The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI • Hacker News Board

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#331

Post by bloppe » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #237

bloppe wrote: post #112

Earlier 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...

Actually, median is exactly what you want. It strips out outliers. It's the "middle of the pack" person. Mean is the one that would be skewed by outliers.

And "the poor are getting poorer" is simply untrue for the last 10 years. They had a pretty bad time from 1980 - 2015, but in the last 10 years, their real income has risen faster than any other quintile: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wages-over-t...

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#332

Post by scottyah » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

5aq9238 wrote: post #98

adverbly wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like if we want to avoid dystopia, our options are: 1. Full-blown socialism 2. Georgism Georgism may have been right all along!

Given that rich people often push Georgism, it looks like a trojan horse. Only rich people will be able to afford land. 3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel.

Only rich people can afford land now. The exception is some uninhabitable patches that would require you to give up your livelihood, except for the small amount of people who can work remotely and they can afford land already.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#333

Post by erelong » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

jmcqk6 wrote: post #280

erelong wrote: post #272

I've looked forward to the destruction of the credential system as it seemed "highly unjust" and like a top barrier to people's freedom (although it hardly seemed to be talked about as such). It locked people in to specific industries or locked them out in distasteful ways. So I largely view AI in a positive light as cutting out this middle man to some extent. The process might rather be: IQ → skills → heritable weal…

Credentials are a way to externalize trust. The trend with AI is to further erode trust. There will be a reaction against this eventually, and it's likely that more mechanisms to externalize trust will be found, not that they will become unimportant.

I think the problem is, compare credentials with reputation. A programmer who possesses no credentials might create "good" software that is validated as "good" even by those possessing credentials. However, a person with credentials related to programming, might produce malicious software that betrays the "trust" of the credential. Thus, just like the fallacy of the labor theory of value, credentials do not inherently relate to the production of heritable wealth. AI shines a light on this disconnect, and that actually the involuntary nature of certain credentials (as opposed perhaps to credentials themselves) creates certain classical impediments to the creation of wealth.

Thus, maybe credentials might be thought to be "necessary but insufficient" for achieving certain goals or validating trust. But even in this above example, the credential was not even necessary for the production of "good" software. AI of course simply exposes this truth as it gives more direct access to skills and knowledge to the average person: the (involuntary) credential was never necessary for doing some of these things, and we are able to remove the necessity entirely in some cases.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#334

Post by lostlogin » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #303

ceejayoz wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the world would be a much better place if travel was more common.

Having people see how other countries work on a regular basis really opens your eyes.

And then you have travel and expensive healthcare to pay for.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#335

Post by _DeadFred_ » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 6:02 PM UTC

ericmcer wrote: post #304

bix6 wrote: post #69

Earlier 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...

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 ti…

You are so close. The rich don't buy all the doctor visits, they buy whole farms/doctor practices and place a tax paid to them on every transaction. We are switching to a society structured for maximum extraction everywhere because there is so much capital at the top looking for places to park, and why wealth disparity is so bad for a society. The feudal lords got paid on every transaction and with the current disparity the rich are buying their way back to that system.

Poor spend money to survive, circulating through the system.

Rich park excess money in PE buyouts of previously owner owned dental practices, HVAC, rental properties, etc and 'optimizing' for maximum extraction. Some capital is needed to fund new things, but excess turns EVERTHING into rent extraction with barons taking their cut above all else.

More and more of the services/things in life are owned not by the person that started the business, but by the rich whose money 'is just bits and has no impact on the poors'. Rich don't compete for doctor appointments, they just extract more and more $$$ by owning every doctors visit, every practice, every corporate farm. And the poors can't compete. Hence you end up with a feudal system because of the disparity. The rich should have enough to enjoy a good life and to have freed up investment capital in the system to start new things, but not enough to re-convert society back to feudalism where they own all and get paid a percentage on everything, always, just for existing.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#336

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 6:07 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #334

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the world would be a much better place if travel was more common. Having people see how other countries work on a regular basis really opens your eyes. And then you have travel and expensive healthcare to pay for.

I’m also not treating these six weeks as a tourist. My wife and I both learning Spanish - she’s just starting I’m at around a high A2 (https://www.escuela-hablamos.com/en/understanding-the-common...).

We are involved in ex pat groups on Facebook, have gone to meet ups, and are having dinner with a few people we have met.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#337

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 6:10 PM UTC

qwerasdf5 wrote: post #228

bluefirebrand wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper prices don't matter at all when no one has any income due to all of the jobs being automated

If 'no one has any income', then prices become 0.

There will always be a relative few people with income. The business owners, property owners, asset holders, landlords, and so on. Those are the people who prices are set for, and who will participate in the economy. The rest of us? A lot of us are already essentially economically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and more and more are becoming so every day, even as they nominally get richer.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#338

Post by ceejayoz » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 6:11 PM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #305

ceejayoz wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. Substantially so, in my case.

Likely not for many, but I definitely did all this math annually.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#339

Post by ceejayoz » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #329

bdangubic wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both my wife and I have been contractors for decade+ and have been with Kaiser and are paying $1.1k/month for Bronze-ish plan (1 child)

How does that work if you have a pre-existing condition? I am honestly curious

ACA-compliant plans can't deny or change pricing for them.

It was a good change, but it needed the individual mandate to function successfully. That got removed.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#340

Post by bayeslaw » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #268

The opening paragraph bothers me greatly. "multiply a gaussian and a power law, the power law dominates." They literally are distributions of different variables, why would you "multiply" two different distributions that exist on different domains!? The example they're using as an opening is very wrong, it makes no sense and makes the author sound incompetent. Even if I get the point they're trying to make (if I try…

Cool, I'm a scientist too w a PhD and everything, I just don't make a big deal out of it - unlike you it seems. Granted, distributions don't get multiplied, random variables do. Funnily enough the essay's actual model (log(Y) = 0.35·zIQ + 0.45·zW + ...) is additive in log space, which is multiplicative in outcome space. The preface language is loose I grant you that but the formal model that appears later is well defined. Not sure what you want to say with a 2d histogram. We are modelling, not visualizing.