Mod parent sort of funny, though it didn't really clarify why gambling on the game you are controlling is so problematic.

Really, no joke. This story seemed ripe enough, though I admit I can't think of any low-hanging without racist taint.

Only joke out of 200+ comments. Slashdot used to have a better batting percentage for Funny.

And I'm not even sure if the joke works. It might not affect the price significantly, depending on how much competition there is from "dumb" refrigerators...

Story seemed to have lots of potential. Maybe humorous people don't use Gemini, so no jokes?

I think the FP was supposed to be a joke or setting the stage for a joke, but yours appears to be the first attempt to actually answer the question at a non-superficial level.

However my answer was just a superficial joke: "Don't be evil" => "Be as EVIL as possible".

(Also, "All your attentions is belong to we googlers.")

Better of the weak jokes on the story, but don't see much potential for humor.

However I have a couple of personal anecdotes and the first can be fit into your Subject if the "basket" is a building. The building in question is on prime real estate close to Shibuya Station, which is a kind of "King Youth" neighborhood. I visited the building a number of times as construction was being completed and before the security was tightened against such tourists. I think I even met Masayoshi's brother, who was supposed to be in charge of the innovations. That's "met" in the sense of I saw a honcho and someone told me about him. Not sure, but that building may be the "physical home" of the so-called "Vision Fund" and some of the fired folks were probably working there...

On your [Mr Dollar Ton's] joke, I have met a number of those VCs over the years, mostly at a "Venture Cafe" near Toronomon that one of them runs. I have definitely met the bigwig there and we had at least one interesting little chat. But mostly I remember talking with another VC who was complaining about not being able to find enough projects to throw money at. He understood that most of the projects are going to fail and he won't make any profit from them, but he has so much money that he doesn't know what else to do with it except roll the dice for more winners. Not sure how much of that was true or perhaps just a compulsive gambler's bravado, but it got me to thinking...

If you have to feed the troll, can't you at least think of a substantive Subject?

But is there any Funny in the discussion of the story?

ACK on the belated comment--and the story never got any Funny.

Above is the title of a rant I'm working on. Summary will be something like 'not with a flash-bank of orange BS, but with whimpers (for money from the Democrats), cowardice (of the Republican politicians), and burps (from the insanely greedy bastards who have taken over the world).

Not sure what part confused you.

Maybe the attempted mix of "common sense" philosophy and comedy via cultural references? The main place I see for potential confusion is in the references to the WH occupant, but on principle I refuse to use that brand name. The YOB clearly believes there is no such thing as bad publicity and welcomes every mention, anything to keep the spotlight on him, but at least I feel a tiny bit of satisfaction in not mentioned the mal-brand.

The massive distortions in the real estate market have stemmed from the wall of money created by decades of near-zero interest rates. This has driven serious malinvestment.

Was that capitalist? Well, the money supply is indirectly controlled by the Fed, which -- due to political pressure -- attempts to iron out the business cycle by creating walls of money every time it looks like things are getting choppy.

One could argue -- and I would agree -- that this is better than the pure unfettered capitalist alternative, which would see bank failures and people's life savings wiped out for no fault of their own. However, as a consequence, we get this absurd malinvestment problem.

There's more to this. You might ask, why doesn't the Fed just set the interest rate higher, so that people really need to have a productive use for money before they go buy up a bunch of houses? That hits at the heart of the stated goal to create persistent low levels of inflation, which allows the government (and debtors everywhere) to debase their debts. Because otherwise people wouldn't borrow as much money to drive economic growth. I find this nonsensical, because we loosening capital requirements creates precisely the malinvestment we want to stop. However, it's the government likes the ability to continuously debase its debt.

So it's not capitalism, and it's absolutely the result of policy choices, and it doesn't have to be this way. But it is because it suits the needs of powerful people in society.

Communists countries found ways to incentivize people to work. It's just that people ended up doing all the wrong things (in aggregate), and the system became hopelessly byzantine and corrupt. They really needed prices as a signalling mechanism for demand and scarcity. There's a great book on this by an economist. Socialism, the failed idea that never dies. Niemietz spends most of the time talking about the history of how people talk about socialism, but there's sections of the book specifically dedicated to a clear explanation of why it always must fail, and why it always must turn authoritarian. There's a short counter-factual story at the end, where East Germany is a non-authoritarian communist state, with precisely zero human rights abuses, and how the system of socialist incentives lead to complete dysfunction.

Indeed, complete with the "lost decade" that turned out to be 30 years of no-growth, and an aging population causing deflation. Except in China the problems are larger in scope, and the gradients are steeper. I'm not saying that China is going away. I mean, Japan is still there. It's just that the narrative changed on Japan, and it will change on China too.

In this video, university professor Patrick Boyle explains how short sighted pension plans destroyed the American auto industry. Once you look at the math, it's pretty obvious.

The misallocation of resources does have some benefits. It's still a misallocation, and thus, by definition, overall a problem.