[HN Gopher] A man whose software ate the world ___________________________________________________________________ A man whose software ate the world Author : jger15 Score : 61 points Date : 2021-06-25 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.thepullrequest.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.thepullrequest.com) | visualradio wrote: | "All of Europe had been what you were describing for 300 years or | so. But by the time the US came along, that spirit was starting | to fade. So what they did quite literally was put all their money | in the US. The way JP Morgan got established was that his father | Junius Morgan ran the leading merchant bank in London, and then | set up his son Pierpont to run a correspondent bank in New York, | and the two of them basically funneled money from the UK to the | US to build everything in what was known as the Second Industrial | Revolution." | | The money was not as important as the workers, thinkers, raw | materials. The prior civil war era was a period of massive | industrial output, despite the government simply throwing legal | tender into circulation without obtaining gold from Europe, and | the destruction of huge quantities of wealth in the war. The | railroads and war effort required business to organize the | transportation and production of large quantities of material | wealth which lead to a greater focus on industrial profits, | rather than hollow financial profits from real estate | speculation. The later form of investment is 'hollow' because the | procedure is a M -> M' paper gain which does not produce any | material goods or fixed capital as a side effect. | | European investors had been investing money in America since | 1600s, primarily to engage in real estate speculation on western | lands, what was important in industrialization is that there was | a shift in investment from real estate speculation to industrial | development. The driver of the shift was industrialists like | Andrew Carnegie who were involved in the war effort. | | To promote industrial investment without militarism it's | primarily a matter of reducing large after-tax total returns and | access to credit for financial speculators obtaining hollow M -> | M' gains relative to industrial investors. | bsedlm wrote: | > European investors had been investing money in America since | 1600s, | | I belive that during the 17th century they were investing money | in trips to America and back. Nothing of much was being left in | america beyond what was necessary to exploit the land. | blueyes wrote: | Couple interesting ideas and terms here: | | * "vetocracy" - the rule of those who say no. Andreessen says it | contributed to IBM's obsolescence. Happening now to the USA. | | * Related to: Why don't we solve carbon emissions with nuclear | fission? Totally fair question. | | * The Internet saved the economy during the COVID lockdowns. (I | think that's pretty plausible.) | adolph wrote: | I think "vetocracy" may be related to Taleb's idea that "The | Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority" | | https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict... | wankerrific wrote: | A great read of a man getting high huffing his own farts -- like | all of our billionaire overlords. | emteycz wrote: | I don't want to dismiss your feelings - could you please | explain why do you feel like there are some "billionaire | overlords" over you? I personally never ever felt anything | close to that, so I'd like to understand where is that coming | from. As I see it, nobody is forcing me to do anything and I am | met with _great_ opportunities nearly daily. | breck wrote: | Mind expanding read. | | Tangent. Made me want to read Around the World in Eighty Days. | Here's a public domain ePub version: | | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/103 | [deleted] | morelisp wrote: | Watch carefully as the paragraph beginning with a semi-reasonable | assertion that "the notion of scientific objectivity [has] | existed for a very short window of time" goes all the way to the | batshit "rule of law... emerged in the wake of our post- | Enlightenment textual explosion." | | What fucking charlatans. | neilv wrote: | > _running something like Netscape 3.x while watching the | 'throbber'--a looping, pixelated animation of a planet-straddling | 'N' getting hit with a meteor shower_ | | Trivia (but maybe relevant to HN): I believe the reason it was | called a "throbber" was from the throbbing "N" [1] with which | Netscape Navigator replaced NCSA Mosaic's cool spinning globe.[2] | | I always thought that the throbbing N seemed like a placeholder. | I vaguely recall JWZ later having a collection of | throbbers/spinners for Navigator. | | [1] http://www.andrewturnbull.net/nscape1.html | | [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97sLnauJ78?t=2m10s | okareaman wrote: | America can build nuclear power plants and high speed trains but | we choose to do it in a responsible way or not at all if a better | idea comes along. The Chinese govt can seize all the land they | want, displace whoever they please and destroy their environment | to build things. I don't know anyone excited about a high speed | train between Los Angeles and the Bay Area. It's pretty easy to | Uber to the airport and hop on a jet to get there quicker. I keep | reading Andreessen to find something that expands my thinking but | I never find it. | [deleted] | simlan wrote: | Yeah hard and fast liberalism. Way to go /s off | | Started out legit... Covid vaccine in March 20 ? Not even the | autocrats of the world dared that prior to evidence. | fencepost wrote: | _Covid vaccine in March 20 ? Not even the autocrats of the | world dared that prior to evidence._ | | If Covid had a higher fatality rate, there's an excellent | chance we'd have seen vaccines in accelerated trials as early | as March 2020. The vaccines were in existence by around that | point[0], but in part because mRNA vaccines are a brand new | technology there wasn't as much push to accelerate distribution | as there could have been. | | If the fatality or long term damage rate was 10x what it is, | there'd have been a lot more willingness to "try it NOW." | | [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071766/ - of | note, Moderna had a vaccine prepared 42 days after the spike | protein sequence was published on January 10. It took roughly | another 6 weeks before that vaccine was being injected in Phase | 1 trials in early May. | f00zz wrote: | I read "Around the World in 80 Days" not too long ago, and as I | was reading the part where they're crossing the US I had exactly | that same thought: the US was the China of the late 19th century. | narrator wrote: | The difference between Clubhouse and Twitter is Twitter has bots. | Bots haven't mastered faking speech well enough to disrupt | Clubhouse yet. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-06-25 23:00 UTC)