501–510 of 732 posts
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Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build.
How can inflation adjusted income be up and there still be an affordability crisis?
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That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies.
On average, most large cap stocks (MSFT, GOOG, AAPL, etc) are owned by millions of retail investors through 401Ks, mutual funds, ETFs, and direct ownership.
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how does the Linux kernel lack quality?
It did in the early days, especially up until 2.4 which was generally considered the first enterprise-ready kernel version. (You can argue about whether the old "enterprise-capable" definitions still applied but they were a benchmark for a lot of people.) Of course, lots of ancillary stuff too in userspace and outside the kernel related to filesystems and the like.
feels LLM assisted, at the very least. > The skill isn’t being right. It’s entering discussions to align on the problem > clarity isn’t a style preference - it’s operational risk reduction > The punchline isn’t “never innovate.” It’s “innovate only where you’re uniquely paid to innovate > This isn’t strictly about self-promotion. It’s about making the value chain legible to everyone > The problem isn’t that engineers…
I’m stunned at the reception this is receiving, it’s LinkedIn-tier slop.
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> If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits It's not greater profits but lower costs (and prices) that matter here.
Lower costs only translate into lower prices if sufficient competition is there. That is not true for many markets
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There have been times historically where that was true but all productivity gains have been captured by the .1% for the past few decades.
And someone don't need to look further than this quite interesting report by the Rand Corp: https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher i…
Total employee compensation includes things like the value of employer provided health insurance.
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Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build.
How can inflation adjusted income be up and there still be an affordability crisis?
Housing is only a part of the basket used to measure inflation. Housing's price rose faster than the weighted basket average, some other goods and services rose slower or even fell.
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Inflation adjusted incomes are up in the US across the board. The affordability problem is largely the price of housing because it's illegal to build.
because the developing world is producing a lot of things except the housing.
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> If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits It's not greater profits but lower costs (and prices) that matter here.
Lower costs only translate into lower prices if sufficient competition is there. That is not true for many markets
I'm all in favour of lowering barriers to entry, too. We need more competition.
Be that from startups, from foreign companies (like from China), or from companies in other sectors branching out (eg Walmart letting you open bank accounts).
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And they will have to go find another job instead. It feels weird but this is how we raise living standards - removing human labor from production (or, in other words, increasing the amount produced per human) Automation is a game of diffuse societal benefit at the expense of a few workers. Well, I guess owners also benefit but in the long term that extra profit is competed away.
> removing human labor from production Karl Marx would argue this evil because this take away the value and job satisfaction from the labour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Quoting Marx is a bit like quoting Aristotle or Ptolemy.