finchswordmesses

[finchswordmesses]

Fun with Math: Capitalism Edition

Suppose you're an employee, working at the bottling plant for international soft-drink brand Coca-Cola. As a warehouse worker, you make an average of 40,000 dollars a year (according to Glassdor). You enjoy your job, but there's a problem. Coca-Cola keeps expecting you to show up and work? What the heck is up with that? If only there was some way to get 40k a year from international soft-drink brand Coca-Cola without ever having to set foot in one of their facilities.

Well, what if I told you there was? It's time to learn about the wonders of stock dividends.

At the time I am writing this exact sentence, a share of $KO goes for $71.71. If you were to buy a share of the company at that price, you would get several benefits that aren't important to this essay, but relevantly you would be entitled to a dividend. Dividends are monetary disbursements payed out by companies to shareholders at fixed intervals (usually once every quarter, as is the case with our funny soda brand). Again, at the time of writing this sentence, a single share of $KO pays out a dividend of 51 cents per quarter, or $2.04 a year.

I'm sure you can already see where this is going, and I'm not really interested in drawing this out for engagement. If one share earns $2, then all you need to make $40k a year is to have 20,000 shares. Well, 19,608, to be precise. Well, 19,607.843137 shares to be really precise. That may sound like a lot, but the number of shares of $KO in circulation is about 4.3 billion, so you can be sure there are plenty to go around.

How much would this cost? Well, punch in 19,608 into a calculator and multiply by 71.71 and you get a cool...

$1,406,089.68

And there you have it. The secret technique for never having to work a day in your life, again. Why spend all day working yourself to the bone for Coca-Cola when, for the low, low price of over 1.4 million dollars, you can earn the exact same salary?

Now, I understand that 1.4 million dollars seems like a lot of money. For a large number of the people reading this, I feel confident guessing that that number is an order of magnitude more money than you've probably seen in one place in your entire life, at least in the positive. But in the grand scheme of things, in the world of financial instruments, 1.4 million is not a lot at all. 1.4 million is just a little bit more than the net revenue Coke made in one hour in 2024, on average (based on their reported net earnings of 11.5 billion dollars). 1.4 million is a mere 0.3% of what Elon Musk paid to buy Twitter, a cheap inferior knockoff of BlueSky. 1.4 million is no amount of money at all.

This is the biggest and most egregious failure of capitalism, made manifest. There are, as I said previously, about 4.3 billion shares outstanding of $KO. This means that Coca-Cola pays roughly $8.8 billion dollars in dividend payments. There are about 19,000 salaried positions at the Coca-Cola company (again, according to Glassdoor). If Coca-Cola payed that money out to every single one of their employees, then everyone from the CEO to the janitors would pocket an extra $461,000 per year! You, humble Coke warehouse employee, could duodecuple your pay (that is, multiply it by 12). Working for Coca-Cola could, without exaggeration, pay better than many branches of medicine. You could be paid better than doctors! But where does that money go, instead?

Shareholders.

Shareholders are not required to work for the company. They are not required to give any sort of value to the company. Most shareholders are people who bought $KO secondhand on the open market, and the people who sold it off don't care if it's going to someone who cares about Coke, or wants to see it improve, or even knows what Coca-Cola even does. Your average shareholder is only concerned with the stock price, and while they can often participate in votes to determine the company's future, turnout is often so tepid that companies give voters a cheat-sheet on what vote the board wants them to do. It is possible (though highly irrational) for a shareholder in $KO to be actively working to sabotage the company, or funnel the proceeds into a competing business. But if they just so happen to have a measly 1.4 million burning a hole in their pocket, they can get paid by Coke exactly the same as someone who does the actual work that provides the company with their money.

So, remember: the next time you feel overworked at your job, it's totally valid to feel that way. After all, if you work at the Coca-Cola warehouses, you're working to support yourself and at least eleven other people who didn't show up for work, today.

[finchswordmesses]

Literal First Tumblr Post, baybee

So, I saw a post on Bluesky, and it was so awful I made an entire ass Tumblr blog to talk about it.

The post shows a screenshot from an ad for an AI service. To save you all the trouble of going to a whole-ass other website, I'll transcribe the relevant bits of text from the ad, here:

"A.I. isn't just another tool - It will redefine how our world works. Why memorize facts, write code, research anything - when a model can do it in seconds? The best communicator, the best analyst, the best problem solver - is now the one that knows how to ask the right question. The future won't reward effort. It will reward leverage."

This is... wrong. And bad. The corners of the internet I frequent hate every bit of this sentiment, and so do I. The problem is, the place where my brain went is so ridiculously arcane I cannot possibly convey it in anything resembling 300 characters. So, I'm talking about it here.

Let me tell you a story about scurvy.

Part One: Scurvy and the "Scientists" who Rejected it

In the early days of the age of sail, there were a lot of things that doomed voyages. Storms, pirates, mutiny, those fucked up looking dragons everyone drew in the margins of the maps... sailing was a dangerous business. But among the many, many threats to long voyages was a new disease that seemed to exclusively affect sailors.

