A tale of two worlds

Drawing on Rothbard's essay on inequality and the division of labor, Dr. Lucas Engelhardt argues that human diversity is the very foundation of comparative advantage and prosperity, and that billionaires arise either by serving large numbers of people through the market or by extracting wealth through political connections.

We Want One Solution, But One Solution Can't Solve Our Polycrisis Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via Substack, Whatever the problem, our minds seek one solution--preferably a simple one--to escape the trackless wilderness of complex, inter-connected problems. Problem-solving boils down to identifying the key problem and finding a fix that’s easy to understand and straightforward to apply. Our minds rebel when confronted with polycrisis, a knotted mess of inter-connected problems, and so we apply solutions we already have in hand. As I explained in previous Musings, this leads us to modify our...

New OpenAI Funding Round Could Top $100 Billion, Pushing Valuation North Of $850 Billion OpenAI's private valuation could soon top $850 billion, as the first tranche of a new funding round is expected to raise more than $100 billion, giving the ChatGPT maker fresh powder for additional infrastructure spending and faster development of its AI tools, Bloomberg reported. People familiar with the fundraising told the outlet that the ChatGPT maker's valuation could exceed $850 billion, with a reported pre-money valuation of $730 billion. The first phase of the funding round is being...