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I'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 o

by ayaros 10mo ago

I'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 ago
Technological 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 ago
  Invest in making food/shelter cheaper?
  - dotancohen 10mo ago
    Food 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 ago
      Cheap 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
      - bryanlarsen 10mo ago
        Food is not Baumol, productivity increases is how we went from 80% of the population working in primary food production to 1%. These increases have not stopped.
    - estearum 10mo ago
      The US has built its physical infrastructure to make familial interdependence extremely difficult and often impossible. Too monotonous housing mixes over too large of areas.
      - dotancohen 10mo ago
        Large houses make familial interdependence extremely difficult? That doesn't make sense. Or did I misunderstood? I don't live in the US.
        estearum 10mo ago
        Most people don't have houses large enough to house multiple generations inside the house. Houses are sized for parents + kids. And those are the only dwelling units available or legally allowed for vast distances in any direction.
        dotancohen 10mo ago
        From what I've seen American bedrooms are far larger that the 12 square meter bedrooms that are normal for two or three children to share in my country. Grandparents don't need a separate wing, they need a room.
- droopyEyelids 10mo ago
  What if some of the homeless people are children or people who could lead normal lives but found themselves in dire circumstances? Some of us believe that keeping children out of poverty may be an investment in the human capital of a country.
  - newfriend 10mo ago
    The US already provides significant aid to those in poverty, especially children. We don't need to stifle innovation to reach some level of aid that bleeding hearts deem sufficient.
    - QuercusMax 10mo ago
      Do you really think that building giant datacenters full of accelerators that will never be used is "innovation"?
      - _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
        We need excess capacity for when the next 'rip off anime artist XYZ' fad hits. If we didn't do that, we would be failing capitalism and all the people of history who contributed to our technological progress.
  - dkural 10mo ago
    Anthropologists measure how civilized a tribe or society was by looking if they took care of the elderly, and what the child survival rates were. USA leads to developed world in child poverty, child homelessness, and highest rate of child death due to violence. Conservatives often bring up the statistic by race. It turns out bringing people over as slaves, and after freedom, refusing to provide land, education, fair access to voting rights, or to housing (by redlining etc.) - all policies advocated by conservatives of time past, was not the smartest thing to do. Our failure as a civilized society began and is in large part a consequence of the original sin of the USA.
    - estearum 10mo ago
- nativeit 10mo ago
  The proportion of people you write off as “layabouts” is always conveniently ambiguous…of the number of unemployed/underemployed, how many are you suggesting are simply too lazy to work for a living?
- QuercusMax 10mo ago
  Lots of people lose their housing when they lose employment, and then they're stuck and can't get back into housing. A very large percentage of unhoused people are working jobs; they're not all "layabouts". We know that just straight up giving money to the poorest of the poor results in positive outcomes.
  - limagnolia 10mo ago
    "A very large percentage" Exactly how large are we talking here? I have known quite a few 'unhoused' folk, and not many that had jobs. Those that do tend to find housing pretty quickly (Granted, my part of the country is probably different from your part, but I am interested in stats from any region).
- LightBug1 10mo ago
  It's not unthinkable that one of those "layabouts" could have been the next Steve Jobs under different circumstances ... People are our first, best resource. Closely followed by technology. You've lost sight of that.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
  In the USA cowboys were homeless guys. You know that right? Like they had no home, slept outside. Many were pretty big layabouts. Yet they are pretty big part of our foundation myth and we don't say 'man they just should have died'. Can I go be a cowboy? Can I just go sleep outside? maybe work a few minimal paying cattle run jobs a year? No? If society won't allow me to just exist outside, then society has an obligation to make sure I have a place to lay my head.
  - randomNumber7 10mo ago
    If you are not willing to fight for your rights you will lose them.
- sfink 10mo ago
