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Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

geohot.github.io

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Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#91

Post by zadikian »

theturtletalks wrote: post #47

> Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of t…

Amazon has brand value because both buyers and sellers trust it, aside from the shipping speed. An LLM can't evaluate trust for you, and it especially won't win in adverserial games like price haggling.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#92

Post by bluefirebrand »

jampekka wrote: post #45
1970-01-01 wrote: post #9

Let's not gloss over the electrical supply. These chips won't work for free.

LLM inference uses on the order of 1 Wh per query. That's under 10 meters of driving on an EV or running air conditioning for under 5 seconds. https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...

One query is not going to be a useful benchmark when people are deploying AI swarms in loops to solve simple problems

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#93

Post by lukev »

smeeth wrote: post #55

Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad. Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to. Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot wou…

Rent is charging money for access to an asset or property.

The P in IP is Property.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#94

Post by schubidubiduba »

solarkraft wrote: post #86

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They ca…

No. The market being free would mean that a private person can also hire Indians to call companies.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#95

Post by some_random »

>Not to mention the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved. Nobody should build an economy based on rent seeking and increasing friction. I pray the collapse will be swift and legible so that reconstruction (in the right way) can begin as soon as possible.

Insane take for a bunch of reasons, the destruction of the US economy would necessarily entail the destruction of the world economy. Hopefully I don't have to explain why that would be bad. Furthermore, a ton of the "rent seeking" Citrini Research was discussing isn't traditional rent seeking but the cognitive services previously necessary. Software engineering, for instance, falls into that bucket.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#96

Post by bluefirebrand »

brookst wrote: post #42

I find it amusing and, IDK, charming how “rent-seeking” has become a general purpose pejorative, like “bourgeoisie” was at one time.

More like "rent-seeking" has become a general purpose business strategy

Instead of selling products companies want recurring revenue from subscription. That's rent seeking. And look how commonplace it is now

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#97

Post by happytoexplain »

smeeth wrote: post #55

Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad. Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to. Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot wou…

People can make beaches. And they have.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#98

Post by lisper »

schubidubiduba wrote: post #94
solarkraft wrote: post #86

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They ca…

No. The market being free would mean that a private person can also hire Indians to call companies.

What is stopping them?

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#99

Post by [deleted] »

lukev wrote: post #93
smeeth wrote: post #55

Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad. Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to. Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot wou…

Rent is charging money for access to an asset or property . The P in IP is Property.

[deleted]

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#100

Post by lukev »

smeeth wrote: post #55

Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad. Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to. Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot wou…

Also, the defining feature of capitalism is that it encloses what was previously common.

Land used not to be owned (feudal lordship was functionally different than private ownership.) Then, society shifted, land became private, and that was the beginning of rent. This is enclosure.

The whole concept of IP is to explicitly extend this process to ideas -- they are not free, they are owned, and I have to pay you to use them. This is also enclosure, precisely.

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