Can someone, who knows computer graphics, explain why the old library had so many issues with flickering and black triangles or rectangles flashing on the app, and why the new library is expected to not have those same problems?
Product management might be the worst meme in the industry.
Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong?
It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never learn.
Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month.
Just saved you thousands or millions in salaries, and you have a better chance of making things that your users actually want.
Good PM's are extremely good at understanding users, and use soft-skills to make the rest of the org focus on users more. I've worked with a couple, and they've added an enormous amount of value, sometimes steering teams of dozens of engineers in a more productive direction.
The problem is, it's hard to measure how good a PM is, even harder than for engineers. The instinct is to use product KPI's to do so, but especially at BigTech company, distribution advantages and traction of previous products will be the dominant factor here, and the best way of raising many product KPI's are actually user-hostile. Someone who has been a successful FAANG engineer who goes to a startup might lean towards over-engineering, but at least they should be sharp on the fundamentals. Someone who has been a successful FAANG PM might actually have no idea how to get PMF.
> Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month
This is actually a great idea, but what will happen is this socially competent engineer will soon have a new full-time job gathering those insights, coalescing them into actionable product changes, persuading the rest of the org to adopt those changes, and making sure the original user insights make it into the product. Voila: you've re-invented product management.
But I actually think it's good to source PM's from people who've been engineers for a few years. PM's used to come from a technical background; Google famously gave entry-level coding tests to PM's well into the '10s. I dunno when it became more fashionable to hire MBA's and consultants into this role, but it may have been a mistake.
This is a names vs. structure thing. For a moment, taboo the term product manager.
What I'm suggesting is a low risk way to see if an engineer has an aptitude for aligning the roadmap with what the users want.
If they aren't great at it, they can go back to engineering.
We also know for sure that they are technically competent since they are currently working as an engineer, no risk there.
The conventional wisdom (bad meme) is going to the labor market with a search term for people who claim to know what the users want, any user, any problem, doesn't matter. These people are usually incompetent and have never written software. Then hiring 1 and potentially more of the people that respond to the shibboleth.
If you want the first case, then you can't say "product manager" because people will automatically do the second case.
> What I'm suggesting is a low risk way to see if an engineer has an aptitude for aligning the roadmap with what the users want. If they aren't great at it, they can go back to engineering. We also know for sure that they are technically competent since they are currently working as an engineer, no risk there.
It doesn't have to be the most socially competent engineer to gather feedback. Having the engineering team sit with the target users gives so much insight into how the product is being used.
I once worked on an administrative tool at a financial institution. There were lots of pain points, as it started as a dev tool that turned into a monstrosity for the support staff. We asked to have a meeting with some reps who were literally 2 floors below us. Having the reps talk as they worked with the tool in real time over 1 hour was worth more than a year's worth of feedback that trickled in. It's one thing to solicit feedback. It's another to see how idiosyncrasies shape how products get used.
Putting on a PM hat is something I've been doing regularly in my engineering career over the last quarter century. Even as a junior (still in college!) at my first job I was thinking about product, in no small part because there were no PMs in sight. As I grew through multiple startups and eventually bigger brand name tech companies, I realized that understanding how the details work combined with some sense of what users actually want and how they behave is a super power. With AI this skillset has never been more relevant.
I agree your assessment about the value of good PMs. The issue, in my experience, is that only about 20% (at most) are actually good. 60% are fine and can be successful with the right Design and Engingeering partners. And 20% should just be replaced by AI now so we can put the proper guardrails around their opinions and not be misled by their charisma or whatever other human traits enabled them to get hired into a job they are utterly unqualified for.
I have worked with some really really good product managers.
But not lately. Lately it’s been people who have very little relevant domain expertise, zero interest in putting in the time to develop said expertise beyond just cataloguing and regurgitating feedback from the customers they like most on a personal level, and seem to mostly have only been selected for the position because they are really good at office politics.
But I think it’s not entirely their fault. What I’ve also noticed is that, when I was on teams with really elective product managers, we also had a full time project manager. That possibly freed up a lot of the product manager’s time. One person to be good at the tactical so the other can be good at the strategic.
Since project managers have become passé, though, I think the product managers are just stretched too thin. Which sets up bad incentive structures: it’s impossible to actually do the job well anymore, so of course the only ones who survive are the office politicians who are really good at gladhanding the right people and shifting blame when things don’t go well.
There are individuals who have good taste for products in certain domains.
Their own preferences are an accurate approximation for those of the users.
Those people might add value when they are given control of the product.
That good taste doesn't translate between domains very often.
Good taste for developer tools doesn't mean good taste for a video game inventory screen.
And that's the crux of the problem.
There is a segment of the labor market calling themselves "product manager" who act like good taste is domain independent, and spread lies about their importance to the success of every business.
What's worse is that otherwise smart people (founders, executives) fall for it because they think hiring them is what they are supposed to do.
Over time, as more and more people realized that PM is a side door into big companies with lots of money, "Product Manager" became an imposter role like "Scrum Master".
Now product orgs are pretty much synonymous with incompetence.
Taste is pretty transferable, I think what you're talking about is intuition. The foundations of intuition are deeply understanding problems and the ability to navigate towards solutions related to those problems. Both of these are relatively domain-dependent. People can have intuition for how to do things but lack the taste to make those solutions feel right.
Taste on the other hand is about creating an overall feeling from a product. It's holistic and about coherence, where intuition is more bottom-up problem solving. Tasteful decisions are those that use restraint, that strike a particular tone, that say 'no' when others might say 'yes'. It's a lot more magical, and a lot rarer.
