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flownoon | 2 years ago | on: Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value

Most of Musk’s money comes from astronomical stock valuations. Most of that stock is bought by hedge funds and the financial sector. That money mostly comes from mortgages and loans, which allow the financial sector to capture the land value that could otherwise belong to the people.

So basically land value (which nobody creates through their own labor- its created by a community and should be owned by the community) is vacuumed up by the financial sector, which they throw at tech.

For more on this process, look into Michael Hudson, who accurately forecasted the 08 financial crisis.

flownoon | 2 years ago | on: Deep-sea mining may soon ease the world's battery-metal shortage

I used to think this way. I guess it is possible, in the long-term, that we might see some kind of social collapse due to a tragedy-of-the-commons driven depletion of some critical resource.

But I see no evidence this is close. Humans are flourishing more than ever before. And in the places that humans aren't flourishing, this is more due to social issues (inequality, deaths of despair) than to resource depletion. Moreover, stalling birthrates obviate any kind of Malthusian concerns for at least a generation or so.

People have been predicting resource-driven collapses for a long time now, since the Club of Rome and Donella Meadow’s Limits to Growth in the 70s. I haven't read Geoffrey West but it looks like he is in the same camp. A lot of very smart modelers and game theoreticians have come up with models predicting collapse. But they've been wrong so far when pressed to make falsifiable predictions (see the Simon-Erlich wager). And beyond falsifiable predictions, more empirical and less theoretical work also seems to show that models of resource-depletion and collapse are too simple to map on to what actually happens. See for example, Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, about how societies around the world and through history have successfully managed common-pool resources.

So Im not worried about resource-depletion-driven collapse.

flownoon | 3 years ago | on: A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses

I got scammed by this exact type of thing when I needed a tow truck ASAP to jump my car. They had a fake business <1 mile away with lots of good reviews. After giving them my credit card info right away and after a long delay, I gave it more scrutiny and realized it was definitely a fake business. I called multiple times to figure out where the F$&@ my tow truck was, each time talking to a different person with a filipino accent. An impressively sophisticated scam, Im not sure how google could fight it

flownoon | 3 years ago | on: Graduate students question career options

I got a PhD in 2.5 years (already had a masters), a very fast amount of time, and the advice I always give people is “pick a program with clear deliverables.”

My advisor said that after publishing 3 articles in good journals, I was done. So I was very motivated, had a clear target, and had a more satisfying and quick experience than probably 98% of PhD students.

I looked at programs in more attractive locations and at better rated schools, where they said essentially “you are done when we feel like you are done”. I turned them down and it was a fantastic decision.

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