Oceans Yet to Burn

xhxhxhx:

mitigatedchaos replied to your post: mitigatedchaos replied to your post: …

(also admittedly I am really tired right now)

thinking in equilibrium is hard and I’m not that great at it, either, but the additional insight I want to deliver is that technological innovation and capital accumulation responds to prices

Google invested in the driverless cars because it can create profits in the captured markets. That’s a Schumpeterian process: capital and labor for technological innovation is scarce, so rational firms allocate capital and labor where the captured market can deliver the greatest profits.

By necessity, that doesn’t happen “all at once”, as you suggested earlier. There are only so many software and intelligence engineers to go around. Google had to pay them dearly:

For the past year, Google’s car project has been a talent sieve, thanks to leadership changes, strategy doubts, new startup dreams and rivals luring self-driving technology experts. Another force pushing people out? Money. A lot of it.

[….]

A large multiplier was applied to the compensation packages in late 2015, resulting in multi-million dollar payments in some cases, according to the people familiar with the situation. One member of the team had a multiplier of 16 applied to bonuses and equity amassed over four years, one of the people said. They asked not to be identified talking about private matters. 

[…]

It’s unclear how much the payouts cost Alphabet, however, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat talked about it during an earnings conference call with analysts in early 2016.

Operating expenses in the fourth quarter of 2015 rose 14 percent to $6.6 billion, “primarily driven by R&D expense, particularly affected by expenses resulting from project milestones in Other Bets established several years ago,” Porat said, according to a transcript. The CFO wasn’t specific, but one of the people familiar with the situation said the comments referred to the car project compensation.

Google is the most powerful firm in the world, but Google does not have limitless resources, and those resources are prudent enough to command their marginal product. Google already had an endowment here: detailed, comprehensive, machine-readable routes for every navigable roadway in the world; alongside efficient photograph recognition software.

Google, and competing firms, can make a coordinated push where the technology is right, but there are real resource constraints that limit the ‘revolutionary’ impacts of their technology.  Technology doesn’t just develop itself, especially capital- and labor-intensive technologies like this one. Not yet, anyways. And not anytime soon.

Google isn’t making surgeonless-surgeries or builderless-buildings or teacherless-teaching, because there aren’t the profits in those markets to justify the costs of the technology and capital investments needed to undercut market incumbents – Google doesn’t have detailed, comprehensive, machine-readable databases of surgeries, building plans, or problem sets which it can process at nominal cost – which suggests that dramatic innovations in those markets aren’t just around the corner, either. 

It takes work to do these things. It’s not going to happen all at once unless these are perfect general purpose technologies, with trivial adaptation and marketization costs. I don’t think that’s what they are. 

The other constraint is that Schumpeterian innovation profits depend on market prices and incomes. Acemoglu makes them straightforwardly reflect factor prices: falling relative wages induce labor-augmenting demand, falling relative rents induce capital-augmenting demand. 

But if you’re working from a model where capital elastically substitutes for labor, I think the equilibrium conditions look different. If your technology is so impressive that it materially reduces labor incomes by substituting for labor, then it will reduce the profits from the goods and services your technology produces. 

Less demand for driverless cars means less people can effectively demand drives, right? That really cuts into your bottom line, doesn’t it? Why would you invest in capital-augmenting technology if the relative returns to that capital-augmenting technology are so low? Why would you develop a driverless car if no one could afford to drive it?

Even if you have dramatically different understandings of what the constraints are, I think you have to work out the equilibrium conditions, the individual, marginal choices they emerge from. Why would individuals and firms keep doing the things that get you to that outcome?

I’m not actually entirely averse to thinking of all production as a product of labor.  It’s in search of the equilibrium in a closed system with labor that I devised a heuristical model I am adapting for the OTV game concept, because I wanted to figure out prices for a setting in the transhuman space future.

Of course, not all goods respond nice and linearly to labor (especially WRT time), e.g. land vs waitressing, so it doesn’t necessarily hold that, if differences in productivity between workers are sufficient, the price for someone’s labor cannot fall below the minimum in terms of absolute resources that they need to survive.  Indeed, this already happens for sufficiently low-productivity workers, workers during famines, etc.

Anyhow,

• If my technology is so impressive that it reduces labor incomes, that doesn’t matter unless I’m the majority employer within the system.  I can pull the money from someone else hiring these people, at least for a while.
  