Both taste and intuition are ultimately about judgment, which is why they're often confused for one another. The difference is they approach problems from the opposite side; taste from above, intuition from below.
I agree with your assessment otherwise, PM can be a real smoke screen especially across domain and company stage.
The proportion of "really good" PMs on product engineering teams has to be less than 0.1%.
The counter to that is "the proportion of 'really good engineers' to product engineering teams has got to be in the single digits," and I would agree with that, as well.
The problem is what is incentivized to be built - most teams are working on "number go up?" revenue or engagement as a proxy to revenue "problems." Not "is this a good product that people actively enjoy using?" problems.
> Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users
In most of my engineering jobs, the Product Managers were much closer to our users than the engineers.
Good product managers are very valuable. There are a lot of bad ones carrying the product manager title because it was viewed as the easy way to get a job in tech without having to know how to program, but smart companies are getting better at filtering them out.
> Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month
Every single time I've seen this tried, it turns into a situation where one or two highly vocal customers capture the engineering team's direction and steer the product toward their personal needs. It's the same thing that happens when the sales people start feeding requests from their customers into the roadmap.
I've worked with some really good product managers, as well as some total duds. They all talked to customers on a regular basis. There is so much more to the job than that. Every time I think I understand a product manager's job completely, I see one fail in a way I hadn't thought about.
For example, I had one product manager who made themselves irrelevant because they wouldn't work with sales. The company needed to sell the product to pay us, and sales talked with potential buyers about what might swing their purchase decision and what they would pay extra for. Since the PM only talked to users and ignored sales when doing product design and product roadmaps, the way sales input got integrated into product development is that we frequently got top-down directives from management to prioritize one-off requests from sales over the roadmap. Needless to say, this didn't lead to a cohesive and easy-to-understand product.
Before I saw that PM failing, I hadn't thought about the relationship between product and sales.
This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now. AI coding is making technically minded product manager's MORE powerful not less. When/if coding just because your ability to accurately describe what you want to build, the people yielding this skill are the ones who understand customer requirements, not the opposite.
> Find your most socially competent engineer,
These usually get promoted to product management anyway, so this isn't a new thought.
> This sentiment is going exactly against the trend right now.
It's not.
Engineers are having more and more minutia and busy work taken off their plate, now done by AI.
That allows them to be heads up more often, more of their cognitive capacity is directed towards strategy, design, quality.
Meanwhile, users are building more and more of their own tools in house.
Why pay someone when you can vibe code a working solution in a few minutes?
So product managers are getting squeezed out by smarter people below them moving into their cognitive space and being better at solving the problems they were supposed to be solving.
And users moving into their space by taking low hanging fruit away from them.
No more month long discussions about where to put the chart and what color it should be.
The user made their own dashboard and it calls into the API. What API? The one the PM doesn't understand and a single engineer maintains with the help of several LLMs.
If it's simple and easy: the user took it over, if it's complex: it's going to the smartest person in the room. That has never been the PM.
In my average experience, without interviewing management teams - my observation is that the "smartest person in the room" is rarely the one deciding anything.
This also depends on your definition on "smartest".
> This also depends on your definition on "smartest".
Which the parent conveniently left out a definition of. I sort of ignored that implication and went straight to the point - which is it doesn't matter if the PM is the smartest or not. What matters is who makes the decisions and typically the PM does.
> people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users
I agree completely that these are the important qualifications to be setting direction for a product.
> Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month.
This doesn't necessarily follow from the above, but in Anthropic's case specifically, where the users are software engineers, it probably would have worked better than whatever they have going on now.
In general, it's probably better to have domain experts doing product management, as opposed to someone who is trained in product management.
The ability to reverse is very dependent on the transformation being well known, in this case it is deterministic and known with certainty.
Any algorithm to reverse motion blur will depend on the translation and rotation of the camera in physical space, and the best the algorithm could do will be limited by the uncertainty in estimating those values.
If you apply a fake motion blur like in photoshop or after effects then that could probably be reversed pretty well.
> and the best the algorithm could do will be limited by the uncertainty in estimating those values
That's relatively easy if you're assuming simple translation and rotation (simple camera movement), as opposed to a squiggle movement or something (e.g. from vibration or being knocked). Because you can simply detect how much sharper the image gets, and hone in on the right values.
I recall a paper from many years ago (early 2010s) describing methods to estimate the camera motion and remove motion blur from blurry image contents only. I think they used a quality metric on the resulting “unblurred” image as a loss function for learning the effective motion estimate. This was before deep learning took off; certainly today’s image models could do much better at assessing the quality of the unblurred image than a hand-crafted metric.
Naive self-interest is a characteristic of children.
You didn't stumble upon some ancient wisdom of another culture, you just matured and established a family, which your instincts tell you to put before yourself.
The West is individualistic, but all that means is that individuals choose their circle of concern. Without any further guidance, that means that innate instincts about who is important (family, close friends) dominate, rather than a forced narrative about the collective.
Kids do think about others and cooperate, they do have natural empathy and care too. A lot more in cooperative cultures where they are taught to be like that. Less in individualistic cultures where they are taught to not be empathetic. Even within West, there is range of individualism. Netherland is different then USA and both are different then Spain.
It is not just instinct that makes some people (including kids) dominant, it is also that they are being actively taught to act like that. The natural thing is for parents to teach kids own values, both in a planned and conscious way and in the "by the way" style.
Not the "West", obsessive single minded individualism is a US characteristic. All other western nations (read: Europe) realize that there is significant value to society and that to achieve things we need to work as a group.
