How?
It might expedite intel gathering and psychological warfare to an extent but let's not pretend China doesn't have agents inside of all of the "friendly" platforms already.
Because China can control what gets recommended to TikTok viewers and actively brainwash them. Even if it does not work on all people that's enough to be a security concern.
Yes. Human rights to free expression don’t end at the border, and are not contingent on citizenship.
If you only believe in human rights for passport holders, you don’t believe in human rights.
Furthermore, if you think your enemies having the right to publish whatever they like is a national security threat, you don’t believe in the nation or its founding principles as outlined in the US constitution.
State censorship is much more of a national security threat than foreign propaganda.
I think a lot of people don't consider the implications of foreign powers acting against their nation, not a corporation in that country but the actual government using it's vast resources to undermine other countries.
Can you codify the difference? I seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between wealth creation and wealth extraction if voluntary market activity constitutes extraction.
I'd definitionally describe all voluntary transactions free of coercion to imply the buyer values the utility of what they're buying (i.e. true wealth - piles of currency are not true wealth, they're what you exchange for true wealth) more than the currency they're trading for it, no?
Involuntary transactions featuring coercion on the other hand, like the government demanding you pay taxes under threat of imprisonment (enforced at gunpoint, if necessary) are clearly extractive, by my definition.
In practice, a lot of things that look extractive (e.g., designing better high frequency trading algorithms) potentially have some marginal utility (e.g., creating market liquidity), but the money high performing people make is likely larger than the utility they add to the system (because most of the money in having the best high frequency trading algorithm comes from beating other people's high frequency trading algorithms).
While there's many definitions, I'd concentrate on zero-sum vs non-zero-sum games. Lots of games in trading are effectively zero-sum games - if I make 100USD, you lose 100USD (there's details about transaction costs going to exchanges that make this more nuanced, but the principle applies). A chunk of financial engineering games are not : for example risk pooling games. A big part of finance for example is liquidity provisioning games - which kindof boil down to risk pooling games in the limit. But unfortunately - a _very_ big chunk of the financial markets is zero-sum.
Even in a purely digital world - most of the economy is not zero sum - i.e., it _creates_ wealth. I pay you 100USD for 1 million LLM tokens - a purely digital transaction - the net result of this is the 1 million tokes that I can consume and use - net of the transaction.
I mean - of course the entirety of financial markets are not zero sum - it would indeed be almost lunacy to claim that :) My point is that there's a big part of the financial markets that _are_ zero-sum - not that all financial markets are. One can argue about EMH and that the zero-sum games are in fact injecting information into the market by providing better price discovery, and that is indeed an argument - but one is left with the intellectually unsatisfying statement of "Well, anything the market does is information extraction, and the market is an information extraction machine, so prima facie, it works" - which is basically restating the EMH axiom.
For example, the added value provided by sub-millisecond arbitrage between NY and Chicago - while making the prices converge a fraction of a millisecond faster, makes the overall set of people playing that game in excess of 1B USD in aggregate. I'd argue that such a ratio of profit vs value-added gain is very bad, bordering on 0 - thus making that effectively a zero-sum game.
Building toll roads is creation of value. People voluntarily pay to drive on them because they offer superior qualities to garbage public roads. If I could exclusively drive on toll roads, I would.
Public roads, OTOH, are extractive because someone is taking money from you to build them even if you don't consent to it and deliberately avoid them at every opportunity.
- Exercising (e.g., running, hiking, swimming - depending on pool / beach access -, joining a group of friends who play basketball, etc...)
- Playing video games (e.g., buy Factorio and play if for years)
- Working on personal projects (e.g., writing, coding, etc...)
There are more expensive hobbies, but even then they can often be done cheaply, e.g., though climbing is generally pricey, some gyms are surprisingly cheap, etc...
It seems that swimming is the most resistant to gear acquisition syndrome. I can't imagine swimmers can spend much time obsessing over fancy swimsuits or goggles. There's nothing to do but get in the water and swim.
This article is wonderfully written. However I feel it makes a conceptual conflation.
First it describes the Greek philosophies as being essentially self help. Following that logic it would seem stocisim is not a system of ethics at all, but rather a way of dealing with struggle. Given that characterization, it seems quite bizzare to complain that stocisim provides no moral impetus to help others (a bit like complaining that a hammer - as opposed to a shovel - is a poor tool to dig holes).
This doesn't seem a fair analogy. Elon Musk is not being paid by the government, as I understand.
The reason the manager flying around spending money to attend a downsizing meeting is gross is that the manager is spending company money (that could go to prevent downsizing).
To complete the analogy, you would need to be implying that Elon's personal money should be paid to fund federal services.
> you would need to be implying that Elon's personal money should be paid to fund federal services.
I am. These payments are called taxes.
Taxes he's successfully evaded paying using the the same tricks as every other billionaire, such as taking out loans against his shares that will be repaid after his death by his estate, which has negligible tax rates compared to the kind of income taxes paid by mere mortals.
All joking aside, if Elon -- just him, no other billionaire -- had simply paid the same marginal tax rates as any random upper-middle-class citizen, it would be 10x the amount DOGE had cut so far from the federal budget.
Your claim that good economicts "know there is no free lunch" is completely false, unsubstantiated and actively misleading.
Many impressive economists believe there are policies that could massively improve the worlds economy, but that implementating these policies is a coordination problem / hard to overcome lobbying / politically intractable, etc...
Radical Markets is great book on exactly this topic.
I’m just saying every perceived benefit has some kind of cost or perverse consequence, eventually. Please feel free to point to a specific example of a policy that has been successfully implemented that contradicts this principle.
Protectionist polices can serve countries well. A lovely example is South Korea's entertainment industry (they prohibited displaying foreign cinema, and the resulting need to produce domestic cinema lead to them developing a strong and independent entertainment industry, examples: squid game, train to busan, etc...)
It looks to me like the countries in the pie charts are ones with protectionism (e.g., China), while you are seem to be implicitly advocating for the opposite...
I don't this is a quaint or antiquated practice. Writing (preferably physically writing) and or typing long essay is extremely standard amoung certain Silicone Valley and Tech circles. Paul Graham is also one of its most vocal advocates.
