[HN Gopher] A man whose software ate the world
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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.
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