7 ms·
As an elder millennial, I just don't know what to say. That a once in a generation allocation of capital should go towards...whatever this all will be, is certa
by scroot 10mo ago
As an elder millennial, I just don't know what to say. That a once in a generation allocation of capital should go towards...whatever this all will be, is certainly tragic given current state of the world and its problems. Can't help but see it as the latest in a lifelong series of baffling high stakes decisions of dubious social benefit that have necessarily global consequences.
- PrairieFire 10mo agoagree the capital could be put to better use, however I believe the alternative is this capital wouldn't have otherwise been put to work in ways that allow it to leak to the populace at large. for some of the big investors in AI infrastructure, this is cash that was previously and likely would have otherwise been put toward stock buybacks. for many of the big investors pumping cash in, these are funds deploying the wealth of the mega rich, that again, otherwise would have been deployed in other ways that wouldn't leach down to the many that are yielding it via this AI infrastructure boom (datacenter materials, land acquisition, energy infrastructure, building trades, etc, etc)
- amanaplanacanal 10mo agoIt could have, though. Higher taxes on the rich, spend it on social programs.
- ayaros 10mo agoWhy is this so horrible. Put more resources in the hands of the average person. They will get pumped right back into the economy. If people have money to spend, they can buy more things, including goods and services from gigantic tax-dodging mega-corporations. Gigantic mega-corporations do enjoy increased growth and higher sales, don't they? Or am I mistaken?
- thmsths 10mo agoBecause the entire western culture has shifted to instant gratification. Yes, what you suggest would most likely lead to increased business eventually. But they want better number this quarter, so they resort to the cheap tricks like financial engineering/layoffs to get an immediate boost.
- panick21_ 10mo agoI'm not saying you are wrong that some redistribution can be good, but your analysis is simplistic and ignores many factors. You can just redistribute and then say 'well people will spend the money'. That's literally the 'Broken Window' fallacy from economics. You are ignoring that if you don't redistribute it, money also gets spend, just differently. Also, the central bank is targeting AD, so you're not actually increasing nominal income by redistributing.
- QuercusMax 10mo agoStock buybacks don't build anything. They're just a way to take money from inside a company and give it to the shareholders.
- panick21_ 10mo agoI don't know what that has to do with the point discussed. Do you think shareholder don't spend money, but employees do or something?
- coliveira 10mo agoThere are many ways of spending money in the population that don't include just "distribution of money", as it's portrayed nowadays. Child care, free and high quality schools, free transportation, free or subsidized healthcare, investment is labor-intensive industries, these are all examples of expenditures that translate in better quality of life and also improve competitiveness for the country.
- panick21_ 10mo agoThat has literally nothing to do with the point I have argued.
- 542354234235 10mo agoTake a million dollars, give 1,000 poor people $1,000 and every dollar will be spent on goods and services. The companies running those services and making those goods will need to have their employees work more hours, putting more money back in poor people’s pockets in addition to the money the companies make. Those employees have a few extra dollars to spend on goods and services, etc. Give a rich person a million dollars, and they will put it in an offshore tax shelter. That’s not exactly driving economic activity.
- coliveira 10mo agoBecause government is always a fight about resources. More resources in the hands of common people and to make their lives better is less money in the hands of powerful corporations and individuals, be it in the form of higher taxes for the rich or less direct money going to their enterprises.
- QuercusMax 10mo agoOne of the big issues is money in politics. Our congresspeople make a killing off of legal insider trading, they take huge donations from companies, and the supreme court has even said that it's cool to give "gratuities" in exchange for legislation or court rulings you like. Corruption is killing this country.
- 542354234235 10mo agoThe shift in the US to the idea of “job creators” being business owners is part of it. It was just a way to direct money to the already rich, as if they would hire more people with that money. When it is plainly obvious that consumers are job creators, in that if they buy more goods and services, businesses will hire more people to make or provide more of those things. Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.
