"the system is already an open conspiracy of the capitalist class"
I thought of Katharina Pistor's excellent book, The Code of Capital, the thesis of which is essentially that law (and lawyers) create capital. In other words, the legal encoding of assets *is* the capital. The law itself is the asset. This is where the conspiracy is made manifest.
I think that depositors got a bailout is not all that significant in the grand scheme of things.
Far more important is the new Fed facility, which (in effect) allows banks who have made bets on interest rates remaining low take a mulligan on those bets. The Fed is now in essence saying that the purpose of interest rate hikes is *solely* to generate unemployment; financial institutions will be protected from any fallout.
I’m not quite so down on free market banking in general given the unpleasant alternatives, but I agree with the thrust here, and particularly how an insular tech oligarchy is way over its head and caused a panic totally unnecessarily and at enormous cost to the rest of us.
The way this is prevented is several fold. For one, the 2018 regulatory loosening should never have occurred. Two, there was a stupid accounting rule allowing the bank to hide its toxic binds as ‘holding to maturity’, that needs to be nixed or capped. Three, we shouldn’t have a tech oligarchy and need to enforce our existing antitrust laws to break up a ton of these companies. Four, we shouldn’t have any oligarchy and should have top tax brackets in the 75% range in order to discourage such massive accumulations of wealth that end up being very legitimately dangerous to the rest of us.
Silicon Valley has to have the single greatest concentration of Guys Demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Or, “what if a bunch of nerds, but they were all both incredibly smug AND incredibly dumb.”
All these smug and dumb, he-reminds-me-of-Jared Kushner types and similar types of evil people, whether they be Knowing Evil (Peter Thiel) or Stupid Evil (Elon Musk), dominating an entire industry---an industry that happens to have more money (and power?!) than God, and which serves as an influence-investment vehicle for people like Kushner’s close friend/“bro” Mohammed bin Salman.
Equal parts malevolent and moronic. None of us should have ever trusted a word these dipshits uttered, let alone allowed them to become Masters of the Economy (TM). I guess we were too busy hating Wall Street (and justifiably so!) to notice that the West Coast of the US had its own Bad Vibes Wealth Concentration (besides Hollywood, of course) making a massive contribution to the capitalist hell-world in which we live.
Anyway, well done on yet another great piece, John.
It would be interesting to know why Silicon Valley is laying off so many workers. If there’s reason related to spend less money on workers while advancing other AI related reason then they deserve better ethics control from the government. Not save their failing bank. Meta was suppose to bring new innovation but it seems they’re cutting 10,000 employees. Did smartworking a factor that convinced Silicon Valley to lay off more?
"It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends." No doubt this is a signal moment of a form, one where Silicon Valley mainstreams significantly in a short period of time. But I guess it's been a long-running disappearing act at this point, precisely the kind of thing that happens when power becomes to alluring to the would be "disruptors" of another time--a slow fade into the same power structures that make it hard to hide behind the irony of "innovation" so core to their narrative.
Off topic, but not entirely--are there any good books on whether AI is hyped?
It hasn't become what we were told it would become --for years and years.
It's unclear whether machine learning is intelligence.
Chatbots are very disruptive and will insert themselves into our lives but still chatbots. Machine learning chatbots, sure.
It's going to be gradual but some fleshing out of the explanation isn't being done and this makes me suspicious. I am not in STEM but it's much more obvious why the Hadrion Collider is a major advance than whether AI as described in the past even exists now or will in the future. Why is the explanation so fuzzy? I suspect because this is because how capital is raised, generally. Silicon Valley is hypeville so when hype turns into 'robots to keep old people company--they'll really like that!' I start to wonder, honestly.
When I read this line in your piece...
"the system is already an open conspiracy of the capitalist class"
I thought of Katharina Pistor's excellent book, The Code of Capital, the thesis of which is essentially that law (and lawyers) create capital. In other words, the legal encoding of assets *is* the capital. The law itself is the asset. This is where the conspiracy is made manifest.
I think that depositors got a bailout is not all that significant in the grand scheme of things.
Far more important is the new Fed facility, which (in effect) allows banks who have made bets on interest rates remaining low take a mulligan on those bets. The Fed is now in essence saying that the purpose of interest rate hikes is *solely* to generate unemployment; financial institutions will be protected from any fallout.
Excellent piece, John.
I’m not quite so down on free market banking in general given the unpleasant alternatives, but I agree with the thrust here, and particularly how an insular tech oligarchy is way over its head and caused a panic totally unnecessarily and at enormous cost to the rest of us.
The way this is prevented is several fold. For one, the 2018 regulatory loosening should never have occurred. Two, there was a stupid accounting rule allowing the bank to hide its toxic binds as ‘holding to maturity’, that needs to be nixed or capped. Three, we shouldn’t have a tech oligarchy and need to enforce our existing antitrust laws to break up a ton of these companies. Four, we shouldn’t have any oligarchy and should have top tax brackets in the 75% range in order to discourage such massive accumulations of wealth that end up being very legitimately dangerous to the rest of us.
Silicon Valley has to have the single greatest concentration of Guys Demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Or, “what if a bunch of nerds, but they were all both incredibly smug AND incredibly dumb.”
All these smug and dumb, he-reminds-me-of-Jared Kushner types and similar types of evil people, whether they be Knowing Evil (Peter Thiel) or Stupid Evil (Elon Musk), dominating an entire industry---an industry that happens to have more money (and power?!) than God, and which serves as an influence-investment vehicle for people like Kushner’s close friend/“bro” Mohammed bin Salman.
Equal parts malevolent and moronic. None of us should have ever trusted a word these dipshits uttered, let alone allowed them to become Masters of the Economy (TM). I guess we were too busy hating Wall Street (and justifiably so!) to notice that the West Coast of the US had its own Bad Vibes Wealth Concentration (besides Hollywood, of course) making a massive contribution to the capitalist hell-world in which we live.
Anyway, well done on yet another great piece, John.
this is very well put.
Hell, they can't even beat China at social media any more (TikTok)
". . . Henry Fords . . . in more ways than one . . ." Amen
Hot damn, you brought the spice, and I am totally here for it.
It would be interesting to know why Silicon Valley is laying off so many workers. If there’s reason related to spend less money on workers while advancing other AI related reason then they deserve better ethics control from the government. Not save their failing bank. Meta was suppose to bring new innovation but it seems they’re cutting 10,000 employees. Did smartworking a factor that convinced Silicon Valley to lay off more?
"It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends." No doubt this is a signal moment of a form, one where Silicon Valley mainstreams significantly in a short period of time. But I guess it's been a long-running disappearing act at this point, precisely the kind of thing that happens when power becomes to alluring to the would be "disruptors" of another time--a slow fade into the same power structures that make it hard to hide behind the irony of "innovation" so core to their narrative.
Off topic, but not entirely--are there any good books on whether AI is hyped?
It hasn't become what we were told it would become --for years and years.
It's unclear whether machine learning is intelligence.
Chatbots are very disruptive and will insert themselves into our lives but still chatbots. Machine learning chatbots, sure.
It's going to be gradual but some fleshing out of the explanation isn't being done and this makes me suspicious. I am not in STEM but it's much more obvious why the Hadrion Collider is a major advance than whether AI as described in the past even exists now or will in the future. Why is the explanation so fuzzy? I suspect because this is because how capital is raised, generally. Silicon Valley is hypeville so when hype turns into 'robots to keep old people company--they'll really like that!' I start to wonder, honestly.
It's been days but this line still has me cracking up:
Imagine if George Bailey gave his speech in It’s a Wonderful Life and the townspeople said, “Fuck you, George, gimme my money.”