There’s also been times when other values more like what the GP implies have driven governance and social direction in the US. There was a side with values like that in the civil war. There was government and there were movements with those values for much of the 20th century especially following periods of national trial when it was clear we needed governing values that truly drove the common welfare.

A lot of us grew up and are still living with the fruits of that. That’s the America we’ve known. We’ve also always known that there are many Americans who never bought in, who had a vision more like the other side of the civil war, or want welfare that’s a bit more unevenly distributed, perhaps not even distributed in some directions at all.

It can still be a bit of a shock to find out that illiberal portion growing with a grip on a growing number of levers of power.

Can the America with a vision of truly common welfare reassert itself? Maybe. Maybe not.

But I appreciate the elaboration. I don't generally use LLMs for writing, but I'm interested in what people perceive as good and the gap between that LLM output among other things. I actually liked this piece, and could outline some things that I thought were effective about it as is, but being curious about what other people dislike seemed more likely to be educational.

I especially appreciate the criticism of repetition in this piece and LLM output in general. That's a great one to think about because repetition has a place in rhetoric, especially with some audiences, but probably less so with other audiences (perhaps especially an engineering minded audience). And for any audience there will be a point of diminishing returns. All things LLMs may be poorly positioned to dial in.

> Better to say "It's awful writing" then write an extended essay empathizing via guessing what was in your head and what you actually did.

But you did! Thank you. And FWIW the extended criticism that you eventually provided including attempting to guess at the author's perspective boosts signal for me. When someone does that, it gives me particulars to learn from and makes it seem less likely they're just cranky or grinding an unknown axe. Though of course no one has time for essay responses all the time (and the pay usually isn't great).

There’s no way. Every proposal is either a bid for capital via moonshot enthusiasm or a stalking horse for something else, and these days I wouldn’t be surprised if it was orbital weapons platforms in disguise.

* Clojure is built different in terms of hot code reloading

* the REPL is its own application process in languages Ruby or Python, but in Clojure it’s sortof a client for the system

Is that right? Is there more to it?

Can you describe what you think is awful (beyond rhetorical choices that have become LLM markers)?

* someone has to write language specifying a program, natural language or programming.

* a programming langugage is a handle with specific properties at a specific level of abstraction. Whether it’s a popular handle won’t change that it’s far more than a toy.

It’s been convenient that we can throw better hardware at our constraints regularly. Our convenience much less our personal economic functions is not necessarily what markets will generally optimize for, much like developers of electron apps aren’t optimizing for user resources.

You’re right to point out that we’re all opted in at multiple levels to tech dependent on mining operations with a terrible human cost. I’d love to see these dangerous mining operations made safer with tech and policy, and you’re quite right that individual opt out is unlikely to have any effect (much less selective opt out from LLMs). Is that the end of the story?

If we’re just here to complain that someone’s marginal harm reduction posture is marginal I’m not sure that’s an effective rebuttal. Collective effort to lay new tracks and untie people off the old ones has more power than complaining someone used their personal trolley switch to shunt to a track with slightly fewer people.

Of course, that goes for people manning their personal switches too. And it’s worthwhile to pause and appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem.

There’s several orders of magnitude less available discussion of selecting data structures for problem domains than there is code.

If the underlying information is implicit in high volume of code available then maybe the models are good at it, especially when driven by devs who can/will prompt in that direction. And that assumption seems likely related to how much code was written by devs who focus on data.

Then again maybe the quality of Lincoln's literacy defies it.

Worth noting that GDP per capita of Norway and Iceland are pretty close to the US:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita

Using general stats like that helps avoid sharpshooter fallacies that could be hazards in picking a list of high profile successes.

Still, let's talk about those successes. What are the conditions that gave rise to SpaceX, Amazon, Google, and Walmart? Whatever they are, none of their stories seems path-dependent anyone's personal billions. SpaceX owes as much or more to government decisions to privately source launch capability (not to mention path dependence on public programs supporting a certain related company). Google was famously founded by not particularly wealthy PhD students with initial capital well under a million dollars. Walmart wasn't founded with millions let alone billions. Bezos was probably the wealthiest founder when it comes to your list -- maybe had a six figure net worth, possibly seven, certainly good networks for raising capital -- but the bootstrapping capital that went into it didn't require anyone to be a billionaire.

Whatever the US does right as far as positive business environment goes, it doesn't require personal billions, so it's pretty unlikely to stop with additional taxes on billionaire concentrations of wealth. Taxes which, again, at the level of any proposed rate, would most likely not even un-billionaire anyone.

Fractional direct appointments are the usual case in any large organization. If you're the chief executive, you don't hire individual department workers, you might not even pick individual department management, you probably pick other "C-level" staff and have them manage management personnel most of the time.

It's more like a captain of a ship than "an ant driving an elephant." Every avenue you have to direct the ship depends on a network of knowledge and relationships supporting steering and operational systems. You don't DIY turning the tanker, you team-turn the tanker because you've learned how to work with a team.

The rule of law and checks and balances also means these elected officeholders don’t have arbitrary control, which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional and effective federal workforce) as well as some limits.

I swear we have a problem where we quantize to caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and control theorists would probably anticipate this means things will start to swing a bit wildly.