Kids have very little agency to begin with, so looking out for #1 is a fully rational strategy from their POV. As an adult, you grow a lot more comfortable with your situation and it becomes natural to "expand the circle of concern" beyond oneself.
I think it has more to do with agency than age except that agency increases with age.
Look at prisoners, people dependent upon disability, people in authoritarian societies, you see all the same stuff. They're just more tactful about it because they're adults.
What they call "fluid intelligence" is just intelligence and the rest are skills/aptitudes.
"Crystallized intelligence" is more plainly: efficacy/productivity and it's common knowledge that people are most productive during the middle of their lives. When they have the best balance of knowledge accumulated and raw intelligence.
In humans, intelligence manifests as memory, spatial and verbal reasoning, pattern recognition, etc.
What is so interesting about IQ and g (the general factor) is that all of these abilities trend together.
A score in one area is a good prediction of the score in another area.
There is no reason why that must be the case a priori, and LLMs are a great example of an intelligent system which is much better at recalling information than it is at reasoning.
Human aging doesn't seem to affect all of these abilities uniformly.
e.g. Everyone seems to complain about memory the most (and that matches my experience), but I've been pleasantly surprised how well neuroplasticity and pattern recognition have held.
LLMs in my opinion is pattern recognition of text sequences at an almost infinite scale. My understanding is that "world models" is an attempt to replace the text sequences with more realistic approximations of the world. But they still plan to use pattern recognition.
In the meantime, humans would still need to do the reasoning.
We do pattern recognition at an unconscious level all the time. When we perform a task using "system 2" of our mind we are rational and conscious, but when we perform a task using system 1 we do it automatically, intuitively and witu no effort. System 1 often relies on unconscious patterns matching
For example, a chess grandmaster can instinctively tell a good move when seeing a board during a real game. But if they see a random chess board that was not part of a real game, they regress to almost novice level at this task, because there are no patterns to recognize
(patterns such as tactics like pins and skews, or common mating patterns like backrank mate, or common pawn structures and corresponding pawn breaks, things like that - all those patterns can get recognized unconsciously)
Then perhaps the peak identification is wrong -- surely they haven't tested solid comparison groups for such claims, like individuals that didn't receive education later in life.
The series this is from (Free to Choose) is a great introduction to economics for people of any age.
I highly recommend it.
This particular example can be misinterpreted though.
It's true that no single person knows how to make that exact pencil that he is holding.
But it's not true that no single individual exists who can make a pencil by themselves.
If the criteria is just that it works as a pencil, then many people could make or find something that fills that criteria.
This is an important distinction because there are things like microprocessors, which no single person knows how to make. But also: no single person could alone build something that has anywhere near the same capability.
It's conceivable that a civilization could forget how to do something like that because it requires so many people with non-overlapping knowledge to create anything close.
We aren't going to forget how to make pencils because it is such a simple problem, that many individuals are capable of figuring out workable solutions alone.
> This is an important distinction because there are things like microprocessors, which no single person knows how to make.
That depends on your definition of “knows how to make.” I worked at Samsung Austin Semiconductor for a while, and there are some insanely smart and knowledgeable people there (and, I’m sure, at every other semiconductor company). It was actually a really good life experience for me, because it grounded and humbled me in the way that only working around borderline genius can.
I can describe to you all the steps that go into manufacturing a silicon wafer, with more detail in my particular area (wet cleans) than others, but I certainly can’t answer any and all questions about the process. However, I am nearly certain that there existed at least one person at SAS who could describe every step of every process in such excruciating detail that, given enough time and skilled workers (you said “know,” not “do” - I am under no delusion that a single person could ever hope to build a fab), they could bootstrap a fab.
> This is an important distinction because there are things like microprocessors, which no single person knows how to make. But also: no single person could alone build something that has anywhere near the same capability
The levels of advanced _whatever_ that we've reached is absurdly bonkers.
It seems to me that at some point in the last 50 or so years the world went from "given a lot of time I can make a _crude_ but reasonably functional version of whatever XYZ in my garage" to "it requires the structural backbone of a whole civilization to achieve XYZ".
Of course it's sort of a delusion. Maybe it's more about the ramp appearing more exponential than ever.
Taxation is the mechanism that moves power from the people to the government, and increasingly politicians and their specific interests.
Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power?
Every government goon doing authoritarian dirty work collects a paycheck and wouldn't do their job without it.
> Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power?
Absolutely. The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way. If there was less wealth inequality there'd be much less scope for this.
Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government (not that I suggest that's what we do).
Politics has it's fair share of corruption too. But at least in my country (the UK) it's the lesser evil. And even if you look at a country like the US where there is a lot more political corruption, the source of a lot of that seems to be private money influencing elections.
Every marginal dollar* taxed is a dollar politicians don't have to scrounge from a wealthy donor, in order to get that politician's pet interests achieved. You are saying MORE taxation means less wealthy donor influence on private citizens. And parent is saying LESS taxation means less policy influence on private citizens.
Here's what I say: how about both? Or neither? I think the scope of the problem is defined too narrowly so far in this particular thread.
*Or say, 10 dollars, since a donor's dollar is leveraged
>Every marginal dollar* taxed is a dollar politicians don't have to scrounge from a wealthy donor, in order to get that politician's pet interests achieved.
You fundamentally misunderstand the relationship.
The donors donate because the politician will then direct more money at the donors interests.
I spend $1mil on lobbying, $1mil on bunk science at labs I fund or astro turf'd grass roots support (something the government can point to to justify their action), $1mil on donations I get a preferential change in law or rule, or perhaps even government investment in my industry, that lets my business make billions, bringing back say $6mil in profit to me personally. Repeat for all my other business activities.
