431–440 of 752 posts
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> All this means is there are enough buyers who can afford 2,800 sqft houses to keep builders from wasting a lot on a 1,600 sqft house. So there's a limited supply of lots (or of permission to use those lots).
Exactly. Zoning laws affect lot sizes, remove them as in Houston or most other countries and the problem disappears.
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I mean that I know of first hand, just the US and Japan. "Possible" being a low bar that just means that I've seen it at least once. I don't think data with all of those factors (household income, number of earners per household, gender of the earners, home ownership, and number of children) exists for any country. Do you have data like that for 1960s America or is your argument based on extrapolations from watching…
I have seen it all across the EU. Is pretty doable (granted, you have a University title). But you can absolutely buy a home and have a couple of children which will have absolute all they need.
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> If huge swaths of office workers are suddenly and permanently unemployed, who's going to be hiring all these tradesmen? "Professionals were 57.8 percent of the total workforce in 2023, with 93 million people working across a wide variety of occupations" [1]. A reasonable worst-case scenario leaves about half of the workforce intact as is. We'd have to assume AI creates zero new jobs or industries, and that none of…
>We'd have to assume AI creates zero new jobs or industries Zero American jobs, sure. It's clear that these american industries don't want to invest in America. >They won't. They never have. not permanent, but trends don't look good. It doesnt' remain permanent because mass unemployment becomes a huge political issue at some point. As is it now among Gen Z who's completely pivoted in the course of a year.
Were there less weavers with machines now doing the job (or whatever?). Sure. But it balances out. It’s just bumpy.
The big change here is that it’s hitting so many industries at once, but that already happened with the personal computer.
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UBI correctly identifies the problem (people can’t afford housing/clothing/food without money) but is an inefficient solution imo. If we want people to have those things, we should simply give them to them.
the main problem with UBI is it makes people even more dependent on the state, and therefore more easy to control by said state.
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> That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. I'm skeptical of this explanation for falling birthrates just because birthrates are falling across the world and there seems to be no correlation between fertility and financial security. America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates. Hung…
Birth rates correlate negatively with education of women. I read somewhere that this is one of the most robust findings in all of social science (and when I asked Gemini just now whether there was such a correlation, it said the same).
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Clearly, a lot of people here disagree with you. Doesn't mean you cannot be right, but in general, the HN crowd is a pretty good predictor of the trends in the tech industry.
The mass is usually wrong on predicting these kinds of events. I don't see why HN is any different than Reddit group think.
Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.
There are at least a few stories from the 90s where companies that readily could have invested in “getting online” instead decided that it would only harm their existing business. The hype at the time was extraordinary to be sure, but after the dust settled the internet did change the shape of the world. Nobody can really know what things will look like in 10 years, but if you have the capital to deploy and any convi…
100% true. Do not invest trillions on such an uncertainty in the long term is always a bad investment.
> but if you have the capital to deploy and any conviction at all that this might be a sea-change moment, it seems foolish to not pursue it.
Gamblers argument: "But what if this is the winning ticket?"
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Clearly, a lot of people here disagree with you. Doesn't mean you cannot be right, but in general, the HN crowd is a pretty good predictor of the trends in the tech industry.
Bitcoin is going to be the next universal payment system anytime now...
Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon will get through easily. They don't have excessive debt. They can afford to lose their investments into AI. Their valuations will take a hit. Nvidia will lose revenue and profits, stock will go down by 60% or more, but it will also survive. Oracle will likely fail. It funded its AI pivot with debt. The Debt-to-Revenue ratio is 1.77, the Debt-to-Equity ratio D/E is 520, and it has a…
OpenAI, Anthropic, and others will be bought for cents on the dollar. OpenAI is existential threat to all big tech including Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple. Hence, they're all spending lavishly right now to not get left behind. Meta --> GenAI Content creation can disrupt Instagram. ChatGPT likely has more data on a person than Instagram does by now for ads. 800 million daily active users for ChatGPT already. Google -…
AI isn’t bullshit, but selling access to a proprietary model has certainly not been proven as a business model yet.
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If the AI bubble pops it's just another bubble like the many ones that have occurred throughout history and the market eventually recovers. In the AGI Succeeds scenario, the situation is unprecedented and it's not clear how it ever gets better.
Tbh, the answer is simple: if we truly get AGI, the government would nationalize it because it's a matter of national security and prosperity for that matter. Everything will change forever. Agriculture, Transportation, Health... Breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough. The country would hold the actual key to solve almost any problem.
In the Classical Period, it was the citizen soldiers of Rome and Greece, at least in the west. These produced the ancient republics and proto-democracies.
Later replaced by professional standing armies under people like Alexander and the Ceasars. This allowed kings and emperors.
In the Early to Mid Medieaval time, they were replaced by knights, elites who allowed a few men to defeat commoners many times their number. This caused feudalism.
Near the end of the period, pikes and crossbows and improved logistic systems shifted power back to central governments, primarily kings/emperors.
Then, with rifles, this swung the pendulum all the way back to citizen soldiers between the 18th and early 20th century, which brought back democracies and republics.
Now the pendulum is going in the opposite direction. Technology and capital distribution has already effectively moved a lot of power back to an oligarchic elite.
And if full AGI combined with robots more physically capable than humans, it can swing all the way. In principle a single monarch could gain monopoly of violence over an entire country.
Do not take for granted that our current undertanding of what the government is, is going to stay the same.
Some kind of merger between capital and power seems likely, where democratic elections quickly become completely obsolete.
Once the police and military have been mostly automated, I don't think our current system is going to last very long.