  > Technological advancement is what has pulled billions of people out of poverty. I agree with this. Perhaps that's what is driving the current billionaire class to say "never again!" and making sure that they capture all the value instead of letting any of it slip away and make it into the unwashed undeserving hands of lesser beings. Chatbots actually can bring a lot of benefit to society at large. As in, they have the raw capability to. (I can't speak to whether it's worth the cost.) But that's not going to improve poverty this time around, because it's magnifying the disparities in wealth distribution and the haves aren't showing any brand new willingness to give anything up in order to even things out. > Giving handouts to layabouts isn't an ideal allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization. I agree with this too. Neither is giving handouts to billionaires (or the not quite as eye-wateringly wealthy class). However, giving handouts to struggling people who will improve their circumstances is a very good allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization. We haven't figured out any foolproof way of ensuring such money doesn't fall into the hands of layabouts or billionaires, but that's not an adequate reason to not do it at all. Perfect is the enemy of the good. Some of those "layabouts" physically cannot do anything with it other than spending it on drugs, and that's an example of a set of people who we should endeavor to not give handouts to. (At least, not ones that can be easily exchanged for drugs.) Some of those billionaires similarly have no mental ability of ever using that money in a way that benefits anyone. (Including themselves; they're past the point that the numbers in their bank accounts have any effect on their lives.) That hasn't seemed to stop us from allowing things to continue in a way that funnels massive quantities of money to them. It is a choice. If people en masse were really and truly bothered by this, we have more than enough mechanisms to change things. Those mechanisms are being rapidly dismantled, but we are nowhere near the point where figurative pitchforks and torches are ineffective.
- estearum 10mo ago
  Technological advancements and cultural advancements that spread the benefits more broadly than naturally occurs in an industrialized economy. That is what pulled people out of poverty. If you want to see what unfettered technological advancement does, you can read stories from the Gilded Age. The cotton gin dramatically increased human enslavement. The sewing machine decreased quality of life for seamstresses. > During the shirtmakers' strike, one of the shirtmakers testified that she worked eleven hours in the shop and four at home, and had never in the best of times made over six dollars a week. Another stated that she worked from 4 o’clock in the morning to 11 at night. These girls had to find their own thread and pay for their own machines out of their wages. These were children, by the way. Living perpetually at the brink of starvation from the day they were born until the day they died, but working like dogs all the while.
nine_zeros 10mo ago
> but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power. What you have just described is people wanting investment in common society - you see the return on this investment but ultra-capitalistic individuals don't see any returns on this investment because it doesn't benefit them. In other words, you just asked for higher taxes on the rich that your elected officials could use for your desired investment. And the rich don't want that which is why they spend on lobbying.
dkural 10mo ago
[ This comment I'm making is USA centric. ]. I agree with the idea of making our society better and more equitable - reducing homelessness, hunger, poverty, especially for our children. However, I think redirecting this to AI datacenter spending is a red-herring, here's why I think this: As a society we give a significant portion of our surplus to government. We then vote on what the government should spend this on. AI datacenter spending is massive, but if you add it all up, it doesn't cover half of a years worth of government spending. We need to change our politics to redirect taxation and spending to achieve a better society. Having a private healthcare system that spends twice the amount for the poorest results in the developed world is a policy choice. Spending more than the rest of the world combined on the military is a policy choice. Not increasing minimum wage so at least everyone with a full time job can afford a home is a policy job (google "working homelessness). VC is a teeny tiny part of the economy. All of tech is only about 6% of the global economy.
- jkubicek 10mo ago
  > AI datacenter spending is massive, but if you add it all up, it doesn't cover half of a years worth of government spending. I didn't check your math here, but if that's true, AI datacenter spending is a few orders of magnitude larger than I assumed. "massive" doesn't even begin to describe it
  - atmavatar 10mo ago
    The US federal budget in 2024 had outlays of 6.8 trillion dollars [1]. nVidia's current market cap (nearly all AI investment) is currently 4.4 trillion dollars [2][3]. While that's hardly an exact or exhaustive accounting of AI spending, I believe it does demonstrate that AI investment is clearly in the same order of magnitude as government spending, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually surpassed government spending for a full year, let alone half of one. 1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 2. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ 3. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/nvidias-market-cap-tops-4point5-trillion-on-ai-infrastructure-deals.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/nvidias-market-cap-tops-4poi...
