> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Yes, the same is absolutely true for many other professions. And artists are probably more aware than most, at least on average, how much luck plays a role.
But note that I have been very careful not to call the fund managers individually immoral.
Of course that is a feature, but at this point I have to suspect that you're willfully ignoring the point.
The moral problems begin when writing that book gives you extraordinary power beyond what is healthy for society (which is extremely rare for authors, of course; the discussion isn't really about authors, you just invoked them in an attempt to conjure a moral shield for the people who are the real problem).
And again, even that in itself is still not a moral failing of the individual. It's primarily a failure of the system in which the individual operates.
It does become a moral failing of the individual if the individual uses that power to perpetuate the system.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. [1]
I was talking specifically about the moral implications of books that can be read without any additional work from the author. This statement is about books, not authors.
> but it's certainly not "work" the same way that digging a ditch
I don't think so. Value comes from utility, not from toil.
It's nice to be nice. The strongest possible interpretation of your comment is that you're simply noting accurately that there is no moral failure in writing a great novel.
I agree, writing great novels is a wonderful thing and a moral positive.
As the Wikipedia article states, the labour theory of value (LTV) was replaced by the theory of marginal utility in mainstream economics due to its major inconsistencies.
> Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.
So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way?
I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.
> So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way?
Google ads "extracted" value from traditional advertising in newspapers and magazines, so the "exploitation" (or efficiency gains, if you're charitable) came at the expense of employees at other organizations worldwide.
> As the Wikipedia article states, the labour theory of value (LTV) was replaced by the theory of marginal utility in mainstream economics due to its major inconsistencies.
"Mainstream economics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It didn't "replace" LTV. Marginal utility is simply an an ideological rejection of it with the confusion of price vs value that ignores class exploitation. The proponents of this were the gensis of the so-called "Austrian school" [1] and thus the fathers of neoliberalism [2].
> So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way?
Yes, objectively, as measured by profit. The counterargument is that many were well-paid compared to their non-tech colleagues. While true, they still created way more value than what they were paid.
> I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.
There's a great deal of labor involved in building+preparing casks, storing them, monitoring, maintaining the temp/humidity of a space. Additionally, a good chunk of the price of aged whisky is just due to the fact that the product is constantly evaporating and you're getting a lower yield on the same initial input. Price increase != value created
You're missing the point. The difference between three-year-old and fifteen-year-old whisky is mainly due to capital costs, not labour costs. According to the LVT, capital costs are not real.
> product is constantly evaporating and you're getting a lower yield on the same initial input
This so-called 'angel's share' accounts for ~2% per year, not 10%.
> According to the LVT, capital costs are not real.
Capital costs are not real in LTV?
A carpenter takes wood, nails and hammer and creates value making tables.
Hammers are a capital cost and are made the same way - workers are a factory xreate value by assembling steel and other components making a hammer.
Steel workers un a steel mill create value by turning iron into steel.
Iron miners create wealth by mining iron.
And so on.
Capital costs are accounted for. Not turtles all the way down, but labor - newly created value comes from labor. The value in a hammer comes from the labor to make it a year ago when you bought it.
> "Mainstream economics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
As is "mainstream medicine" or "mainstream climate science". If you don't trust mainstream science, you must be either extremely smart or just delusional.
Surely you can see that not trusting mainstream economics shouldn't be as controversial as the hard sciences. Mainstream economics consistently fails to make correct or replicatable predictions.
It isn't that simple. The most important thing about a city is the streets and blocks. Manhattan and Barcelona are good examples of cities that have been designed in a way that make them walkable and high density.
The only places where you get non-walkable streets and blocks are the ones where you restrict density dramatically. Most cities aren't designed by some individual planning out where the streets should go. They evolved. If you allow an existing city to increase its density dramatically, people start demanding the streets improve to meet their needs.
The more density that gets built, the harder it is to improve streets. Construction of the interstates, Haussman's remaking of Paris, etc were immensely destructive, even if they enabled much more legible and prosperous development afterwards.
In the West at least, basically every street and block was laid out by planners from the early 1800s until post WWII. After that it's much more done by large scale private land developers (e.g. Levittown, Irvine).
It is harder but I also find that a poor excuse for not improving streets and infrastructure because it can be done and the taxes scale faster than costs. But people and politicians are short sighted and rather kick that can down the road either to make them look good from good financials or to leave enough money on the table for a bit of corruption.
Companies spending money on advertising is just another way of acquiring customers. If they were unable to do that, they would need to resort to other, more costly ways of acquiring customers. I doubt that higher costs would result in lower prices for customers.
How did people that had something to sell do it before advertising?
The problem again is greed. The organic way is too inefficient so advertising needs to come in and make people rich instead of letting the product do the convincing naturally, word of mouth and so on.
On the other hand, smaller pages mean that more pages can fit in your CPU cache. Since CPU speed has improved much more than memory bus speed, and since cache is a scarce resource, it is important to use your cache lines as efficiently as possible.
Ultimately, it's a trade-off: larger pages mean faster I/O, while smaller pages mean better CPU utilisation.
I use Postgres JSON functions to return nested results. The database itself contains no JSON; just a well-normalised data model. However, the queries return nested JSON in the format required by the application, e.g. for rendering an HTML template or returning JSON to the client in a single round trip. Check out the old dogs can sort of learn new tricks in this great article: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/sql-needed-struct...
> JSON functions to return nested results. The database itself contains no JSON; just a well-normalised data model. However, the queries return nested JSON in the format required by the application
Entirely valid usecase, since the client application is likely going to parse some cartesian product of tabular relationship data into "normalized" JSON array of objects anyways.
Generally, generating the JSON response directly for consumption in the DB is faster.
Please don't do this.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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