The tricky part is that the latency characteristics of these operations would be pretty surprising and unintuitive. It has the same problems as virtual memory and mark/sweep GC; sometimes, depending on system state and things that other threads are doing, an unrelated operation might block for very long time periods and give you huge user-visible pauses. It's often better to force these expensive operations to be explicit so that the developer has to think through the latency & consistency implications and make the tradeoffs they want.

There was a huge Bitcoin push in Texas about 5ish years back. But the way they went about it was that they passed a bunch of tax breaks for Bitcoin miners - the most commodified, energy-intensive part of the value chain. Coinbase and Kraken and Ripple and Solana and Binance's U.S. operations are all based out of California.

The article mentions Exxon's reincorporation in Texas, and Chevron also recently moved their headquarters from California to Houston. But oil is a dying, commodified industry. The replacement is electrification, in terms of solar, batteries, EVs, inverters, and other parts of the value chain. Enphase is in California, SunPower was until its recent bankruptcy, Tesla R&D is still in Palo Alto, and other major companies like Rivian and Lucid also put all their R&D in the Bay Area.

The other major industry Texas is known for is construction, and cheap houses. But construction, if you read any of the construction-physics.com articles that frequently pop up here, is another famously low-margin industry. We know how to do it, and millions of people do.

My theory is that low-margin industries get located in Texas because they make it easy. By being business-friendly, low-regulation, and low-expenses, they become the only place that low-margin commodity businesses can survive. Thus, everyone who has no pricing power and struggles to cut costs moves to Texas, because they offer the lowest costs of everyone.

California is the opposite: by making business onerous, creating huge amounts of regulation, taxing the hell out of both people and businesses, and enshrining a pyramid scheme in their state constitution via Prop 13, they make sure that only the richest can survive there. And thus only the richest do survive. The state is filled with wealthy companies and wealthy individuals because everybody else got priced out and moved elsewhere. Selection effects dominate efficiency effects.

That illustrates the converse. People will absolutely try to avoid future problems if they are the ones that bear the consequences for them. Use birth control (or put your kid on it) so you don't have to raise another child for 20+ years. Don't hang out with that volatile "friend" who always seems to be having another crisis. Fix your roof so you don't lose the house. Don't go into debt because you're the one who will be paying interest on it.

But almost by definition, bearing the consequences of your own decisions implies that there's no transaction.

It's interesting and fitting that the article begins with a discussion of Toyota. People buy Toyotas because they want to avoid problems. The biggest selling point is reliability; a Toyota's value prop is that you can keep it for 20 years and you won't have unexpected things go wrong with it. Toyota has managed to turn this into a sales driver because they appeal to the self-interest of a buyer who will be living with the car for 10-20 years. There are thousands of individual decisions that Toyota makes to avoid problems with their cars, starting with a very conservative aversion to new technology or anything that is engineeringly risky. Each individual one is invisible to the customer, and often comes with significant costs in isolation. But because their sales driver is "be reliable at all costs" and they've ingrained that into the culture, they've built an organization that is willing to make these feature trade-offs for reliability.

Also, an interesting corollary is "Oftentimes, a good life is lived with few transactions."

On a side note, both Wikipedia entries reinforce my original point that the mathematics of this is fascinating.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament

The first-approximation engineer realization about music (which I suspect the GP is going off of) is "okay, there are 12 notes in the chromatic scale, each octave doubles frequency, therefore the frequency ratio between two adjacent notes is the 12th root of 2 and we should just have 12 names for the notes". This is what's called an "equal-tempered scale"; the gap between each note is the same ratio, and you have a simple geometric progression upwards.

Except we don't actually have an equal-tempered scale. If you try to play on an equal-tempered scale, it'll sound subtly "off", and certain chords will result in "beats" (pulsing) where the frequency ratios are off just enough to cause an unpleasant modulation in loudness.

The modern diatonic scale is based on the circle-of-5ths [1], where the fundamental ratio is the 5th at 3/2 the frequency. It works like this because now chords are an even multiple of frequencies, while you would get an irrational number with the equal-tempered scale. Going up from the root (C), the next 5th up is G at a ratio of 3/2. Then you go up to D (9/4); when you reduce this to lowest terms because you've ascended a full octave, it gives a ratio of 9/8, which is one whole tone above. Next 5th up is A (27/16), which is the ratio in frequencies of a 6th. And then you get E (81 / 32 = 81/64), a major 3rd. And so on. The frequency ratios of the diatonic scale come from repeatedly reducing powers of 3/2 to lowest terms after dividing out the octave.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths

Unfortunately there doesn't really seem to be a cure for institutional decay. Once unethical people get in power, they hire other unethical people, and then you're just stuck in Game of Thrones. You have to go quit and found another company, and single-mindedly keep all those people away, kinda like Anthropic did when they left OpenAI.

When it comes to globalization, there is a legit role for hegemonic military power, and it's to keep trade lanes open. So for example, interdicting Somali pirates or Houthi rebels or keeping the Straight of Hormuz open would be legit uses of force. Sinking suspected drug boats in the Caribbean or imposing their own blockade would not be. Providing a stable currency is legit, using that currency to impose sanctions on countries or individuals that do things you do not like is not legit.

There is another conversation to be had about the use of power and how enforcing your ideals often comes into conflict with the values of your ideals themselves, but that is another conversation, not for this thread.

The interesting part is that while the benefits of globalization were not evenly distributed (part of the reason for the populist backlash against it), reversing it does not seem to benefit the people who were harmed by it. Maybe somebody who actually lives there can correct me, but the working class has seemingly not been lifted back into the middle class just because borders were closed. The factories have not come back. Instead it seems like capital owners benefitted most handsomely from globalization, and then de-globalization just entrenches their gains. And in terms of material gains and consumption, people just do without and all end up poorer.

Important lessons for America, which is about to embark on its own de-globalization adventure.

Anyone remember this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

How many of the logos that scroll by there still exist?

One way to think about it is that for a new idea/site/community/business/government/etc to gain adoption, it must be significantly better than what came before. It comes in far above the mean, because every new idea etc that doesn't come in way above the mean dies out and never gains adoption. The rest of its life is just long, slow regression to the mean. For the most part, it continually gets worse, simply because statistically, when you are much better than average the only way to go is down. Eventually, it drops below the mean and some other better replacement takes over from it.

So people can absolutely be right when they say that everything is always getting worse! The fact of existence in the first place means that they started off much better than average - after all, the vast majority of potential configurations of atoms/molecules/cells/DNA/ideas/firms/people do not exist, and we happen to have the particular arrangement that was selected for. And then constituent parts move around in random motion, entropy takes its toll, and we read this as things decaying. Somewhat literally, this is what it means to decay.

The way to avoid this is to be constantly swapping out subsystems that aren't working for you with subsystems that are.

They were right about all of that but it took 15-20 years and the companies involved grew 100x in that timefold, eventually reaching trillion-dollar valuations that would've seemed insane in 2007.

There is a tremendous amount of money to be made in destroying society.

I went to a charter school, and one with a very different (project-based) educational philosophy. The charter school was founded by, among others, a business leader who had previously exited a startup he founded. He thought it would revolutionize education for his kids. Instead, his kids did extremely poorly at this school, and ended up going back to their normal public schools, where they did great.

I ended up going to work for his next company as my first job out of high school, and he was recounting this story to my boss, who was a grizzled childless 50-something programmer without a dog in this fight. The school founder had soured on charter schools by then, and said somewhat sarcastically "Well, they work for some kids." My boss was like "Maybe that's the point, that the kids who they work for get to attend a school that works for them."