Politician, political appointees and regulatory agencies pet interests only matter insofar as I get better value for my money by choose one who's interests align.
> Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government
No need to literally burn the money, either: just use the entirety of that increased tax revenue on paying down the national debt, and lower the debt ceiling by the exact same amount so it can't go back up. This is an even better deal if you think "interest rates are too high, the Fed should cut a lot more". It all fits. And we managed this throughout the 1990s.
Of course it is. Things getting cheaper is really bad for the economy.
That's why computers never became an industry, they just kept getting cheaper every year so nobody bought them. If only computing power had kept getting more expensive every year, we might have some kind of tech industry!
In the traditional / academic sense of the word, it _is_ deflation. The repurposing of inflation/deflation to refer to consumer price action is much more recent.
Is there a strong correlation between higher taxes and decreasing wealth inequality?
The one part of your comment with which I certainly agree is:
> Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government (not that I suggest that's what we do).
...except, I am perhaps prepared to suggest actually implementing such a system, at least as an experiment.
Removing spending power from places where it's concentrated seems to have obvious benefits, but giving it to the state (the entity in which political power is maximally concentrated, at least with respect to the legitimate initiation of violence) seems like it's moving the power dynamic in the wrong direction.
> Is there a strong correlation between higher taxes and decreasing wealth inequality?
A sufficiently strong progressive taxation regime would obviously have this effect, assuming you could actually enforce it. For example, if you taxed 99% of earnings above $10 million that would greatly reduce the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, even without taking into account how that money was redistributed.
That's obviously an extreme, and I'm not suggesting we do exactly that. But 80% tax rates were common as recently as the late 20th century, and coincidentally there were much lower rates of wealth inequality during this time.
Well I think we all understand the basic arithmetic; that's not what's in dispute.
The question is,
> even without taking into account how that money was redistributed.
...if you're taking money from people earning $11 million, and giving it instead of the military and prison industrial complexes, obviously you've concentrated, rather than diluting power.
I think there's a real question about how possible it is for a taxation regime to ever have a progressive effect inside the belly of empire.
> The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way
This is so wrong, its not expensive to bribe politicians so higher taxes wouldn't stop this at all. The problem is that its possible to bribe politicians, meaning government has too much power, taxes would make that worse not better. And even more important most bribes doesn't come from individuals, it comes from super PACs and corporations, and those would exist regardless how much you tax rich people.
What you need is a less centralized government so its harder to bribe a few key people to get what you want, and a more direct democracy that can eliminate politicians that takes bribes.
When voters can't punish bad politicians since the incumbents has so much power to draw voting lines and decide who is on the ballots then corruption will always escalate out of control.
If the government doesn't have enough power, the wealthy won't need to bribe politicians to do their bidding. They will do their own bidding directly, and there will be nobody to stop them.
It's like, if you want to sell your cyanide penis pills under big government, you need to bribe someone. If you want to sell them under small government, you just... you just sell them, that's what.
There may be ways to design a government where power is better distributed, e.g. using sortition, but ultimately it needs to be richer and more powerful than its wealthiest citizens, otherwise these wealthy citizens will assess, correctly, that when push comes to shove, the laws won't apply to them, and they do not need the government's permission to do what they want.
Even a small government still has courts, in fact they would be a far more sizeable fraction of the government and thus a lot more effective. So if people like Epstein engage in criminal behavior, or even just unlawful behavior that they would be liable for, they can definitely be held accountable.
But suppose you have egalitarian nation N -- what stops the billionaire from non-egalitarian nation B from influencing your politicians? Especially if nation N is small and nation B is large.
Moreover -- why would low-level elites (think: entrepreneurs, small business owners, etc.) stay in nation N if it was more profitable to do business in nation B -- recall this is precisely the type of person that is often most mobile and internationalized.
The government is the majority of people. So the government very well can be against 49% of the people and it would still fit your definition.
If 100 people were about to embark on a journey on a ship, what makes you think 51 of them know who should run the ship if none of them have ever even been on a ship?
There are a variety of ways that democratic governments are structure that make this an inaccurate characterization of how things work.
The US, for example, apportions representatives and votes for President in a way that overweights less populated states, and there are various aspects of parliamentary systems that help avoid landing in a two-party system where a simple majority gets the say in everything—they force compromise and coalition building among disparate groups. Additionally, Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.
Democratic countries are also basically never "pure" democracies where everyone votes on every decision as in your Plato's ship analogy—we elect people who audition for the role of running the ship, ostensibly those among the people who are best suited to the task.
First, it is not always the case that there are only two parties. You can totally have a government made by representants of all "relevant" parties (by "relevant" I mean that the party needs a minimum size, otherwise anyone could create a party of one person).
Second, your ship example is pretty weird. The people gets to elect representatives regularly. It's not embarking on a ship with complete strangers: you have been on this ship all your life. "Never have been on a ship" would mean electing a newborn baby... that wouldn't count as a functioning democracy :-).
> I think they mean "taxation of the too rich" in that case.
Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down.
The problem is this is a collective negotiation, not a discussion about what to ask the genie for when we rub the lamp.
If the middle class wants to decrease their own taxes (which is the political issue that objectively affects them the most, and how they lose their power), then they are going to have to meet the wealthy half way.
Idealism is the enemy of the the common sense, rational, self-interested move.
> And needless to say, a non-functioning democracy is not a proof that the concept of democracy doesn't work.
Yes, democracy is a good idea precisely because imperfect implementations of it work well.
If it worked in theory and not in practice, then it wouldn't be a good idea.
Contrast it to communism, which is literally an info-hazard.