• If I’m the CEO of most companies, I don’t get paid based on the conditions in ten years, I get paid on a much shorter horizon.
• And unless I did, it’s a problem for the Commons, not me.
• And it doesn’t matter if it’s incredibly profitable - it matters whether my competitors will pursue it.  If my competitors make less profit per transaction but undercut my prices by 10%, soon I will be making no profit per transaction.  (Although it’s true that at some point the correct decision becomes to exit the industry.)

But maybe I’m missing something here, since my own econ education didn’t go all that far.

xhxhxhx:

mitigatedchaos reblogged your post: @poipoipoi-2016: So what just happened with Trump?…

Conservatives and others on the right have down-prioritized it because they thought the whole Trump-Russia thing was bullsht.

Which is why the reporting should change their minds, but won’t. It’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their politics depends on them not understanding it.

Probably doesn’t help that Hillary seemed hyped for war in Syria, which could have lead to war with Russia, both of which are pretty terrible.

I have nothing but contempt for this canard. It imagines a fantastical risk of conflict over a small, irrelevant Middle Eastern country, while ignoring the grave risks of nuclear war over treaty allies in Europe, which Trump’s election has substantially heightened.

But even if you did believe that, Clinton’s foreign policy is irrelevant now. Trump’s foreign policy is not.

Well, that is the difficulty with oppositional politics.

I wonder if in multi-party systems, the standard for “better than the other guys” is higher.  Probably not.

xhxhxhx:

@poipoipoi-2016:

So what just happened with Trump?

I seem to have missed the good bits.

The news of the night is Jeff Sessions lied about the nature of his conversations with Sergei Kislyak, but this post is about the whole elephant.

As I said to @deusvulture, I think most people don’t know why they should care about the issue and why they should care if the facts are sufficient to support the pleaded claims.

Everyone on Tumblr, from reactionaries to conservatives to libertarians to liberals to the left seems to have the same indifference to the issue, and it mystifies me.  I don’t know enough to write an airtight account of the controversy, but no one else seems to know the stakes at play.

I know that the stakes are pretty high, but everyone else seems to think that there are no stakes at all.

Conservatives and others on the right have down-prioritized it because they thought the whole Trump-Russia thing was bullsht.

Probably doesn’t help that Hillary seemed hyped for war in Syria, which could have lead to war with Russia, both of which are pretty terrible.

blackjackgabbiani:

@mitigatedchaos it isn’t dodging anything. I’m looking at actions and deeds regardless of who they come from.

Plus I’m not sure what your overall point is. Nobody is tolerant of everything. We wouldn’t have opposition to tyrrany if that was the case. Having a bit of intolerance doesn’t negate being pro-diversity.

My point was laid out in the original post: it is entirely normal for people not to want their culture replaced, this is not a unique evil of vile Trump voters which crawled up out of a cave somewhere, and people on the left are the same way.

What I’m trying to explain is that when you lose cultural dominance, you don’t just lose cultural dominance over the little things like what music plays in the local bar.  You lose them over the big things as well.  It isn’t your culture’s decision anymore.  And that can hurt.

Liberal/Progressivism itself has a sort of meta-culture which the Robert E. Lee statue violates.  But if our hypothetical confedernecks establish themselves as a majority, then the progressives don’t get to make that decision anymore.  Laws follow culture, not just alter it.

Some hostile cultural aspects can be neutralized without really trying to, but they aren’t all so vulnerable to liberal social atomization.  My concern, in part, is that since you don’t understand just what it is you’re trying to do, you won’t be able to summon the political will to do what is necessary for your plans.

intrigue-posthaste-please:

Is anyone else bothered by how many news sources have begun referring to “the Russians” instead of “the Russian government” or “Russian officials”? It seems xenophobic. It’s troublesome to me that “the Russians” have begun to take on a sort of evil and alien aspect in many Americans’ minds.

You didn’t notice this in Hollywood movies before?

the-grey-tribe:

I was asked once “Why do you even want to have a girlfriend? What do you want to do with her? What do you want her to do?“

I replied “You know, the usual. You know?“

The guy who asked had a deep point to make, but I know he could not have answered this himself to his own satisfaction.

“Redundancy,” I answered. “Two mammals are more likely to reach task completion than one, as their failures are unlikely to overlap, significantly boosting performance as compared to one mammal.”

