential to amplify the free market economy.
that's a great point, but. Just like the moon landing, some degree of food security in the "first world" countries has been achieved many decades ago now. Maybe it's time for some new achievements, like, i dunno, security against mystery viruses, or something else to write home about?
It didn’t feel all that secure in March of last year.
And I mean, the MRNA vaccine seems pretty amazing that rollout began worldwide in less than a year from a novel coronavirus popping up. But the same people working in agriculture aren’t working on virus research. The market decides where to allocate resources, are you advocating for some sort of central planning in lieu of this? What would a different system look like that doesn’t have the major pitfalls that the Soviet government had, where strange things happened like nearly hunting whales to extinction because they needed to make the 1967 whale oil quota?
I think this analysis is completely spot on. Personally, I have had the same thoughts for about a year and I have just switched from a 'pure' ML/DS' to exactly the hybrid engineering style role you describe.
People placed a lot more 'art' into their speech than people nowadays. You hear it in the old English of England as well with the particularity of enunciation. Speech was the main interface of communication compared to today's more logocentric and multimedia audio visual world. In our age we appear to place that art into crafting text messages (nuances of capitalisation, punctuation, abbreviations, emojis etc.).
There's a huge selection bias at play. Back then being recorded was a big deal and quite rare, so what little of it survives to this day was probably not representative of the bulk of how people talked.
Also back then people traveled less (especially in the lower classes) which probably made accents stronger and more easily identifiable. Now it's routine for people of all classes to move to a different part of the country for studies or work, and you have mass media spamming a somewhat "standard" Parisian French across the country.
And speech is still the main interface of communication. In general when people send casual texts they'll try to emulate the spoken language, including nonstandard inflections and spelling changes etc...
If anything on average we probably pay a lot less attention to the written word than we used to because we use it so much more and for much more casual conversation. Few people used to write "wanna grab sumthin 2 eat?" a few decades ago.
I think this is hugely reaching, as though some random french craftsman is consciously making an art of his speech. It's just an accent. Accents come and go.
No, it's really not. The spoken French has simplified over time and lost nuances in the process. It also shows if you compare tv news from the fifties and now. The parent remark is not about accent.
I would not say that nuances were lost. At most, word usage and the way nuances are expressed have changed. People from the 1910s just happen to make use of many words that have fallen out of use for the people living in 2021.
Someone from 1910 would have a hard time understanding all the neologisms that were introduced after two world wars and decolonization until today.
For us from 2021, someone from 1912 uses words that are commonly found in written works from the same period (and after). This is why we feel it sounds like 'art'. Written words live way longer than spoken words.
Even today, common spoken French is very different from common written French.
It has gained new nuances in the process. I wouldn't call it a simplification, given that foreign speakers often struggle with some of the finer points of slang.
I don't know if I would call that art, if we're talking about the traditional Parisian accent that is linked here (a popular accent, mostly used by lower classes). Today it sounds rather uneducated, and although it is easier to understand than many other local French accents, it doesn't sound especially clearer than modern speech.
Although it might sound clearer to English speakers because it features more word-level stress while standard French doesn't really have it (but this has not been lost recently).
I studied French for many years in high-school and college. I've since forgotten much of it, but I was able to easily follow this "uneducated" accent. At times I found myself not even needing to read the subtitles. I had forgotten some of the meanings, but I could pick out the words and structure. Compare this to when I was learning French: most of the spoken material was in a more modern accent and was spoken much more quickly (as is de rigueur). I wonder if some of these older accents may be useful in teaching.
Similarly I've been learning Spanish the past few years, and the most comprehensible accents are those from Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras--some of the poorest Spanish-speaking countries. I cannot for the life of me understand a heavy Mexican or Chilean accent, but I can easily follow Guatemalan. It's interesting from a socio-linguistic perspective if nothing else.
No. The sentences are more elaborate and pronunciation, while heavily emphased in comparison with modern casual french, doesn't suffer yet from "word eating". Links(?) between words are also clearer, less mumbled together.
England/the UK is also a bit of a special case with its strong class system. Your accent is important socially in that regard.
This is still the case today but was even more so and educated upper classes people were taught to speak 'properly'. That very posh accent you hear in old British films and old BBC footage is called "traditional received pronunciation(RP)" [1].
That being said, accent is a social marker almost everywhere. It certainly is one in France, including because the country is very centralised on Paris and regional accents are usually deemed 'inferior' (it's similar to England, tbh).
These days in France the accent and way of speaking you want to avoid at all cost is "l'accent des cités", i.e. the accent of people, often of foreign descent, from the bad suburban areas.
