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/cries-because-georgism-is-the-GOAT-and-its-not-even-on-the-list

Redistribution that enhances production rather than stifling it. Which provides justice rather than creating injustice. A great idea to bury under dust for centuries.

well... georgism is sort of orthogonal to capitalism and socialism. You could have a georgist tax regime in both capitalist and socialist utopia.

But... yes... it would be great if enough people knew about Henry George and Georgism that the Gallup people thought it was worthwhile to put it on a survey.

And allow me to bemoan the current state of affairs where the definitions of capitalism and socialism used by most Americans are defined by tribal communities whose (sub)social order depends on the in-crowd toeing a particular party line with respect to whom is allowed to extract rent, set prices, rent and tax rates. Which is to say, if you're comfortably making seven figures on your constellation of payday loan offices, you probably a fan of the status quo.

For my right-wing nut-job friends, remember, there are "socialist" countries like Sweden, Denmark and (arguably) Canada which are perfectly pleasant. Venezuela and Cuba's problems aren't due to their "socialist" nature, but to wide-spread corruption and oligarchy. Keynes (and even Marx) had interesting things to say, though doctrinaire adoption of political and economic philosophy from previous centuries is not likely a good idea.

For my left-wing pinko friends, remember, not all "capitalism" is regressive. Even places like Sweden, Denmark and Canada have a form of capitalism despite being mildly constrained by collective action. Hayak had interesting things to say, though doctrinaire adoption of political and economic philosophy from previous centuries is not likely a good idea.

Stop me before I mention Modern Monetary Theory.


> Stop me before I mention Modern Monetary Theory.

Au contraire! Please continue!


I can't say too much that Richard Murphy hasn't said already.

Here's his latest video: https://youtu.be/mKWfEQlcDoU

I encourage everyone to read about it if you're a person who absorbs info via text better.

Here's the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

It's worth a read. I wish there was a single volume "MMT for Dummies," but to get the full read on it, you currently have to read a bunch of different texts. I like the Wikipedia article because they include some of the critiques as well as the supporting arguments.

My take on economics is there are few theories that are universally applicable. Keynes is applicable to some situations as is Hayak and even E. F. Schumacher. The hard part is figuring out which theory is good for which situation (and how to tell if your assumption about applicability was wrong.)

What I find surprising about modern Americans is they really want to elect someone who has all the answers. FDR was somewhat famous for f*king up a couple times and changing course when the data didn't match the theory. We're so tribal these days we refuse to admit that even good leaders can get it wrong once and again and having an honest discussion about why the error occurred and how they're going to fix it might lead to better outcomes.

I am reminded of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs' quote "Act like a dumbsh*t and they'll treat you like an equal." Perhaps I should run for office on the platform of "I'm probably as dumb as you are, which makes me smarter than my opponents."


It's kind of too bad MMT came out during a long period of low inflation when a lot of people who should know better expected that to continue indefinitely. So then MMT sounds like "spend more money indefinitely".

Now that inflation is high and MMT says "increase taxes / reduce spending", it sounds far more reasonable.


> Now that inflation is high and MMT says "increase taxes / reduce spending", it sounds far more reasonable.

I don’t think the people that were appalled at loose “fiscal”—more specifically targeted—policy from Congress as a substitute for loose “monetary” policy from the Fed (under the MMT model that the real constraint on “fiscal” policy are its monetary effects rather than fiscal balance) would be any happier with tight “fiscal” policy substituting for tight “monetary” policy from the Fed.

I don’t think they would be happy for the “who pays the bill” when tightening is needed to be one members of Congress have to defend to their constituents anymore than they want “where does stimulus go” to be.

They may like selective appeals to constraints to avoid discussing the specific merits of spending proposals they don’t like, and dislike losing the myth of fiscal constraints, but they still don't want to subject the distributional impact of m monetary tightening to real policy debate.


> I'm probably as dumb as you are, which makes me smarter than my opponents

Got my vote!


Hayek. Unless you mean somebody else. Or kayak.

lol. yes. H-A-Y-E-K. Though I have been thinking about kayaking lately...

Georgism is a tax policy, not a full ideology. It can't be implemented under capitalism, because the capitalists would never allow it. And it would ve redundant under working socialism.

Don't cry---run for office and do as great a job as Mamdani is doing, or find a Georgist who can and support them. Its pretty clear that people are open to giving alternatives a chance to show they can do better.

But. Mamdani just had a good PR campaign. The bar majority of the "good" work he has done was actually some by someone else, the state, former administration.

