The system is too big and complex for there to be a notion such as merit. We are animals and just like all animals we must fight to survive. Some people get lucky, some get unlucky. Merit is irrelevant.
And if you try to create a merit based system, you take away the liberties of the people. Who decides what person deserves more than another? You will create a system ripe for corruption.
> And if you try to create a merit based system, you take away the liberties of the people.
How does a system that rewards people for being good at what they do 'take away liberties'?
> Who decides what person deserves more than another? You will create a system ripe for corruption.
Who decides this now? Its the people who already have more and this has resulted in our existing system being rife with corruption at this very moment.
> How does a system that rewards people for being good at what they do 'take away liberties'?
Define being good at what you do. It's not such an easy thing. IMO the best way we can do such a thing is let markets and trade define what it means to be good at what you do. If you provide value to others and your customers are willing to pay you a premium, that means you are good at what you do.
It's hard to explain my way of thinking to you in a comment on an online forum, if you are willing to look it up, the word to search is libertarian.
> Who decides this now?
The system is currently a democratic one, with a large state. The people decide who gets to control the state. The problem is, the government has so much power, it motivates greedy people to try to control it. So the rich and greedy spent their money on manipulating the democratic vote in order to get control of the government and hopefully make the money they spent back with some extra.
In my opinion, the government should be weaker in terms of its monitary power and stronger in terms of its policy power. Less taxes and more enforcement of competition rules.
Competition doesn't have to be merit based. My view on competition rules is that it should prevent winners, period. If there is a company so good that they can effectively monopolize a market based on merit alone, they should still be punished. How is that advocating for merit?
Monopolies form for other reasons than 'because they are so good', and without exception, monopolies go on to produce less-good products over time while simultaneously preventing better products from entering the market.
So in practice, rules against monopoly are fully consistent with merit-based ideals.
They're saying if the stock goes up and you get margin-called on the short, you have to sell index shares, you can't just annihilate the Tesla shares with the anti-Tesla shares and walk away.
I think most people trade synthetic, just because it's faster and you don't have to wait for settlements, but maybe that is different if you trade onshore (I am a foreign investor).
Anyway if you are synthetic your margin is most likely shared between shorts and long on the same instrument, so no, you wouldn't be called.
We aren’t talking about penny stocks we are talking about a tech giant. At the scales that any ordinary investor is operating at there will be no liquidity issues with shorting it and if it is in your index fund the short and long positions will directly offset if you size it correctly leading you to have net zero exposure to SpaceX.
Why though. This is a dead serious question, what is the difference in using financial derivatives and prediction markets. Both are a transaction between parties that is influenced by some other underlying event. Why is it ok for the event to be a stock price, but not ok for it to be a sports match?
The financial derivatives are (supposed to be) regulated, there's laws against insider trading that keep the market fair. For sports betting there's laws against match fixing.
The prediction market CEOs on the other hand seem to be actively encouraging insider trading and match fixing, it's practically their main selling point.
What actually happens is, smart people are isolated from the problems of the general population and work towards meaningless goals at the cost of the everyday tax payer doing unglamorous work to earn a living. Decoupling science from the state will also reduce the meaningless competition of academia that leads to the publish-or-perish and replication crises, because the people who will be doing it, will do it for the love of the game, regardless of social status and money.
If you want to live in this world, you have to trade your time and provide value to others. You shouldn't get a free pass because, just because you convinced yourself and the government that you're smarter than everyone else.
"Decoupling science from the state" is just bullshit from "government icky, taxation is theft" morons.
No, governments should definitely fund scientific research. When it is public it is the only guarantee that it will benefit everyone. Scientific research done by private entities is kneecapped by their financial interests (and be very sure they will bury any advance that jeopardize their financial interests).
How are radio telescopes and mars rovers in my interest? How would you know what is in my interest? I worked for my money so the person in the best position to judge what is in my interest is me. I am sorry for you if that is such a hard concept to understand.
You’re free to vote towards your goals, or move to countries which invest basically nothing in research. There’s plenty of them. I suspect you may not enjoy such great quality of life there.
In case it wasn’t a rhetorical question, they’re in your interest because through the process of building them we improve our understanding of the world, develop new technologies which the industrial system wouldn’t have backed, educate the next generation of engineers and scientists, and inspire the kids that will form the second next generation.
