True, except that gold's actual usage price -- for industry and jewelry -- hasn't been its trading price for a very long time. As long as people have viewed it as a store of wealth its price has been inflated by that perception.

You are suggesting quite a few things, except you don't like to actually say directly what it is that you want to happen. Here is one thing you said: "Elon Musk should be a wealthy man, no doubt about it but a trillionaire or hell even a $100B is a failure of our economy, our culture, our society or our politics." - 100B is not Musk anymore, it's more than Musk, who I consider to be a con artist.

What you are implying to calling 100B owner a failure of economy and culture and society and politics is that it should be impossible for some reason for a person to accrue enough ownership of private resources to be at that level. It is your inadequacies that are showing here and it is your word play that we are debating. What you are suggesting is oppression and tyranny, nothing less, which is what is required for a person not to be able to accrue any amount of wealth regardless of how it is obtained.

How about this: "I mean, he does. He also still is one person with 24 hours a day, does he actually provide enough productivity to justify tens of millions every day?" - nobody has to justify anything, if they are able to accrue some wealth beyond your imagination does not make it wrong that a person should be able to do so.

To this I have already answered: "Explain this (i am fully anticipating Libertarian-Randian gobbledygook)" - obviously a large amount of accumulated wealth is represented by a business and this business clearly benefits the society much more than the individual who runs it, otherwise the company wouldn't be valuable enough for you to pay attention how wealthy the owner of this company becomes.

This: "Everything you said would equally apply if he was worth $1B as it does $1000B so what does he need the extra 999B? His lifestyle changes 0%. He can still own and run companies." - implies that a person shouldn't be able to have ownership in a company that is growing in value, Musk or anyone else. So if you build a company that becomes so valuable people invest into it enough that its market share, its profits are so large that the value exceeds 100B (on paper, doesn't matter). If you are the single largest owner of the stock in this company your shares go above and beyond 1B.

You are pretending that you are not suggesting confiscation (oppression by the voting majority) yet what else are you suggesting? Be clear, what are your demands and goals? I already see the reasons, jealousy and ideology with a strange belief that a person shouldn't be able to own something of serious value for some reason.

This: "And I would ask just the same what the unhealthy fixation on defending the massive wealth inequality?" - I am FOR wealth inequality, it's the only thing that actually motivates people to move forward with business ideas in the first place. If wealth equality was the goal, nobody would be ruining their lives trying to run a business.

This: " I'll guess if I ask for the alternative you'll point to "communism" and I will just say you are not a serious person with a serious position. Like I said, Randian nonsense." - you are the one bringing up communism and Randian ideas, whatever, you are fixated on the nomenclature.

This: "You say you want to "protect private property" as if what I am suggesting eliminates private property in any fashion." - of course you are. You are suggesting this exact thing, you wouldn't be happy until there wouldn't be "wealth inequality". This requires that people cannot own things cannot operate things as they see fit, cannot go beyond some artificial number that is stuck in your head. You think 1B is plenty and 100B is too much, whatever that is all about. In reality it's all garbage. A person who made a billion dollar company can use the money that he makes to start more companies and eventually go much further than 1B dollars and this bugs the shit out of you because you are on a mission.

I am 100% certain you were the one bringing up communism, I was not. I am against destruction of private property rights, which is what you are suggesting.

what is unsatisfying to you? I am absolutely against majority oppressing a minority via government intervention, a minority in this case is people with more money than most The tyranny of majority leads to redistribution of resources. Communism is not even supposed to have a government. As someone born in the former USSR half a century ago I can point at that system and absolutely refuse it. I can also point at any oppressive system and refuse it. You are proposing an oppressive system, oppression by the force of government backed by the tyranny of majority. I am against it, it leads to destruction of freedoms, economic freedoms being the only ones that matter.

inequality is the resulr of ability to own property and I want this to be protected regardless how much property because I have seen the alternative and it is misery.

What is this unhealthy fixation on what someone is "worth"? It is not a billion tons of gold, it is not a quintillion tons of grains. It is a fiction, a fleeting number on paper that signifies current valuation of a business. Musk does not have a trillion dollars under his mattress. Not even 2 billion.

Working from home is an alternative, one that we should use more.

(Of course, I WFH full time and have for 20 of the last 30 years, so I have a bit of a bias.)

I think Musk is a con artist, but why is it difficult to wrap your head around a person benefiting less from his billions than the society? Society gets to use these billions in many ways more than the person himself. Society gets the products made by the businesses that are valued at billions, society gets the jobs and paychecks from all of this money. What does the person get except for a headache of dealing with the norms and rules and taxes imposed by the society upon his business? He really doesn't eat much more than the next guy, though his meals will be more expensive because they are cooked by some private chefs. But the cost of the food, chefs, housing, airplanes, whatever is negligible compared to the value of the company that society gets to enjoy. Even just the trading of the stock market allows people to have something to invest into, there are jobs, there are products, then there are various contracts required to maintain this business, so there are other side businesses that rely on the gigantic companies owned by the billionaire.