GaryBluto 10mo ago
> 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. It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned. So many great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way.
- pnut 10mo ago
  Is that true, that it's money that belongs to people? OpenAI isn't spending $1 trillion in hard earned cash on data centres, that is funny money from the ocean of financial liquid slushing around, seeing alpha. It also certainly is not a cohort of accredited investors putting their grandchildren's inheritance on the line. Misaligned incentives (regulations) both create and perpetuate that situation.
- saulpw 10mo ago
  > It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned. "earned", that may be the case with millionaires, but it is not the case with billionaires. A person can't "earn" a billion dollars. They steal and cheat and destroy competition illegally. I also take issue with the idea that someone can do whatever they want with their money. That is not true. They are not allowed to corner the market on silver, they aren't allowed to bribe politicians, and they aren't allowed to buy sex from underage girls. These are established laws that are obviously for the unalloyed benefit of society as a whole, but the extremely wealthy have been guilty of all of these things, and statements like yours promote the sentiment that allows them to get away with it. Finally, "great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way". No. You might be able to argue that today's advanced computing technology wouldn't have happened without private capital allocation (and that is debatable), but the breakthroughs that saved millions of lives--vaccines, antibiotics, insulin, for example--were not the result of directed private investment.
- UtopiaPunk 10mo ago
  "It's capital that belongs to people and those people..." That's not a fundamental law of physics. It's how we've decided to arrange our current society, more or less, but it's always up for negotiation. Land used to be understood as a publicly shared resource, but then kings and the nobles decided it belong to them, and they fenced in the commons. The landed gentry became a ruling class because the land "belonged" to them. Then society renegotiated that, and decided that things primarily belonged to the "capitalist" class instead of noblemen. Even under capitalism, we understand that that ownership is a little squishy. We have taxes. The rich understandably do not like taxes because it reduces their wealth (and Ayn Rand-styled libertarians also do not like taxes of any kind, but they are beyond understanding except to their own kind). As a counterpoint, I and many others believe that one person or one corporation cannot generate massive amounts of wealth all by themselves. What does it mean to "earn" 10 billion dollars? Does such a person work thousdands of time harder or smarter than, say, a plumber or a school teacher? Of course not. They make money because they have money: they hire workers to make things for them that lead to profit, and they pay the workers less than the profit that is earned. Or they rent something that they own. Or they invest that money in something that is expected to earn them a higher return. In any scenario, how is it possible to earn that profit? They do so because they participate in a larger society. Workers are educated in schools, which the employer probably does not pay for in full. Customers and employees travel on infrastructure, maintained by towns and state governments. People live in houses which are built and managed by other parties. The rich are only able to grow wealth because they exist in a larger society. I would argue that it is not only fair, but crucial, that they pay back into the community.
amluto 10mo ago
From what I’ve read, addressing homelessness effectively requires competence more than it requires vast sums of money. Here’s one article: https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-texas-comparison/ https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-t... Note that Houston’s approach seems to be largely working. It’s not exactly cheap, but the costs are not even in the same ballpark as AI capital expenses. Also, upzoning doesn’t require public funding at all.
- gowld 10mo ago
  Houston has less homelessness than California because people at the edge of homelessness prefer to live in California than Houston.
  - amluto 10mo ago
    I’m not a person on the edge of homelessness, but I did an extremely quick comparison. California cities near the coast have dramatically better weather, but Houston has rents that are so much lower than big California cities that it’s kind of absurd. If I had to live outdoors in one of these places, all other thing being equal, I would pick CA for the weather. But if I had trouble affording housing, I think Houston wins by a huge margin.
- mrguyorama 10mo ago
