[dead]
The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
301–310 of 435 posts
Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.lmtribune.com/local-news/achilles-takes-on-risch... > By my estimate, about 60% of Idahoans don't earn a livable wage Sure boss it’s all fine and dandy.
And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho… Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.
Why are you so defensive of rich people?
Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.
Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not that much. https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/cost-of-employer-sponsored-h... A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”
It really is. The US saw an average of $14,885 per-capita healthcare costs in 2024. Higher now.
I’m never going to defend the American health care system as I sit in a country now for six weeks where I fully plan to become a resident of post retirement mainly because of the healthcare even if I don’t live here full time.
Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
#304The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel econom…
We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous. > Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...
What do they mean by "assets"? Is it securities in the form of stocks/bonds/etc?
If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes.
If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day.
The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.
Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I compared plans at work over the years, I’ve found that it is rarely cheaper to do low deductible/higher monthly costs than higher deductible /lower monthly cost + pay deductible out of pocket.
That will vary from person to person. In our case, we tend to hit the max out-of-pocket pretty fast.
Is that still cheaper than high deductible + HSA contribution to cover the deductible?
Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm ... there is definitely historical precedence for the article's assertions. There is also precedence for what happens when such a big wealth imbalance is present (spoiler: it's a revolution). This article is methodical in its points. Your retort reads like an easily dismissed hot take.
And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Humans are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than economic systems. The negative net is easy and very popular today but positivity is just as possible. It’s all about how you read data and there’s a lot of room for interpretation. If you’ve fallen for the doom that’s on you but calling something with so much historical prece…
>And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Dinosaurs are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than _______, hell, they were around 99 million years longer than humans.
Species go extinct all the time, most species go though all kinds of things before then, so there is nearly zero correlation between surviving something bad in the past and surviving something else bad in the future.
Modern humanity is not anti-fragile any longer like we were in the past.
Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous. > Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...
The cost of living crisis is almost singularly caused by poor governance, not feudal tech lords. NIMBYism prevents new houses from being built, driving up the cost of housing. Healthcare is for-profit, yet not allowed to operate like a true competitive market, with heavy regulations restricting providers to a few that the government favors. Thus it's essentially an oligopoly, driving costs sky high.
The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics.
Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.
Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
#308The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel econom…
There isn’t an alternative to allocating resources with money because money is a just measure of value. Things will get valued, relative to each other. Because different things are harder to make, or needed more. And it’s a whole lot better to measure that and make decisions informed than to not measure properly, or ignore those measurements, and watch resources get misdirected in a way that shrinks the economy. You…
I mean, if any argument on why AI would extinct mankind, this is the most likely. Humans make no economic sense to an AI that controls all intellectual and manual labor. What do most humans have to reciprocate? Why not use the resources it gets to build more AI?
Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho… Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.
Why are you so defensive of rich people? Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.
I am not defending rich people - that would be the people who defend the current President and his cronies like in Idaho who support him and voted for him 70%
It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.
Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what the "real" in "median real income" means. It measures how much stuff you can buy, not how much currency you have. And it's been going up relatively reliably: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n
Median is obviously flawed here. What should be looked at is wealth distribution. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and anyone with any power is doing their best to accelerate this trend. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
No, the poor are also getting richer: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107
You're looking at what percent of the total wealth pie do the poor get. But the pie itself is growing, and so is _everyones_ slice of the pie.
Maybe you think its an inherent problem that some people get a bigger percent of the pie than others. But its objectively untrue to say that the poor are getting poorer.