If you try to bring it in to existence, you won't achieve your goal, and the system you do create will be much worse for you.
Even if it works in theory, it's a bad idea because it doesn't work in practice.
There's no way that even the richest people in the world are "powerful" enough in that sense unless you're talking about literal royalty in resource-rich countries. Even Epstein's power was largely about his cronyism, not about directly expending his wealth.
Yeah, Epstein was removed since he didn't have much power compared to country leaders and so on. Even the richest people of the world has very little power compared to an authoritarian country leader.
I'm having difficulty parsing what you're saying in your first paragraph. What is it to 'meet the wealthy half way'? Did the ultra wealthy meet the middle class or the poor half way when they essentially ended their tax obligations and legalized mass influence buying in Citizens United? What's the 'half measure' that is going to rein all that back in?
No they did not. It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
The wealthy have about as much power as the entire middle class, but can wield it better because they are more nimble.
That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy.
If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.
> It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
That's basically my main argument for replacing election-based democracy by lottery-based democracy. Electing the right representatives is a coordination problem in and of itself, a process which the wealthy are already quite adept at manipulating, so we might as well cut the middle man and pick a random representative sample of the population instead, who can then coordinate properly.
It's generally easier to make such a process tamper-proof than an election. You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment. Then anyone can verify the integrity of the process by verifying the seed includes their contribution, and computing the candidates themselves.
>You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment.
If that were a viable model for the real world, we could make existing elections just as tamper-proof.
I don't really want to cut taxes for the working/middle class though. I want to tax the everliving fuck out of the hyper-wealthy, to the point that they cease to exist. The money should go into providing goods and services for the working/middle class, but collecting that money and lighting it on fire (or parking assets in a sovereign wealth fund) is a superior option to doing nothing.
Neither our democracy nor our position as a world power survived capitalism eating itself and everything else. We are down to single individuals holding more nominal wealth than whole continents, and the worship of the billionaire has replaced the worship of Jesus Christ for most Americans, a palace cult committing national suicide on your behalf. If you want any of the things that America pitched as its merits in fighting for influence in the Cold War, you want this situation over with.
Let them eat three commas and not a penny more. When you become a billionaire we give you a medal and confiscate every dollar above 1 billion. Using a carrier strike group if necessary.
They're not standing still now. They're eating our entrails. Right now.
We haven't passed a budget in almost 30 years, we've been routinely filibustering nearly all legislation for 15 (breaking the gameplay loop for electoral democracy), we're unilaterally withdrawing from trade and military alliances week by week. We have fascist armies on the streets pulling people from their cars and houses. Our leaders openly brag about their corruption and a good fraction of our people praise them for it simply because it pisses other people off.
We are allegedly about to "Federalize Elections" and also enter a war with Iran that a supermajority of voters do not want.
In terms of state capacity, in terms of our agency in the world, in terms of what we historically regarded as our legacy and our culture and our material security and our institutions, we are in freefall. And it is mostly down to having far too much wealth concentrated in far too few people.
Have you considered that enforcing any right against a wealthy person is punishing them for being successful? They can't come on your property, that's a punishment.
The prospect of "Attack" and "Literal War" is limited by the fact that worst-case resistance involves a drone strike, and worst-case compliance involves retaining enough wealth for you and everyone you know to live on the beach sipping mojitos for the rest of your natural lives, while holding a nice trophy.
Just not, you know, a space program and a larger military than Krushchev's reporting to you personally.
Tax cuts for the ultra wealthy are routinely paired with tax cuts for the less wealthy, for the same reason that countries which tax the ultra wealthy a lot also tax the less wealthy a lot. Building support for taxation means convincing people that taxes are great and they should embrace the benefits of living in a society with lots of tax revenue to spend.
> Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down.
That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.
I believe this attitude is pretty common in many parts of the world.
That being said, I do think the extremes of wealth (there is a big difference between a millionaire and a billionaire) have a particularly detrimental effect on society by completely distorting our economic system (there can be no such thing as a free market when such a small number of individuals control such a large proportion of the spending power).
>...I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.
Whether your gift will make a better society, I can't know - much like your taxes you have very little control over what the money is going to be used for.
>...(there can be no such thing as a free market when such a small number of individuals control such a large proportion of the spending power).
A free market is generally considered a system where there are voluntary exchanges between buyers and sellers based on mutual benefit. It seems odd to claim that since there are some very wealthy people in the country that somehow a consumer can't buy bread from a baker, etc. Maybe you can expand a bit on how you are defining free market.
> Maybe you can expand a bit on how you are defining free market.
Not OP, but just look at a company town as an example in a bottle.
When the rich and powerful control the means of production so completely that they are the only people one can buy what one needs from, then in what way can the exchanges still be called "voluntary" and in what way is "mutual benefit" achieved vs the lesser of two evils: "perpetual debtorship that one must endlessly toil to slow the progress of" vs "abject starvation"?
At the end of the day consent and free will are actually really complicated topics, and they can be surprisingly easy to pervert by unequal power dynamics. The market cannot be free whenever feudalism forms to take its place.
I'm curious about your thoughts on voluntarily donating the excess wages that you perceive earning.. and perhaps not directly to the US government (which is — to put it simply — not in a healthy state of mind at the moment), but instead to charity organizations that you can vet and trust?
Obviously actually vetting these organizations to make sure that your dollar accomplishes what you wish of it remains a Very Hard Problem, but at least while making baby steps from where we are right now (with our dystopian government) increases in taxation would not constitute a small step in the right direction.
EG: a better environment might look like a healthy government being supported by higher taxes than we see today, but without that first "healthy government" component the latter cannot be a net positive.
