CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@mcc An alternative explanation for much of the same results (which I think is more likely because it doesn't require the collective action of a capital strike), is that the investment is all real and intentional, it's just vastly misdirected from the point of view of general economic growth.

Billionaires don't care about their absolute wealth (they can't spend it all), but only about relative wealth (compared to their peers). And so all the investment gets misdirected into long shots, because getting lucky with those is the only way to significantly move up the rankings.

Investing in normal things can only get you a normal return. It's just treading water as far as they are concerned.

@schwa I mean, I can believe that the humans who write sqlite actually DO write correct code. So if that's the thing you are choosing to compare to...

But you're not wrong, and part of the tragedy of the present moment is that so few humans who code are in a position to be able to write it correctly. So much of what we do as an industry is built upon the shifting sands of someone else's frameworks, and the sands move underneath us for reasons we don't know, and our stuff falls down, and we prop it back up again.

In that sort of environment, more and more of what you write (by hand or otherwise) becomes just plausible and it's harder and harder to say whether any of it is correct.

@slava I admire how you can explain this type of thing with such clarity.