- panick21_ 10mo agoThe framing of X or Y are job creators is idiotic. Its literally the most basic fact of economics that you need producers and consumers, otherwise you don't have an economy. The more economically correct way to express this would be that entrepreneurs and companies who innovated increase productivity and that makes the overall economy more efficient allowing your country to grow. > Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us. This just sounds like quarter baked economics ideas you have made up yourself. Neither 'trickle down' nor 'trickle up' are concepts economist use. And that you confidently assert anything about the social outcomes of these 'concepts' is ridiculous.
- phkahler 10mo agoLet's pay down the debt before increasing social programs. You know, save the country first. If a penny saved is a penny earned then everyone -rich or poor- is looking for a handout.
- amanaplanacanal 10mo agoThe only person who has come close to balancing the federal budget was Clinton. But Republicans still try to position themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility. If the voters can't even figure out why the debt keeps going up, I think you are fighting a losing battle.
- Atheros 10mo ago> likely would have otherwise been put toward stock buybacks Stock buybacks from who? When stock gets bought the money doesn't disappear into thin air; the same cash is now in someone else's hands. Those people would then want to invest it in something and then we're back to square one. You assert that if not for AI, wealth wouldn't have been spent on materials, land, trades, ect. But I don't think you have any reason to think this. Money is just an abstraction. People would have necessarily done something with their land, labor, and skills. It isn't like there isn't unmet demand for things like houses or train tunnels or new-fangled types of aircraft or countless other things. Instead it's being spent on GPUs.
- PrairieFire 10mo agoTotally agree that the money doesn’t vanish. My point isn’t “buybacks literally destroy capital,” it’s about how that capital tends to get redeployed and by whom. Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders, which are already disproportionately wealthy and already heavily allocated to financial assets. A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled into more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc), not into large, lumpy, real world capex that employs a bunch of electricians, heavy equipment operators, lineworkers, land surveyors, etc. AI infra does that. Even if the ultimate economic owner is the same class of people, the path the money takes is different: it has to go through chip fabs, power projects, network buildouts, construction crews, land acquisition, permitting, and so on. That’s the “leakage” I was pointing at. To be more precise: I’m not claiming “no one would ever build anything else”, I’m saying given the current incentive structure, the realistic counterfactual for a lot of this megacap tech cash is more financialization (buybacks, M&A, sitting on balance sheets) rather than “let’s go fund housing, transit tunnels, or new aircraft.”
- Atheros 10mo agoI really don't think any of that is true; it's just popular rhetoric. For example: "Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders" is obviously false: the shareholders (via the company) did have cash and now they don't. The cash is distributed to the market. The quoted statement is precisely backwards. > A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled That doesn't mean anything. > more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc) And do they sit on it? No, of course not. They invest it in things. Real actual things. > buybacks Already discussed > M&A If they use cash to pay for a merger, then the former owners now have cash that they will reinvest. > balance sheets Money on a balance sheet is actually money sitting in J.P. Morgan or whoever. Via fractional reserve lending, J.P. Morgan lends that money to businesses and home owners and real actual houses (or whatever) get built with it. The counterfactual for AI spending really is other real actual hard spending.
- ayaros 10mo agoI'm a younger millennial. I'm always seeing homeless people in my city and it's an issue that I think about on a daily basis. Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things? So many people are in poverty, they can't afford basic necessities. The world is shitty. Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power. Yeah, the world is shitty, and resources aren't allocated ideally. Must it be so?
- newfriend 10mo agoTechnological advancement is what has pulled billions of people out of poverty. Giving handouts to layabouts isn't an ideal allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization.
- johnrob 10mo agoInvest in making food/shelter cheaper?
- dotancohen 10mo agoFood and shelter are cheaper than at almost any time in human history. Additionally, people have more variety of healthy foods all year long. No matter how cheap food and shelter are, there will always be people who can not acquire them. Halting all human progress until the last human is fed and sheltered is a recipe for stagnation. Other cultures handle this with strong family bonds - those few who can not acquire food or shelter for whatever reason are generally provided for by their families.
- johnrob 10mo agoCheap depends on how we define the cost. In relative terms, food is more expensive than ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
- arisAlexis 10mo agoYes this capital allocation is a once in a lifetime opportunity to crate AGI that will solve diseases and poverty.
