"You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he'd be the king" was originally written by Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, in a 2008 blog post on startup fundraising
Still totally shameful that they can't hold hands for 10 seconds in a symbolic show of unity. Like divorced parents who can't get along for the good of their children, it reflects extremely poorly on both of them.
Its reasonable, but as we've advanced humanity in so many other fields (medical, technical, agricultural) why shouldn't the base standard of living also be increasing.
I agree with the sentiment, but the premise of capitalism is that those advances also become cheaper due to market efficiencies. In other words, people should be able to have a higher quality of life for relatively lower cost. If/where that actually occurs is a whole different discussion.
The base standard of living has increased throughout pretty much all of humanity over the past 50 years, and through huge parts of humanity over even 20 years.
Theres also lots more people, and as more people consume more resources it does not follow that better technology in some field will translate to increased every aspect of life.
I wonder what kind of unprecedented economic growth we'd be seeing right now if we kept with the status quo rather than imposing tariffs and scaring off foreign investors.
Yeah, and as part of the "class war", a majority of the lower classes decided to elect a billionaire whose first order of business was to implement giant tax cuts for the richest Americans while cutting programs like Medicaid and SNAP.
Class war will never work in America because we're too stupid.
Correction: the class war already started long ago. Unfortunately the lower classes are not only getting trounced, they mostly don’t know the war is happening.
It turned out the revolution was always being televised, only it was us thinking what we saw was a reflection of society, not that it was being delivered to us disguised as our own ideas.
Mass layouts started when the government increased the interest rate to fight inflation. By 2024, inflation was already under control, the interest rate was falling slowly, and companies were starting to hire.
I don't think that's how it works. It's not like coiling a spring it's more like starting to roll a ball down a hill, once you ruin it it keeps getting worse in a feedback loop as various systems feed on each other (populism, erosion of norms, etc).
I think you're grossly underestimating European naivete. You probably did fuck up your relationship with Canada though. They didn't seem happy about that one.
I'm talking more about intra-country dynamics, rather than inter-country. Momentum, good or bad, is a thing. It's not that mysterious, we can trace it to things that feed off each other, like the inflation <-> populism loop, which makes civic institutions progressively worse over time. Turkey is a modern case study. This is the opposite of the "coiled spring" analogy, where if a country get worse it is bound to get better even stronger.
And yet prices are marginally up while all the "economists" expected major inflation.
Dollar vs Euro is at same level now as it was in 2019 - there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong.
I keep seeing this “marginally higher” statement about prices, usually as part of a “things are actually fine” argument, but everything in my life has increased in cost in a way I just don’t understand. Is it that these are counterbalanced in some way making it not macroeconomically relevant?
Gold front runs monetary policy and "economists" aren't the only ones trading that. Look at the gold chart for the past year. I don't think it's really disputed that high inflation is on the horizon due to the debt situation (which Trump has made worse with the OBBB)
> there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong
Care to list those? I can think of a few but it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.
> I don't think it's really disputed that high inflation is on the horizon
This is moving the goalpost because you know economists (the critics) forecasted major inflation sooner/now, and it hasn't happened.
> Care to list those? [...] it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.
You're not making sense or making coherent thoughts. The US is still the #2 exporting country in the world in absolute terms despite importing a relatively higher amount.
> This is moving the goalpost because you know economists (the critics) forecasted major inflation sooner/now
Yes, because no one expected him to chicken out as hard as he did. It also came out that people in his cabinet (specifically Howard Lutnick) were betting against tariffs while simultaneously advocating for them. The legal opinion is heavily leaning towards them being illegal after many lower court decisions. Do you care to explain how tariffs wouldn't be inflationary if the actions matched the rhetoric?
> The US is still the #2 exporting country
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Look at how much we import vs how much we export. What would you call an economy that imports more than it exports? A ___ based economy?
> Do you care to explain how tariffs wouldn't be inflationary if the actions matched the rhetoric?
It's like you're asking people to explain something that happened as if there's no explanation beyond your hatred of Trump. Why do you choose to dismiss drivers like stockpiling inventory, increased USMCA compliance, broader economic offsets (AI/tech boom, energy production) that could explain how tariffs aren't necessarily inflationary?