Private research already exists and works well in some fields, mine included. But public research is just as important since it can afford higher risk and longer scope. You can’t begin to count the startups that were created as spin-offs of university research groups.
Frankly, your particular interest is completely irrelevant.
Scientific research is of societal interest, even if your particular interest differ. The best you can do is vote for parties that promise to shut down scientific research, or find another group of likeminded morons and form such a party with them.
If you disagree with the concept of taxes, well, sucks to be you. May your desires never come to fruition, because life would be hell.
It would be great if we had line-item vetoes on our tax forms. However, we don't. You have to fund some things you don't like or agree with, and so do I, and so do the rest of the taxpayers.
That's just how taxes work. Like capitalism and democracy, taxes suck, but nobody has come up with adequate substitutes that check all the necessary boxes.
Why wouldn't I veto everything except the give me back my money tax? Now, I'm not actually ridiculously selfish asshole that doesn't think of others or the long term consequences of my choices, but it's a prisoners dilemma, with everybody else in your country, and defecting gives you money back. Cynically I don't think that'll work.
It wouldn't be a "Give money to anyone you like" kind of choice, but "Allocate money to these departments." Funding that you assign to one category would have to come out of another. Think basic research is a waste? Allocate less to NSF and more to foreign aid, or to something else that you prefer. Don't want to fund welfare? Move the money to defense, and so forth.
Obviously still open to gaming and abuse, but it's not as if the current system isn't.
Agree this reminds me of the level my Herman Hesse “The Glass Bead Game”. Academics and researchers have a moral duty to give back to the larger society that enables their endeavors .
"Being linked to the state" doesn't always mean being bound by social status and money, but rather receiving support in terms of social status and money. For example, artist support, even if government support is contingent on "the work conforming to LGBT trends," is better than nothing. How can a scientist's passion for science remain connected to the 99% of the public who have no interest in and know nothing about science? As for whether it's a low-quality paper or genuine research, that depends entirely on the conscience and ethics of the practitioners; no policy direction, left or right, can solve this. Left-wing fabrication is plagiarism, right-wing fabrication becomes illegal fundraising and financial fraud. Right-wing fabrication is far more destructive and harmful.
Funnily enough, the future of the Chinese economy depends on being able to access their local market. The chinese people save too much and aren't buying their own products
You are right that getting Chinese households to invest in the domestic (Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hong Kong) stock market is also a key goal that they're rolling out incentives for.
> The chinese people save too much and aren't buying their own products
Nonsense.
Total Retail Sales of Consumer Goods went up 4.6% in the first 11 months of 2025. That is the number with spending on automobiles excluded. A total of 24 million cars were sold in China in 2025 with vast majority being Chinese brands. If 24 million car purchases a year is "aren't buying their own products", then car industry doesn't exist in the US.
I don't think many equipment makers are Taiwanese. The names I am familiar with are KLA from the US. Tokyo Electron from Japan and ASML from Netherlands. TSMC buys equipment from them and build the fabs. The PRC wants complete vertical integration.
Funnily enough, linear algebra is a good example of how doing doesn't lead to understanding. Just calculating eigenvalues and eigenvectors don't give you the geometric view of what is happening. Also talk to some engineering students who learned how to do matrix multiplication, but can't tell you what a vector is (it is not just something with magnitude and direction).
This isn't going to happen simply because it would introduce enormous strategic vulnerabilities. The first act ina war would be to sever an opponent's grid connections to their neighbors because that would massively erode their ability to maintain an orderly civil society.
We've lived in a geopolitical world since Britain converted its navy from coal to oil prior to WWI, making itself dependent on Middle East oil (the UK didn't realise its North Sea reserves until the 1960s, they weren't developed until the 1970s/80s, contributing hugely to the Thatcher boom). Choke-points of oil exporters (particularly Iran, OPEC), pipelines (TAPLINE), canals (Suez, Panama, etc.), straits (Hormouz, Malacca, etc.) have all been at the centre of global geopolitics for well over a century.
Solar changes the who and where, but really not the what significantly. Solar is far more distributed and less concentrated, and options for distribution are potentially more diverse (cables, direct power beaming, synfuel production and distribution) in ways that an oil-based economy hasn't been.
Even within national borders, power production and distribution are sufficiently centralised and choke-pointed that they are vulnerable to significant disruption, even by non-targeted accidents and natural disasters. Major national and regional power outages are not especially frequent, but neither are they unfamiliar: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages>.
