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Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

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Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#311

Post by dudefeliciano »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #278
FridgeSeal wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It’s totally fine guys, if we give billionaires even more money it will totally all work out and be fine! Everything is ok and our benevelont overlords will take earnest care of us, despite literally never having shown the merest inclination to do that ever before”.

You jest, but the wonderful thing is billionaires are mortal. The known anti-semite and Hitler admirer Henry Ford's chartiable foundation added DEI to its mandate in 2021. Andrew Carnegie, an infamous monopolist and strike crusher...his charitable foundations helps fund science education to this day, and his university has graduated countless engineers. The point is... billionaires will die... their capital can conti…

Individual people are mortal, the concept of "billionaires" is not.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#312

Post by fwipsy »

chanux wrote: post #289
fwipsy wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that physical labor will become incredibly expensive if nobody has jobs? Do you think tools are that hard to get? Chinese tools are cheaper than ever.

It may not stay that way for various reasons. Maybe bringing down from China may not make sense anymore.

There's a tension between "AI will take everyone's jobs" and "things will be expensive." If we lose our jobs to AI it will probably be because it has higher productivity, which will tend to make things cheaper - even if manufacturing needs to be onshored, if only because AI drives down the cost of labor.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#313

Post by dec0dedab0de »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #91
interstice wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get this, you still have to go outside once in a while as an ultra rich person surely? Why not spend some relatively tiny amount of resources on fixing terrible roads + picking up trash + healthcare for the homeless? Does this happen and I just don't know about it?

healthcare for the homeless means seeing more homeless. It’s much more effective to let them die.

just for the record, I don't believe this, it's just why a rich person might not want to provide healthcare for the homeless.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#314

Post by tim333 »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #266
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #24

We’ve seen this before when the mines and factories closed. Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.

> reskill find new work except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge and while yes, this happened before, it happened over decades, and more importantly, the new jobs were created as the old ones were being destroyed neither of these conditions are happening this time around so we have not "been there before"

One minor data point. I've got a friend who worked as a translator. That's slacked off a bit and she's retrained as a tour guide. I think there will be a trend towards humans doing more human facing work.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#315

Post by skybrian »

Yizahi wrote: post #297
skybrian wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI could be done a lot of different ways, but it's a natural fit with progressive taxes. A UBI funded by taxes makes taxes more progressive. It's somewhat like the standard tax deduction, except you still get it if you don't pay any tax. It keeps the wolf from the door, but you still need to save enough to retire on. The US standard tax deduction amounts to about $1300 a month. Suppose that were instead paid out aut…

Making a good progressive tax scale is a task which a freshmen can do in a hour. The problem is not a better tax scale, the problem is how to find actual shit to tax. Doing nothing, we have the modern state of economy, when there are poor people having small to no tax basis, then "middle(lol)" class exposing all their assets and funds fully to the tax office and paying maximum taxes on this planet among everyone beca…

One thing that might help is closing loopholes around unrealized capital gains. Suppose that, as an alternative to taxing capital gains on its stock, a startup could deposit 20% of issued stock into a sovereign wealth fund? For a company with all its growth ahead of it, this is roughly equivalent and can’t be avoided later (not even with buy, borrow, die) because it’s already been paid. And yet, shareholders would probably find it attractive because they don’t pay the tax themselves.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#316

Post by Aurornis »

skybrian wrote: post #315
Yizahi wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a good progressive tax scale is a task which a freshmen can do in a hour. The problem is not a better tax scale, the problem is how to find actual shit to tax. Doing nothing, we have the modern state of economy, when there are poor people having small to no tax basis, then "middle(lol)" class exposing all their assets and funds fully to the tax office and paying maximum taxes on this planet among everyone beca…

One thing that might help is closing loopholes around unrealized capital gains. Suppose that, as an alternative to taxing capital gains on its stock, a startup could deposit 20% of issued stock into a sovereign wealth fund? For a company with all its growth ahead of it, this is roughly equivalent and can’t be avoided later (not even with buy, borrow, die) because it’s already been paid. And yet, shareholders would pr…

Taking 1/5 of every startup from the beginning is a great way to get every entrepreneur to found their company in another country.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#317

Post by skybrian »

Aurornis wrote: post #316
skybrian wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that might help is closing loopholes around unrealized capital gains. Suppose that, as an alternative to taxing capital gains on its stock, a startup could deposit 20% of issued stock into a sovereign wealth fund? For a company with all its growth ahead of it, this is roughly equivalent and can’t be avoided later (not even with buy, borrow, die) because it’s already been paid. And yet, shareholders would pr…

Taking 1/5 of every startup from the beginning is a great way to get every entrepreneur to found their company in another country.

Let’s say it’s voluntary and it only applies to whichever class of stock you designate, which can be non-voting. You use it for employee stock or to sell stock to investors who want a tax-free investment.

I think investors would pay more for the shares.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#318

Post by jfengel »

Aurornis wrote: post #316
skybrian wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that might help is closing loopholes around unrealized capital gains. Suppose that, as an alternative to taxing capital gains on its stock, a startup could deposit 20% of issued stock into a sovereign wealth fund? For a company with all its growth ahead of it, this is roughly equivalent and can’t be avoided later (not even with buy, borrow, die) because it’s already been paid. And yet, shareholders would pr…

Taking 1/5 of every startup from the beginning is a great way to get every entrepreneur to found their company in another country.

If other countries were that friendly to startups, people would already be doing it.

Startups get done in the US because of the network effect: this is where the other startups are, and where the people who fund startups are. It's hard for them all to de-camp at once to a different country, especially since most of the countries they'd want to go to already have higher taxes than the US.

There's probably some limit beyond which people would leave anyway -- presumably, lower than 100%. I don't know if they'd leave over 20%. But I bet you could demand a 5-10% stake, and get many threats but few actual departures.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#319

Post by krupan »

ryeights wrote: post #253
krupan wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many of us the release of GPT-3 appeared like a huge step function, a gigantic leap forward, but the fact is, it wasn't that huge. We've been researching computers and AI for around 70 years now. We had productive "machine learning" and pattern completion for a good what, 10 or 15 years before GPT-3 was released. Your phone could auto complete. Computers could win at chess. I worked on working autonomous flying d…

In what sense is an LLM analogous (much less reducible to) a search engine?

Search engine: crawl the entire Internet and create an index. When you ask it a question it uses that index to point you to an answer among all the information it crawled.

LLM: crawl the entire Internet and train a model. When you ask it a question, it uses that model to spit out an answer. Worse than a search engine though, if it can't come up with a good answer it just makes shit up

Both use the same sources of information. Neither can produce a (correct) answer that doesn't exist somewhere in that information source

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