> Look at how much we import vs how much we export. What would you call an economy that imports more...
You ask this as if I didn't say the US imports more than it exports.
> Why do you choose to dismiss drivers like stockpiling inventory, increased USMCA compliance, broader economic offsets (AI/tech boom, energy production)
Okay, so you're admitting that they're inflationary but choose to rattle off a list of random stuff that somehow, magically, offsets the increased costs from tariffs. Please go into detail on one of those, including what you're talking about (e.g. what is "increased USCMA compliance"?)
AI datacenters have increased energy costs in the localities where they're based and raised memory prices by eating up all the supply.
> You ask this as if I didn't say the US imports more than it exports.
So.. you were agreeing with my point then? I don't understand why you'd call my thoughts "not coherent" then agree with it.
> Okay, so you're admitting that they're inflationary but choose to rattle off a list of random stuff that somehow, magically, offsets the increased costs from tariffs.
Haha! I haven't seen someone try to dismiss counterarguments as "magic." I should've said that more when I got answers wrong on my tests in high school.
> So.. you were agreeing with my point then?
If not "magic," then the objector "actually agrees" with you.
I asked you to elaborate since you didn't explain anything, hence the use of "magic" which is sometimes referred to as hand waving. I'll take your non-response as a sign that you're not interested in elaborating for reasons.
You’re arguing that tariffs aren’t inflationary by bringing up other events affecting the economy, which I agree with ‘hypeatei needs explaining, but even assuming those do offset the tariffs you’re still incorrect.
>You’re arguing that tariffs aren’t inflationary by bringing up other events affecting the economy
Huh? You're not reading what I said and instead are relying on accusations. It's also weird to say direct behaviors triggered by tariffs don't play into realized inflation. That's mental gymnastics.
>Tariffs definitionally are inflationary.
No. Weird thing to be confidently incorrect about. Tariffs are price increasing (colloquially "inflationary"), but not definitionally inflationary in the economic meaning. Look it up.
> Tariffs are price increasing (colloquially "inflationary"), but not definitionally inflationary in the economic meaning. Look it up.
Weird (okay, not all that weird, but ironic, in context) thing to be confidently incorrect about.
Outside of the overtly ideology-over-description Austrian School of economics, which has a different jargon designed to advance their ideology, the general definition of (unqualified) inflation in economics is a sustained increase in general price levels.
And belief that the Austrian School usage is just the “economic meaning” is a pretty good sign that someone doesn't understand even Austrian School economics beyond rote recitation of doctrines and aphorisms.
The introduction of tariffs does, assuming no additional countervailing policy changes, result in sustained general price increases. (Over time, adaptation to the tariffs will, in cases where there aren't hard reasons preventing this, become more diffuse across products than they are initially at introduction, but the net long-term effect is still a general price increase.)
> assuming no additional countervailing policy changes
When you add this qualifier who is disagreeing? This is tautological.
It's like you're making a point that doesn't flow from the original discussion and point raised that economists missed the mark on how much Trump's tariffs would cause extreme inflation for everyday US citizens. They still can (TBD), but haven't to the extent predicted.
> > assuming no additional countervailing policy changes
> When you add this qualifier who is disagreeing?
Anyone who disagrees that tariffs are inflationary. If you enact them, price level increases are produced which are sustained unless some other event unrelated to the tariffs introduces a deflationary effect which offsets the inflationary effect of the tariffs.
>some other event unrelated to the tariffs introduces
I appreciate your good faith approach to discussion.
IMHO, this has devolved into semantics and has fallen astray from the original discussion above.
Here's an example to demonstrate semantics:
1. Trump put tariffs.
2. USMCA (read: NAFTA 2.0) exemptions, pre-existing policy, started to get used more to avoid tariffs.
They are unrelated in that the policies are different. However, they are related because companies became more incentivized to use the exemptions as a result of the tariff. Nothing new (AFAIK) was "introduced" on just this combo alone.
It's very very easy to make stocks go up. Zimbabwe and Venezuela have stock markets that have gone up millions of times over for instance. The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average, even when the economy is a complete mess.
No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing. You judge it be things like median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA) and employment figures.
