While I welcome the places where it is bringing value, I’m more worried about all the places it’s being shoehorned in that are a waste of money, fueling the bubble. The blast radius is going to be spectacular.
It creates a lot of value though. You may not see it but it exists. People so easily forget what you he financial systems looked like historically. Everything from having fluid loans of all type that don’t discriminate, to ipos, it’s easy to sell a business or to buy one. If I am buying stock it’s never been easier and modern spreads are some of the lowest in history.
That is just absurd. You are stuck in your head if you genuinely think that is true. Reminds me of some of the “10x engineers” I have worked with in the past that were so arrogant they ignored reality.
Investors don't want 5x revenue valuations, they want 30x growth.
Make 'real infrastructure' and 'housing' companies attractive products for investors to buy and they'll buy. (No idea how to do that, don't ask me! :))
That's the thing. You have to remove the unsustainable nonsense that looks like 30x growth in order for investors to be willing to invest in 5x revenue valuations.
(If you have real things that are actually producing 30x growth then that's fine, obvs.)
Maybe investors shouldn't treat inversion like casino gambling. With their capital, they could make inversions (or even their own businesses) that grow slower but steadily.
We need to kill the idea that a) this is what investors should be looking for, and b) it's even possible aside from a 1 in 1,000,000,000 fluke.
All of these economic instruments are supposed to be there to serve the needs of real human people, not just to make the wealthy even wealthier. We need to break this cycle of ever-escalating capital chasing capital, and get investment in things that will actually make people's lives better.
capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value. IMHO blaming regulators for not nudging capital in the politically desirable way is appropriate: either they shouldn't be regulating because they don't know how, or they're regulating according to a hidden policy instead of whatever they say. (cue 'why not both'.)
There is no need for hedging language, it is entirely weaponized greed.
> but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value.
No, its in a way which tries to remove constraints from the power of the capitalist class, and full enable their dominion over society -- that's what drove it and how it evolved from prior systems.
The assumed existence of competition (along with other assumptions) making it optimal was a much later, after the fact attempt at rationalizing it in response to criticism, and actual attempts to promote competition were later yet reforms limiting capitalism, not part of its essence.
> capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value.
In practice, capitalism itself doesn't really promote competition, but rather competition is an externally-enforced situation required to keep capitalism from going off the rails. IMHO, capitalism naturally evolves towards monopoly (otherwise antitrust laws would be unnecessary).
Are you being deliberately obtuse? In case you aren't, the answer is roads, bridges, public transportation, electrified rail, grid modernization, utility-scale storage and solar. We need these things desperately, and instead we're going to get sheds full of video cards from here to the horizon.
If you want to spend your money and time building bridges for electrified rail, go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. Other people clearly feel they have enough of that and would rather invest in datacenters. Who are you to say they're wrong?
I say they're wrong, and I do so in my capacity as a citizen. These large pools of capital should not be allowed to follow the whims of a handful of unelected oligarchs who have clearly lost the plot. In a functioning society, this scale of decision would not be left to the whims of international finance capital, but decided via democratic means. It's unfortunate that the last scraps of the Fordist labor truce are unraveling, because it means that I and my comrades are going to have to discipline this generation of oligarchs just like our grandparents did the last really nasty one.
This kind of absolutist individualist argument just rings more and more hollow as we see the very real consequences of that philosophy for our society.
Who am I to say they're wrong? A human being, that's who. A human being who lives in a modern society that does not have to prioritize the whims of the wealthy few over the needs of the many. We can choose to set stringent requirements on people who have that much money, and therefore power, and that is not evil. Indeed, it is the furthest thing from it.
And what happens when those people don't want to have your requirements "set" on them? Do you force those peaceful people to do your bidding with violence? Would that not make you the evil ones?
Look at the reply from the guy I was questioning. It took just two or three mild questions for him to go full Hitler, talking about how his comrades will have to "discipline" a whole generation of "oligarchs" (i.e. anyone who makes things he doesn't personally prioritize).
Collectivist thinking always leads to violence, and eventually societal failure.
There's nothing violent about using elections to make the decision to tax rich people so that we can spend (formerly) their money building roads and bridges. The idea that this is the road to Hitlerism is absurd, and thankfully this rhetorical stance no longer rings the slightest bit true to anyone within earshot of the working class.
Also, as I'm sure you're aware, I was using "discipline" as a term of art to mean "withhold our labor until their profits suffer and they are willing to negotiate". This was the strategy employed the last time we seriously dealt with concentrated capital getting high on its own supply. It is also not a form of violence. What's the alternative? Capital using force to require us to work against our will? Would you call that slavery? Or just serfdom? Which do you advocate?
> There's nothing violent about using elections to make the decision to tax rich people so that we can spend (formerly) their money building roads and bridges
The results of votes are enforced on the losers using the police, who will do so violently if required.
You mentioned the Fordist truce. The unions the auto industry dealt with weren't just a bunch of people refusing to work. They were frequently violent, and they also used stealing other people's property as a standard tactic to prevent anyone else from working also. Those were violent times.
> The results of votes are enforced on the losers using the police, who will do so violently if required.
The whims of the dictator are also enforced on the public using police.
All human rules, laws, customs, and edicts are enforced, ultimately, with violence of one sort or another. There is no way to avoid the threat of violence being the bedrock of the power of the state, and in the absence of formal states the strong would use violence to enforce their desires until they became states.
So if you're an anti-statist, just say so. (So we can all dismiss everything you have to say as coming from a place of absolute ignorance of what's needed to live and operate in the real world. If we were to abolish all states tomorrow, and erase the very memory of their existence from every human alive, by Sunday new ones would have arisen to replace them, one way or another, because they are how humans organize themselves.)
This thread started with a false dilemma: do we spend money on datacenters or "real infrastructure". It's only a dilemma if you assume governments should decide the answer, as ElevenLathe did.
Otherwise there's no need to choose between dictatorship or majority rule via democracy: everyone can spend money on the infrastructure they feel is more important, and there doesn't need to be any losers. Which is mostly how we try to do things in reality.
We can talk about how violent taxing the rich is once we have the first instance ever in history of the police locking up a rich guy for refusing to pay their taxes. Even then, sure, I'm fine with that level of violence. We would live in a utopia if that were the worst kind of state violence we had to deal with.
Go ahead and twist my normal, non-radical politics into whatever shape you want. You're the wing nut, not me. Normal people want normal stuff out of politics: functioning infrastructure, upward mobility, a future. Only the most warped, unreachable paint huffers are willing to throw away all possibility of a normal country for the "freedom" of a few dozen rapacious sociopaths. This means that we will ultimately win. Unfortunately normal people have been asleep at the switch for at least a generation, so you're probably going to be able to drag us through several hellish decades, maybe centuries, until we can right the ship.
I'm sure I'll see you in the camps, so at least we'll have that in common. Have a nice day.
