261–270 of 296 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wild graphic. US spending on one flying killing machine (the F-35) is comparable to total spending on the Marshall plan to reconstruct Europe after WWII, or the interstate highway system, or all datacenters combined. Priorities!
I don't think that's right - the scale is logarithmic. The Marshall Plan is 20 times as expensive
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wild graphic. US spending on one flying killing machine (the F-35) is comparable to total spending on the Marshall plan to reconstruct Europe after WWII, or the interstate highway system, or all datacenters combined. Priorities!
I don't think that's right - the scale is logarithmic. The Marshall Plan is 20 times as expensive
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depreciation schedule: Tulips: weeks GPUs: 6 years Fiber: 20-50 years Rail, roads, bridges: 50-100+ years Hyperscalers closer to tulips than other hard infra.
What rail, road or bridge in the US lasts 50 years? The maintenance of rail over 6 years costs more than replacing all the GPUs in a data center, even at their current markup.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for…
That's definitely true for some of them, but for others it's not so clear, like the Apollo or Manhattan projects? Those of course also have lasting impact but it's more in terms of knowledge, which at least arguably we are also accruing with these data centers.
RS-25 - It was designed as HG-3 during the 60s for Saturn-V and manufactured for the Space Shuttle and refurbished for SLS and just launched last month.
Vehicle assembly building - Built for Saturn-V launches been in active use and continues today .
Crawler-transporters - Hanz and Franz were built in 1966 for Apollo and still used for launches.
There are plenty of other examples from Apollo program of actual hardware being repurposed and used for later missions.
In other mega space projects, Hubble is still doing active research, 35 years after launch, voyager is sending data close to 50 years later.
It is a whole another topic whether they should be used, how NASA is funded , and this is why makes programs like SLS or the shuttle are so expensive and so forth.
The point is these mega projects had a long lifetime of value, albeit with higher maintenance costs for the tech heavy ones like Apollo than say a bridge or a dam does.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet the homeownership rate in 1950 was 53% (an all-time high up to that point) compared to 65% today: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Housi... Only 80% of units had private indoor toilets or showers. It is notable that the median monthly rent was $35/month on a median income of $3000, so ~15% of income spent on rental housing. But it's interesting reading that report because a significant f…
What an interesting paper you found! Home ownership stats in contemporary times are quite misleading because of debt. Most home owners now are still paying rent in the form of a mortgage to a bank. In the 50s most home owners genuinely owned their homes 'free and clear'. The exact rate was 56% in the 1951 per your paper (which was a local low), and now it's at 40% which is a local high. And the contemporary demograph…
I suspect that it's a complex mixture of all possibilities, and you can only really look at trends and your own life - the one thing you can have something resembling understanding and control.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for…
I’m not sure tax depreciation rates are the best measure here. Those GPUs will be used for much longer than 6 years, and the returns from the businesses will be an order of magnitude longer.
Will it be worth the cost of electricity to run them if the flops/watt of newer chips is lower?
This seems like a total category error. The Railroads are the only example that actually seems comparable, in being an infrastructure build out that's mostly done by a variety of private companies. Examples of things that would be worth comparing to the datacenter boom are factory construction and utilities (electrification in the first half of the 20th century, running water, gas pipes.)
Fwiw, Railroads were the reason for some of the biggest bank collapses in history. Panic of 1873 was literally called "The Great Depression" (until a greater depression hit). 20 years later was the Panic of 1893. Both were due to over-investment and a bubble bursting, and they took out tons of banks and businesses. We're seeing exactly the same thing with AI, as there is massive investment creating a bubble without a…
It's just banks investing in private equity firms. So it's still banks, just by proxy, due to 2008 regulation.
I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an interesting paper you found! Home ownership stats in contemporary times are quite misleading because of debt. Most home owners now are still paying rent in the form of a mortgage to a bank. In the 50s most home owners genuinely owned their homes 'free and clear'. The exact rate was 56% in the 1951 per your paper (which was a local low), and now it's at 40% which is a local high. And the contemporary demograph…
I sometimes feel that the facts are all out there, but half the people pick one half the facts as causal and the other half pick the other half. Are home prices rising because people have fewer kids (and therefore more to spend on housing) or are people having fewer kids because house prices are rising (and therefore less to spend on kids)? I suspect that it's a complex mixture of all possibilities, and you can only…
Maybe a false dichotomy? My suspicion is that home prices rise because more credit becomes available (and not only homes prices but the price of other assets). If you think about it in broader terms this explains what happens to the fruits of our increased productivity - lenders extend more credit as productivity rises thereby claiming the benefit for themselves. The working person is still stuck with a 40 hour week because despite being more productive they have more debt to service.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPUs are consumables, not infrastructure. Model weights are the lasting thing. It's always like that with software. You can still run an OS or a program made 20 years ago, in some cases that program may in fact have no modern replacements available (think niche domains) - meanwhile, in those 20 years, you've probably churned through 5-10 generations of computing hardware.
This is completely false - GPUs are not consumables, they are factors of production. Models are technologies. Without the GPUs the technology is not accessible. You sound like someone who thinks they have a strong understanding of economics when they don't.
Looks to me like, as with a drill bit, a GPU could be reasonably classified as either a consumable or a factor of production.
This is because GPUs wear out and fail; the smaller the features, the faster electromigration kills them.