
The Price of Progress - arikr
http://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2017/10/10/the-price-of-progress/
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wallace_f
>So, Uber has said to the global workforce, in hushed but clear tones:
‘Thanks, and fuck you.'”

I have lived years of my life under the poverty line, and so perhaps that's
why I get annoyed by the above.

That's just how markets work. I'm not aware of any reasonable theory that Uber
should be responsible for solving income resistribution.

The failure is one of government. Trillions spent on the War on Poverty with
little to show for it. Meanwhile corruption and collusion between finance,
healthcare, insurance, academia and many other industries take money from the
poor and working classes, and give it to the rich.

If you truly 'care about poor people,' perhaps you should also be annoyed with
groups that actually produce something of value being made scapegoats while
truly worse-than-useless, despicable thieves walk free(1).

1-[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-26/why-no-
on...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-26/why-no-one-went-to-
jail-in-the-financial-crisis)

~~~
stupidcomments
>The failure is one of government. Trillions spent on the War on Poverty with
little to show for it.

What we really need to do is bioengineer people to be about 10 inch tall while
retaining the same or much better mental capacity (through neural lace/ brain
running on super computer phones or whatever-preferrably self sovereign and
free from nasty spyware or whatever ha). This would solve the housing crisis,
make space travel much easier, and make feeding the population vastly easier.
Right now it takes 1/5 acre of soybean for a person for a year. Imagine if it
took only a couple of plants to do so.

Farm in your own tiny house via exoskeleton/ hydroponics and thats enough
food, you basically dont have to work, and there would be enough extra land
for people to techno—minecraft the countryside and get to other planets on
cellphone rocket sized space ships.

Discuss.

~~~
taneq
Why bother with bioengineering once we have neural lace level tech? Just go
pure virtual and you can have as big a castle as you want on a square inch of
silicon.

~~~
stupidcomments
A good point - maybe if there were proper measures - once you are fully on the
silicon, you've really given up a ton of freedom. How do you get out of the
silicon unless you have someone outside to help you? There would have to be
safeguards. Like, what if your 'friend' outside the silicon decides he's not
going to let you out unless you be worship him for all eternity or, (insert
other ethical or not, but definitely human rights-wise degrading act),
whatever. It might be that to avoid turning everyone into robot zombies,
everyone would need to keep at least a toe in the real, with a way to get out
for good, even if, the real is dangerous at 10 inches tall, because a
wandering squirrel might bowl you over or whatever.

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mistermann
Surely there must be plenty of people like this today: old, retired,
destitute. What happens to them currently, generally speaking?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Struggling along in poverty until they die (seriously). My grandmother lives
in a retirement community in Florida, I have met these people, and it is a
terrible way to live out the last part of one's life. It is part of why I'm an
activist for social causes.

------
clairity
this kind of efficiency argument as the root of inequality is quite popular
and appealing to technologists it seems, as variations of it show up here
every day. maybe we secretly feel clever for being ahead of this particular
tidal wave of progress? maybe we feel we can bandaid over it by advocating for
technical solutions like universal basic income to pay for our driverless cars
and robotic overlords?

in any case, the last 50 years have been a slow but relentless imbalancing of
the playing field against labor and in favor of capital, rather than a
relentless march toward perfect productivity.

technology certainly has aided and abetted this shift, by helping to speed up
the world beyond the comprehensive agility of humans. and it has done so
largely for wielders of capital, of financiers and bankers and investors and
lawyers and consultants and executives, so that information can be hoarded and
honed and aimed precisely. knowledge is power indeed.

as our greed led us to hoard money, and as capital concentrated, it wasn't
enough to be well off. some of us really had an urge to be richer than our
neighbors and out-compete them. our sense of self depended on it. we needed to
influence the political system and even exert influence on foreign nations so
that incremental advantages could be won over time. economists advocated
unmitigated globalism and reagan cut taxes for the wealthy so they could
"create jobs" and the benefits could "trickle down".

instead, money flowed to things like real estate, a relatively greenfield
investment opportunity, where the mortgage interest deduction, combined with
bailed out government guarantors (freddie and fannie) and tax shelters like
1031 exchanges, allowed speculators to make enormous sums on the spread
between their cost of capital and the inflated interest rates of the times.
and they could easily sell off the loans, recover their capital, and do it all
over again in a matter of months, while the lone home owner often needed to
wait years to realize gains (not that i'm necessarily advocating homes be
investment vehicles).

money flowed to education, where regulations placed a choke hold on borrowers,
basically giving lenders a risk-free investment backed again by government
guarantees and the force of government to compel students to pay (bailouts are
not for students of course).

executives and their investors, not to be outplayed, exploited tax shields to
create private equity opportunities by essentially buying companies on loan,
dressing them up, and flipping them. executives simultaneously complained
about the lack of talent and the inability to compete with third-world labor,
to get further concessions like a cut in the capital gains tax and tax
holidays on foreign earnings that went straight past labor and into their
piggy banks.

politicians on both sides of the aisle got fat on the largess all these
regulatory advantages bestowed to them. the supreme court further obliged with
citizen's united, and have so far allowed egregious gerrymandering.

we bailed out the banking industry not once, but twice, as well as the auto
industry. we subsidize oil & gas and transportation, and give huge
unaccounted-for sums to the military-industrial complex. all this money seems
to somehow end up benefitting capital much more than labor. the US spends 3-4
times on infrastructure projects than most other countries; the same with
education and healthcare. all with no perceivable societal benefit. we seem to
be in collective love with giving tax-payer money to capital holders for free.

and so it goes. but that's not even the tip of the iceberg, that's a few
droplets of water melting down off the side. the ground is swelling with anger
over the continued blind eye of government and capital at all of this
unfairness. we are social animals, and deep down, we expect that the group
will care for each other, treat each other fairly, even protect each other,
but greed has overwhelmed us. and technology-driven efficiency gains are only
incidental to all this.