  Wasn't houston's "approach" to buy bus tickets to California from a company that just resold commodity bus tickets and was owned by the governors friend and charged 10x market price? The governor of Texas bragged about sending 100k homeless people to california (spending about $150 million in the process). >in the Golden State, 439 people are homeless for every 100,000 residents – compared to 81 in the Lone Star State. If I'm doing my math right, 81 per 100k in a state of 30 million people means 24k homeless people. So the state brags about bussing 100k homeless people to California, and then brags about only having 24k homeless people, and you think it's because they build an extra 100k houses a year? The same math for California means that their homeless population is 175k. In other words, Texas is claiming to have more than doubled California's homeless population. Maybe the reason Texas can build twice as many homes a year is because it literally has half the population density?
ericmcer 10mo ago
The last 10 years has seen CA spend more on homelessness than ever before, and more than any other state by a huge margin. The result of that giant expenditure is the problem is worse than ever. I don't want to get deep in the philosophical weeds around human behavior, techno-optimism, etc., but it is a bit reductive to say "why don't we just give homeless people money".
- trenbologna 10mo ago
  In CA this issue has to do with Gavin giving that money to his friends who produce very little. Textbook cronyism
- armitron 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - _menelaus 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - holsta 10mo ago
      Many experiments have shown that when you take away people's concerns about money for housing and food, that frees up energy and attention to do other things. Like the famous experiment in Finland where homeless people were given cash with no strings attached and most were able to rise out of their despair. The healthcare professionals could then focus their energy on the harder cases. It also saved a bunch of money in the process.
    - denkmoon 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - knowitnone3 10mo ago
        [flagged]
UtopiaPunk 10mo ago
I don't think it is a coincidence that the areas with the wealhiest people/corporations are the same areas with the most extreme poverty. The details are, of course, complicated, but zooming way way out, the rich literally drain wealth from those around them.
- venturecruelty 10mo ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. Sorry you're getting downvoted. I visited San Francisco about ten years ago, and seeing a homeless person sheltering themselves under a flag or some sort of merch from a tech company really drove home just how bereft of humanity corporate power centers really are.
  - cindyllm 10mo ago
    [dead]
SequoiaHope 10mo ago
The Sikhs in India run multiple facilities across the country that each can serve 50,000-100,000 free meals a day. It doesn’t even take much in the form of resources, and we could do this in every major city in the US yet we still don’t do it. It’s quite disheartening. https://youtu.be/5FWWe2U41N8 https://youtu.be/5FWWe2U41N8
- selimthegrim 10mo ago
  They didn’t invent it but yes, they have refined it to a high degree.
IAmGraydon 10mo ago
The older I get, the more I realize that our choices in life come down to two options: benefit me or benefit others. The first one leads to nearly every trouble we have in the world. The second nearly always leads to happiness, whether directly or indirectly. Our bias as humans has always been toward the first, but our evolution is and will continue to slowly bring us toward the second option. Beyond simple reproduction, this realization is our purpose, in my opinion.
- jodrellblank 10mo ago
  Curiously, that is what I heard moments ago on Tom Campbell's theory of everything: https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=2629 https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=2629 https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=3000 https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=3000 He was a physics grad, did some experiments with out of body experiences, decided the Universe is a simulation for immortal consciousness to experience making choices and dealing with their consequences, and reasoned from there that the purpose of life is to get rid of ego and fear and learn to benefit others instead of ourselves. Quite how he got from one to the other isn't clear to me, or why it's physics related; the message seems to be a familiar religious one, deal with whatever struggles happen to you and try to be egoless and kind.
AstroBen 10mo ago
> Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things I suspect this is a much more complicated issue than just giving them food and shelter. Can money even solve it? How would you allocate money to end obesity, for instance? It's primarily a behavioral issue, a cultural issue
- brokenmachine 10mo ago
  I guess it's food and exercise. Healthy food is expensive, do things to make that relatively cheaper and thus more appealing. Exercise is expensive, do things to make that relatively cheaper and thus more appealing. Walkable cities are another issue. People shouldn't have to get in their car to go anywhere.
GolfPopper 10mo ago
The current pattern of resource allocation is a necessary requirement for the existence of the billionaire-class, who put significant effort into making sure it continues.

