When housing prices are high, anyone who can't afford a down payment is completely screwed, because they're paying the high rents which inhibits saving, but the high rents they're paying aren't turning into principal. So the savings of most of the people who can't afford a home end up being ~0 or negative (in debt). But this will be worse, i.e. more inequality, in the country with the higher housing costs.

It just doesn't show up in the median when the median is a homeowner and then the higher housing costs increase their number.

But the "extra" wealth is mostly on paper because you have the house but you also need somewhere to live. If you sold it to get the money you'd have to pay the crazy rents, so all the value really does is give you the capacity to borrow against it, which is only useful if you wanted to borrow more than a smaller amount of equity would have allowed you to, which most people wouldn't. And if they did they wouldn't have that "wealth" anymore because they'd have borrowed and spent it, and would then be paying interest on the debt.

The killer app for jailbreaking game systems is and has always been running unlicensed games, a scenario which Apple, Xbox, and Nintendo vigorously object to. It's also why Sony killed Linux on PS3. On the other hand, you can run unlicensed games on Android and it hasn't killed Google Play.

So in other words, go back to in-app purchases processed by Google.

In general their money isn't money, it's stock. The thing it buys them is being the CEO of their company instead of letting Wall St pick someone even worse.

The real problem is that companies are now so large that you'd have to be a multi-billionaire to have a controlling interest.

The list almost always reads the same on every major corporation. Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, ect... Numbers may be slightly out of date in some cases. If the Institutionals all vote together or collectively, almost none of the wealthy have "controlling amounts". (wikipedia listings)

  - NVIDIA: The Vanguard Group(8.280%), BlackRock(5.623%), Fidelity Investments(5.161%), State Street Corporation(3.711%), *Jensen Huang(3.507%)*, Geode Capital Management(2.024%), T. Rowe Price(2.013%), JPMorgan Chase(1.417%)

  - Apple: Vanguard Group Inc(9.47%), Blackrock Inc.(7.76%), State Street Corporation(4.04%), JPMORGAN CHASE & CO(3.20%), Geode Capital Management, LLC(2.41%), FMR, LLC(2.05%)

  - Microsoft: The Vanguard Group(8.9%), BlackRock(5.6%), State Street Corporation(4.0%), *Steve Ballmer(4.0%),* Fidelity Investments(2.9%), Geode Capital Management(2.1%), T. Rowe Price International(1.9%) (Ballmer is a notable exception)

  - Alphabet: The Vanguard Group(7.25%), BlackRock(6.27%), State Street Corporation(3.36%), *Sergey Brin(3.0%)*, *Larry Page(3.0%)*, Fidelity Investments(2.07%), Geode Capital Management(1.76%), T. Rowe Price(1.73%) (Sergey and Larry each get 10x votes)

  - Amazon: (Notable exception to this trend) *Jeff Bezos(9.04%)*, The Vanguard Group(7.96%), BlackRock(4.93%), State Street Corporation(3.5%), Fidelity Investments(3.22%), Geode Capital Management(2.03%), JP Morgan Investment Management(1.81%), Eaton Vance(1.5%), T. Rowe Price(1.48%)

  - Meta: (Another exception) *Mark Zuckerberg (13.5%)*, The Vanguard Group (8.8%), BlackRock (7.66%), Fidelity Investments (6.28%), State Street Corporation (3.97%), JPMorgan Chase (2.38%), Geode Capital Management (2.27%), T. Rowe Price (1.95%)

  - Broadcom: The Vanguard Group(10.03%), BlackRock(7.63%), Capital World Investors(4.53%), Capital International Investors(4.04%), State Street Corporation(3.95%), Geode Capital Management(2.12%), Insiders[Various](2.04%)

  - Tesla: *Elon Musk(12.9%)*, The Vanguard Group(7.2%), BlackRock(4.5%), State Street Corporation(3.4%), Geode Capital Management(1.7%), Capital Research & Management(1.3%)

Notably, in-practice they probably usually just vote whatever one of the main founders, CEO's, ect... recommends unless there's some actual major issue. Although that's so far above my pay grade, no idea what actually goes on.

Funnily, the next one on the list is JPMorgan and they're controlled by ... Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street... Who in turn control major portions of NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta... It's all rather incestuous and circular.

And funnier, they all own each other.

