Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who will maintain their houses? Why would it be immigrants instead of an underclass of citizens already in the country?
What houses? In Canada we stick 5 of them in every basement with no path to ownership. They’re happy to share bedrooms because it’s better than where they came from. The “underclass” of today got in early enough to own land and will be the landed gentry of tomorrow
Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
251–260 of 319 posts
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
i absolutely hear you on that. it just seems too hard to do that. my solution is to make companies that are cool, fun to work at, push good values and make some money. then use that money to push for appropriate political moves like you are saying. how would you propose to reform the government? through voting? good effing luck. it will take $$$. additionally, i get really annoyed with all the complaining that is don…
Sometimes there just isn’t a solution or it’s not the right time. That’s what bitching is good for. Imagine being the world’s most dedicated republican in 1750s France. You could analyze the state of the world and everything required to fix it but no matter what you do there’s still decades of feudalism left and feudalism fucking sucks. That’s where we are today and these bandaid solutions like making “better” compan…
but we can move to new feudal leaders or literally become a feudal leader ourself.
America baby!
Is it easy? nope. neither was getting a tech job or rising and surviving in it. but some of us do and some of us don’t.
anyone interested in some cold blooded american history from the mid-1800s should check out American Primeval on netflix. i really enjoyed it. it is a bit graphic.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
What exactly does society even with a strong safety net (which I support) owe anyone? Universal healthcare? Yes. A method to enable people to have safe shelter? Yes. Even public transportation to get to jobs - Yes. I’m even in favor of affordable public college education. But everyone should be able to own a home? No. People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the po…
> What exactly does society even with a strong safety net (which I support) owe anyone? Universal healthcare? Yes. A method to enable people to have safe shelter? Yes. Even public transportation to get to jobs - Yes. I’m even in favor of affordable public college education. Cosigned all above. > But everyone should be able to own a home? No. I think insofar as property is treated as an investment vehicle, everyone sh…
You would be surprised at how low the credit rating you have to have to get an FHA mortgage. It only needs to be 580 to qualify for 3.5% down.
> However, owning a home is a significant economic data point because it's a large investment
And then later you said
> A house shouldn't necessarily appreciate in value over time, and the fact that it's expected to is... strange.
So exactly how do you keep a property from appreciating in an area that people want to be in? My parent bought their home in 1978 in South GA for $50K. According to Zillow it’s now worth $180K. Inflation adjusted it should be worth $245K (https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/).
> And that's not even going into things like offshoring and cheap international goods that have obliterated small town America, or corporations like Walmart, which have done a fantastic job of pillaging middle America's markets out of existence.
So you support Trump’s inflationary policies about tariffs that will make goods more expensive in an effort to bring jobs back to the US (which won’t happen).
The world where every other country was demolished by wars and allowing the US not to have to compete with other developed nations is gone. Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back to the US. Would you be in favor of taxing those in the 90th percentile in wealthy (which you only have to make around $160K to be in) enough to support all of the other people so they can buy houses?
I think a lot of people here have absolutely no idea how “rich” they are compared to the average American and aren’t willing to give up enough of their income for “equality”.
> So like, you gotta deal with them one way or another. They're not just going to Thanos-snap out of existence.
Let them suffer. They would rather vote for politicians who hate the same people they hate - non Christians (except for Jews for some reason), minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, college educated, etc. They aren’t voting against their own interest because they are “uneducated”.
They see the country eventually becoming more diverse and minority/majority and are doing everything they can to fight the inevitable.
They themselves would rather not have universal healthcare because it might help the “illegals”.
Of course other cohorts are the middle class evangelicals who think they are going to burn in hell if gay people have equal rights and Jesus won’t have any place to come back to if Israel isn’t protected. I’m not exaggerating at all to make a point.
Then you have people with money who like the status quo and don’t care about inequality.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
agree with all your points with the anecdata that the Roomba is awesome for dog hair. awesome.