by ayaros 10mo ago

newfriend 10mo ago

Technological 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 ago
Invest in making food/shelter cheaper?
- dotancohen 10mo ago
  Food 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 ago
    Cheap 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
    - bryanlarsen 10mo ago
      Food is not Baumol, productivity increases is how we went from 80% of the population working in primary food production to 1%. These increases have not stopped.
  - estearum 10mo ago
    The US has built its physical infrastructure to make familial interdependence extremely difficult and often impossible. Too monotonous housing mixes over too large of areas.
    - dotancohen 10mo ago
      Large houses make familial interdependence extremely difficult? That doesn't make sense. Or did I misunderstood? I don't live in the US.
      - estearum 10mo ago
        Most people don't have houses large enough to house multiple generations inside the house. Houses are sized for parents + kids. And those are the only dwelling units available or legally allowed for vast distances in any direction.
        dotancohen 10mo ago
        From what I've seen American bedrooms are far larger that the 12 square meter bedrooms that are normal for two or three children to share in my country. Grandparents don't need a separate wing, they need a room.
droopyEyelids 10mo ago
What if some of the homeless people are children or people who could lead normal lives but found themselves in dire circumstances? Some of us believe that keeping children out of poverty may be an investment in the human capital of a country.
- newfriend 10mo ago
  The US already provides significant aid to those in poverty, especially children. We don't need to stifle innovation to reach some level of aid that bleeding hearts deem sufficient.
  - QuercusMax 10mo ago
    Do you really think that building giant datacenters full of accelerators that will never be used is "innovation"?
    - _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
      We need excess capacity for when the next 'rip off anime artist XYZ' fad hits. If we didn't do that, we would be failing capitalism and all the people of history who contributed to our technological progress.
- dkural 10mo ago
  Anthropologists measure how civilized a tribe or society was by looking if they took care of the elderly, and what the child survival rates were. USA leads to developed world in child poverty, child homelessness, and highest rate of child death due to violence. Conservatives often bring up the statistic by race. It turns out bringing people over as slaves, and after freedom, refusing to provide land, education, fair access to voting rights, or to housing (by redlining etc.) - all policies advocated by conservatives of time past, was not the smartest thing to do. Our failure as a civilized society began and is in large part a consequence of the original sin of the USA.
  - estearum 10mo ago
nativeit 10mo ago
The proportion of people you write off as “layabouts” is always conveniently ambiguous…of the number of unemployed/underemployed, how many are you suggesting are simply too lazy to work for a living?
QuercusMax 10mo ago
Lots of people lose their housing when they lose employment, and then they're stuck and can't get back into housing. A very large percentage of unhoused people are working jobs; they're not all "layabouts". We know that just straight up giving money to the poorest of the poor results in positive outcomes.
- limagnolia 10mo ago
  "A very large percentage" Exactly how large are we talking here? I have known quite a few 'unhoused' folk, and not many that had jobs. Those that do tend to find housing pretty quickly (Granted, my part of the country is probably different from your part, but I am interested in stats from any region).
LightBug1 10mo ago
It's not unthinkable that one of those "layabouts" could have been the next Steve Jobs under different circumstances ... People are our first, best resource. Closely followed by technology. You've lost sight of that.
_DeadFred_ 10mo ago
In the USA cowboys were homeless guys. You know that right? Like they had no home, slept outside. Many were pretty big layabouts. Yet they are pretty big part of our foundation myth and we don't say 'man they just should have died'. Can I go be a cowboy? Can I just go sleep outside? maybe work a few minimal paying cattle run jobs a year? No? If society won't allow me to just exist outside, then society has an obligation to make sure I have a place to lay my head.
- randomNumber7 10mo ago
  If you are not willing to fight for your rights you will lose them.
sfink 10mo ago
> Technological advancement is what has pulled billions of people out of poverty. I agree with this. Perhaps that's what is driving the current billionaire class to say "never again!" and making sure that they capture all the value instead of letting any of it slip away and make it into the unwashed undeserving hands of lesser beings. Chatbots actually can bring a lot of benefit to society at large. As in, they have the raw capability to. (I can't speak to whether it's worth the cost.) But that's not going to improve poverty this time around, because it's magnifying the disparities in wealth distribution and the haves aren't showing any brand new willingness to give anything up in order to even things out. > Giving handouts to layabouts isn't an ideal allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization. I agree with this too. Neither is giving handouts to billionaires (or the not quite as eye-wateringly wealthy class). However, giving handouts to struggling people who will improve their circumstances is a very good allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization. We haven't figured out any foolproof way of ensuring such money doesn't fall into the hands of layabouts or billionaires, but that's not an adequate reason to not do it at all. Perfect is the enemy of the good. Some of those "layabouts" physically cannot do anything with it other than spending it on drugs, and that's an example of a set of people who we should endeavor to not give handouts to. (At least, not ones that can be easily exchanged for drugs.) Some of those billionaires similarly have no mental ability of ever using that money in a way that benefits anyone. (Including themselves; they're past the point that the numbers in their bank accounts have any effect on their lives.) That hasn't seemed to stop us from allowing things to continue in a way that funnels massive quantities of money to them. It is a choice. If people en masse were really and truly bothered by this, we have more than enough mechanisms to change things. Those mechanisms are being rapidly dismantled, but we are nowhere near the point where figurative pitchforks and torches are ineffective.
estearum 10mo ago
Technological advancements and cultural advancements that spread the benefits more broadly than naturally occurs in an industrialized economy. That is what pulled people out of poverty. If you want to see what unfettered technological advancement does, you can read stories from the Gilded Age. The cotton gin dramatically increased human enslavement. The sewing machine decreased quality of life for seamstresses. > During the shirtmakers' strike, one of the shirtmakers testified that she worked eleven hours in the shop and four at home, and had never in the best of times made over six dollars a week. Another stated that she worked from 4 o’clock in the morning to 11 at night. These girls had to find their own thread and pay for their own machines out of their wages. These were children, by the way. Living perpetually at the brink of starvation from the day they were born until the day they died, but working like dogs all the while.