  Vanguard itself is weird, like a mutual fund, and owned by its funds, then in turned owned by shareholders.  However, *those* owners, are almost entire large institutional also.  Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, UBS Group, JPMorgan Chase, LPL Financial, Envestnet Asset Management, Ameriprise Financial, TIAA Trust, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Beacon Capital Management, Betterment, Wealthfront Advisers, and Cove Street Capital

  Blackrock is pretty the same circular ownership: The Vanguard Group(9.08%), BlackRock Inc(7.02%), State Street Corporation(4.95%), Temasek Holdings Ltd(4.28%), Bank of America Corp(4.28%), Capital Research Global Investors(3.78%), Morgan Stanley(3.62%), Charles Schwab Corporation(3.14%), Capital World Investors(2.68%), Geode Capital Management(2.32%)

  State Street is ... of course, the same ownership: Vanguard Group Inc(13.23%), Blackrock Inc(8.71%), JPMorgan Chase(6.06%), State Street Corporation(4.83%), FMR, LLC(4.05%), Invesco Ltd(3.00%), Harris Associates L.P(2.73%), Geode Capital Management, LLC(2.66%), Dodge & Cox Inc(2.43%), Morgan Stanley(1.71%)

It's almost like there could be a book about this from a hundred years ago:

https://www.amazon.com/Other-Peoples-Money-How-Bankers/dp/19...

- And, thanks for the reference on the book. Never seen it before, yet not very surprising it looks pretty much like the Gilded Age with '"robber barons" who's fortunes were made at the expense of the working class, by chicanery and betrayal of democracy.'

Instead you need to get some adults back in the room and start doing things like prosecuting government officials for corruption regardless of which party they're in, passing the laws that lower the cost of living even over the opposition of the people getting paid the higher costs, and actually enforcing antitrust laws instead of both parties using them as a cudgel to get tech and media corporations to bend the knee politically in exchange for not enforcing them.

But to do that you have to step on the toes of the banks and the National Association of Realtors and the trades unions on housing costs and the healthcare companies and the AMA on healthcare costs. Which the rest of the public wants you to do, but that's not how you get paid off, so it's not what they do.

Instead they talk a big game but when it comes time to do it, they offer up economic sophism like rent control or medical price controls that not only don't solve the problems but generally make them worse. And then people don't like them because they suck.

So then:

> Maybe the other party should do the other thing then? Actually decentralize things and reduce federal power in ways that stick between administrations. Then the next Trump wouldn't have the power to do things like this, and meanwhile California and other states could be setting their own emissions standards or imposing network neutrality or antitrust rules etc. without federal interference.

If you define the bad things they're not allowed to do narrowly then they'll trivially avoid the restrictions while still doing bad things. What works better is to define the good things they are allowed to do. But then the good things have to be defined narrowly, because a broad definition makes it easy to get bad things into the tent.

So a proposal can either be to prohibit some bad things on paper while not really doing it in practice, or it can be to permit them to do only the things that have to be done federally for some specific reason and define them narrowly enough that it doesn't just let them do whatever they want. Those are the only real options.

No, we simply realize that 20 years of compromise for a party blatantly breaking the rules is not working. You can call it "flipping the coin" if you want, but in my eyes we've been trying to continue a game of chess after dozens of illegal moves.

Maybe continuing to play the game as if nothing happened isn't the solution this time.

Here's the second clause of the 18th amendment (prohibition of alcohol), ratified in 1919 and repealed by the 21st:

> The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

In other words, in 1919 it was generally understood that the federal government didn't have the power to so much as prohibit alcohol, and they needed a constitutional amendment to grant that power (without withdrawing it from the states through preemption).

Most of what the federal government currently does was intended to be unconstitutional, until FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court if they didn't knuckle under and approve his unconstitutional acts, and then they did. Likewise Roe v. Wade, initiated by the Court itself in a year the left held the majority and then kept that way for half a century even though its logic was muddled and inconsistent with those same opinions they themselves wanted that said the government does have the power to regulate healthcare providers. Likewise gun control, which the constitution not only didn't give the federal government the power to do, it explicitly constrained them from it.

You can think that any of these things would be good policy, but without breaking the rules to enact them you'd need to amend the constitution. So never mind 20 years, this has been going on for a lot longer than that.

But if you abandon the rules because it's expedient, and then they abandon the rules because you did, and then you abandon even more of the rules because they did, we all end up in a place nobody likes.

There are many issues on which not everyone agrees what should be done. If the federal government does them, the same solution is forced on everyone even if a large plurality of people would prefer something else and those people constitute the majority of various states, so it makes more sense to let each state decide for themselves. There is nothing stopping them from all doing the same thing if there was consensus.

And when there isn't consensus, you get to see how each of the alternatives turn out when different states do different things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy

But if the federal government is even allowed to do them then whichever faction has the federal majority imposes their will on everyone else and prevents that from happening.

> Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context

The post I responded to was the one that brought up "breaking the rules". My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.