Again, a billionaire personally can use maybe a few hundred million dollars, maybe even a couple of billion (if he buys a couple of yachts and a few mansions). The gain to the guy is completely negligible compared to the gain to the society. It is like infrastructure in itself, that's what these huge businesses are. To say that this is 'Libertarian-Randian gobbledygook' is simply to use a personal attack in place of an argument.

But again, I am fully convinced Musk is a gigantic fraud, running his empire almost exclusively on vaporware.

You do know that Musk doesn't actually have a trillion dollars in *money*, right? He doesn't have anywhere remotely close to that much money. His total liquid assets are extensive, sure, maybe as much as a few billion, but nearly all of his incredible net worth isn't money. You could probably call it "potential money".

And everyone should keep in mind that this is true for basically all of the billionaires. Not that there isn't real wealth there, but it's a lot fuzzier than the numbers appear. Basically everyone with astronomical wealth mostly owns shares in companies, and how much of that value is real in any near-term sense depends on a lot of factors.

Musk's wealth is more speculative and fuzzy than most because his companies' valuation is based not on the revenues the companies generate now but theories about what they might generate in the future. Tesla's high valuation is all about the promise of self-driving cars restructuring transportation. SpaceX's is a little bit about cheap access to space changing a lot of stuff and more about AI. In all cases the high valuations are bets on world-changing technology being becoming real, and on Musk's companies being able to capture a good chunk of the resulting revenues.

That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.

It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.

This is the primary driver in the US, too. In fact, wages have not stagnated, not when you look at the full picture including government transfers, and every generation is wealthier than the one before. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current housing price bubble, each generation even has higher home ownership rates than the previous generations at the same ages. Houses and apartments are also significantly bigger and more luxurious (which explains most of their higher prices, actually; do some comparisons on a per square foot basis over time, then adjust for the higher quality and greater amenities we have today).

But if you look at how Americans spend their money over the years, the biggest change you'll find is that we spend less on housing, food and clothing as a percentage of our income (in spite of bigger, nicer houses, far more restaurant and delivered food, and much larger wardrobes) and much more on entertainment -- and that in spite of the fact that entertainment has gotten dramatically cheaper.

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

However, immigration is only a stopgap solution to the problem of population decline, because fertility is declining everywhere on the globe, fast. The global fertility rate is basically at replacement now, but the decline is continuing, and accelerating. We'll drop below replacement as a species in just a few years. Even then population will keep growing for a while due to the "filling out" effect, but then it'll start dropping, fast. And it will quickly become top-heavy (more old than young).

Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amount of knowledge that was learned by doing and isn't -- and maybe can't be -- taught anywhere but on the job.

To some extent we could probably manage with a smaller population if more of the population became highly educated (not necessarily in the academic sense, though we'd need that, too), but that transition wouldn't be easy, in part because there are lots of people who simply aren't interested in highly-technical work. We'd need a lot more of them to become willing to learn and do it anyway. Obviously the first step would be to bring the whole remaining population up to what the developed world considers a basic level of education -- that would enable us to tap new supplies of scientists, engineers and technicians. But the population reduction that seems likely to come means we'd need a lot more than that to be able to maintain our knowledge base and production diversity.

AI might change all this, of course. It could make it completely unnecessary for humans to participate in any of the above. But without something like that, it seems unlikely that our technological civilization could survive with less than a billion people or so, and technological progress would likely take a severe hit long before we hit that level of population reduction.

Even that isn't true. The correct statement is that it's a crime to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater in circumstances where doing so is reasonably likely to incite a panic that would cause death or injury.

If you shouted "Fire!" in an American theater today, odds are that everyone would just ignore you, and a reasonable person would expect that to be the outcome. That's because fires in modern theaters are (1) quite rare, (2) much more likely to be announced by an alarm and (3) not difficult to escape safely due to the plethora of clearly-marked exit routes that are required by law. So everyone knows that in the event of a fire trampling people in an effort to escape is not necessary for self-preservation, that calmly walking to the nearest exit is better.

It's worth noting that the truth or falsity of the shout isn't really even much of a factor in the legal question. What matters is whether a reasonable person would expect that the shout would be likely to cause unnecessary death or injury as opposed to not shouting. The original Schenk v. United States case opinion in which Holmes used "Fire in a crowded theater" as an example, did argue that truth was an absolute shield, but later rulings, especially the 1969 case that overturned Schenk, removed that protection. If you shout intending to cause real physical harm and expecting that to be the result of your action it's a crime, even if what you shouted was true.

The number of accidents you have depends far more on how you drive than how fast you react. If you and Claude are correct about AVs having slower reaction times that just highlights the importance of driving style over reaction time, because AVs have fewer and less severe accidents than human drivers.

The main thing you can do -- and AV systems do, generally -- is leave yourself more space and therefore time to react, which includes driving slower in areas where sudden incursions into the roadway are likely.

That said, I expect AVs to react faster as their systems improve. All of our AI is excessively compute-heavy right now, but we know that isn't essential because our brains do more with less in spite of the fact that our wetware runs on a significantly inferior substrate. As we learn how to build more efficient AI systems, that should reduce AV compute requirements and make it feasible for them to "think faster", and therefore react faster.

The one thing that is clear is that AVs will continue improving on their already better-than-human safety records.