nine_zeros 10mo ago

> but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power. What you have just described is people wanting investment in common society - you see the return on this investment but ultra-capitalistic individuals don't see any returns on this investment because it doesn't benefit them. In other words, you just asked for higher taxes on the rich that your elected officials could use for your desired investment. And the rich don't want that which is why they spend on lobbying.

dkural 10mo ago

[ This comment I'm making is USA centric. ]. I agree with the idea of making our society better and more equitable - reducing homelessness, hunger, poverty, especially for our children. However, I think redirecting this to AI datacenter spending is a red-herring, here's why I think this: As a society we give a significant portion of our surplus to government. We then vote on what the government should spend this on. AI datacenter spending is massive, but if you add it all up, it doesn't cover half of a years worth of government spending. We need to change our politics to redirect taxation and spending to achieve a better society. Having a private healthcare system that spends twice the amount for the poorest results in the developed world is a policy choice. Spending more than the rest of the world combined on the military is a policy choice. Not increasing minimum wage so at least everyone with a full time job can afford a home is a policy job (google "working homelessness). VC is a teeny tiny part of the economy. All of tech is only about 6% of the global economy.

jkubicek 10mo ago
> AI datacenter spending is massive, but if you add it all up, it doesn't cover half of a years worth of government spending. I didn't check your math here, but if that's true, AI datacenter spending is a few orders of magnitude larger than I assumed. "massive" doesn't even begin to describe it
- atmavatar 10mo ago
  The US federal budget in 2024 had outlays of 6.8 trillion dollars [1]. nVidia's current market cap (nearly all AI investment) is currently 4.4 trillion dollars [2][3]. While that's hardly an exact or exhaustive accounting of AI spending, I believe it does demonstrate that AI investment is clearly in the same order of magnitude as government spending, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually surpassed government spending for a full year, let alone half of one. 1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181 2. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ 3. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/nvidias-market-cap-tops-4point5-trillion-on-ai-infrastructure-deals.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/nvidias-market-cap-tops-4poi...

