> And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.
Well that’s wrong. Exploitive businesses do exist. Rent seeking and arbitrage does exist. But the ire today isn’t directed to Wall Street or private equity. It’s being directed to people who built real companies. It’s not inherently exploitive to sell a customer a valuable product or employ someone to build that product.
In the 1990s, it took weeks to order something by mail. Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
But there are many online stores, and Amazon is one of the worst? On line shopping was an innovation but Amazon, in particular, was just a cash grab from all the others.
If you pay attention to how people spend their money, and not what they say (i.e. actions speak louder than words)
People really love billionaire owned businesses.
We can look at Walmart, which eviscerated mom&pop stores all over rural America, and you'd be hard pressed to find much love of Walmart in those places, but alas, people gave their money to Walmart instead of Jone's Town General.
> Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
This bit might be a bit unfair. USPS and Amazon Delivery are different services, fulfilling different needs. Neither will deliver a pizza in 30 min or less, for example.
> Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
It's also impossible without Amazon exploiting all the workers in the chain - from warehouse workers forced to undergo dehumanizing _unpaid_ searches that take hours when leaving the warehouse, to being forced to pee in bottles.
It is impossible to become a billionaire without exploting people.
I'd rather use a bottle than some of the toxic lavatories and porta potties and have to buy something to get the lav key or wait in line. It's also quick and easy.
Have you ever been on a road trip and there's no lav for miles?
Someone working a job they freely chose is not being exploited. This word is losing all meaning. Amazon pays more with better benefits than most other warehouse jobs.
Sure if people could just pick whatever they want we'd all be sitting on the beach having drinks with supermodels, but then who's going to make the drinks?
People can pick among various jobs. If they picked warehouse worker that was the best option available to them. Taking it away means they have to choose something worse.
And a job is not a lifetime commitment. Warehouse worker may be a stop on the way to something else. I worked in a warehouse for a while, now I don't. People are not static blobs.
> if the economy is growing at 2.5%, how do you sustain 15% over 5 years
My family of five is getting taller at say 1% per year. But my 4 year old and 7 year old are growing at 10% per year. My wife, my teenage daughter, and I have topped out. What exactly is inconsistent about this?
Assuming invariance of scale between how growth works between a family's height and how a company worth a billion(s?) operates relative to the environment. It's the same error Paul makes when he has the politicians calculate the log base and form that connection about exponents in their minds.
This is the level of detail I am asking for. “Subpopulation height increases because of the physical and understood processes of maturation and growth”. You could easily go into the biology involved, model the genetic, environmental, and random variance.
You will note that PG does not provide such a mechanism for how a $100m company grows into a $10b company (thus producing $b wealth for founders).
Just to be clear. I am not saying at the object level that such growth is impossible. I am saying that at the meta/causal level, PG did not adequately characterize it it.
Your analogy does not apply. Billionaires are growing faster than anybody else in the global economy. The impoverished are growing slowest. If you want to apply this to your family then the adults would be growing by 15% every year, while your kids growing the least (and your teenagers would be shrinking).
If we take this analogy further, your kids would be the ones working the hardest to bring the food on the table required for this growth, and the adults would consume like 90% of it.
Your phraseology of “extract” suffers from the same problem as AOC’s. You’re conflating value creation with value extraction.
The problem with AOC’s argument is she’s recycling a 2008 talking point into a context where it doesn’t make sense. Financial entities making trillions moving money around raises questions about whether value is really being created. When I get three Amazon packages delivered to my house every day, there’s no question about value creation.
Her point isn’t that Amazon is bad because it’s a trillion dollar company
Her point is that Bezos is bad because he and Amazon could have paid that driver 10x what they make and still had more money than they could spend in 100 lifetimes
The distribution of the gains is absurdly weighted towards the top
If you want to make a point about exploitive labor practices, that’s totally valid. Explain how Amazon’s labor practices are exploitive. But Bezos having more money than he can spend in a lifetime is totally irrelevant to that. It’s not relevant to anything.
The entire point is that the riches borne of the success of amazon could have been shared more equally while not actually making a different in Bezos' or his families life.
The only difference would have been that his score on the billionaire leader board would have been slightly lower.
That fact is not only relevant, it's a central pillar of the point.
> The entire point is that the riches borne of the success of amazon could have been shared more equally while not actually making a different in Bezos' or his families life.
Why does that matter? What is the universal principle that’s at play here? Does this principle apply to everyone? Does it apply to you? People in my dad’s village in Bangladesh survive on $5/day. Under your principle, why do you get to spend 1,000x that on a vacation?
