myrmepropagandistfuturebird@sauropods.win
Sep 9, 2026, 11:46 AMAnd I think the disfunction we see is the result of that freeloading. There just isn't enough raw cognitive power behind the money anymore.
Replies
AzuaronAzuaron@cyberpunk.lolSep 9, 2026, 11:55 AM@futurebird I think it goes further than that. It's not just "freeloading"--people who are looking to make money with money operate in ways that are destructive to the economy. This includes the formation of monopolies and monopsonies and the destruction of competition required for that, sure, but also things like leveraged buyouts.
It is often more profitable to destroy things than it is to make things, right up until it suddenly isn't, the market crashes, and the financial vultures make the "real economy" pay for their avarice.
FediThing :progress_pride:FediThing@chinwag.orgSep 9, 2026, 11:58 AMThis is such an interesting approach, thank you for posting. The more split up resources are, the more potential for intelligent deployment of those resources?
There are many fields where possibly similar things going on?
We would get more interesting films if a single major motion picture's budget was distributed to microbudget projects. Huge-budget movies tend to be so risk-averse that they are usually very bland and derivative.
Totally different (and grimmer) example: In the Ukraine War and Iran War, large numbers of cheap drones are causing headaches for small numbers of hugely expensive missiles and aircraft.
- myrmepropagandistfuturebird@sauropods.winSep 9, 2026, 12:14 PM
People who say they love capitalism don't talk much about just how much their theory depends on collective intelligence. Just how badly it falls apart if you don't have all of those perfect economic agents making millions of rational decisions, doing the *work* of deciding what is a better value.
Other aspects of capitalism give large players the power to bigfoot these decisions to bend the market to their whims: and those whims aren't rational anymore. It all falls apart.
mathewmathew@universeodon.comSep 9, 2026, 1:08 PM@FediThing @futurebird As a general rule, small decentralized diverse ecosystems are more successful and resilient than large centralized monocultures. This shows up everywhere, as you’ve noticed.
In the world of finance, a key strategy for investment is putting money in multiple ETFs, each of which splits the investment across hundreds of small companies. When the 2008 financial crisis happened, my 401(k) wasn’t hit too badly, ironically partly because I had a lot invested in supposedly risky overseas funds. (American exceptionalism strikes again.) I’ve gone through and worked out how much I have invested in companies that might tank when the AI bubble bursts, and it’s about 5–6% of the total, which is pretty good given how AI is being rammed in everywhere.
In computer security, a network of diverse nodes can be harder to secure, but it means that a single security issue is less likely to take down the entire network. But IT people are told the opposite — that if every host is standardized it’ll be more secure. In the short term that may be true, but see the CrowdStrike disaster for how it can work out in the long term.