GaryBluto 10mo ago

> 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. It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned. So many great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way.

pnut 10mo ago
Is that true, that it's money that belongs to people? OpenAI isn't spending $1 trillion in hard earned cash on data centres, that is funny money from the ocean of financial liquid slushing around, seeing alpha. It also certainly is not a cohort of accredited investors putting their grandchildren's inheritance on the line. Misaligned incentives (regulations) both create and perpetuate that situation.
saulpw 10mo ago
> It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned. "earned", that may be the case with millionaires, but it is not the case with billionaires. A person can't "earn" a billion dollars. They steal and cheat and destroy competition illegally. I also take issue with the idea that someone can do whatever they want with their money. That is not true. They are not allowed to corner the market on silver, they aren't allowed to bribe politicians, and they aren't allowed to buy sex from underage girls. These are established laws that are obviously for the unalloyed benefit of society as a whole, but the extremely wealthy have been guilty of all of these things, and statements like yours promote the sentiment that allows them to get away with it. Finally, "great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way". No. You might be able to argue that today's advanced computing technology wouldn't have happened without private capital allocation (and that is debatable), but the breakthroughs that saved millions of lives--vaccines, antibiotics, insulin, for example--were not the result of directed private investment.
UtopiaPunk 10mo ago
"It's capital that belongs to people and those people..." That's not a fundamental law of physics. It's how we've decided to arrange our current society, more or less, but it's always up for negotiation. Land used to be understood as a publicly shared resource, but then kings and the nobles decided it belong to them, and they fenced in the commons. The landed gentry became a ruling class because the land "belonged" to them. Then society renegotiated that, and decided that things primarily belonged to the "capitalist" class instead of noblemen. Even under capitalism, we understand that that ownership is a little squishy. We have taxes. The rich understandably do not like taxes because it reduces their wealth (and Ayn Rand-styled libertarians also do not like taxes of any kind, but they are beyond understanding except to their own kind). As a counterpoint, I and many others believe that one person or one corporation cannot generate massive amounts of wealth all by themselves. What does it mean to "earn" 10 billion dollars? Does such a person work thousdands of time harder or smarter than, say, a plumber or a school teacher? Of course not. They make money because they have money: they hire workers to make things for them that lead to profit, and they pay the workers less than the profit that is earned. Or they rent something that they own. Or they invest that money in something that is expected to earn them a higher return. In any scenario, how is it possible to earn that profit? They do so because they participate in a larger society. Workers are educated in schools, which the employer probably does not pay for in full. Customers and employees travel on infrastructure, maintained by towns and state governments. People live in houses which are built and managed by other parties. The rich are only able to grow wealth because they exist in a larger society. I would argue that it is not only fair, but crucial, that they pay back into the community.

amluto 10mo ago

From what I’ve read, addressing homelessness effectively requires competence more than it requires vast sums of money. Here’s one article: https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-texas-comparison/ https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-t... Note that Houston’s approach seems to be largely working. It’s not exactly cheap, but the costs are not even in the same ballpark as AI capital expenses. Also, upzoning doesn’t require public funding at all.

gowld 10mo ago
Houston has less homelessness than California because people at the edge of homelessness prefer to live in California than Houston.
- amluto 10mo ago
  I’m not a person on the edge of homelessness, but I did an extremely quick comparison. California cities near the coast have dramatically better weather, but Houston has rents that are so much lower than big California cities that it’s kind of absurd. If I had to live outdoors in one of these places, all other thing being equal, I would pick CA for the weather. But if I had trouble affording housing, I think Houston wins by a huge margin.
mrguyorama 10mo ago
Wasn't houston's "approach" to buy bus tickets to California from a company that just resold commodity bus tickets and was owned by the governors friend and charged 10x market price? The governor of Texas bragged about sending 100k homeless people to california (spending about $150 million in the process). >in the Golden State, 439 people are homeless for every 100,000 residents – compared to 81 in the Lone Star State. If I'm doing my math right, 81 per 100k in a state of 30 million people means 24k homeless people. So the state brags about bussing 100k homeless people to California, and then brags about only having 24k homeless people, and you think it's because they build an extra 100k houses a year? The same math for California means that their homeless population is 175k. In other words, Texas is claiming to have more than doubled California's homeless population. Maybe the reason Texas can build twice as many homes a year is because it literally has half the population density?

