Earlier quoted context omitted.
automation makes every job scalable, no?
could you automate a BJJ coach?
Who's going to pay for a BJJ coach when nearly everyone is out of job?
The only moat left is money?
241–250 of 398 posts
Re: The only moat left is money?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have it backwards. Regulation is what enables monopolies. There is no monopoly for any of the major industries like cow herding or cellular telephone service in Somalia despite almost no effective regulation. There is not even a monopoly of pirates despite them willing to use violence to try and enforce a monopoly. If you look at the history of the US, for instance, railroad regulation was brought forth l…
> Regulation is what enables monopolies That's patently false. AT&T was a monopoly and they were broken up by antitrust regulation. The absolute most you can say is that some regulations enable monopoly. I contend that we simply should pass the good kind of regulations instead. Monopoly is enabled by market forces such as economies of scale. Monopolization is a natural market process which happens on its own unless i…
>> Regulation is what enables monopolies
>That's patently false. AT&T was a monopoly and they were broken up by antitrust regulation.
This is patently false in the context of the reply you have made -- after the invention of the telephone more and more and eventually hundreds of telephone services popped up. Then in 1918 (circa WWI), the government effectively quasi-nationalized AT&T by controlling it via a commission and the postmaster general and then AT&T leveraged politicians to create "universal telephone service" provided by AT&T and regulate competitors out of the market while using regulatory capture to use commissions to regulate rates, effectively creating a cartel that drove competitors out of business via regulation.
the whole idea of a "natural market process" here is absolute and utter hogwash. The majority of the market was AT&T competitor up until the regulators stepped in and turned it into an unnatural monopoly enforced by regulatory capture.
>The FDA, for all the flaws of its current incarnation, is the archetype of necessary regulation. Pre-FDA, the free market did nothing whatsoever to prevent nauseating practices like the adulteration of milk with powdered plaster, lead, and cow brains. The history there is fun but quite gross.
You're now arguing why we need regulation rather than whether they create monopolies or not. I see this as a complete red herring, although an interesting topic, that there are some counterpoints to.
> What is notable about Somalia is not its lack of regulation, but the fact that it is perhaps THE least stable country on the planet. It is not the basis for any useful comparison here.
What is notable is that the whole thesis is without regulation it turns into this monopolized hellscape and every inspection of that theory turns out to be false, and sometimes even the opposite.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then what are acting and music royalties?
They're the exceptions that prove the rule. For every Taylor Swift, there are probably tens of thousands of songwriters who have never earned a dollar from their creations. The vast majority of valuable copyrighted/patented creations are works for hire, which is compensated just like other labor. Or the creator signs or licenses the rights away to a publisher and maybe receives contractual royalties, rarely more than…
Stock photography?
Font/Typography sales?
What about Pluralsight/Udemy courses?
Substack/Patreon membership?
Buying printable art from etsy?
Re: The only moat left is money?
#244So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago. He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to comp…
I'm excited for a future where the technologist is like the tailor in their community. Scaling software has created a host of 'product traps' and there is no need for that for the vast number of activities people do aided by technology.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tailors are a niche thing for weirdos, now. It's not exactly a growth market. Most folks only wear a suit to weddings and funerals, and maybe job interviews. They have basically no need for more than two suits, and many try to get by with just one (in black, probably). Lots don't own one at all, maybe just a cheap fused-construction blazer or two, if even that. Outright bespoke clothes are a niche of a niche. Normal…
I mean, you do you. Clothing is really _fashion_ for tons of people. Fashion is art. People like art.
As someone who has tried to make several businesses around art, people generally like art but not enough to pay "at scale" money for it.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#246So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago. He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to comp…
Is providing scalable products at a cheaper price scalable? If so, can it hurry up and scale? This is a bit of a paradox.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#247So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago. He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to comp…
Being a tailor is scalable, that's way there are way, way more cheap machine produced clothes today than in the past. Surely he did not miss that the textile industry was at the core of industrial revolution. So being a tailor is more like a post-scaling job - the automation has already happened and now there are only remnants left.
But how can you be sure a job is peak-automated? A few years ago, I would have said musicians are post-scaling - way fewer musicians jobs now that you can play recorded music. But it looks like generative AI will hit musicians again. Can some of welding be automated? Probably.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#248> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…
Seriously you can ship in a week things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago. LLMs are just glue between pieces of your code you still need to be able to plug them into a coherent architecture to do something impressive.
Apple Pay (launched around 12 years ago, and likely costing billions) is exactly the counter-example here. The 'code' was the easy part. The moat was the decade of hardware R&D and the leverage to force banks to adopt a new standard. An LLM might write the API wrapper in seconds, but it can't hallucinate a relationship with Visa and Mastercard. You literally cannot create a new Apple Pay in a week or even years, no matter how much you vibe code.
I'm sometimes baffled by what people think can pass as a product in a real sense.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#249So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago. He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to comp…
That seems like reasonable advice until you realize you have no idea what will and will not scale in a few years, and there's only so many tailors/plumbers/welders/etc. What it really comes down to is these options as more work gets automated: 1) New jobs doing different things that weren't done before 2) Same jobs but shorter hours so "full time" with a salary to match starts to look more like 4 days, or 5 hours/day…
The point of doing something non-scalable is that you can enter and exit the market fairly easily. You don't need to be a tailor your whole life. You can make a living as a barber, electrician, teacher, or nurse.
I'm not saying it's easy! It's hard as hell. It sucks when your job gets automated. I'm just saying that aiming for something non-scalable means you're not always tilting at windmills, and the game can't be rigged against you.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#250So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago. He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to comp…
Is providing scalable products at a cheaper price scalable? If so, can it hurry up and scale? This is a bit of a paradox.
Who cares? He's arguing about providing something that is not scalable: so whatever happens to things that are scalable ain't the topic.