You can use non-USD currencies to judge how the US stock market has fared to avoid the issues with currency health. You may argue that dollar-denominated returns aren't real, but SPY isn't down even when denominated in EUR https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR
>median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA)
> The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average...
This is demonstrably false? Long-term average US inflation since 1913 is 3.1% [0]. Long-term nominal average US stock returns since 1928 are 9.94% [1]. A nearly 7% advantage compounded every year for roughly a century is not "slightly above", it is absolutely enormous. Over 60,000% enormous.
Furthermore, when inflation is high, interest rates go up, and interest rates act like gravity on stock prices. See any number of Warren Buffett shareholder letters. See also: the year 2022. Stock market returns are mildly negatively correlated with inflation (with a coefficient of -0.229 [2]).
For rate rises that are enacted to slow inflation (which slows stock market growth as you said) i think you have the cause and effect reversed.
The best way to see how inflation and stocks are linked is to look at economies where inflation is not intentionally slowed by rate rises. The stocks go up more or less with inflation (and some small % of gains they may have on top as you say). When you have rate rises that slow inflation you do indeed slow stock growth. But this is also inline with the link between inflation and stock price.
Just to add onto your point, bad employment numbers can actually be bullish for stocks due to a higher chance of Fed rate cuts. Obviously there is a threshold there because if too many people are unemployed then no one can buy stuff, but it just highlights how disconnected stocks are from the economy.
> No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing
On the news stations they do, and it was a bunch of FUD about the stock markets tanking.
Tesla, too. "Look what he's done to his brand, let's hit him in the wallet" blah blah.
That was while things were in a downtrend. It was going to be the biggest recession ever, Trump was so stupid he couldn't possibly understand the ramifications, etc.
The initial dip was bought up by retail investors then everyone realized TACO (Trump always chickens out) so the markets don't really care about tariff threats anymore.
What benefit have we gotten from the chaotic tariff policy? Any trade deals?
Oil prices have fallen. And likely will through the rest of the year. And the US conspicuously didn't apply tariffs on oil from Canada (while simultaneously saying "we don't need anything from Canada" and threatening our sovereignty and tariffing everything else) which is a huge amount of imports into the US.
Oil prices down isn't necessarily a good thing for an oil exporter like the US though. In aggregate.
If the US had actually applied tariffs on Canadian oil your gas pump prices would be up very significantly.
Canadian crude imports are about 20-25% of crude feedstock for gasoline in the US. Put a 10% import tax on top. Keeping things the same, that's <5% increase in domestic wholesale prices.
Since the administration have stopped releasing some data that usually is released, how fast would people be able to notice that the economy tanked, if it did?
Well technically, the economy has tanked (sort of), people say that the economy's doing great but the figures that we see in (q4?) are extrapolated from the previous quaters in which the only thing (from what people tell me) is keeping the "illusion" of economy doing good is the spending within AI datacenters. But a huge part of that is shrouded within mystery as well (Stargate project is really suspicious in my honest opinion though I can be wrong)
Also wasn't there some BLS figure which was pushed by the Administration to try to have good numbers or similar. I mean speaking from a different countries pov, Personally I wouldn't trust the numbers the current administration gives.
I don't know if this is the same belief that Americans within America also hold though.
You're accusing people of moving the goalposts on the tariff conversation, the goal posts were doing backflips and jazzercise from the day they were announced.
So yeah, the tariffs are still a net negative on the economy, but have been so erratically and poorly implemented that they're not nearly as bad as they could have been. It's like a plastered drunk guy swinging a knife at you. It's a lethal threat, but he's tripping over himself constantly and can barely stand so it's easy to dodge for now. Could be a more serious issue if he ever sobers up.
I agree they've been very erratic. What does that have to do with whether or not our economy tanked as a result? It didn't, the prophecies were FUD, everything he does is bad, blah blah.
Trump's a lethal threat that is too incompetent to be lethal? Okay. So quit with the FUD then.
So you'd turn your back on the knife wielding drunk guy and turn on Netflix because he hasn't managed to stab you yet?
FUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt. If you didn't feel any of that in the previous year you haven't been paying attention or don't have any serious responsibilities.
