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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#351

Post by crote »

deepsun wrote: post #327
Animats wrote: post #248

India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily. This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots…

Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.

Name one country which is fully self-sustaining.

Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.

Re: The dead economy theory

#352

Post by nickff »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #339
Galanwe wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money? 1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500. 2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game. 3) So you ha…

Facebook doesn't get the money when you buy a share of META -- that goes to the person you bought the share from. They could do an offering to raise money, but they aren't. They've been doing the opposite, they've been buying back shares at a significant rate. Some of it is to offset stock based compensation, and some of it is just stock pumping.

The high share prices do subsidize Meta's share-based compensation, which seems to make up a substantial portion of the total wage bill. High and rising share prices also allow Meta to purchase other companies with Meta shares, instead of having to pay cash, which is beneficial in many ways.

Re: The dead economy theory

#353

Post by notahacker »

BeetleB wrote: post #246
Zigurd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> later this year One can hope that reality intrudes before the bubble gets even more dangerously inflated, but how many years has Tesla had a ridiculous P/E ratio. Even after growth stagnated and market leadership was lost in Asia and Europe. Number still goes up.

I hate Musk, and I'm not going to justify Tesla's crazy stock valuation, but consider the following: Outside of China, Tesla's probably the only company that can compete on battery prices. I don't know how accurate it was, but a news report was comparing the cost the manufacturer's pay to build the battery. Chinese companies were around $6000. Tesla was at $7000. Everyone else was around $12-15K. This is why a number…

This assumes it is literally impossible for anyone else to reduce their battery costs to a level which makes them competitive with Tesla in an environment when battery prices are falling rapidly and the tech continues to evolve (and Tesla's EVs are not even unusually cheap or experimental in their battery supply chains)

That sounds less likely than the bull case Tesla is trying to make on "we're a robotics company now" or "one day all cars will be autonomous taxis controlled by us".

Re: The dead economy theory

#354

Post by theendisney »

unreal37 wrote: post #307
bauerd wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? What makes you think it's a simple system to develop at scale?

Cause it's developed. It's been a stable product for a decade. It's like having 10,000 construction workers on a completed building.

10 years ago i wrote a php web chat in 2 hours or so. I pretty much never look at it but the tinestamps suggest it always worked.

I could add more features to it and those will also work.

A friend once worked on an application with a huge team. He often pointed out the window at a large costuction site with a comparable number of people working. He made countless jokes about real work, a real system, real organisation etc Then one day the building was finished and their application kept crashing in production.

Re: The dead economy theory

#357

Post by fsckboy »

vitally3643 wrote: post #289
graemep wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work.

The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death .

>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death

false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.

doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.

Re: The dead economy theory

#358

Post by Henchman21 »

wcfrobert wrote: post #299

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…

The PKD short story “Autofac” seems highly relevant. Amazon had the HUGE BRASS BALLS to include this as an episode in “Electric Dreams”:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/

Re: The dead economy theory

#360

Post by Henchman21 »

rambojohnson wrote: post #330
tomrod wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't request for human dignity. Demand it!

But apparently the only acceptable way to demand basic human dignity and freedom is to stand politely in line with a ballot. I think we’ve reached a phase in society where the real call to action makes people uncomfortable. Nobody wants rubber bullets to the face.

If we’re not willing to fight for ourselves we don’t deserve life.
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