During periods of conflict, national and irregular forces routinely target power infrastructure, with significant but rarely absolutely crippling effect. For the past three-and-some years, two major eastern-European adversaries have been directly targeting one anothers' energy infrastructure. Though the results are costly, neither has been bombed back to the stone age, or even the pre-electrical era:
"Resilience Under Fire: How Ukraine’s Energy Sector is Adapting – and What It Means for Europe"
This won't happen because the lines are bi-directional. It would be like chopping off their own energy supply. Because of the Earth's rotation, neighbors can take advantage of each other's sunlight. Parts of Europe and North Africa's energy markets are already working on this.
For the past 100+ years, the US has been spending a significant amount of money on protecting oil supplies to protect its oil billionaires and its economy. It's the #1 budget item, outspending the combined military spending of the next 10 economies. This can be reduced to zero, and ultimately, the $ 39 trillion deficit can be eliminated.
Bidirectional powerlines make the grid more stable for tha larger region around most countries because it makes it easier to route around the conflict as far as capacities permit. Not many countries span coast to coast in a way that couldn't be routed around. So that would actually increase the vulnerability of individual countries.
The EU is actually extremely special because its souvereign member states collaborate in almost all areas on a level that is unmatched anywhere else. But the ideological foundation is getting eroded by propaganda and if that assault is effective, Europe will balcanize again and end up experiencing many more armed conflicts.
People believed this before. Then WW1 happened. 100 years later, people forgot the lessons of the past, and believed this again. Then Russia invaded Ukraine.
If Ukraine was part of NATO it wouldn’t have happened I am willing to bet.
Most in depth analysis I’ve seen of these Russia - Ukraine conflicts cite this as one of the top factors in why Russia invaded both a decade ago and the most recent war that is ongoing.
That is to say - mutual cooperation agreements like that have enough teeth to keep conflicts to a minimum as the repercussions are severe
Also another ultimate irony is that Russia didn’t completely cut the rest of Europe off from its oil and gas. That symbiosis continues albeit not the same way. Perhaps electricity would be the same
The loss is not that much - approximately 3.5% per 1000km. IIRC the Changji-Guquan HVDC line reported around 8% over 3300km thanks to working at 1100kV.
Extend that to 10k km and you're looking at approximately 25%, but if it's surplus solar, who cares?
Such a line costs as much as a highway broadly speaking, so it's not impossible to build.
For reference, that would give me in Maine the ability to buy power from a solar farm in Arizona or other literally unutilized deserts.
Local power costs are over 30 cents per KWh, so that could be pretty competitive.
The problem is that, no profit based organization will ever build "surplus" solar to enable that kind of thing. If we want surplus power, if we want a strong grid, if we want cheap power, if we want to enable the ability to quite literally waste solar power on inefficient processes (including things like industrial processes that produce less CO2 or generating hydrogen or methane as long term energy storage), we have to get the government to make it happen
But, uh, we hired people who would rather spend $170 billion on harassing random cities and brown people so..... Everyone get ready to pay absurd rates for electricity to support outdated businesses that have been directing American energy policy since Reagan, including paying about 60k coal miners in west virginia for a resource that is economically inferior to other fossil fuels but because they voted for a democrat once they now get a stranglehold on the US economy.
> For reference, that would give me in Maine the ability to buy power from a solar farm in Arizona or other literally unutilized deserts.
>
> Local power costs are over 30 cents per KWh, so that could be pretty competitive.
>
> The problem is that, no profit based organization will ever build "surplus" solar to enable that kind of thing. If we want surplus power, if we want a strong grid, if we want cheap power, if we want to enable the ability to quite literally waste solar power on inefficient processes (including things like industrial processes that produce less CO2 or generating hydrogen or methane as long term energy storage), we have to get the government to make it happen
>
I think what we seeing in a lot of places now is quite the opposite. There are significant opportunities for arbitrage, so private entities are building HVDC lines in Europe for example (without special subsidies over the usual ones that all big infrastructure always seems to get AFAIK). That's part of the beauty of the renewables revolution it breaks up the stronghold that only a few big corps held over generation.
> For reference, that would give me in Maine the ability to buy power from a solar farm in Arizona or other literally unutilized deserts.
>
> Local power costs are over 30 cents per KWh, so that could be pretty competitive.
