At the center of their story is a quiet revolution in the American economy: the rise of a particular kind of private business. A few decades ago, these businesses collectively made far less money than Corporate America. But by 2011, they were generating more income than all traditional U.S. corporations combined — and accounting for most of the rise in the share of income flowing to the top "one percent."

Over the previous few decades, this sort of private business had — quite privately — taken over the American business world. In 1980, pass-through businesses generated about one-fifth of all U.S. business income. By 2011, they generated more than half. Move over, Corporate America. Hello, Pass-Through America!

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/09/14/g-s1-14...

Technically speaking, maintenance is a capital investment.

Use of some rare natural consumable (lubricating a machine with whale oil?) would still require a) labor b) capital and c) paying rent to whoever owned that slice of nature. So consumption, broadly, may take from nature, but the returns (if there are any) go only to people - as rent, interest, or wages. If there are no returns, then it is just consumption proper.

Large tech companies have been excellent at claiming that they are doing R&D and claiming tax breaks for that.

This turns out not to be the case.

Unless a calamity throws human survivors back to the stone age there can be no future Wright brothers, in the post Tevatron and LHC, James Webb telescope era there will be no new Woz, no new Jobs... 2-3 people in a garage or hanger soldering and welding

Any yet unseen discoveries will require teams of people composing something on the scale of...AI robots and Wolverine like regenerative medicine

And Google and such ...hired PhDs to do that work so they could own it and not have them release it without permission. They weren't hiring basement tinkers.

Look beyond the syntactic totems of power like brand names and logos and it's just soylent green. The contemporary legal and PR gibberish defining ownership and hyping yet another chat app are not real; it's just physics.

Oooh ok; I'll validate you; you're so special to me after all

Totes will advocate for a social system where you get a shot at the life you want

But only as propagation of such freedom is in my interest too

Will never know/care if it works out for you personally; but everyone is physically welcome.

Debating finance and related semantics is generic and shallow at this point in human history; the ledger of ownership/capital distribution makes it clear and the cops on TV rounding people up when the people attached to the names on the ledger feel scurred; all quite clear as well

Finance is rhetorical only to me; empirically the only evidence it exists is the say so of others

My applied physics studies and engineering experiments in fancy labs, studying information propagation in various physical mediums never revealed to me a fundamental particle that gives rise to value of a dollar

But go ahead spend another 250 years debating the memes of the long dead; I am more interested in weird science and a lived experience that's more than that.

Oh no some people who have zero obligation to me took some made up points away... guess I should commit seppuku? You all want me to keep you in mind next time I buy groceries; would some HNer find this choice generic; lol...nah...

Not unreasonable to call such banal arithmetical score keeping generic and shallow; a binary up/down vote; oh so deep and heretofore unknown to humans

Believe it or not my real goal is discuss actually interesting things not the same old blah blah blah of CNBC. The generic and shallow tone towards finance babble is because it's a generic and shallow context we pretend to find interesting because of its centralness to our social cult practices; when all you have is a hammer every problem is a nail; coloring either tool or both pink, blue mango... the context is the same context

The government is the number 1 employer of economics PhDs and well... may be that they are ready to quit hiring them: https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/the-collapse-of-the-econ-phd-j...

The times are a changing; moving on from ultimately arbitrary academic euphemisms. You know how we don't call ourselves British in the US? And the world doesn't default to Latin? Future people won't sound like us either; because it doesn't really matter.

I stick to discovery of new music and bleeding edge physical experimentation in physics and engineering to get a bump. Dollars and cents bean counting is just empty fingers flapping to mime a babbling mouth

This, though, is actually interesting analysis of reality before us:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/for-the-first-time...

We may be able to just beam consciousness across timespace with out the dick shaped rockets; but we will never find out if we keep living in sunk cost fallacy and cling to rockets to nowhere because it's what the 55+ year olds oo'd and ahh'd at as kids to the detriment of the next generation of kids finding even cooler things to oo and ahh

There you go. Some proper deep thoughts.

Like and subscribe!

Oh no fellow American; I am 100% behind our norm of not having to concern myself with your having food, shelter, or healthcare

Don't mistake my point for giving a fuck that you, of all people, do not end up living in box behind a McDonald's; I don't care, text on a screen. :)

I just prefer brevity and absolute candor not empty platitudes and pointless circumlocution