OK, let's assume that oil is the only relevant resource, and population is the other relevant factor, and there's no efficiencies of scale or exceptional American ingenuity that can be discovered. 30x the resources combined with 60 times the population would mean we should be able to provide at least half the floor that Norway does, right?

Does that mean if we discover another resource the US has, or efficiencies of scale, or an exceptionally ingenious solution, we can revise that number up?

What if we'd behaved differently in the past when our oil to population ratio was similar to Norway's (or better)? And when's the 2nd best time to start?

Or is this more of a shrug we're nothing compared to those fortunate Scandinavians and that's why we just can't have nice things that they have no matter how nice it would be to have those things, stiff upper lip chaps, greatest country in the world situation?

> And defends the world with defense expenditures.

This is the "I have to wash my hair that night" of excuses -- plausibly true at some level yet studiedly ignoring such a wide latitude of optionality involved that it's clearly covering a refusal.

> Once that door is open, there will be no end to it.

Slippery slope fallacy. Tax rates move, but not monotonically.

For average US households effective income tax rates are more or less flat for the last generation or three. For high eaners? To say that the trend is downward doesn't cover it, it's a dramatic drop compared to midcentury era rates.

Wealth taxes in the countries that have them don't seem to demand an ever larger share.

If your strongest example is washington state a capital gains tax rate change within the same order of magnitude (that's still well below average effective income tax rates) you don't have much of a case.

Lots of unevisceratedly wealthy people live in states where the highest income tax bracket has rates over 10%. I'm sure the people with over a million a year in income will remain prosperous.

> If your estate is $1 billion, your estate tax will be:

Also you'll be dead and as such won't have continued control over any of your previous assets. Hence the earlier comment to the effect that one may as well complain to God about having to loosen ones grasp on them at death as rail against rendering unto caeser.

The natural "tax rate" on assets at death is 100%. Any smaller number than that is an affordance from the cooperation of society.

> said many times that billionaires should not exist

Perhaps he's right and it's hard to draw a solid straight line between that scale of personal profit and input. Perhaps he's wrong.

Still, as discussed, the most extreme concrete policy that Sanders has proposed is a wealth tax of 5%, and we've discussed why the dynamics of that are not existential threats to the wealth of anyone, much less worthy of the term "evisceration."

No one is proposing taking all the money from even the billionares. Most likely outcome of a 5% tax rate is stabilization.

> it won't raise the general standard of living.

And yet other societies have managed to produce better general standards of living (and higher rates of entrepreneurial success) via various policies including some different tax rates.

> You will also never have companies like SpaceX.

Companies exist to broadly source capital to bring to bear on an enterprise. So it stands to reason that companies like Space X will exist whether the capital comes from a wide pool of investors whose upside is limited somewhere below hyperwealth, or a contribution from a narrower set of investors with a higher concentration, at least as long as there's a credible upside.

It's about how you approach commons and common wealth. Any commons will do. It does not rely on oil resources per se.

Let's say for the sake of argument it does depend on oil wealth, though.

The US currently has something like 30x the proven oil reserves that Norway does (>200 billion barrels vs ~7 billion). It has already produced at least 200billion barrels since the 1850s. What if the US had treated the wealth from past oil production the way Norway has? What if it treated the next 200 billion that way?

And oil is only one of many commons resources to choose from.

> See Bernie Sanders!

Yes, I addressed Sanders proposal in my earlier comment: "single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy."

A single digit wealth tax is unlikely to fully offset even conventional yearly returns, hence the "might not have impact beyond stabilizing" the wealth of those subject to it.

Even if we assume no yearly returns though -- simply a 5% bite out of net worth -- a wealth tax will not make anyone in that economic strata unwealthy (there's a billions-floor beneath which it wouldn't apply, leaving the worst case still radically prosperous).

There's no reasonable basis to characterize that as "evisceration."

But repeating loaded terms like that as part of an ideological rosary is a common religious and rhetorical strategy.

> Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).

My understanding is that estate taxes generally have thresholds that have to be met before they kick in. Federal threshold is on the order of 10million, WA is 3 million.

Having dynastic wealth flows limited over a few million dollars is also not reasonably described as "evisceration" (especially with all the other vehicles for transferring wealth).

May as well complain to God that you can't take it with you as that you might have to loosen your grasp at death to render unto caeser.

No one is “eviscerated.”

And it’s disingenuous to use that term for any proposal that has even the slightest public traction in the US. The most extreme proposals require single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy.

No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy. Yet. But if we pretend the only options are (a) unencumbered hyperwealth with attendant hyper income inequality and (b) eviscerating the wealthy for long enough, it’s more likely some people will eventually embrace the latter.

And this is particularly relevant for the age of LLMs. None of them approach intelligence with reliance on a huge data commons (and likely even data that isn’t intended for the commons) they’re an enterprise with a natural arrow from the commons to the common wealth, if we can remember a culture that sustains it.

Consumer electronics are cheaper; this is the trend for substitutable goods.

Love me the right 20-30 year old car, but the dramatic cost rise around covid times means the savings is only relative to new. A 3x increase in old car prices hasn’t been matched by 3 fold wage increases for most.

And of course we’re discussing this in a larger conversation about automating away 1980s jobs.