>
> The problem is that, no profit based organization will ever build "surplus" solar to enable that kind of thing. If we want surplus power, if we want a strong grid, if we want cheap power, if we want to enable the ability to quite literally waste solar power on inefficient processes (including things like industrial processes that produce less CO2 or generating hydrogen or methane as long term energy storage), we have to get the government to make it happen
There are huge orbortunities for arbitrage in these areas. That's why in Europe there has been significant investment into HVDC connections recently. AFAIK they are mostly (all? ) build privately without special government subsidies (over the usual ones that all large infrastructure projects always seem to get). I think this partly the beauty of the renewable revolution, it
Regional grids are connected via tie-lines, and I heard international grids are also starting to become more connected in this way too. Though, I'd imagine it's complicated to send power from one side of the planet to the other. For starters grids can have different frequencies that need to be converted between. Also all transmission lines are subject to loss factors. In addition all the intermediary transmission companies have to route the power and avoid congestion on their grids, Then you have deal with all the financial settlement of the wheeling charges, which if you have to go through multiple grids and multiple currencies sounds like fun to deal with.
My understanding of the intentions of connecting international grids is for things like emergency supply of electricity to a different grid to stabilise the frequency and prevent blackouts.
Utility conductors are just aluminum wrapped around a steel core, air is the insulator. You can theoretically handle voltage drop with larger conductors, and there are probably ways to ‘boost’ power over a long transmission line run. I deal with electrical wiring past the utility service entrance and am not super familiar with the utility side so perhaps an EE who works on the grid can chime in with more detail.
I also know breakers for HVDC are extremely challenging to make, AC power has the benefit of sine waves crossing the zero line so power can be switched/broken a lot easier than with DC.
I don't agree. How can wasting your money in your twenties and thirties be more valuable than saving for an early retirement. Imagine being able to retire at 40 and do whatever you want. If you weren't stupid, your health should be good enough. Why prolong the time you have to do stupid chores for other people when you can be strategic and opt out as early as possible.
You can take once-in-a-lifetime experiences in your 20s and still save for retirement. I went to Burning Man and traveled to Amsterdam in my 20s and that didn't impact my savings.
I should point out that it's cheaper to travel when young: Back then I stayed in a tent in the desert and in a friend's room near Amsterdam. If I did the same trip today, I'd have my family in tow, and would need more comfortable accommodations.
I should also point out that startup equity is not retirement savings. Selling 10% of your equity, investing most of it, and then doing something that you won't be able to do when you're old is a very wise and mature decision.
Taking some time off to travel when you're young is much more than a beach vacation. You meet people (sometimes you meet your future wife), that can become lifelong friends. You learn what you like and don't like; and that the world is infinitely more complicated and beautiful than what you could imagine through books and watching youtube.
After 40 you've already made many of your major life decisions - career, partner, education, kids etc. There's less room for new experiences to alter that trajectory meaningfully.
One thing I've also realized through being lucky enough to enjoy some "semi-retirement" between work is having a healthy balance makes me appreciate both work and "leisure" more. It gets pretty boring to go to the beach every day, it turns out. I was itching to get back to building something by the end.
I don't think it's an either or proposition. You can both retire early AND take a nice vacation. Sure it delays your retirement date by a couple of days, but I think that's a good tradeoff generally. I'm approaching 40 and even now, the vacations I took when I was 10 years younger were different than now, I could cram more in, do more things without being as sore the next day, etc. And I haven't had kids yet, that would definitely change vacations.
Kids is one big reason. You can have totally different experiences before you have kids, once they arrive your outlook on life changes, risk tolerance changes etc.
If you can retire at 40 having lived your 20s/30s to the fullest then game on, but it would be crazy to sacrifice that time when you are so free and full of energy otherwise IMHO.
FWIW I am fortunate enough to have really enjoyed by earlier years and be mostly retired in my early 40s.
The act of grading itself is what's wrong with colleges. Different people learn at different paces. Forcing everyone to work at the fastest rate and then judging them for not performing is what kills interest in subjects. People should be allowed to write tests when they want to, learn at the pace they want to decide for themselves when it's time to move on, because lets face it, not everyone cares about some prof's pet subject.
The problem is that higher education became something marketable and universities decided to sell diplomas instead of giving people a chance to learn skills they think might help them reach their goals.
And if you try to create a merit based system, you take away the liberties of the people. Who decides what person deserves more than another? You will create a system ripe for corruption.
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