AI sticker shock hits corporate America

These are golden times for AI consulting. We're getting into that business because it is up for grabs. Everybody as AI FOMO right now and begging people to take their money. Exactly what you are highlighting. And, yet, nobody has the beginning of a clue what to do or how to do stuff with AI. That's classic consulting territory.

My analysis of the whole space is that all the tech people are focused on completely the wrong end of the problem space (model quality, training, token cost, etc.). They are geeking out on that stuff. Worse, they are mostly not even that good at using their own tools. I regularly talk to so called "AI native" companies that are hiring enterprise sales people to do sales like it's 2006 instead of 2026. Their product is AI native, but their companies aren't.

The real issues are on the low level plumbing end. How do you connect all the data silos you have. Are they even the right silos still? And once you fix that: how do you get organized around tapping into those. What guardrails do you need? How do you deal with compliance issues? Etc. You don't need to do a lot to get value back. Most people haven't gone there yet.

Mostly people actually already have and pay for the tools that would enable a lot more if only they knew how: ChatGPT, Codex, Manus, Perlexity Computer, Claude CoWork, etc.

What you are outlining is funny but true. The issue isn't money or tools but figuring out what to do with the tools you already bought.

Exactly. And even worse is that crime itself is firmly rooted in politics.

Example: You work at walmart, as a cashier. You drop a $100 bill on the floor and pocket it from the till. You're caught, cops called, and you are arrested.

Example: You work as a manager at the same walmart. Store manager says labor costs are too damned high. So you go in on 10 employees, and edit their timecards to cut $100 from each of them, totaling $1000. IF you are caught, police will not respond. Instead, it is a "civil matter".

This is a bit dated chart, but its still very much correct. https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... But notice the wage theft types are all "civil matters", and the non-eage theft are heavily criminally prosecuted. And who does those? Predominantly poorer people.

We also see this with dumping trash, being criminal and severe to the individual, but companies (read: Musk) can dump thousands of gallons of toxic sludge per day. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/inspection-texas-drainag...

We also see criminality differences between charges of freebase cocaine versus crack cocaine. Crack was what black people smoked, so sentencing was like 10x of freebase.

When you start looking at how laws are apllied, its almost always the same pattern: those at the top are a civil matter. Those who report to the top are a criminal matter. Those at the bottom are "charged with the fullest maximum punishment".

Right, because every $100 spent on tokens results in more than $100 of profit from NVIDIA stock. That totally makes sense. But why so indirect, why not buy NVIDIA GPU and trash them? That should increase profit even more, since you're cutting out the middlemen.

All that aside, refusal to participate in bullshit doesn't imply some "plan" to bring the company down, it's really just refusing bullshit. It's not "5D bullshit", i.e. a move in the same bullshit game they are refusing

And if you offer someone 5 bucks to help burn down their own house, that of all their friends, so someone can make 5000 bucks, then they might just refuse, not because they have some plan, but precisely because refusal or letting themselves get hollowed out as well is the only option they're given. It's not like any of the hollowed out people listen to them in earnest.

Young people, which is crazy to me, often want some kind of stake and participation in the world rather than being disposable slaves, they want to do work that makes sense, that enables them and others to grow and prosper, in order to prepare them to become stewards of that world later on, which they want to make better and not just exploit, generally. Mostly, some of them of course are assholes or stupid, but in general, people come to this world way less fucked up than the world wants them to be.

Right. Though I want to focus on a specific aspect of your hypothetical (which is essentially real):

If the manager hadn't stolen $100 from the cashier, there would have been a MUCH weaker incentive for the cashier to steal themselves.

This is the crux around which everything else turns: we are effectively post-scarcity, as far as production is concerned. As a society, we purposely create theft, and debt, and the associated desperation and crime, as a matter of policy. As a choice.

If you were eradicate wage theft, you would essentially eradicate the internal logic of street theft, in the vast majority of cases. We could just... not have theft. But by not prosecuting wage theft, we, as a society, have decided that we condone and even need theft.

I know people that were laid off because they were low on the “token leaderboard” so yes it happens.