“The real girlfriend is the girlfriend that was inside you all along,” I answered. He rolled his eyes at my pre-mocking of his deep point.

“Vulnerability,” I answered. “Relationships are a cycle of mutually-increasing vulnerability, something that is dangerous in this world, and intimate physical contact builds bonding and trust, in addition to creating mutual vulnerability.” He was silent for a moment, but then opened his his mouth. “Well, *Actually” he says…

the-grey-tribe:

There is a common back-and-forth where the outgroup points out toxic people on the your side doing bad things, and your first impulse is to defend them, but your second impulse is to point out that these bad people are not typical of the ingroup.

The outgroup then clarifies: These people are what’s wrong with ingroup, because these shitty people are a symptom of all the shittyness, and suddenly you have to defend them and say they are not so bad after all.

Okay, but while the average Soviet citizen was not Stalin, the USSR having Stalins/etc was in part the product of its ideology.

xhxhxhx:

collapsedsquid reblogged your post: collapsedsquid reblogged your…

You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended.  Killing people was not effective in developing the country.  Actually doing public health is.

I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“

Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”

Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.

Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.

The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.

I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.

But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.

Sen says as much:

In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social comparison and contrast.

China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.

There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel (including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable - 892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790 in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.

In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.

You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.

I think @mitigatedchaos​ is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents. 

China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.

Look at that malnutrition table again:

Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.  

So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.

Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’t socialists.

Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.

Which was what that graph was about.

bambamramfan:

fierceawakening:

bambamramfan:

There’s a lot of… dialogue about monogamy vs polyamory these days, in our cosmopolitan little bubble. No one wants to tell others which lifestyle you should choose so I wouldn’t call it a debate, but there’s a great deal of defending “how your lifestyle works, and why you’re happy with it” that can’t save itself from becoming discourse about the two main options.

This happens enough that we fail to recognize that no, polyamory just won. We all live in its world now.

Or more accurately, we all live free of monogamous ideology now.

Case in point. I have a friend, and she’s monogamously committed to her boyfriend. Sure, she hangs out with a lot of other boys. She even visits them by herself, and crashes in their bed. She’s generous with hugs and other mild displays of physical affection to men. And she kind of pines after some specific men, wishing for greater emotional attachment. This isn’t even hidden, it’s all openly acknowledged. But, this is the definition of monogamy she and her SO have worked out.

The reaction of people from her social circle, the people from our general social bubble is “fine. Whatever works for the two of you. If that’s what you call monogamy, I have no reason to disagree with you.” There’s no call for us to try to strictly define what monogamy should mean for them.

Let me assure you, this is not how it would work under monogamous ideology. In a society where monogamy was the reigning lifestyle choice, it includes a specific definition of monogamy, and “being too touchy with other men” would definitely violate that. Even with her partner’s consent, she would be found guilty of breaking social taboos. (Which is basically how her non-cosmopolitan co-workers react.)

But none of us (which I assume includes most of my readers) give a fuck. Call yourself polyamorous, monogamish, what the fuck ever. As long as you both are happy what business is it of mine? And that is the true spirit of polyamory - anarchism towards society wide definitions of romantic relationships.

You might individually choose to snuggle with just one person, and hopefully can get that special person to agree. But it’s very different when that’s a private agreement between two people (one which can be altered at any time they want), than when it’s an arrangement coded and enforced by the whole social world. And we just don’t have that in liberal cosmopolitania any more.

After all, one of the main benefits of monogamy was that you don’t have to negotiate shit. You’re together, you’re just dating each other, these are the default rules, and for people who don’t want to process and explicitly lay out their preferences, this is a lot easier. But that’s gone now - any couple does have to figure out whether they are poly or mono, and even if they are mono, where they feel those boundaries lie, because ain’t no one else doing that regulating for them.

I am… really really troubled by the idea that “monogamous ideology” exists. Or that if you don’t have a bad ideology, you have “poly ideology,” even if you have said “FUCK OFF, I’M NOT POLY” more than once.

Anti-poly ideology exists, yes.

But monogamy can mean anything from “I am attracted to one person at a time” to “I want three girlfriends but think God must hate me” to “more just sounds like a brain-breaking logistical nightmarish time suck, I’m good” to “you know, in practice I only ever dated one person at a time.”

The idea that that adds up to an ideology is why I… feel perhaps more suspicious than I should of loud poly people.

I don’t date one person at a time to spite people who don’t. I do it because I don’t like sensory overload.