My Roomba painted the whole room With dog excrement. The roomba thus went straight in the trash.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a simple litmus test for these sort of nearish future dystopias - how long before you have an 'AI plumber' or an 'AI electrician'? I'm not just listing random skilled trades, but listing jobs that are extremely complex, 100% context sensitive in a way that just doesn't generalize well, requires a mixture of high dexterity and high strength, and a million other things. To say nothing of the numerous [oft extre…
We have YouTube plumbers. Has destroyed the industry? No. But it’s made plumbing accessible to a whole range of DIYers. Maybe AI will be just as productive. Seriously YouTube has been amazing for the world of self learning. AI could learn a lot from it.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
120 years ago 40% of Americans were farmers, today that number is under 2%. That technical progress resulted in a few companies and farm conglomerates becoming incredibly wealthy. But the benefits that we all received was we didn't have to toil in a field, and we get fresh beef on every corner. The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive.
> The wealth gap growing, and the median person being better off aren't mutually exclusive. The wealth gap was growing since 1980. Is the median person better today when the median person cannot afford a college education or a house? Both of those were easily afforded in the 80s. Also remember: the average job didn't require a college education back then either. College has become a gatekeeper due to its rising costs…
That's due to the post-war boom. The book Capital in the 21st Century goes over this, that the period between 1950 - 2000 was an anomaly for the US that cannot be replicated, yet people bring up this stat as if it were normal.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#257Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest. It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits didn't go mainly to the top. I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere with the help of some robots. Or have them do all your housework. In principle, this is great, but our society is not set up for a lot of people not working while the technology is progressed by a relatively small number o…
If John Deere can help it, those Deerebots will be sealed shut, TPM'd & DRM'd to hell. You'd pay a subscription and have to take them into a service center to get them serviced and have the firmware updated. They basic subscription tier will only work with genuine Monsanto(TM) seedPods(R)
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally think it's polarized, and either the Pentti Linkola/Ted K way of thinking that the industrial revolution (or maybe even the agricultural revolution) were a detriment to humanity is correct and there is no turning it around within that framework, or all tech progress will reach an ultimately good equilibrium, though will be unstable and have mistakes along the way. I definitely lean towards the latter. Wh…
Regulation is violence? sorry for putting my socialist hat on, but free market is efficient, so efficient that without regulation it’ll optimise away human happiness and find a way to turn tears into profits. Regulation is basically saying that you can make money in ways that benefits the humanity also, at least in theory. Lobbying and corrupt regulators muddy the waters
One of the most fundamental limits on the market is the criminalization of killing other people, giving it a prohibitive extra "cost". This kind of restriction on the choices of participants is so incredibly well-accepted that we simply take it for granted, and seldom think about it as a "regulation" even though it is.
That regulation prevents CEOs from "rationally" deciding it costs less to assassinate rivals' employees than it costs to improve their product.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
What exactly does society even with a strong safety net (which I support) owe anyone? Universal healthcare? Yes. A method to enable people to have safe shelter? Yes. Even public transportation to get to jobs - Yes. I’m even in favor of affordable public college education. But everyone should be able to own a home? No. People today are living all across the country and not be homeless and the people who live in the po…
> But everyone should be able to own a home? No. Do you seriously want to turn this discussion into lower-class rental / apartment discussion? Okay, fine. Lets go there. https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea... Average rent in 1980 was $243/month. Average rent in 2025 is $1397/month. For those who cannot afford a home, life has gotten worse. For those who _can_ afford a home, their life has got…
But, rural America consistently votes for politicians and people who are trying to get rid of services they need the most. They are getting exactly what they are voting for and cheering right now.
They are actively opposed to programs that would make education more affordable and cheering cutting the department of education, the post office, internet for rural America etc.
Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is “affording a house” the marker of a success? I would say just the opposite. Owning a home decreases mobility and the ability to move to where the jobs are. That being said, the home ownership rate in the US is 65% and almost anyone who wants to go to college can via loans and scholarships. Only around 40% of people in the US have a college education. But that doesn’t mean that the other 60% are homeless and st…
Well inability to own a house was a major prelude to the 1930s economic and later conflict issues, particularly in western Europe (where it was more expensive in places like Britain to buy a house than even today, about 10-14x salary vs 8x today). House prices have been how they are now before: in the 1920s... (America is a bit of an exception because of all the expansion into California etc in the early 1900s). Male…
As I asked before, what do you propose? Rent control? Affordable higher education? I agree with that. But half of America as seen by the support of DOGE and the lack of support for student loan forgiveness of any kind don’t. America is getting exactly what they voted for - especially in the poorest, least educated states that vote Republican.