This sounds a lot like a sovereign wealth fund. The government obtains fractional ownership over large enterprises (this can happen through market mechanisms or populist strongarming — choose your own adventure) and pours the profits on these investments into the social safety net or even citizens' dividends.
For this to work at scale domestically, the fund would need to be a double-digit percentage of the market cap of the entire US economy. It would be a pretty drastic departure from the way we do things now. There would be downsides: market distortions and fraud and capital flight.
But in my mind it would be a solution to the problem of wealth pooling up in the AI economy, and probably also a balm for the "pyramid scheme" aspect of Social Security which captures economic growth through payroll taxes (more people making more money, year on year) in a century where we expect the national population to peak and decline.
Pick your poison, I guess, but I want to see more discussion of this idea in the Overton window.
Yes, it is. And yes, except that it wasn't. A SWF is about building common wealth inside the systems that finance capital built (in the same way that the 401k replaced the pension) rather than turning back the clock on them. How you acquire those assets can vary wildly:
- Maybe you just decide to invest some public money
- Maybe you have some natural resources that are collective-by-default (minerals wealth on public land)
- Maybe there's a bailout of an industry that is financially broken but has become too big to fail cough and the government presses its leverage
- Maybe a president just wakes up and decides that he wants the government to own 10% of Intel, and makes that deal happen on favorable terms.
I would like a non-native speaker to weigh in, but I gloss it as "there are ONLY a few and this is ONE OF them" and have never found that confusing or contradictory.
That's exactly the difference: "one of the few" necessarily implies scarcity, whereas you could say e.g. "one of the only grains of sand at the beach" while clearly there are many.
I wouldn’t use that phase for sand grains exactly because there are so many. If you added a qualification like “… that is colored blue” then it sounds fine again to me.
It's not that I don't understand what they want to express and how they use the phrase. I'm arguing that it's a poor phrase for the job, when "one of the few" exactly and necessarily implies that, while "one of the few" doesn't necessarily.
In fact it's even more vacuous ("nothingburger") because sometimes it's not even clear which way the person means it; if I say "I'm one of the only people to do a handstand on a Thursday morning", do I imagine that I'm in a large group or a small one?
[Edit: this paragraph added to respond to post below saying I'm not going to win, which was edited out and I couldn't respond to for some reason.] I'm not trying to "win" any more than I would try to tell people that literally isn't a synonym for figuratively; I know that ship has sailed. That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to say it doesn't make sense, and I'm very aware that people get extremely angry about it for some reason, as if it's a personal affront. Not everyone has to buy into the cargo cult of descriptivism (particularly in the face of absurdity), differences of opinion are still allowed :)
Is your objection to the use of 'only' to refer to multiple things, or specifically the phrase "one of the only"? Would you consider "I am only five minutes late" to be valid?
(edit - for the record, this was in response to the first paragraph only, as the others were edited in afterwards)
My objection is in direct analogy to "could care less": it fails to rule out the very thing that is to be ruled out.
The grains of sand example should make it clear: it is not true that this grain is one of few at the beach, but it is true that it's one of the only. This makes it a poor expression for scarcity, and while obviously we know what was actually intended (as with "could care less"), that doesn't really make it any better.
I'm trying to understand but struggling -- so it is specifically the phrase "one of the only" that bothers you, but the example of "only five minutes late" is acceptable? And the issue is that "only" in that context doesn't mean a singular item, but rather a group of ambiguous size?
If the subject matter weren't somewhat baffling in the first place the edits and deletions certainly didn't help.
FYI for anyone reading this (not directed at you specifically): the 'delay' option in profile setting adds a delay before your comments appear publicly, giving you a buffer for edits and deletions before it goes out to the world.
Personally it helps a lot with ensuring I'm happy with the comments I make, and it helps avoid situations like this where multiple layers of retroactive changes make the conversation hard to follow.
You can't respond to fresh comments in a back-and-forth on HN, there's a delay of a few minutes before the reply button shows up when many comments are being posted in quick succession. (or maybe it has to do with depth? unsure)
as a nonnative fluent speaker, to me "one of the few" and "one of the only" mean the same thing, with "of the only" possibly being even less than "of the few"
It's a stereotype of his political opponents as adrift in selfishness, hedonism, and "gender stuff".
When you find your thought patterns flowing through tropes this way it is a good sign to consider logging off for a long while, as the author is doing. I wish him peace and perspective.
On one hand, I wonder if a gradual transition would work. Spend enough time over the years mirroring your conscious patterns onto a computational substrate, and they might get used to the lay of the land, the loss of old senses and the appearance of new ones. There might not be an ultimate "stepping in", but something like you might be able to outlive you, on a substrate that it feels happy and comfortable on.
On the other hand, the idea of "simulating your consciousness" raises questions beyond just cognition or personality. A mechanistically perfect simulation of your brain might not be conscious at all. Spooky stuff.
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson