[DiscourseFan]

Yeah but like, most of us work in tech and sure a lot of this money is getting “wasted,” but on what and who? Often on people who spend it elsewhere, a little bit gets siphoned off every time for living costs, luxuries, and side projects of individual employees, or other benefactors thereof. I wouldn’t call this excess a “bad” thing, the excess is what allows us any reprieve in the rat race, time to spend with loved ones, time to engage or worthy pursuits. It funds professor’s salaries (and administrator’s!), its what pays artists, its why all these engineers retire early and make posts about porting Doom to a microwave. Of course it would often be better if this excess was taken elsewhere, so that we wouldn’t have people dying needlessley just because they lost out in life, but even that wouldn’t require a fraction of the wealth of our society generates on top of its basic needs. Excess is not a bad thing!

[danny_codes]

The excess money goes into assets that people need to survive/thrive. In SF/Bay Area a lot of it goes into land appreciation (housing prices). The end effect is rampant homelessness (did you know a full 1% of SF is homeless), delayed family formation, and an ever-growing state bill to subsidize landowners.

Excess isn't a problem, it's the distribution of the excess. Right now (in America) pretty much all of it goes to the top couple percent. The bottom ~40% of Americans have, by all practical measures, experienced a reduction in standard of living compared to 1980. Like, yes, they can afford more trivialities. TVs are cheap, particle-board furniture is cheap, and so on. But the actually important things like healthcare, education, and housing have moved further out of reach.

So yes, it's nice that my Anthropic friends can retire to work on, in one case, their fantasy novels. I'm very happy they can focus on something they love (and I look forward to reading their books). However, that much capital concentration leads to a hefty chunk of our (really rather rich) country struggling to service basic needs (like having a roof).

[DiscourseFan]

Yeah I know. Them's the breaks, right?

How big of a chance do you think those books will be about a gentle and kind but supremely powerful entity guiding the world? Of course it would be best if the book only appears to be based on that premise, and while the entity is quite powerful, it is being supported by a cabal of individuals who claim they are merely its caretakers but actually derive extraordinary social power by controlling it, and it is revealed that in other lands there are other such entities, and what appeared to be an general peace is actually an illusion created by this powerful group of people using their entity, that they are engaged in near constant warfare, directly or indirectly, with other entities; but, even they believe so deeply that what they are doing is right that they think they are only the entity's caretakers, and that there are only wars because other people want to use their entity for personal gain!

Who knows, your friend might be very clever.