> That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.
This confusion is precisely why the middle class has less power than ever before.
You and many others have been sold a meme that your tax dollars are in service to a greater good, and you are a bad person if you recognize this to be a scam.
At an individual level, for each person in the middle class, 90% of the social programs they pay for are negative EV for them personally.
It would be better for each of them if they just kept what they earned, and didn't expect to get it back "later" or "when they really need it" whenever that is.
This is an empirical, testable claim, and the math will be slightly different for each person. You should check for yourself.
If everyone turned off the news, and totally ignored the messaging around taxes and government programs and just looked at their own cash inflows and outflows to/from the government, the middle class would retain far more power than they do.
> If everyone turned off the news, and totally ignored the messaging around taxes and government programs and just looked at their own cash inflows and outflows to/from the government, the middle class would retain far more power than they do.
Are you only counting material benefit that you personally get from the government rather than the benefit that other less well off people get in your calculations? Because if my tax dollars enable otherwise less well off people to live a lifestyle closer to my own, then I would consider that a benefit to me and a large part of the intended outcome of that taxation.
> Because if my tax dollars enable otherwise less well off people to live a lifestyle closer to my own
That's a very big 'if'. Less well off people have to pay taxes too, such as payroll taxes on their labor income, or sales taxes on essential purchases that amount to a large fraction of what they spend money on. And government redistribution is extremely inefficient. They'd be far better off if most of these taxes were done away with for lower-income folks, letting them keep far more of what they earn from their work.
> They'd be far better off if most of these taxes were done away with for lower-income folks, letting them keep far more of what they earn from their work.
Well I'd certainly be in favour of a more progressive taxation system that taxes higher earners more and lower earners less, and puts more emphasis on wealth and income (incl. capita gains) taxes and less on sales taxes.
But I'm also realistic that as a software engineer, my salary is above the average, and thus in such a setup I'd likely end up paying more.
> At an individual level, for each person in the middle class, 90% of the social programs they pay for are negative EV for them personally. It would be better for each of them if they just kept what they earned, and didn't expect to get it back "later" or "when they really need it" whenever that is. This is an empirical, testable claim, and the math will be slightly different for each person. You should check for yourself.
This whole "expected value" concept when taken to the extreme is just rationalist patter. It's a useful exercise when you're running a business, but there is more to life than fiscal efficiency. Empiricism, when taken to an extreme, is as dystopian as anything else.
90% of those social programs are what keep us from being killed in the street for our watches and jewelry. They keep people less fortunate than us from becoming desperate. They level the playing field so our children aren't all victims of the circumstances of their birth. By those metrics, which are my preferred metrics and not the size of my paycheck, they are a huge benefit.
Also one could argue that the US military is the world's largest social service program in that it provides jobs for a large part of the country that otherwise has no prospects for a good life.
This is where the Rawlsian veil of ignorance must be applied. What's the EV if you turn off all the tax programs and you don't know which class you're in? If it's negative, cut that program. If not, keep it.
I think GP is confused about the meaning of republican government. In a democracy like ancient Athens the people are directly involved in governance, but that's not what we have in the U.S. and other advanced countries. We elect representatives.
The natural flow of money tends towards pooling on certain individuals and groups, because accumulating capital is significantly easier when you start with capital.
This is unwanted, first because it produces individuals powerful enough to topple the people’s will, and second because it is not in the interest of society for wealth to be accumulated rather than moving.
By first principles you need a system to limit accumulation and redistribute it. That’s taxation.
The money not being extracted from the right places, or not being distributed where it should, is a sign that the government is unwilling or incapable or working for the people.
It is the people’s collective responsibility to prevent and fix that problem.
Agree, I think the issue is that taxes specifically flow to "the government" in the abstract. If there was a simple law like "95% of income or gains above $10M are taxed and redistributed equally via check / IRS rebate to every citizen automatically" then it could be a high-trust system that helps out everyone. Politicians, though greedy and self-interested, would have little choice but to continue the program untouched, similar to social security.
I'd also feel a lot better about "Elon gets $200B payout", because he gets $2B and $198B goes to tax payers -- seems pretty fair. $2B is still more than anyone ever needs to live a lavish life of luxury and/or start any reasonable self-business, or buy off any politicians.
Most super-wealthy folks are not going to spend anywhere on the order of $200B or even $20B (in the broad timeframe of Elon's payout) on their own consumption. Even if Elon spent $100B on a mission to Mars or whatever it is that he cares about, would you really have reason to object to that, any more than if the money was spent by NASA? (The whole Apollo program and surrounding stuff probably cost on the order of that amount of money once you control for inflation, so there's plenty of precedent.)
Nope no complaints, but most wealth isn't being spent. If the majority of the wealth was being spent, then there wouldn't be wealth imbalance (as all that money would flow elsewhere into the economy).
The only way a wealth imbalance can occur is that someone sits on wealth and that it continues to compound. The top 1% have wealth greater than the bottom 95% of the population combined. I don't see why its more moral for someone to sit on investments than to have the money distributed to others to spend.
In one case, the money goes to whichever investment the individual favors (e.g. buying tons of gold). In the "redistribute" scenario, it goes to improving the lives of many millions of people in real tangible ways, and creating a more equitable and balanced society and social trust.
The top 1% of the US hold roughly 30% of all the wealth. That's roughly the same as the bottom 90% of the population. I understand there are implementation issues, but I'm merely calling out the obvious immorality of "90% of people should scrape to get by while trustfund kid lives in 4th mansion, because 'market efficiency'".