ericmcer 10mo ago

The last 10 years has seen CA spend more on homelessness than ever before, and more than any other state by a huge margin. The result of that giant expenditure is the problem is worse than ever. I don't want to get deep in the philosophical weeds around human behavior, techno-optimism, etc., but it is a bit reductive to say "why don't we just give homeless people money".

trenbologna 10mo ago
In CA this issue has to do with Gavin giving that money to his friends who produce very little. Textbook cronyism
armitron 10mo ago
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- _menelaus 10mo ago
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  - holsta 10mo ago
    Many experiments have shown that when you take away people's concerns about money for housing and food, that frees up energy and attention to do other things. Like the famous experiment in Finland where homeless people were given cash with no strings attached and most were able to rise out of their despair. The healthcare professionals could then focus their energy on the harder cases. It also saved a bunch of money in the process.
  - denkmoon 10mo ago
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    - knowitnone3 10mo ago
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UtopiaPunk 10mo ago

I don't think it is a coincidence that the areas with the wealhiest people/corporations are the same areas with the most extreme poverty. The details are, of course, complicated, but zooming way way out, the rich literally drain wealth from those around them.

venturecruelty 10mo ago
Thanks for pointing this out. Sorry you're getting downvoted. I visited San Francisco about ten years ago, and seeing a homeless person sheltering themselves under a flag or some sort of merch from a tech company really drove home just how bereft of humanity corporate power centers really are.
- cindyllm 10mo ago
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SequoiaHope 10mo ago

The Sikhs in India run multiple facilities across the country that each can serve 50,000-100,000 free meals a day. It doesn’t even take much in the form of resources, and we could do this in every major city in the US yet we still don’t do it. It’s quite disheartening. https://youtu.be/5FWWe2U41N8 https://youtu.be/5FWWe2U41N8

selimthegrim 10mo ago
They didn’t invent it but yes, they have refined it to a high degree.

IAmGraydon 10mo ago

The older I get, the more I realize that our choices in life come down to two options: benefit me or benefit others. The first one leads to nearly every trouble we have in the world. The second nearly always leads to happiness, whether directly or indirectly. Our bias as humans has always been toward the first, but our evolution is and will continue to slowly bring us toward the second option. Beyond simple reproduction, this realization is our purpose, in my opinion.

jodrellblank 10mo ago
Curiously, that is what I heard moments ago on Tom Campbell's theory of everything: https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=2629 https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=2629 https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=3000 https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=3000 He was a physics grad, did some experiments with out of body experiences, decided the Universe is a simulation for immortal consciousness to experience making choices and dealing with their consequences, and reasoned from there that the purpose of life is to get rid of ego and fear and learn to benefit others instead of ourselves. Quite how he got from one to the other isn't clear to me, or why it's physics related; the message seems to be a familiar religious one, deal with whatever struggles happen to you and try to be egoless and kind.

AstroBen 10mo ago

> Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things I suspect this is a much more complicated issue than just giving them food and shelter. Can money even solve it? How would you allocate money to end obesity, for instance? It's primarily a behavioral issue, a cultural issue

brokenmachine 10mo ago
I guess it's food and exercise. Healthy food is expensive, do things to make that relatively cheaper and thus more appealing. Exercise is expensive, do things to make that relatively cheaper and thus more appealing. Walkable cities are another issue. People shouldn't have to get in their car to go anywhere.

GolfPopper 10mo ago

The current pattern of resource allocation is a necessary requirement for the existence of the billionaire-class, who put significant effort into making sure it continues.