541–550 of 607 posts
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Give AI a medical license and all those critical health care jobs will literally disappear overnight.
It would require several breakthroughs in robotics and AI to automate a nurse's job. And then it would still be unlikely that this kind of automation is saving costs.
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In my humble opinion, money is a distraction most of the time when trying to understand economic matters. Instead it's better to take opposite view: looking at the flow of goods and services. AI will allow higher production of goods and services. If producing goods and services becomes cheap enough (and it's looking like it will become dirt cheap), then it will not take much redistribution for it to reach the masses.…
> and it's looking like it will become dirt cheap Why do you say this? How does AI helping us lower prices of goods?
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I hate this point, so what? It's not like the lower class in "pick you region of interest" can take advantage of this localized price disparity. The poor person is poor based on their spending power with respect to the local economy and its pricing.
Using this example: a computer was an unlikely purchase for a lower-middle class person in the US, but it wasn't totally unattainable. Many people in the US probably did it, and some of them probably found some positive return on that investment. That's not true of many "objectively" poor people in the world, who even if they could buy the computer, they might not have had access to electricity to run it.
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You can easily live a “lower middle class 1980s life” on minimum wage today. Find a 1980s apartment, an early 2000s used car, and don’t bother paying for TV, Starbucks, a cellphone, etc.
this is straight up not even true, and even if it was, you're ignoring the fact that things like cell phone and internet are required to function in modern society.
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GP claims their family was lower middle class not properly middle class. My family mostly traveled like kelnos family did at the time. Also gas prices in the 80s-90s were so cheap that it rarely made sense to fly over driving. We flew as a family twice as a kid because we were an immigrant family and we saved up to visit the country of origin but it was ridiculously expensive to take the whole family, so dad stayed h…
They said solid middle class not lower. My family was working class not even lower middle class. And even we flew a few times in the late 80s early 90s, and we had a (probably used) Tandy computer that hooked up to the living room TV. People have different priorities. We certainly couldn’t have afforded a current generation top of the line computer, and we couldn’t have flown every year. But an older computer and the…
Yes, obviously a Tandy or C64 in 1990 is different, but anyway this thread is beating a dead horse. I regret even starting it. It's the kind of off-topic nonsense that HN is filled with these days.
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Seven independent government agencies are still an arm of the same leadership. When complete organizational separation is introduced, the concerns you speak of go away. In the USA, the ARPA (you might recognize that name from the thing you're using right now) program regularly enables "seven" independent leaders to tackle a problem and this is widely considered a resounding success.
No real scotsmen
- If they do a good job with leadership, only one team will be necessary. Anything else is truly a waste.
- If they do a poor job with leadership, every team will fail. Any more than one is also truly a waste[1].
The latter is the most likely outcome, of course. Now, when you absolve yourself from the process then those points still apply, but now you have several leaders duking it out to see which one doesn't fail. But, for the same reasons, those leaders each only benefit from having one team.
[1] You could argue that all teams are truly a waste, but one team is necessary to show that leadership failed. That brings abstract value, even if it fails to deliver the intended value. You don't know until you try.
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this is straight up not even true, and even if it was, you're ignoring the fact that things like cell phone and internet are required to function in modern society.
They are only required for a modern lifestyle. Plenty of Amish manage without them.
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The Nordic model depends on sitting on an ocean of oil. > No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy. See Bernie Sanders! Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).
The "Nordic model" refers to the socioeconomics common in Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden), not just to Norway. It's about how you approach commons and common wealth. Any commons will do. It does not rely on oil resources per se. Let's say for the sake of argument it does depend on oil wealth, though. The US currently has something like 30x the proven oil reserves that Norway does (>20…
And 60x the population. And defends the world with defense expenditures.
> simply a 5% bite out of net worth
Once that door is open, there will be no end to it. Washington state enacted a 7% capital gains tax, and the next year raised it to 9.9%. Now they're close to enacting a 9.9% income tax.
> My understanding is that estate taxes generally have thresholds that have to be met before they kick in. Federal threshold is on the order of 10million, WA is 3 million.
If your estate is $1 billion, your estate tax will be:
35% of $997,000,000 + 40% of $990,000,000 = 74.5% effective tax rate.
> Sanders
said many times that billionaires should not exist
> that you can't take it with you as that you might have to loosen your grasp at death to render unto caeser.
You could take all the money from billionaires and it won't raise the general standard of living. You will also never have companies like SpaceX.
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No real scotsmen
Remember, when it comes to government — at least a democratic one — the people complaining are also the leadership. Think about it from their perspective: - If they do a good job with leadership, only one team will be necessary. Anything else is truly a waste. - If they do a poor job with leadership, every team will fail. Any more than one is also truly a waste[1]. The latter is the most likely outcome, of course. No…
The repeated movement of the goalposts here is only evidence of the no real scotsmen strategy being employed.