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The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

danielhomola.com

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

#371

Post by smallmancontrov »

metalliqaz wrote: post #269
smallmancontrov wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We fixed it before and we can fix it again. We need another Roosevelt.

Exactly how that may have played out in the last century could be explained by many, many chains of causes and effects. But it wasn't a great leader that made it happen. At the bottom of everything, I believe it was this: Decades of Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death destroyed not only capital but huge swaths of the labor pool. With labor at a premium, it became more valuable and power shifted. I think that without a…

Yes, economic disaster is the driver (tangential: a lump-of-labor supply shock was not the transmission mechanism), but big political movements always happen from the pieces lying around. Everyone can feel that a disaster of one form or another is coming. We need to make sure the right pieces are lying around.

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

#372

Post by _DeadFred_ »

bloppe wrote: post #367
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth. I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life. I…

I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue…

My example is representative of EVERY person I grew up with that didn't come from generational wealth. I guess if their parents died when they were young of a fluke you would consider them lucky, but what's the average lifespan for someone in the area? Everyone I knew would rather have had the option to live/raise a family in their home town than inherit a million dollar home in their 50s after they had to start a new life they didn't pick.

You can write paragraphs about how displacing people is fair, how kicking grannies out of their homes and auctioning them off because of tax debt (something that was happening) is the moral way. But you are still just talking around displacement of people to reach your desired end goal.

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

#373

Post by aerhardt »

z3t4 wrote: post #46

Changing social class has always been very difficult. The solution is to get rid of social classes. Or at least try to even out the difference between the lowest class and highest class.

> Changing social class has always been very difficult

It's been very difficult in part because 150+ years of Marxist tradition has not been able to define what a class is. Upwards social mobility by other metrics such as wealth and income, both intra- and inter-generation, is actually provable and real.

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

#374

Post by Yizahi »

Interesting article. People are nitpicking different issues but not many are addressing the core idea, and that idea I think is sound, regardless of the coefficients picked and so on. Inequality is rapidly increasing all over the world, it is cumulative and self reinforcing (people in power using their unequal wealth to pass laws making inequality even worse). Sure, maybe median income is steadily increasing. The enormous accumulation of wealth on top would quickly render income increase meaningless. Anecdote to illustrate - just yesterday someone took a photo of a new apartment complex (so already not a luxury segment at all) with an ad on a fence "new apartments for your collection". For "collection". So they already know who their market is - wealthy guys/corpos buying housing in bulk to flip for profit or rent. Today it's an isolated joke, tomorrow it will be a standard. Same with everything else - private transportation, above average education, even knowledge work would be a prestige thing.

Combine that with disillusioned poor strata electing right-wingers in hopes of solving inequality via xenophobia, but afterwards getting autocrats who are only interested in the personal enrichment and burning wealth ladder even faster, plus blocking any option to return to centrist government to preserve power (see Russia, Hungary etc.). The cumulative outcome of all of this is rather bleak. But median income will be a few percents higher, yahoo, amazing.

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

#375

Post by dag100 »

9rx wrote: post #364
dag100 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide). And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair tr…

> By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If the debt is never called, yes, that is true. However, most companies don't get that luxury. For regular poor people, eventually those who control those companies need to call the debt to get the food, shelter, etc. they need to live and, when possible, things like entertainment, vacations, etc. to make li…

You haven't responded to my second statement:

> And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.

According to you, any transaction in which one party A proffers a non-currency resource, and the other, B, offers currency, is in fact the signing of a contract in which B promises to provide the other party something in the future. However, A could then turn around and promise party C for its resources using B's promise - and effectively transfer this promise to C, which then holds the right to demand resources from B.

You are effectively just describing the fiat system of currency where B is the government.

Calling cash, which is fungible and transferrable, "debt", which generally denotes an obligation of some sort, obfuscates what your logic.

Once you pay Apple - ergo, transfer it IOUs that represent your promise to provide resources in the future - it has no way of holding you to your promise other than by giving you back your IOU or giving it to someone else. This does not square with the definition of "debt".

Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people. Of course a billionaire would not be able to "call all the debt [they have] accumulated". You're just saying that they maintain so much value that they can't ever trade it all for tangible goods and services. However, no-one except the government has to honour their request to trade their so-called "debt" that they have accumulated from others for actual resources.

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

#376

Post by 9rx »

dag100 wrote: post #375
9rx wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If the debt is never called, yes, that is true. However, most companies don't get that luxury. For regular poor people, eventually those who control those companies need to call the debt to get the food, shelter, etc. they need to live and, when possible, things like entertainment, vacations, etc. to make li…

You haven't responded to my second statement: > And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd. According to you, any transaction in which one party A proffers a non-currency resource, and the other, B, offers currency, is in fact the signing of a contract in which B promises to provid…

> Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people.

Quite possibly. But that doesn't actually matter because if they don't understand something they will ask questions until they do understand, just as it seems you now do. That's how communication works. It is bidirectional for good reason. I admittedly don't understand what you are trying to add with this. What are we supposed to learn from this?

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

#377

Post by guzfip »

deaux wrote: post #213
bluescrn wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than those who just want to burn the system down with no real plan for what comes next, and unable to comprehend the inevitable bloodshed of the 'glorious revolution' that they crave.

Do you comprehend the scale of the inevitable bloodshed that maintaining the status quo is bound to lead to? You don't do so any better than those you're chastising.

Most of them fried their brains with stimulants long ago. Thankfully for them, they no longer have to think. An LLM does it for them.

But it’s just the same idiots were rabidly cheering the latest JavaScript framework a decade ago, NFT’s and all manors or ridiculous things anyone with 2 working brain cells saw transparently though.

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

#378

Post by monknomo »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #358
monknomo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good way of thinking, and it suggests that breaking up large clumps of money and resources is a reasonable way forward

The problem is currency is inherently clumpy. While value is always judged and assigned to things, the existence of a static, cumulative ledger of it is not a requirement. It doesn't take a lot to recreate the capitalism to feudalism pipeline. If you have currency, small imbalances in resources and needs compound over time, creating imbalances in wealth. Imbalances in wealth provide the opportunity to leverage that i…

you give a nod to the solution. If we have an undamped oscillator, or a system with a tendency in an undesirable direction, we can damp it.

And currency (given that we make it up and have a reasonable degree of control over its worth and distribution) does not have to be a static cumulative ledger

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

#379

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bix6 wrote: post #369
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High deductible plans max out at around $10K deductible. But it’s the same cost in my experience low deductible vs high deductible + HSA contribution. The difference being that if you don’t need to use your HSA in a year you keep it - unlike low deductible plans.

Ah yes because the family making $40k/year can afford $10k in medical expenses.

In my experience the cost of a low deductible health plan is more expensive than a high deductible health plan + equivalent amount of a pre tax HSA.

I have never known a health care provider that you can’t negotiate a payment plan with. Even if your HSA isn’t funded, they could probably have a payment plan = HSA monthly contribution and then take it out of the HSA.

Yes I understand that a lot of people making $40K would be deftly afraid of doing that. But they would still statistically come out ahead

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

#380

Post by jmcqk6 »

erelong wrote: post #333
jmcqk6 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inherentl…

It sounds like you have a particular bone to pick though you're only doing it by talking in generalities in the OP, and now you're talking about programming credentials.

I don't know of any required credential to write software or be a programmer.

When I think about credentials, I think about doctors and lawyers. In both cases, I'm going to demand that the people I work with are credentialed, and there is no way that I'm going to change that.

Can you give a specific example of something that requires a credential today that you would like to see relaxed?

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