> But. Mamdani just had a good PR campaign. The bar majority of the "good" work he has done was actually some by someone else, the state, former administration.

This comment is not grounded in facts and reality. Accomplishments listed at https://www.mamdanibulletin.com/policy-tracker, cataloged by month, updated monthly. Update your priors.

PR and communications is a necessary component to demonstrate the value being delivered to your constituents, but the work must still be done. Mamdani is using his position and tenure to prove that Democratic Socialism can and does work, in one of the largest cities in the world, for other potential candidates, and for the voters who might support them. He froze the rent for over 2 million renters, and has recovered in ~$130M in wage theft for delivery workers from DoorDash alone. He's implemented universal childcare for 2-year-olds. He has established enforcement against deceptive and abusive landlord practices, hidden junk fees and misleading charges, and illegal auto-renewals and subscriptions.

"Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast." This will be the case study for every mayoral election over the next decade, and who to vote for: putting promise into practice.

(as of this comment, Mamdani polls at ~69% for favorability)

https://sri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/SNY0826-Rel...


Georgism and social credit (canadian, not chinese) are two ideas that the elites better start considering unless they want france 1789 vibes again.

As I say to my left-leaning friends: hey, you know what we should socialize? The money supply. (My right-leaning friends aren't ready for that conversation yet.)


As your left-leaning friend, i agree with you comrad, you are talking about MMT, which got already meantioned in here.

Many of them still get the layers wrong.

They put both legs on the same side of the bike.

Even Astra max which actually put one leg on each side of the bike still somehow messed it up because when it added the bike chain, it put the left leg between the bike chain and the frame.


> The differences between the pelicans aren't huge, but the xhigh one has a better beak.

If you look carefully, everything except the last pelican has the two legs both in front of the crossbar as if the legs are all on one side of the bike.

The last pelican gets this correct.


I’ve been paying attention at this exact detail.

Misplaced legs clearly indicate lack is spatial reasoning - the llm can reason about verbal idea of a bicycle but not about the actual object. The fact that this model got it correct gives me a pause. Did they figure out spatial reasoning? Or did this complain trickle down to the training set?


6 Astra Max is the only other model I’ve seen get this right.

Interestingly, Astra Medium got it right as well.

Okay, you're going to need to go into a lot more detail about exactly how you learned more in 2 months than you did in 20 years having read zero generated code.

Code examples are literally bread and butter when it comes to learning.

How can you learn without looking at code? That's like saying that you can learn to be an architect without looking at drawings...


I didnt know what is relational algebra is? why query plannering execution done in certain ways. What are backend storage system available in open source or commercial products. What are the traitts of each backend storage and how does that effects the replication and failover scenarios. I know all of this, I implemented a small subset of sql's relational algebra in my project and its correct and concise. I expored different backend storage systems, first tried one, then move to next and then 3rd in line, all that in span of less than a month without ever looking what code the coding agents generates.

To make this concrete, it takes someone about 4 months to go through a university course.

They might take six courses at a time.

So you are saying that you learned more than 400 times as much content as a university course?

I'm sorry but this just sounds hilarious And unlikely to most people, and it comes off a bit crazy sounding... For example, do you actually think you could even pass a single university course exam on introductory relational algebra without AI I assistance at all?

I think what is more likely is that you feel confident trying to solve problems with AI's help.

That is not learning.

To learn something, it has to be in your brain, not the AI.

Learning is not the same as becoming capable.

There's an ocean of difference between those two


You need to learn the concepts not implementation detail. If you know what is relational algebra and AI teaches you this in hours then you dont need to know the implementation details any longer. If you can borrow intelligence to solve a problem, you should do that. We, the most IT industry is already working in high level languages which is not how the computer works but abstractions over abstractions that very very few people know the entire cycle of a program how it runs. So AI is not a future abstracton, it is already here and its "intelligent" as opposed to other abstractions. Writing code or documentation by hand is gone, its past. All programming languages, framworks are implementation details and AI has already mastered them, we need to now move on to high goals than learning how to write a loop.

Seems like my point might not be getting through.

I apologize for being blunt, and I don't mean to sound argumentative here, I'm just trying to give you an outsider's perspective:

You should not tell people you learned more in 2 months than in 20 years.

That's all I meant.

It makes you sound crazy, and its also wrong.

Maybe you built more or you feel more capable than you have felt for 20 years, but you surely did not learn more.

I don't need to hear anything from you about how the capability of the average developer has changed. I'm well aware of that already.


I don't even disagree with you here. It's something I've said in the past about things like algorithms. Sometimes knowing a surface level thing allows you to utilise it without necessarily needing to know the implementation level details.