I would say the problem is people doing bad things, and the rules are disconnected from any substantive connection to what is good or bad, and from any essential connection to the idea that the people (not any apparatus of government) is the final arbiter of what should be done.

You also need some rules to temper tyrannical majorities unless "51% of the vote means you get to oppress the minority" is your idea of a good time.

And a lot of these are in the nature of a Ulysses pact. When nobody wants anybody to censor them, and everybody knows that they won't always be in the majority, we can form a general consensus that we all agree not to censor the opposition when we're in the majority and in exchange they can't censor anyone when they're in the majority. For that to work you need an effective mechanism to constrain the majority or some fool is going to steer the ship into the rocks as soon as they hear the Siren song.

Then the broad consensus gets written into the constitution which in turn requires broad consensus to change. If nobody's playing dirty.

Whereas if everybody's playing dirty then pretty clearly the checks and balances aren't working and we need some better ones.

And yeah, pretty clearly the alleged checks and balances we have weren't the right ones. The problem is that the system we have set up enshrines the difficulty of changing those checks and balances as one of its primary features. That's why I think we're not going to get anywhere by trying to chip away at the edges of our problem within the existing constitutional framework.

I mean I'm sympathetic; I fully support having adults back in the White House, even from above the 49th parallel. It does not, however, seem realistic.

People seem to make this mistake a lot.

People want adults back in the room because that's how they get the results they want. Now, are they currently doing the things that will cause that to happen? Obviously not. But "they" is us. There is no external "them" to delegate this to and then blame when it goes wrong. Things get done when someone does them. If you want it done then the someone is you.

That doesn't mean you can solve the entire problem yourself, but it also doesn't mean you can't make a contribution. The absence of trying is the presence of failure.

Now let's consider how we've gotten screwed in the past. The primary recent mechanism is that nobody likes how things are going, but half the country is convinced that the problem is the other half and vice versa. And then they direct their efforts into having their party "win" even though their party sucks because both parties suck. Which absorbs all the inclination people have to try to fix things and throws it into a black hole as everyone's efforts do nothing more than cancel out the efforts of their countrymen on the other team.

If you're being divided into teams then you're playing someone else's game. That makes people think the goal should be to win the game. But the goal should be to change the rules so that people with common interests aren't stuck on opposing teams.

Score voting would be a good start.

Or what's left of it...

i do wonder if there's regardless going to be some kind of (perhaps overwhelming) inundation.

What you need instead is to make it easy and common for people to use browsers that resist fingerprinting, VPNs/Tor, custom email addresses per-account, etc. Because then instead of claiming to not log your information, they simply do not have it.

The biggest thing we need is a better way to pay someone over the internet without them knowing who you are.

I've been saying that for years. Buy a prepaid card for cash at say the supermarket with xyz value on it and a unique email address included (an anonymous debit card with email). That is every new card you buy would have a different disposable email address that would expire when the card is empty.

Such a scheme could also be used to donate micro payments to opensource projects, ad-free Youtubers, etc. and do so anonymously. Moreover, it would make payments easier thus overcome the "requires effort to do" resistance when it comes to donating. Making donating super easy would I reckon greatly increase the income for all those on the receiving end.

However I can't see it happening, governments would outlaw it claiming it'd be used to transfer money for nefarious purposes, money laundering etc.

The major reason I don't donate to good/charitable causes is that I cannot do so anonymously.

Shame really.

I feel like it's too common for people to say "we can't have nice things because the government is run by a clutter of lummoxes" when they should be saying "we should improve society somewhat".

What's the reason you don't want sellers to know who you are?

That would be like buying things in real life while wearing a ski mask and paying with cash.

Any normal pre-total-surveillance store would've had zero issues selling me something for cash if I walked in wearing a ski mask.

Cryptocurrency?

Every one I've tried "just works". The trick is getting people to join you.

As the other comment pointed out, if it's easy enough, that problem will take care of itself. I would also add "lightweight", cloning the entire block is not something everyone would do.

It's got superior privacy properties, sure, but for most people that's not enough. Its gotta be better on other merits too. Until then it wont matter how easy it is to use because you'll still have to turn it back into fiat to use it and now you've just reinvented the problem you were trying to solve with crypto in the first place.

I don't mind using fiat for groceries. I'm talking only about digital currencies for digital services. That's it, at least for starters.

> Its gotta be better on other merits too.

There, a market niche deliberately being overlooked. You can totally reverse benchmark this whole thing if you can actually see its current flaws that prevents it to become mainstream.