- edhelas 10mo ago</sarcasm>
- arisAlexis 10mo agoThis is literally the view of demis hassabis, Sergey brin, Mario amodei and others. Are you seriously implying they are trolling us?
- aeve890 10mo ago/s
- pezezin 10mo agoPoverty is a social and political issue, not technological. We have more than enough resources on this planet to fix it, but we don't.
- arisAlexis 10mo agoThis is a actually the fallacy of communism. It can never and will never be "fixed" like that.
- pezezin 10mo agoI won't be fixed by magical AI either.
- brokenmachine 10mo agoWe have 8.3 billion examples of general intelligence alive on the planet right now. Surely an artificial one in a data center, costing trillions and beholden to shareholders, will solve all society's issues!
- reactordev 10mo agoI threw in the towel in April. It's clear we are Wile E. Coyote running in the air already past the cliff and we haven't fallen yet.
- saulpw 10mo agoWhat does it mean to throw in the towel, in your case? Divesting from the stock market? Moving to a hobby farm? Giving up on humanity?
- reactordev 10mo agoAny dream of owning a home, having retirement, even a career after a couple years when it’s clear I’m over the hump. I’m trying to squeeze as much as I can before that happens and squirrel it away so at least I can have a van down by a river.
- ohhnoodont 10mo agoWhat does squirreling it away mean though? A pile of cash instead of investments? The reality is that you don’t get to throw in the towel.
- reactordev 10mo agoSPY/VOO/land with a river for the van. Probably working at the local Shell or 7-11
- jstummbillig 10mo agoI don't know what to do with this take. We need an order of magnitude more clean productivity in the world so that everyone can live a life that is at least as good as what fairly normal people in the west currently enjoy. Anyone who think this can be fixed with current Musk money is simply not getting it: If we liquidated all of that, that would buy a dinner for everyone in the world (and then, of course, that would be it, because the companies that he owns would stop functioning). We are simply, obviously, not good enough at producing stuff in a sustainable way (or: at all) and we owe it to every human being alive to take every chance to make this happen QUICKLY, because we are paying with extremely shitty humans years, and they are not ours. Bring on the AI, and let's make it work for everyone – and, believe me, if this is not to be to the benefit of roughly everyone, I am ready to fuck shit up. But if the past is any indication, we are okay at improving the lives of everyone when productivity increases. I don't know why this time would be any different. If the way to make good lives for all 8 billions of us must lead to more Musks because, apparently, we are too dumb to do collectivization in any sensible way, I really don't care.
- randomNumber7 10mo ago> I don't know why this time would be any different. This time there is the potential to replace human workers. In the past it only made them more productive.
- AlexandrB 10mo agoI think that's a distinction without difference. If one person can do the job of 10 thanks to automation, what happens to the other 9 who were doing that job before?
- randomNumber7 10mo agoYou can also produce 10x the goods with the same amount of workers or let the other 9 work in other jobs. The difference is that previously there still had been plenty of (low skill) jobs where automation didn't work. Pizza delivery, taxi driver, lots of office jobs with repetitive tasks etc. Soon there will be nothing for the average joe as the machine will be better in all tasks he could perform.
- anthomtb 10mo agoAs a fellow elder millennial I agree with your sentiment. But I don't see the mechanics of how it would work. Rewind to October 2022. How, exactly, does the money* invested in AI since that time get redirected towards whatever issues you find more pressing? *I have some doubts about the headline numbers
- NedF 10mo ago[dead]
- slashdave 10mo agoWell, at least this doesn't involve death and suffering, like the old-fashioned way to jump-start an economy by starting a global war.
- brokenmachine 10mo ago...yet
- 7222aafdcf68cfe 10mo agowhen the US sells out Europe to Russia, do you think the Russians will stop? That global war might be with us within a decade.
- skippyboxedhero 10mo agoCan you imagine if the US wasn't so unbelievably far ahead of everyone else? I am sure the goat herders in rural regions of Pakistan will think themselves lucky when they see the terrible sight of shareholder value being wantonly destroyed by speculative investments that enhance the long-term capital base of the US economy. What an uncivilized society.