Smart people talk about differential impact; i.e compare what we’re seeing today against the counterfactual. / I’m not aware of solid reasoning that argues in favor of tariffs, differentially speaking. / I’m happy to look at models that aren’t a waste of time.
I guess you mean informed people. There's a whole lot of smart people in this thread who aren't talking about differentials.
I don't know shit about tariffs, except what everyone said in the news. It was going to tank the economy. Everyone's retirement was going to poof into smoke. Everything was going to cost 2 or 3x previous prices. None of that came to pass.
I bought gas at 2.27 a couple hours ago. Groceries are cheaper than last year. I'm personally making more money than I was a year ago. My business depends on other people having entertainment/spending money.
I'm just a dummy though, so I can't glean some expert insight into the differential. I don't have a model for you, just the real world.
How do you think the economy is doing? What do the differential impact models, that aren't a waste of time, say about it?
It sounds like you are interested, noticing some inconsistencies, and trying to get to the bottom of it, which is a good place to start!
> I bought gas at 2.27 a couple hours ago. Groceries are cheaper than last year. I'm personally making more money than I was a year ago. My business depends on other people having entertainment/spending money.
Comparing Metric(t=0) to Metric(t=1) is a tempting but incorrect way to assess the quality of an intervention. Lots of people think this way, but it is a flawed heuristic that should be avoided whenever possible. Instead, one should compare: PredictedMetric(action=A, time=1) to PredictedMetric(action=B, time=1). This is obvious when one thinks about it, but people get lazy.
To state in another way: when assessing economic policies, it is smarter to compare the observed outcome against the counterfactual outcome. Forgetting or overlooking this is common, but I won't defend or excuse such sloppy thinking.
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The problem with stating it that way is that I don't think it really drives the point home. Think about someone in a hurry or someone who doesn't know what "counterfactual means... will they stop and _think_? I wouldn't bet on it. So, I'm a fan of hitting people over the head. Show a table:
You can find an example table (with values) at https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-novembe... (Table 1). For example, it shows that removing tariffs would differentially increase household income by about $900 and reduce employment by 0.3%. That's about 500,000 jobs in the US, assuming a labor force of around 170 million.
Will people agree on the models? To say it bluntly (using the "hit them over the head principle"), asking the question like that is bone-headed. Asking it like that is the wrong question, and it misses the whole f-ing point. How on earth we claim to have an educated society when people pose questions like that? We really need to step it up a notch. We've all heard "good journalism gives equal weight to both sides". Fine. But in practice this doesn't get us very far. First, there are more than two sides. Second, hearing out all sides is only the beginning, not the end. Third, practically speaking, if we actually want to make sense of the world in real situations, we're going to discount and possibly completely toss out a whole lot of extraneous, uninformed crap. (Very few serious economists take Trump's economic plans seriously, and there are good reasons for throwing them in the trash! Once one understands what is happening, even mentioning them is usually a waste of time.)
But I digress.
A better question is: on what bases do reasonable people agree and disagree? Using quantitative and substantive models, how can we move forward on making actual testable predictions? Assessing the error in a prediction must not be a matter of opinion. Unless there is a tie, someone is going to be less wrong than the other person. There is no wiggling out of it due to vague language or "miscommunication". That's one key advantage of models. People that care and seek the truth are more likely to share their models. Done right, this will shift the discussion into model specifics and people will have to show their work. This tends to weed out unserious people pretty quickly. (Unfortunately, in many cases, closed models are valuable and so are not shared openly.)
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I don't often find mainstream journalism that covers any technical topic very well, and this includes economics. I'm not here to blame anyone -- many journalists operate in contexts where time constraints and audience expectations are unlikely to meet my quality bar. Sometimes I will give business analysts a bit more credence, but not much. The world lacks good systems for (a) disseminating clear, testable predictions that (b) lay out their counterfactuals. Heck, I'm surprised when I find even one of the two.
Here's my unsolicited advice. Don't bother reading what "most people" say about economic issues. Ask various friends and network for high quality sources and explore on your own. On this topic, I suggest starting with "When Are Tariffs Optimal?" by Thomas Lubik [1].
Once you have an understanding of what economic models predict, then you can dig a bit deeper. I put close to zero weight when reading mainstream writing on technical topics. If you don't go to the primary sources, you are delegating your thinking. It doesn't take that much work to read the summary from the source material.