> The only way a wealth imbalance can occur is that someone sits on wealth and that it continues to compound. The top 1% have wealth greater than the bottom 95% of the population combined. I don't see why its more moral for someone to sit on investments than to have the money distributed to others to spend.
The critical insight is that this doesn't actually work. When we say Jeff Bezos is worth $200B, we don't mean that he has $200B of money that's locked up in a vault when it could be redistributed. We mean that there are a variety of productive businesses in the world - for Bezos, mostly Amazon - which he holds ownership claims to. The vast majority of wealth in the modern US isn't money, and can only be converted to money by finding people with lots of money and selling them the right to sit on the investments instead.
Wealth that isn't being spent is effectively inert and frozen. It may have some precautionary value for the person who's holding it, but this is immaterial once you get to the million-dollar range, let alone the billions. The only interesting thing to ask about is what happens once the wealth is in fact being spent. (Of course, this wealth is generally invested in productive ventures and not literally 'frozen'; but this is a happy side effect, not something that's expressly chosen by whoever holds it. They're simply allocating it so that it 'compounds' effectively.)
> Even if Elon spent $100B on a mission to Mars or whatever it is that he cares about, would you really have reason to object to that
Of course I would. It shouldn't be up to Elon how that money (and the capital/labour they command) gets spent. It should be up to all of us. And if I want it spent on libraries or healthcare instead of space exploration then I should get my equal say in that.
Maybe this is me being a dumb peasant, but I can't imagine where I would get the right to have a say in that.
How is it different from me looking at my neighbor in his bigger house with his nicer car and deciding that those should be mine instead? Or my neighbor with a smaller house wanting my stuff?
If you believe in the equality of man then I think so. These people didn't individually invent and then produce 1000s of years of collective humam technology and culture and society by themselves to justify such extreme inequality.
And even if you thought so you can't be surprised when the have nots band together and attack or topple the rich society even if it obly for a small temporary gain. Desperation is the largest source of crime and political instability throughout history.
Yes, that situation is ridiculous and intervention is necessary. But don't paint it like it's just your feelings. The situation is objectively ridiculous.
What is it then if its not just my feelings? Can you give me some specific principle to go by? When is it OK for me to decide that someone else's possessions should be mine?
If you can justify it from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance while taking the categorical imperative into account, and any other universal moral meta–rules that you may be aware of that I'm not
That's fine, you can leave it to philosophers if you want or you can go and learn it. I only referenced two principles and they both have Wikipedia pages. But don't make no effort to learn how people think about objective morality and then complain nobody knows anything about objective morality.
I'll even link them for you:
The veil of ignorance says you should design morals for a society as if you don't know which position you'll be in in that society. If you want to know if it's moral to feed people to crocodiles, imagine that your mind and soul is placed into a random body in the world where people are fed to crocodiles. You might be feeding someone to a crocodile, you might be fed to a crocodile, and in some versions you might be the crocodile. If you had the choice to live in that world but you don't know which one you'll be, would you take it? If you wouldn't because the chance feels bad to you, that's a sign it's objectively immoral.
Categorical imperative: follow rules that you'd be okay with everyone following all the time. Suppose you're very hungry and you see a supermarket and you steal a loaf of bread. Is this moral? "Everyone should steal food" quickly breaks down commerce and isn't good. "Very hungry people with no money should steal bread" works well enough because most people aren't very hungry with no money. We can say it's moral for very hungry people with no money to steal bread. "Very hungry people with no money should just die" works too, but it fails the other principle: that could be you who dies, and you'd rather be allowed to steal bread to prevent death.
These might be different versions of the same principle but I'm not philosophically savvy enough to know that so I'm stating both.
I don't see how either of those principles suggest I should go steal the steaks, because I could easily end up being the person who is stolen from.
Its not surprising when starving people steal, and you can't really blame them for it. And people shouldn't waste frivolously when there are people in their community that are lacking.
But adding these unwritten caveats to private property rights based on whether someone is satisfied with their lot or not... I can't wrap my head around it.
Here's how it adds up: you are either the elite person who will have a few steaks taken (your life still rocks), or as the poor person, you can at least have enough steak to survive, rather than dying of hunger watching your rich neighbor throw steaks away for no reason.
I didn't take being barely able to afford ramen as someone who is going to starve to death. Their health is probably pretty poor, but I was assuming like in real life there would be other options.
Like I said before, if the alternative is death, then obviously stealing is justified. But if the alternative is the soup kitchen or something, then I can't justify stealing the steak. Otherwise you're on a slippery slope.
Is it only ok for luxury items? What happens when you swap steaks out of that sentence?
You have a hundred (dollars|pens|shoes|boxes of cereal), you probably won't notice if I take one.
I don't feel right taking one if I have other options. Whether or not someone notices doesn't make theft OK, it just means you get away without consequences (depending on your religious beliefs).
Not to mention you probably have to trespass/break and enter to do it.
Elon and people like him are currently spending a similar amount of money on building AGI, how's it going, any reason to object?
Asthma and lung cancer from Elon's gas turbines, polluted water everywhere, high electricity prices everywhere, RAM and SSD price hikes, Micron and Nvidia completely stopped making equipment for consumers, disinformation is everywhere, the internet is full of slop.
Oh, seems like billionaire projects are actually bad for people and there's plenty of reason to object.
> This is unwanted, first because it produces individuals powerful enough to topple the people’s will
Making the government resistant to manipulation is a distinct problem.
It's a game theory/mechanism design problem, and its solution doesn't require taking in lots of money.
Giving the government more power/money causes people to spend more effort to manipulate it, so any weaknesses are exploited to the fullest extent.
