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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

#401

Post by matthest »

mft_ wrote: post #307
matthest wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 direc…

Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs.

Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time.

As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.

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

#402

Post by mft_ »

matthest wrote: post #401
mft_ wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 direc…

Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs. Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time. As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competi…

...in the US.

I was mostly trying to make the point that the cost of living crisis is global, affecting many countries, and that your US-centric view doesn't scale. Healthcare costs hitting consumers directly isn't global as most countries have totally different systems.

---

That said, your suggestion that the answer to rampant capitalism making healthcare unaffordable is more rampant capitalism (which you call competition) is... interesting.

And I wasn't advocating for Sanders personally or his policies specifically, just using him as an example of a conviction politician who might have had the chutzpah to take on and dismantle the business-lobbying-politics establishment.

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

#403

Post by matthest »

mft_ wrote: post #402
matthest wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs. Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time. As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competi…

...in the US. I was mostly trying to make the point that the cost of living crisis is global, affecting many countries, and that your US-centric view doesn't scale. Healthcare costs hitting consumers directly isn't global as most countries have totally different systems. --- That said, your suggestion that the answer to rampant capitalism making healthcare unaffordable is more rampant capitalism (which you call compe…

Ah ok sorry missed that you were talking globally instead of just US.

In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.

In housing, for example, NIMBY laws have for decades restricted all kinds of new housing being built. In capitalism, developers would be allowed to build. So we've very much had the opposite of capitalism.

Cities that are waking up to this and allowing new houses to be built are seeing rents fall across the board.

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

#404

Post by anigbrowl »

9rx wrote: post #346
anigbrowl wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make any sense. Apple has a pile of cash hasn't spent or invested = they have given away free product?

A debt never called is the same as giving something away for free, yes. Technically they can still call the debt, but the question remains outstanding: What do you have that they would want in return? The answer is effectively nothing, and increasingly so.

Who is the debtor in this case, the US government? You seem to think this is a brilliant insight but to me it seems like an empty truism.

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

#405

Post by swed420 »

tunesmith wrote: post #396
swed420 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool concept. Have you considered submitting a Show HN post?

haha. Nervous to. :)

Understandable.

For awhile now I've wished for a tool like this, except it would also incorporate previous discussions that match the same/similar node sentiments in order to encourage group dialogue that builds on previous discussions instead of mindlessly re-hashing them ad nauseam like you see on most platforms these days.

Also, breaking points down into discrete pieces like you've done is reminiscent of the pol.is platform that vTaiwan leveraged, except theirs was pre-AI with whatever limitations that would have brought.

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

#406

Post by dag100 »

9rx wrote: post #387
dag100 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't see any benefit in describing cash as "debt" and instead find it misleading as it implies an obligation to be fulfilled that doesn't actually exist for anyone except the government, and certainly not its customers. In fact, to address an earlier comment: > Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually e…

1. Well, cash is debt. Obviously all things in life are dependent on perspective, but the framing should be useful to separate the idea of a company seeking cash not because they want the raw silver, or what have you. If you try to think too hard about it you might end up confused, but then you ask for clarification and then are no longer confused. This is where I fail to understand what you are trying to say. We get…

1. Whether it is debt or not makes no difference so long as someone else will take it. You imply that Apple having cash means customers owe Apple something. I say that Apple having cash just means Apple could have something else in the place of cash in the future if someone chooses to take Apple's cash for it.

2. I disagree. An autocratic government is fully capable of issuing fiat currency, and a the government being obliged to provide resources in return for its currency is a concept orthogonal to democracy. It doesn't matter whose "debt" cash stems from. All that matters is that it can be traded easily.

Also, I updated my comment to point out more clearly where I disagree with your conclusions. (Apologies for such a late response. I hit HN's rate limit.)

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

#407

Post by phs318u »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #203
kjkjadksj wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upvoted this without reading. For me sometimes the article is just the spark for a far more interesting set of comments that overshadow it. And it is really that I am voting for.

That is certainly an interesting perspective.

I've done the same. Discussions on some subjects are worth having and so I will sometimes upvote because I really want to hear what the HN crowd - who are by and large pretty smart and have interesting perspectives - have to say.

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

#408

Post by wanderingpixel »

keiferski wrote: post #236

A thing I've noticed with AI-written articles (like this one) is that they have a difficult time articulating their actual point. They seem to be trained on what I'll call "Gish Gallop [1] bloggers", where the intent is just to overwhelm the reader with data and arguments, so many that replying to them all in a comment would take hours. This style is especially popular amongst the chattering-about-AI-classes, hence i…

> by the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs

Not to mention that physical jobs in e.g. manufacturing have been highly automated by "the robots" for decades

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

#409

Post by trolleski »

bloppe wrote: post #112
trolleski wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you denominate your income in silly money such as USD, then it won't go down, probably will go up! However if you start asking questions on how much housing medical and materials it buys, then I think it will squeeze people even more than now.

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 simply a 50/50 centrality measure. When you're dealing with a bimodal distribution you won't learn too much about it with median. So you need something else, e.g. Gini coefficient to characterize it.

As for the real, does it measure housing, insurance and medical as well? Does it measure the safety on the streets? Overall quality of life?

AI will strip what's left of the middle class to bare bones. And the tech lords will call it 'disruption', the fixated adolescents they are.

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

#410

Post by croon »

bloppe wrote: post #331
willis936 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a case to be made for "real wages" not capturing what they're meant to capture though, at least if you look at housing [1].

And this isn't even considering the productivity growth over time having a widely asymmetrical distribution, ie not captured by the median person.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-...

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