I feel you did not read this post.

The point is not “be monogamous or be polyamorous.”

The point is that ideology is a society wide phenomenon, and it is not located solely in the individual.

Under monogamous ideology, not only were most people monogamous (at least publicly), but what monogamy meant and enforcement of following this code was a public matter.

If you live in a bubble where polyamory is accepted now, then you also live in a bubble where no one is defining monogamy for you. You can make up the definition of monogamy to fit your relationship. It can include “cuddling other people is ok but no sex”, or hell, it can include “having sex with other people is okay but we still call it monogamy because we want to” and no one is really going to criticize you for that.

Guess what. This freedom is new. It’s a result of living under polyamory, which exists outside just the individual.

(It’s also a burden. It means when you start dating someone, you need to clarify whether your relationship is poly or mono, and if it’s mono what those boundaries are. You can no longer just assume the default rules. Some people understandably loathe this.)

Transitioning from “the rules of my romantic relationship are defined by the social structure around me” to “I get to / must choose the rules” is a big step. But it’s a culture-wide step, and can’t exist solely on the individual level, anymore than “I decide to have private property” is a decision solely by the individual. Both need the social structures that support them.

There’s no escaping this. It’s not saying “polyamory is an ideology yay”, but rather “your society is going to have an ideology about how much freedom people can expect in defining their relationships.” This has always been true, and will be true in the future.

You can say “FUCK OFF I’M NOT POLY” all you want, but I bet if your partner cheats on you none of your friends are going to immediately tell you (at least, as compared to how likely they were to under monogamy), because that’s now your business and not theirs to enforce. This is the anarchy I am talking about.

(And obviously, the current polyamory acceptance only exists in a few very specific bubbles, and monogamous ideology holds sway in most of America and the world still.)

I can and will tell anyone if I find their partner cheating.  I can and will ostracize people from my social groups for cheating.  I can and will abandon anyone that knows if my partner is cheating and fails to inform me.  Fuck the ideology.  I’m physically instantiating my own reality, whether they want me to or not.

The people behind this shift have no idea what it is that they’re unleashing.

argumate:

y’all need a Tumblr safeword; I’ve been interpreting your regular screams of “please stop / bad post op / delete your account / blocked and reported” as countersignalling hyperbole between friends and doubling down.

get off this site.  tumblr is for humans and human-derived semi-artificial constructs, NOT BIRDS

mitigatedchaos:

Tags Now:

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#augmented reality break - (alternate (reality) break) tag intersection, but with coffee so it’s better and therefore augmented (like me)

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#super love love demon battle - SLLDB fandom drama.  eventually boils over into discussion of the SLLDB fandom murders

#HobbesWasRight - series of articles laying out the philosophical groundwork for Googlezon Dynamics’ Leviathan Project and its benefits for the security of the state and the populace

#dogs - dog photos and canine cybernetic augmentations.  also ferrets, to go with the ferret mistagging fad

#national technocracy - hypothetical point within the N-dimensional ideospace lattice originally theorized by RAND Geospatial Dynamics Working Group in the 1950s, generally summarized as “that thing that comes after prediction markets”, many researchers dispute whether it can actually exist.  abandoned by Silicon Valley CEOs in favor of a system based on Facebook likes. 

#dogfree - actual dog photos, just dog photos

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No tags for this timeline, possibly unstable.  Radsuit suggested.

New Tags:

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argumate:

“men and women have statistically different preferences” is a statement universally acknowledged and incredibly controversial at the same time

probably the dissonance is resolved by carefully distinguishing actual men and women (who have statistically differing preferences due to existing in this fallen world and being shaped and moulded by society into the twisted creations that we see all around us) and the Platonic ideal of men and women, who are equal in every way and have identical preferences and behaviour at a statistical level.

admission time: I think that some of the gender forbidden shadowspeech is probably true for a sizeable chunk, once you’ve removed the lesbians, the gays, the bisexuals, transgender individuals, queers, asexuals, autistics, adhders, those with PCOS… basically anyone who has a good reason that they might differ from main plan. (as many as 1/5th of women may have PCOS for instance - not a trivial number)

argumate:

gosh it’s going to get nasty over the next few years as the results demonstrating that blind reviews decrease diversity start to sink in.

Will they?  Hmn.

Might be a split, or maybe the ideological evaporative cooling will continue as it already has been.