Can you also explain your math? You said above that Amazon could pay its workers 10x as much as they do now. Bezos’s share of Amazon’s net profit last year was about $6.9 billion. Amazon has 1.1 million delivery drivers and warehouse workers. So if Bezos’s share was nothing, those workers could earn about $6,300 more. That’s like 10-15% more, not 10 times more as you incorrectly said.
> Bezos’s share of Amazon’s net profit last year was about $6.9 billion
We're not talking about Bezos's profit share for one year. We're talking about giving the workers a bigger share of the profit. Ideally, there would have been a workers union that owned a significant number of amazon shares or some other similar structure. Then all workers benefit from the compounding growth pg is talking about in the article. However that didn't happen, because Bezos didn't want it to happen.
> It's very possible that a "wrong" frame in isolation is the best looking one in a real-time context.
Maybe that’s sometimes true. But, more often, the intermediate states will contribute in a predictable way to the overall look of the animation and if the intermediate states don’t look coherent, then the animation as a whole will be hard to understand.
The examples in the article make this clear. For example, the search box where the initial text animates from the middle while the cursor starts on the left. That disconnects the text from the cursor. There’s no reason for that. It’s just shitty animation work.
Excellent article. The examples from Mac OS Tahoe show how sloppy the work is. Just lazy shit done without attention and care. Steve Jobs would have fired a bunch of people. And this stuff matters:
> This creates a false feeling that something subtly changes when you switch between modes. And you know what? I don’t want my UI to give me false feelings.
The animations in iOS 26 and MacOS Tahoe feel wrong. Almost like an uncanny valley. It makes the UI unpleasant to use.
High turnout brings out the low-information voters and changes the composition of the viable coalition for both parties. If we restricted the franchise, we might be able to sustain something closer to the Romney GOP versus the Mayor Pete Democratic Party. And that would make the government a lot more orderly and competent.
I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the filtering to happen. I want it to happen up front at the voting stage, but have the government be highly responsive to the people that do vote. The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats favor mass voting, but that the actual governance is done by highly credentialed career bureaucrats that aren’t directly answerable to voters.
I’d argue the Mayor Pete model is even less democratic than mine. Because although everyone votes, the effect of that vote is filtered through a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.
> a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.
Now take the next step: Explicitly state, and then defend, your implied premise, namely that it's bad to be governed by people who, from education and experience, have come to know something about their subject areas — and that we should be happy to invite the ignorant, the misguided, and the charlatan to exercise power and authority.
are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window.
Your model doesn’t eliminate politics, it just entrenches the particular politics of the kind of people who go to T10 schools then get jobs as division heads at federal agencies.[1]
There is no such thing as “following the rules” in an apolitical way. Congress writes very broad laws, and the executive branch exercises a tremendous amount of discretion in enforcing and executing those laws. The founders understood that, and their solution to the problem was frequent elections, not the fiction of neutral, apolitical credentialed bureaucrats.
[1] A good example of this is the bank bailouts in the first Obama administration. Even though the voters were outraged at Wall Street, Obama followed the bailout strategy developed by Wall Street. He replaced Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs) with Tim Geithner (NY Fed then private equity), but everyone underneath stayed the same and the bailout strategy stayed the same.
It's not a fiction. People do their jobs even if they don't like the current or past President. I'm sure you can pull out a long list of people who didn't, but unless you name everybody, it simply isn't a fiction. My claim isn't bureaucrats are always apolitical, it's that they mostly are. Showing that some aren't doesn't show that they mostly are.
Take the executive assistant to the American diplomat to, say, Sweden. They file paperwork and schedule appointments for the diplomat. Their role is operational. Logistics stuff. Coordinating what goes where. Setup a meeting between three very important busy people and juggle their calendars. Does that position really need to be someone we vote for? They do operations, not make policy.
If career bureaucrats were just scheduling appointments and filing paperwork, I’d agree with you. But that’s not how these agencies work. Career civil servants are doing entire rulemakings, creating rules that have the force of law. They are preparing enforcement campaigns targeted at entire industries. They are setting internal priorities and policies. And the elected officials have limited ability to control what’s going on if the careers don’t cooperate.
In law school I was an intern for a Commissioner at the FCC. The Bureaus, which were staffed by career civil servants, would send entire rules and orders (hundreds of pages) fully formed up for the political appointees to vote on. Now, I think the career folks at the FCC are fantastic and very responsive to policy changes between administrations.[1] But that’s not true for many agencies. And in those agencies, the career civil servants wield tremendous power and make it very hard for appointees to implement policy the careers disagree with.
[1] Part of this is that, some high-profile stuff aside, there is a consistent ideology between the parties at the FCC. The republicans completely won in the 1980s and almost everyone takes a “law and economics” approach to communications regulations. So the careers are operating from the same analytical framework as the political appointees regardless of who is in power.
