Can't find the article mentioning it but apparently it's an open problem they're thinking about.
But yeah if society collapses these billionaire nerds are the first to go. Quietly, in their bunkers, while the team leader of their seal mercenary team takes over.
Even before the rest of us realizes what's happening.
> Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.
Most? I don't think that can quite be right. But I do think the stuff I'm writing about has held up pretty well through many, many cycles of boom and bust. In fact, Steve Blank has a great new essay out about the coming crash and how ideas in the new book might be useful in helping us reorganize our economy afterwards, kind of the same way The Lean Startup did after the dot-com crash.
The danger of a meritocracy is in the word. What do you merit? Your job? Fair enough. More rights? Certainly not. I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser because they don't merit one's position, consequently one's status and thus should not have a seat at the important tables because after all they don't "merit" it.
What I want ultimately is that we strive to give a better life to everyone. And I don't think that's what meritocracy achieves.
Well, meritocracy isn't just who gets the jobs. It's who gets the jobs that run society. And that's important for everyone, because it matters to everyone that society be competently run, rather than run by incompetents who have important parents.
> I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser
We already do this and we've done it throughout history too. There's always some excuse people will make to feel better than others. Wealth, religion, race, intelligence, education, all sorts of things.
But we do want high social mobility. If you work hard it is easy to climb the ladders. If you squander your wealth it is easy to slip. I'm not saying there should be no friction, the correct balance is always hard to find.
But whatever that merit is is something we need to decide as a society. It can be anything we want. It can be your work that contributes to monetary growth. It could be work that contributes to scientific growth. It could be how great of an artist you are. How popular you are. Our anything. We decide and we decide how much one means more than the other. Or we could even decide that there are no "lessers" and we could decide that the person traveling the world on their parent's dime has the same value to our society as a scientist, businessman, or artist. Mind you, I'm not talking about their value as a human, that's different
The IQ of the smartest human, the perfect memory storing and recollection of computers, the fact that it never tires. I don't know if it's AGI but it's already something greater than us.
Maybe you'll dismiss it as another poetic waxing but what I understand they're saying is that capitalism hasn't yet captured all the inefficiencies of the human experience.
The French part in that sentence should be the name of the region (eg Doré(e) ), not "région", and if you wanted to use the French spelling of "région", you'd have to say "région Dore".
Using the French spelling of région but the wrong word order doesn't make sense.
You'll notice it's about how it makes the poster feel.
Complaints against the right are usually about their actions, the terrible consequences and how they hurt people.
Complaints against the left are often how it makes the complainer feel, it's a mental struggle to not admit they like the result of right wing policies and not being able to embrace a left wing position despite knowing on some level that they should.
Trump supporters and voters will have to live with the fact that they enabled this for the rest of their life. I do not envy them. Especially those that will snap out of it at some point.
I think only a small percentage might ever feel remorse or empathy regarding how their voting choices shaped world outcomes thereafter. For those that ever do regret it, I think giving them a path to redemption is the only way the world will ever heal. For those incapable of having those feelings.. well, I can hope karma is real.
They won't just have to live with it. They like it.
My aunt is a republican lobbyist. She is also a drunk. This means she regularly texts us the most incredibly odious beliefs. Stuff like how my other aunt should kill herself because she is a leech for taking disability from the government. MAGA voters aren't sad that Trump is out here saying "fuck you, libs" on a regular basis. They love it.
That was true after 2016, and plenty of them did. The problem is that Grump was able to attract a whole bunch of new scumbags - from his destructive politicization of Covid, the surveillance industry seeing a more direct route to become an inescapable part of the government, the growing performative chest-thumping "manosphere" etc. At this point I don't see much shame on the horizon.
But yeah if society collapses these billionaire nerds are the first to go. Quietly, in their bunkers, while the team leader of their seal mercenary team takes over.
Even before the rest of us realizes what's happening.
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