>Rewriting history is the power of China's censorship system and media control. It's a pretty scary thing actually.
Circling back to space, this is a fundamental reason why China will struggle to make advances in space once the easy gains have been achieved. Creativity and innovation require a free, liberal and open society to thrive.
These are the priciples which have propelled America's advances in science as they are principles which attract the brightest from around the world.
Very few of the brightest in the world would be willing to sacrifice that freedom to work in China.
> Very few of the brightest in the world would be willing to sacrifice that freedom to work in China.
What freedom? The best and brightest go where the money and opportunities are. And considering china has over a billion people, they don't have to look elsewhere to attract the best and the brightest since they have so many in house.
I don't see China's space program as developing particularly rapidly.
China did a manned mission to low-earth orbit in 2003. 17 years later China hasn't done much on the manned exploration front. Long March 9 isn't expected to even be ready for a manned Lunar mission until the 2030s.
America launched Alan Shepard in 1961 and 8 years later Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
That said, I think there's no reason why China needs to struggle to make advances in space because copying the innovation of other places works very well.
Priorities are simply different right now. Focus is mostly catching up on space infrastructure, indigenous capabilities for civil / military use i.e. actual purpose of space programs. The gap there use to be much larger. Innovative / exploratory missions for nationalism is a sideshow.
We are facing record unemployment so people are having this happen to them across the board. The people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic but are struggling to find work because of the abundance of H-1B holders also "haven't done anything wrong".
The question now is do we continue that flow of labour while jobs are scarce, or stem that flow while we get back on our feet again? On this, the Trump administration appears to have made a tough, but rational choice.
> people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic but are struggling to find work because of the abundance of H-1B holders
That’s a straw man. Those people do not exist. Look at the data.
There’s currently 18 million unemployed Americans. The majority of pandemic related job losses are low wage retail, hospitality and restaurant workers.
There’s a total of 500k H1b visa holders in the US, the vast majority of which are in IT.
There is very little (if any) overlap between those groups.
You aren’t suddenly going to make more money by kicking out all the immigrants. That’s not how the economy works. Those H1b holders are also consumers who spend a majority of their salaries on taxes and products/services in the US. Kicking out 500k people would further hurt unemployment in sectors hit most by the pandemic.
The market always prevails over the state. Private schools can only charge as much as the demonstrated quality of their product while the state as the default option is not accountable to anyone because those who can afford better can escape them.
> Private schools can only charge as much as the demonstrated quality of their product
Part of my aversion to private schools has been about what constitutes 'quality'. For a lot of wealthy parents, 'quality' seems to mean that their kids get straight As without putting in much effort. Money corrupts. Private schools aren't going to easily give up on $30k a year.
I went to a private school for 2 years in HS and it was far more challenging academically than public school, was also harder to get A's so I distrust your statement. Most private schools also have waiting lists to get in so doubt the schools care.
That’s not been my experience. A strong statement like that needs to be backed up by data not an anecdote though. Can you share a study showing private schools are less academically rigorous than public schools and/or give easier As?
Japan and Korea are more or less on the same latitude and near each other and Japan has slightly more area than Korea. I doubt this is an issue about projection distortion.
The mercator projection is a projection...a mathematically consistent way of displaying the surface of a sphere as a two dimensional image.
This map is something else entirely. Not even sure what to call it, but it isn't a projection. The korean peninsula is bigger than India. It's a fantasy at best.
The assumption that China will become the world's most important market is extremely wrong-headed. Their government is incredibly fragile and the world saw this with the outpouring of dissent on WeChat during the COVID outbreak. China also faces the largest demographic timebomb that will ever be witnessed in history, has no allies, nor exportable culture or soft power. These will a huge impediment to it as it tries to move from manufacturing power to political power. Also the Chinese are a decade behind in semiconductor fabrication and fundamentally are still highly dependent on Western tech. The world still dreams to be American in a way they don't dream to be Chinese.
By the way, bringing in politics to a discussion about tech with those comments on Iraq is best avoided.
"No soft power" and "no exportable culture" seem like an exaggeration. Chinese culture had huge influence historically on Japan and Korea. More recently a lot of people enjoyed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the Dark Forest scifi trilogy.
You are right to point that out, since it’s more a lack of knowledge from GP than of exportable culture. I’ll add to your comment that China exports for decades a of lot of cultural products like drama and songs in all East-Asia, where significant ethnical Chinese minorities reside and consume those media. Chinese is also a popular second language for people to learn in the West.
The fact that food is produced in abundance and is distributed in time to population centres for convenient consumption is a marvel of the modern world. And we're only getting better at it over time.
That's helping people.