I understand this argument that by establishing these agencies with career technocrats, you are giving them agency to make up rules in a bubble. with a revolving door and active steering by invested parties. it is in fact antidemocratic. net neutrality shouldn't be a rule published by the FCC, but a serious policy issue that gets chewed up by the congressional sausage machine.
what I don't understand is the remedy you seem to support makes these decisions autocratically, with more external steering by the ostensibly regulated parties. instead of a bunch of little independent fiefdoms with hysteresis and oversight, now we have a giant unitary federal fiefdom, and the only democratic input is a red or blue ever 4 years, if that.
maybe you could put some framing about how you think federal enivironmental/financial/communications/health/housing policy should be managed? because I don't see this shift as being in any way more empowering to the taxpayers.
I think we should eliminate the filibuster so Congress can do actual policymaking. Your example of net neutrality is a great one. Congress should be doing this, perhaps based on recommendations from the executive agencies. There’s thousands of examples of that, such as EPA regulation of CO2 emissions. The executive branch has way too much discretionary authority, especially in the area of rule making.
But I also think that, whatever discretion has been allocated to the executive, it should be exercised by the President and political appointees who are directly accountable to voters. I want Democrats to emulate what Trump did in 2024: get on stage with their proposed appointees to key positions, who can speak about what they want to do in particular areas. The executive runs a huge fraction of the government, and voters should get to see who is going to be in charge. And once they vote, their vote should be effective. These appointees should actually be able to make the big changes they promise.
I think bureaucrats that can’t be voted out are a bigger risk than anything else. You raise the concern about steering by regulated entities, but that happens with bureaucrats too. The department heads of these agencies have a revolving door relationship with the regulated agencies. It’s just not out in the open.
that was pretty destructive. by unfortunate accident the process of developing network standards shut down as that was being lifted. people who tried to address the systemic security issues in internet infrastructure were shouting into the wind while the itar restrictions where in place, since none of their solutions could be deployed. that shortsightedness is at least a partial cause for the huge uncontrollable security issues we have today.
this seems like a direct parallel, sowing confusion during the formative years, for no apparent gain.
I also think as a policy matter it’s futile. But my point is that this is a predictable response to this technology. Analyzing it in terms of one particular administration is missing the forest for the trees.
the trees being that the US federal government is basically off the rails, has abandoned its basic duties and used its authority for all sorts of corrupt and counterproductive ends. apparently you take great comfort in these 'both sides' statements, but the reality is that things have gotten radically worse recently.
It's because Americans and many Europeans under the shield of the U.S. military and have never in their lives felt a moment of fear about external threats.[1] They never have to meaningfully confront the central fact of their existence: that they enjoy a vastly disproportionate share of the world's bounty in a way that would be impossible without overwhelming military power. I suspect people living in say Ukraine don't talk like this.
The Colonel Jessup character was guarding a fence in Cuba. Seriously. Cuba. Imagine hearing that sanctimonious speech about "the manner in which I defend you" and then you find out it's a fence in Cuba.
There hasn't been an existential threat to the United States since the Civil War, and that one was self-inflicted. Obviously we need to maintain a military but 99% of what the current military does is either for economic goals or hollow national pride.
Cuba is less than 95 miles from Florida and was aligned with a hostile nuclear superpower. The possibility of using Cuba as a base of operations for an attack on U.S. soil is the closest the U.S. has ever come to a significant foreign threat.
And guantanamo bay is on the south side of Cuba, not even between Cuba and the US. There has never been fighting there over 100 years. These days it's most famous as a convenient legal location to do torture.
Aaron Sorkin unintentionally created some phenomenal performance art with the closing of that movie and various educated people seeing Jack Nicholson's character as some sort of hard defender of freedom.
It's relevant to the macho point of Jack Nicholson's character talking a bunch of shit about how he defends us. The Guantanamo base is irrelevant except, as previously noted, a convenient location to do torture.
Regarding the larger relationship.. bro, it's not the 1960s. Nobody is even trying to put nukes in Cuba and we could have easily established normal relations at any point in the last 50 years. The only reason that they are "enemies" is because we can't let go of a grudge going on 75 years that is completely irrelevant in today's world.
The scene between Colonel Jessup, Lt Jg Kaffee, and Lance Corporal Dawson and PFC Downey is about the nature of contradictory duties.
Everyone in that scene has a sworn duty to the United States as active duty military.
However, their duties sometimes conflict with each other (Jessup and Kaffee), and are even sometimes self-conflicting (Dawson and Downey).
Bad doesn't always come with a sticker labeling itself, and there's trauma inflicted even in peacetime in the maintenance of military strength (in broken bodies, training deaths, and emotional trauma).