That's because Trump gave many extensions and concessions to so many countries. Remember there was 125% on China in May 2025 before Xi decided to use rare earth minerals to fight back. Maybe you have heard of TACO. So the tariffs as threatened never panned out in reality.
They are affecting specific industries and consumers. The inflation right now is stable only because oil is so cheap. And that has nothing to do with tariffs.
Sure, when the arbitrary tarriff formula was announced for every nation, the stock markets were down thousands, and the bond market was fluctuating. Then you had the short term trade war with China were both countries set tarrifs so high no imports/exports between the two happened for a month, and there was a concern about empty shelves in major department stores.
But as one Wall Street executive put it, "Trump also chickens out", so Wall Street learned he would backdown on any tariffs that had too much negative economic impact.
The impact to social bonds between the US and other Western nations has been thrown completely off track, and now they are looking for exits from anything US related.
These tarrifs were the absolutely dumbest thing imaginable, and have brought the post WWII period of US economic prosperity to a point it can never recover.
It's only down from here. We pissed off our friends.
Is there any hope that they wont let any of the ads logic into the rl / pre-training? I'd like for my paid ChatGPT model to offer an unbiased source of truth on what the best products are.
It’s hard to argue against hiring contributors, but a bounty system that pays pennies vs. market value for skilled developers shouldn’t be the only interview path, it’s borderline exploitative.
It’s not exploitive if you like working on it. I can see an additional upside here (for tinygrad) that they better screen out people who are just trying to optimize for job prospects or money, who would do better elsewhere, and get people who actually like contributing.
Few people with no innate interest in the project are likely to ramp up and start contributing just for a shot at a job. Whereas if you’re Facebook or whoever you are much more likely to get people who don’t care about the product and just have decided they can make a lot of money by jumping through the right hoops.
This idea that you're supposed to accept worse pay because you believe in the idea doesn't apply to George. If his companies succeed, he'll be rich. Of course, there's nothing wrong with even working for free if that's what you like, just don't make a moral principle out of it.
I don’t mean to imply it’s to get employees to accept lower pay. I mean that there is some implicit screening against people who are solely optimizing for high pay.
Lots of reasons why you would want to simultaneously pay well and not attract people who are optimizing for pay.
I don’t fully understand why you wouldn’t want to attract people who optimize pay. You always should aim for getting paid what you’re worth which is understandably hard to define. I think that’s the whole point of OPs argument how this is exploitive. You’re trying to sell a “vision” for lower pay.
All other interview processes (that I've witnessed or heard of) waste anyone's time with barely anything to show for though, regardless if it ever comes to a offer.
As opposed to months of interview prep, followed by half a dozen interview stages, possibly including an unpaid take-home mini project, all of which could be for naught because you fluffed some obscure algorithm question that bears no relation to your day job?
What's even sadder is that because of AI coding agents it's possible the bounty system will go away. The value today is much less in writing the code and much more in defining the tasks and validating the code. We don't have the bandwidth to read tons of AI slop, which at first glance looks okay, but upon spending time to read it you realize it isn't good. The fix for this is probably a reputation or staking system.
I'm shocked that interviewing still works how it does in large companies; the Sybil attacks and DDOS are just getting started.
That's comma.ai's policy since they make hardware and solve physical problems. The tiny corp has been hybrid (remote-first) since day 1 because it primarily writes open source software, and there's a long track record of success with remote for this kind of task.
We have a few whole-team meetups in Hong Kong each year for 2-4 weeks, and there's a San Diego or Hong Kong office that anyone can work from as they choose. We also have a wide array of fancy multi GPU boxes that everyone on the team gets full access to (known external contributors can get some access also).
I think many companies that were quick to embrace remote have walked it back, not everyone is capable of working productively remotely, nor are all types of work amenable to remote.
It's not a helpful reply to that particular comment, but I think it's worth recognizing that the US is now in the same camp as HK or mainland China now where there will be some people who just simply cannot enter.
The mainland and Hong Kong still have significantly different visa policies. I'm not sure if it's changed at all since the handover, except for mainlanders entering HK.
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