Scurvy is a specific form of malnutrition, caused by a prolonged deficiency in Vitamin C intake. It could happen to basically anybody who didn't eat enough fruits and vegetables, but the reason it happened to sailors had entirely to do with failures in logistics. Produce did not keep well, in an era before refrigeration, and alternative methods of preserving such things usually destroyed much of the nutritional value they held. Of course, sailors did not know that. Nobody did. Up until this point in history, there had never been reason to think that people could get sick from only ever eating hardtack every day.

In this time period, science wasn't exactly the same as it is today. Most scholars and doctors of the time were little more than nerds with large and expensive libraries. The prevailing attitude at the time was that learned men should defer to those who came before, that the oldest sources of knowledge were the purest and the closest to God, and therefore the most likely to be correct.

In that vein, your average doctor in the Age of Sail was likely to be some manner of adherent to humor theory. Humor theory was a whole rigamarole invented by Greek physicians that said that every malady in the body was due to a failure to keep your various fluids topped up. Citing the "learned sages" of ages past, doctors confidently proclaimed that this new disease was the result of an imbalance of blood, a torpor that could only be cured by increasing the afflicted's workload. Given that scurvy causes a person's body to slowly disintegrate on the connective tissue level, you can imagine how well that went.

Of course, science was being done. Several people were conducting early experiments, gathering testimony from sailors. Slowly, the idea was being introduced in academic circles that the cause was based in the poor diet of sailors, not a humor imbalance. Still, for years, the community at large clung to their old theories. After all, the Greek sages never said anything about fruits and vegetables as the cause, so why should that even be considered?

What those Age of Sail scholars failed to take into consideration was that the ancient Greeks had never encountered scurvy. At least, not to any extent that mattered. The Greeks lived on an archipelago and never strayed too far from shore. Not compared to the globe-spanning trade empires of the Old World. The first possible mention of scurvy wasn't until Roman times, when brief mention was made of soldier illness during long marches through the relatively barren African countryside. The world, by and large, had just never experienced the problem on this scale, because the world had never had to coordinate logistics on this scale, before.

This post is about A.I. tools.

Part Two: Digital Scurvy

Going back to that advertisement mentioned in the Bluesky post, the feeling that I got from it was very much that of the 16th century doctor. It seeks to push forward the idea that all the answers to every question you could have have already been found. Your job as a "learned sage" in our modern times is not to do research or to inquire or experiment. Your job is to efficiently parrot the knowledge of those that came before, to be the best at drawing forth the wisdom of your forebears.

"The greatest analyst," it says, "is one who knows how to ask the right questions." What is meant by that is not "asking questions in service to independent research." Instead, they mean "asking an AI chatbot the questions most likely to get it to pull the relevant information from its impossibly large database." It is a man in a library who has never gone to sea, but who has just the right Greek physician on hand who can explain humor theory to you.

Because this is the problem: what happens when the ancient sages are wrong? What if their information is faulty, outdated, or rooted in outmoded thinking? What if you try to ask the database the answer to a question it has never been asked, before?

What do you do when the new scurvy arises?

Part Three: The Reality

The vision, as promised, just can't happen. The whole of humanity cannot return to a backward-looking way of thinking, any more than the world's doctors could return to humor theory. Information will still need to be synthesized. Not just recited, not just regurgitated, but actually made, whole cloth.

If the world imagined by AI startups has any chance of not imploding on itself, then the end result will be a world of systematized stolen valor. Writers will still feel the pull to tell stories. Scientists will still perform experiments and research. Artists will still create and experiment and discover new philosophies in art.

The only thing that will change is that they will do so with the understanding that they will never be credited.

Somehow, someway, all their output will find its way into the databases. There, it will be snatched up by the "digital sages," who will proudly hold up their prize as one holds up a magnificent pearl, dredged from the sea floor. They will be lauded for their ability to navigate the databases, to petition the gods in just the right way as to earn their favor.

Meanwhile, the synthesizers will continue their work, forgotten.

Part Four: The Less Fun Reality

The true reality of this world would likely be even more bleak.

Creatives all over the world quickly learn to pull their content from electronic sources. Money is hard to earn for people in the arts, and having to share space with a machine that can spit their own output back at them at a quantity beyond mortal means makes the process less than impossible. What few artists remain successful do so in controlled venues. All viewings are in-person, and recording is tightly monitored. Physical media comes back into fashion, loaded down with any subtle measures the artists can think of to foil scans.

Science, meanwhile, grinds to a halt. Funding has long since been diverted to the sages. The credits on scientific papers, once considered a prestige and an honor, now becomes nothing more than a hollow gesture of ownership known only to a select few in an ever dwindling community. What few researchers hang on do so out of bloody-minded desire to change the world for the better. Their efforts are anemic and without support.

The sages, ensconced in their server farms, see none of this. Secure in their positions as the wisest and most powerful, they assert themselves as the ones with the answers to all of life's questions. The databases become filled with the wisdom of the sages that came before, information synthesized semi-randomly from past information. Soon the life of a digital sage is to quote the lessons imparted by other digital sages, in an endless Ouroboros.

The people do not question the sages, for the sages know how to ask the right questions.

And then, one day, when humanity has charted the stars, a new problem arises. Astronauts on the extremely long voyages in space are suffering from a new affliction, one that has never been encountered, before. Dutifully, the people turn to the sages. Dutifully, the sages make their pleas to the databases.

The databases speak.

"This new affliction is caused by a lack of Vitamin C."