To hold ones nose and pretend there isn't constant violence, even absent declared war, being perpetrated to militarily protect the US and Europe is to be ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the foundation peace is built on.
Jessup is a tale of the distinction between the reality of war and the higher ideals and laws of war.
I understand and respect what you're saying here, but the fly in the ointment is that this posting (gitmo) was always bullshit and never actually mattered.
Jessup is missing the forest for the trees far more than I ever could because it's not my job. He's getting kids killed for a bullshit assignment while being a Colonel.
How do you think an Afghanistan or Iraq veteran would regard the Cuba assignment?
Soviet-allied Cuba was a military threat to the U.S. in 1986 which is when the movie is set. Don’t forget the movie was written before the fall of the Soviet Union. And even when it came out in 1992, it wasn’t clear to audiences that the cold war was really over.
Is Cuba a military threat today? No. But that’s because we have had a navel base there for more than a century, and the Soviet Union is long gone.
Isn't every nuclear bomb an existential threat to all human life? How can one say there are no existential threats while countries people consider "The Enemy" have enough nukes to kill all human life multiple times?
Also global warming is an existential threat. It's really telling how little people care about the world's problems not seeing their very own existence endangered.
In the case of Global Warming its happening to slowly for most people to perceive it as threatening. Even though it massively is.
For Nukes thats just a given nowadays, humans have a remarkable ability to adapt to constant threats. Not in the sense of being able to do something against it but to know it exists and not be terrified every single day. So many things can threaten human life that exist around us and yet we do not get scared after some time anymore atleast not constantly. Look at people living in Australia the entire ecosystem is basically a giant threat to anyone living there. Look at people living in earth prone regions of the world. People adapt and keep on living their lives. This is a fundamental human skill.
True! This is precisely what really annoys me about humans, because it makes humans not care about many things, and it's a skill I struggle with, which causes constant anger and helplessness on my side of things. But I guess it's what allows people to have hope and being whimsical, happy and whatnot.
>Isn't every nuclear bomb an existential threat to all human life?
No, of course not. It's a threat to people within 15 miles of the explosion plus people who are outdoors and turn to look at the bright light in the sky.
And there's never been enough nukes to kill all human life. That statement is based on a despicable calculation in which it is assumed that people would assemble packed shoulder-to-shoulder in circles of just the right size and there are no structures or land masses to deflect the blast and no clouds or fog to absorb the intense light.
More than half of US ocean shipping tonnages is to or from ports on the US Gulf Coast, and Cuba is in a position to cut off access to it if it gets helps from a bigger power.
In EU countries where war with Russia was seen as possible, for example, here in Sweden that is not the case.
The military preparations this fear leads to take a very special form though: investment in actual defence, commitment to stay behind and fight in case on an invasion, that sort of thing.
Obviously working on defence technology is part of this, but it also shapes the direction of the defence technology you work on. Sweden's forces have looked rather different from forces that intend to conduct offensive wars, especially historically. Tanks specifically designed for conducting ambushes are one example. Artillery emplacements designed to sink invasion fleets and to resist direct nuclear attack are another.
I agree with your broader point, but DEI versus no DEI is a bad example. That's not an example of companies sucking up to the preferred policies of whatever administration is in power. Instead, they are responding to decisive legal decisions. There is a clear legal principle at issue: the civil rights laws are symmetric as to race. The Supreme Court held that in SFFA in 2023, and again in Ames in 2025 (which was a 9-0 decision). Most "DEI" programs create unacceptable legal exposure because they involve literature or practices as to white people that would be held up as evidence of racial discrimination in a Title VII lawsuit if the races were switched.
> Considering they rolled back DEI along with everyone else after Trump's second victory, it's difficult to view those previous "values" as anything other than cynical kissing-up to the previous holders of power.
The previous policies simply reflected the culture of employees and HR managers that had graduated from universities that openly practiced race-conscious admissions after Grutter v. Bollinger. The change in policy likely came not from the new administration, but the Supreme Court's SFFA decision in 2023 that reminded everyone the civil rights laws require race blindness.
Well that’s wrong. Exploitive businesses do exist. Rent seeking and arbitrage does exist. But the ire today isn’t directed to Wall Street or private equity. It’s being directed to people who built real companies. It’s not inherently exploitive to sell a customer a valuable product or employ someone to build that product.
In the 1990s, it took weeks to order something by mail. Amazon can now deliver me stuff the same day of the next morning. That’s amazing, considering that it’s all done with trucks, warehouses, and other things that already existed in the 1990s. Whoever made that happen when USPS couldn’t do it deserves to be a billionaire.
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