> and second because it is not in the interest of society for wealth to be accumulated rather than moving.
This reveals a significant misunderstanding of how capital works in an economy.
None of the billionaires that come up when you type in "billionaires" into Google have access to liquid cash anywhere near the number that shows up next to their face.
Their money is invested in productive projects, it's paying salaries and invested in equipment.
Concentrating capital is what allows a civilization to take on big projects.
As a society we want big projects to be paid for by individuals bearing the risk (skin in the game).
In a free-market, capital concentrates in individuals who, empirically, know how to use it well.
Spending other people's money is a great way to make sure that money is spent frivolously.
You can criticize luxury spending all you want, and taxing that is something most people consider "fair", but you aren't speaking for anyone economically literate when you say that you don't want capital to concentrate.
I want it to concentrate as much as it does naturally.
Ideally yes, capital would be the machinery. Now, however, a lot of wealth is numbers sitting on a ledger and backed by stock valuations that have broken their connection with main Street. Or its rolling from one owner to another in derivative markets, doing scarcely little for the economy.
Power concentration can happen regardless of taxation level though. You can have relatively high taxes and relatively low authoritarianism. But you can also have low taxes and full blow dictatorship.
Taxes are much lower in Belarus and Russia vs western Europe, and they're much more authoritarian, coupled with third world tier public services outside of their capitals.
If that were true, then the wealthy and political establishment wouldn’t fight tax increases so damn hard. Over my lifetime, I’ve repeatedly watched wealthy individuals spend more money fighting tax increases than they’d end up paying.
Money is power. So to answer your question literally, if MY taxes went up, I would not have more power, but if the rich's did, I would because they'd have less power.
That's only true in relative terms.
In reality tax rates go up or down on everyone at the same time, because that's how the negotiations shake out.
If taxes go up on everyone, the rich are still the ones that manipulate the government, but now they have control over more tax revenue.
If taxes go down for everyone, the rich are still the ones that can manipulate the government, but now the government has less revenue and can't cause as much damage.
> In reality tax rates go up or down on everyone at the same time, because that's how the negotiations shake out.
This is absolutely false, especially in the US. Progressive tax brackets, breaks for the rich, and targeted changes for capital vs. income, deductions, etc. are the norm. Tax rate change is _always_ selective.
For example: I am a teacher. I run for office. I win. Now, as a consequence of my win, my tax bracket for the rest of my life, is 100% after i exceed the higher of either:
a) my elected official salary, OR
b) the average last 5 years of W2 income, OR
c) the average last 2 years of W2 income.
You'd delete inmediately all the grifters getting into government to be rich. And because those narcissists griefters people would self select themselves out of the running; it gives breathing room to those willing to actually do their DUTY for country. Those willing to sacrifice lifetime income.
This is pathway to the less charismatic, but more duty-oriented people that would not mind working in the govt and also do a good job. Under these rules, you dont care if I stay in govt forever, either. Limited terms have no point, when you can't grift.
This also takes care of those pesky post-election speaking fees, as well!
This would have deeply weird and counterproductive effects on election candidacies; ultimately, people are willing to do their duty for the country, but not at the expense of their entire future income growth. It's the constituents' job to vote for better candidates, there are no foolproof rules beyond that.
Taxation is what moves power from the powerful to the people. All of the Epstein crap was proceeded by Reagan and Thatcher and their trickle down BS that made the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful while everyone else could languish
This statement essentially boils down to "The only right way to fight me is in an environment where I expect to win"
That's how you know the DeFlock strategy is effective. They aren't playing the game that the CEO wants to play, they are playing the actual game.
The actual game is minimizing the impact of cameras that are now everywhere.
Some individuals may take it upon themselves to vandalize the cameras, which can't be planned via conspiracy (that would be illegal), but those radical individuals can be "set up for success" through information.
This strategy of creating an environment where effective vandalism is easy, is also part of the actual game.
> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue.
Yes, and this is unfortunately the best move in many situations given how hard it is to fire people.
The ideal thing to do is fire the incompetent manager who is a tax on their team rather than a multiplier.
That unburdens the highly competent engineers on their team to do good work.
However, that might not be possible or even a good idea.
A failed hire might reflect badly on the upper manager, or prevent them from hiring a replacement.
It might require a lengthy performance improvement plan, which means you have a burdened team for that whole duration.
It's often easier to de-claw the bad manager, and take back on their responsibilities yourself.
Not ideal, but the best of a bad situation.
> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue.
The second red flag in all of this is that an engineer doing good work on their own is labeled "rogue".
Management's job is to make people productive, if they can't realize that the best configuration for their team involves some individuals working largely separate from the managers own mediocre day-to-day ceremonies/projects, then they aren't doing their job.
People that don't need to be managed are the best kind of people, if you can't spot them and leverage them, get out of management.
I'm picturing a 10 second clip showing a child with a green box drawn around them, and position of gas and brake, updating with superhuman reactions.
That would be the best possible marketing that any of these self driving companies could hope for, and Waymo probably now has such a video sitting somewhere.
It depends on the video. What they should do is arrange for the video to get leaked and let the Internet courts argue about it, and then based on the Internet verdict, come out and claim it's real and they fired somebody for leaking it, or it's AI generated.
Love him or hate him, releasing the video is something I can see Elon doing because assuming a human driver would have done worse, it speaks for itself. Release a web video game where the child sometimes jumps out in front of the car, and see how fast humans respond like the "land Starship" game. Assuming humans would do worse, that is. If the child was clearly visible through the car or some how else avoidable by humans, then I'd be hiding the video too.
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