But you did not LEARN Relational Algebra. You learned OF relational algebra. And there's a pretty stark difference there.


Did your MSCS not include a course on database theory?

It's fairly standard for undergrad CS programs and most textbooks include at least a section on relational algebra.


>I didnt know what is relational algebra is? why query plannering execution done in certain ways. What are backend storage system available in open source or commercial products. What are the traitts of each backend storage and how does that effects the replication and failover scenarios. I know all of this, I implemented a small subset of sql's relational algebra in my project and its correct and concise. I expored different backend storage systems, first tried one, then move to next and then 3rd in line, all that in span of less than a month without ever looking what code the coding agents generates.

To be as frank as possible--you "understand" these topics in the same way someone who watches pop-science videos about astronomy "understands" astronomy. That is to say, you have a surface level understanding at best.

This is the sort of behavior people have been talking about over the last few years. People confuse what the AI "understands" with what they understand, and it makes them say delusional stuff like "I learned more in the last 2 months than in 20 years."


or how to be a doctor without knowing how to cut open a person and look at the internals. looking forward to the future doctors

Yet millions of people code react slop without ever touching a line of assembley

Agree.

There are definitely pure MCP use cases.

For web apps though, WebMCP seems like an awesome enabler: better ux and better stakeholder alignment


> MCP makes all of that so much easier to provide.

Easier being the key!

Right now it really does feel like early web days where like 5% of the population is adopting things, but most people just get confused and don't participate.

This is why I'm pretty excited about WebMCP in particular!

WebMCP aligns more stakeholders than pure MCP - which seems heavily biased towards model providers. It also seems like it has the potential for a much cleaner ux.


In some sense, I can't think of a worse group for this to happen to, but a better group for who might come up with a solution and help humanity forge a new path.

I've long been of the opinion that mathematicians are probably the smartest and most clever workforce around.

They really might be our best hope to solving this.

I've often secretly wished that some of these clever folks would get their head out of the books and solve some real world problems. This might just be a forcing function for that.

I can't imagine the social disruption of for example it had been trucking or construction or some other industry which might react more combatively and less constructively to complete automation.


I find that a bit interesting because the most system one part of the brain is probably the part used for visual processing.

It's trying to use a human analogy but the analogy breaks down if you try to apply it directly


I think I saw that the System 1/2 framing is based on the Thinking Fast/Slow book's framing

I'm no crypto expert at all but isn't TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG an actual word?

Google says it translates to "troops shift"

If so, I don't understand how this was difficult at all... Can't you just do a dictionary attack and then check if the resulting phrase forms a sentence?

I don't understand how this couldn't be done by someone in their house with access to a computer and a German dictionary.

Maybe I'm messing something? Was the rearranging of the letters random in some non-deterministic way that wasn't known up front?


The article even says it was "easier" than that - it is a word in a list of known codewords (but slightly off the expected time).

The hard part is not that it's impossible for you to do at home, it's that nobody in 100 years has felt it was worth enough effort to try through enough words until the effort was as simple as prompting the LLM to do the work.

Not every value of AI has to be in the realm of superhuman intelligence, that's just what makes for the most discussion.


Turns out that humans aren’t great at comprehensively consistently searching known search spaces.

Yes, it is an actual word. More than that, it is used as an example in “The History and Principles of German Military Ciphers, 1914–1918”.

But let us use this and tell politicians that "Astra broke SOTA encryption", so AI must be banned.


Oh no, Astra is necessary to defend us from the evil "open AI" models out there. Only ban those.

All the post says is that it was known to be an unsolved cypher. Nothing more, nothing less.

Maybe you can give it a try?

https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/unsolved-adfx...


Did their comment really hurt that much? It's OK for people to point out that you should not overestimate the work done.

Yeah, you're right. Writing a program to solve ciphers with dictionary keys was an assignment in my intro to cryptography course - there's a couple of easy tricks you can do on the output to rapidly filter to the right solution.

Also the letters of the word were rearranged to alphabetical order. And duplicate letters were removed.

So it's not just a dictionary attack. It's that plus modifying the word before using it.


They just solve problems that nobody has tried to solve in the past 50 years and then announce them as breakthroughs.

A lot of existing research is already like that. AI will accelerate it.

And spend a shit ton of money doing it

Speaking as someone who often tries to reduce my use of reduce by replacing it with map and filter where possible, for me, falling back to reduce is analogous to falling back to a while loop or a for loop: I avoid it if I can.

The problem with reduce is that it can do so much, and therefore it is less clear when reading it quickly what it might be doing.


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