> and now you've just reinvented the problem you were trying to solve

One intractable problem at a time my friend. I feel like those are the excuses we've been telling ourselves to not even try. The fact of the matter is that it's going to take time even after you have the infrastructure in place. You can read endless HN comments complaining about, let's call it the situation, on the side but I believe if anything at all it's going to be a grassroots movement and it has to start somewhere. It's actually pretty straightforward, take something that is hard, that you're an expert in, and make it stupidly easy. That's the formula I use anyways but crypto is not my strong suit.

And then there's the other extreme where everybody uses crypto instead of fiat. We have the status quo as evidence that that works to at least some degree. I don't know how many cycles you'll find in the fiat economy, bit its a large number.

For some middle ground situation to work, you don't need everybody to consume exactly as much digital services as they produce, but you need some kind of balance: something like for everyone who consumes twice as much as average somebody else consumes half as much as average. Then you could have this digital-services-only sub-economy.

The more asymmetry you have, the closer you are to having a single producer and millions of consumers, the more quickly you're going to need exchanges involved to restore balance. Else the tech workers run out of fiat to spent on groceries and the grocers run out of crypto to spend on their VPNs and... bored apes gifs?

We can get there by:

1. making the tech easy to use and hope it happens on its own.

2. create artificial demand for digital services via artificial scarcity schemes (this is why modern crypto looks like a casino: tokens as assets).

3. solve a larger share of real problems in ways that make sense to solve digitally (efforts like these are where you get utility tokens from).

More of 1 couldn't hurt. I think we've seen enough of the road that 2 is paving to not want anymore of it. But I think 3 is the bottleneck.

We're in agreement that things could be improved through grassroots change that involves using different payment protocols. But progress in that direction is stalled not because the payments system is hard to use, but because the products themselves aren't diverse enough to sustain their own sub-economy.

If you got better beer out of that arrangement than you can get at the liquor store... That would be and indicator that such dedicated sub-economies can work without an external hype cycle driving them.

Then you could try something more ambitious like VPN service, that way your employees can at least buy beer with that portion of their paychecks (and the brewers can similarly buy VPN serice to avoid interference from the local government, which they might expect if they're "selling" alcohol).

I suppose you could engage in some cloak and dagger exchange at night, but again, the 99% won't do that. The ones who do, are most likely capable of setting up their own services, anonymously, so they don't need to have a commercial, for-profit as their middleman.

Publicly-traded companies fairly consistently follow a particular arc. At first they produce something people like, and thereby become popular. This is often before they go public. Then they grow for a while, until the market becomes saturated. But they're a public company, so they're still expected to grow. And if you can't get more users, the only thing you can do is extract more out of each one.

That's enshitification in a nutshell.

People often suggest things like "consumer protection" regulations, but then you get malicious compliance and regulatory capture. There are only really two things that work:

The first is that the company is still controlled by a founder who actually cares about their reputation. This works pretty well when you can find it, but it tends not to last. Eventually people die or retire.

The second is competition. Not a duopoly where they each point to the other and claim there's an alternative while mirroring every bad act of their partner in crime. Actual competition, where the market share of new companies that have only entered the market in the last 5 years isn't zero. This is why e.g. Costco can be rated higher than Comcast by an amount represented by the difference in altitude between a scenic view at a local park and the depths of hell.

So that's where you want to direct regulatory efforts. Breaking up companies in concentrated markets, repealing regulations that raise barriers to entry or allow incumbents to lock out competitors, etc. Because once a company is beholden to Wall St, the only thing that can keep them honest is real competition.

Effective altruism and other New Age garbage pseudo philosophy can't hold a candle to that.

And he's retired, so the money is no longer useful to him for maintaining control over the company he runs or expanding it, which is when it traditionally starts going to charities.

To reveal my own bias / worldview, I loathe and detest Bill Gates in nearly every way and have done so for over three decades. I think he has had a massively negative impact on humanity, mainly by making the computer industry so shitty for 4+ decades but in other more controversial areas as well.

With Elon Musk, while perceiving a number of big faults in the man, I also acknowledge that he has helped advance some very beneficial technologies (like electric vehicles and battery storage). So I have a mixed opinion on him, while with Gates, he is almost all evil and has had a massive negative impact on the planet.

I guess what I'm saying is that when people only fixate on one oligarch, which one they mostly focus on can be quite telling.

People often don't report minor accidents. Someone scrapes a pole without causing enough damage to hit their insurance deductible, are they going to file a police report? Mostly not. And then the older number had that in it and the newer one doesn't.

But the number for human drivers works like the old number. They're dividing miles driven by reported accidents. On top of that, they're using the average -- by miles -- which isn't the same as the median, and in particular that will over-represent drivers who drive the most miles, who are disproportionately professional drivers.