paraphrase from some posts from geohot
“as more people consume, there is less to consume”

So, there is a building opportunity.

if its popular to consume, then build.

if there is a shortage of labor, this creates leverage for the employee.

This creates opportunity for business. But how can a business be created and grow with a labor shortage? there must be at least some pool of labor so how do you organize that labor?

This is the question, the only question that matters. “How do you orgainze labor?” Even if one man works indefinitely what is the impact?

you must organize people

there must be incentive and compensation

demand is there. Services will need to be served, products will need to be produced. look around. people are moving, the economy is alive, matter is organized. we can do this organization. we inhibit entropy.

collectively we inhibit entropy, this seems to be a function of the human condition. an axiom, if you will.

so, why not be an inhibitor? better to be an inhibitor as an individual then to inhibit on behalf of others. because, incentives will not be aligned.

it seems the trick is to have a collective of people who’s incentives are optimally aligned, whose loss functions are similar.

where is the line between working independently and allocating work to others? how can one be confident enough to offer a full time position to someone?

just how valuable will trade work become?

what is the shortage actually?

even in a blue collar state, there is not enough trade labor. even when it looks like every one has a truck with tools. this is the community I want to live in. where everyone works to build it.

if one question is how to fill the void, the other question is how was it created?

why is finance and marketing so lucrative when there is no actual value creation? This tells me that fundamental value creation in the economy is under valued and that the abstraction layers just do a better job of taking a piece of the pie.

Lets say you have an economy:

everyone plays a direct role in the creation and maintenence of it, and niches are filled accordingly. no one can gain disproportional value from the system and the cost of goods and services are accurate.

How do you incentivize projects? credit and debt serve this purpose. Making a deal with the future.

I want my project to get funding. but no one has large enough caches of extra capitol, so it is hard to fund. if this is the case then the project must be so compelling that people will have to desire to help. allocating their labor. instead of capitol. this creates a psychological problem.

this must be where we get marketing. but then you get marketing that is so good, or, so convincing that incentives align with good marketing as opposed to good products.

so now you need an entity to ensure truth. you can only market true projects. but truth has a tendency to be boring.

basically, you need a mechanism to prevent against run away marketing and finance. that is all.

other wise, you get so much money and so much marketing that there is no longer incentives to build things. This is what appears to be happening in society.

so, why get into building things? especially when there is better compensation elsewhere in the economy?

is this some sort of moral do good that makes me feel better about work?? or is this like a hedge against the economy? like if money loses its value and labor regains its value, work will be a good place to be. tools and the skills to use them. specifically in the sector of the economy that directly supports basic need like energy, water, food, shelter.

this is made difficult when authority solves the problem with more money. creating less incentive to work, less incentive to gain skills. resulting in some cohort of individuals who have the perception that they cannot work and an incentive structure not to try.

what does this leave business to do?

how do you fill the void?

if you cannot funnel enough value to the portion of the economy that creates value, then no one wants to be there and the economy is left to consume the inventory of goods and services until they run out.

exaggerating the void.

The current narrative is robotics and automation (ai). but the funny thing is that automation is most easily implemented in the higher abstractions of the economy like finance and marketing.

the last things to be automated are the base services of the economy like plumbers, welders, builders. so, with the deployment of ai across the economy, there will initially be an exaggerated shortage of labor because the incentives will continue to drive talent and labor to higher abstraction layers in the economy.

at some point, all thats left are the farmers and ranchers who couldn’t give a fuck anyway.