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This can't happen soon enough. AI is a vacuum sucking up a lot of capital and attention that could and should be put to much much better uses
by oldjim798 10mo ago
This can't happen soon enough. AI is a vacuum sucking up a lot of capital and attention that could and should be put to much much better uses
- barbazoo 10mo agoLike what? Do you have any insight into what money might be spent on instead?
- ishtanbul 10mo agoReal infrastructure and housing
- baq 10mo agoInvestors don't want 5x revenue valuations, they want 30x growth. Make 'real infrastructure' and 'housing' companies attractive products for investors to buy and they'll buy. (No idea how to do that, don't ask me! :))
- swexbe 10mo agoMost investors have more money invested in their house than stocks.
- AndrewDucker 10mo agoThat's the thing. You have to remove the unsustainable nonsense that looks like 30x growth in order for investors to be willing to invest in 5x revenue valuations. (If you have real things that are actually producing 30x growth then that's fine, obvs.)
- saubeidl 10mo agoMaybe markets that optimize for capital growth are just a bad way to allocate resources? Why did we decide that return on capital investment is the metric to optimize for, at the expense of everything else?
- baq 10mo agocapitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value. IMHO blaming regulators for not nudging capital in the politically desirable way is appropriate: either they shouldn't be regulating because they don't know how, or they're regulating according to a hidden policy instead of whatever they say. (cue 'why not both'.)
- palmotea 10mo ago> capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value. In practice, capitalism itself doesn't really promote competition, but rather competition is an externally-enforced situation required to keep capitalism from going off the rails. IMHO, capitalism naturally evolves towards monopoly (otherwise antitrust laws would be unnecessary).
- dragonwriter 10mo ago> capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed There is no need for hedging language, it is entirely weaponized greed. > but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value. No, its in a way which tries to remove constraints from the power of the capitalist class, and full enable their dominion over society -- that's what drove it and how it evolved from prior systems. The assumed existence of competition (along with other assumptions) making it optimal was a much later, after the fact attempt at rationalizing it in response to criticism, and actual attempts to promote competition were later yet reforms limiting capitalism, not part of its essence.
- danaris 10mo agoNo. We need to kill the idea that a) this is what investors should be looking for, and b) it's even possible aside from a 1 in 1,000,000,000 fluke. All of these economic instruments are supposed to be there to serve the needs of real human people, not just to make the wealthy even wealthier. We need to break this cycle of ever-escalating capital chasing capital, and get investment in things that will actually make people's lives better.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- waffletower 10mo agoI think housing might have some potential with federal subsidies, particularly in the container scale pre-fabricated home market.
- ASalazarMX 10mo agoMaybe investors shouldn't treat inversion like casino gambling. With their capital, they could make inversions (or even their own businesses) that grow slower but steadily.
- tharmas 10mo agoTax incentives?
- mike_hearn 10mo agoWhat is "real infrastructure", exactly?
- ElevenLathe 10mo agoAre you being deliberately obtuse? In case you aren't, the answer is roads, bridges, public transportation, electrified rail, grid modernization, utility-scale storage and solar. We need these things desperately, and instead we're going to get sheds full of video cards from here to the horizon.
- mike_hearn 10mo agoIf you want to spend your money and time building bridges for electrified rail, go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. Other people clearly feel they have enough of that and would rather invest in datacenters. Who are you to say they're wrong?
- ElevenLathe 10mo agoI say they're wrong, and I do so in my capacity as a citizen. These large pools of capital should not be allowed to follow the whims of a handful of unelected oligarchs who have clearly lost the plot. In a functioning society, this scale of decision would not be left to the whims of international finance capital, but decided via democratic means. It's unfortunate that the last scraps of the Fordist labor truce are unraveling, because it means that I and my comrades are going to have to discipline this generation of oligarchs just like our grandparents did the last really nasty one.
- hollerith 10mo agoSo, would you say that the money being invested in data centers belongs to the voters?
- ElevenLathe 10mo agoI would say it should belong to voters (or "society", or "the people", or whatever formula you want to use to express it), in a functioning society. Unfortunately, we're not in a functioning society, and it doesn't. On the other hand, property is socially constructed, so this political economy can be changed, though how exactly is left as an exercise to the reader -- I don't a foolproof answer.
- dwa3592 10mo agoHealthcare research to start with.
- schnebbau 10mo agoWe could go back to crypto and NFTs being the capital darlings?
- dymk 10mo agoThose did not suck up nearly the capital and attention that AI is. They were like GameStop and AMC.
- infecto 10mo agoBut they also did not create the same amount of value that AI is. Certainly there is hype but also value is being generated.
- dymk 10mo agoWhile I welcome the places where it is bringing value, I’m more worried about all the places it’s being shoehorned in that are a waste of money, fueling the bubble. The blast radius is going to be spectacular.
- oldjim798 10mo agoI have yet to see any value generated from AI. Just as useful as NFTs
- infecto 10mo agoThat is just absurd. You are stuck in your head if you genuinely think that is true. Reminds me of some of the “10x engineers” I have worked with in the past that were so arrogant they ignored reality.
- dzhiurgis 10mo agoThen financial system doesn't create value despite being like 20% of economy (crypto is perhaps 5% of finance system).
- 10mo ago
- tester756 10mo agoOn the other hand we've never invested as much in hardware & software optimization as we do now
- palmotea 10mo ago> On the other hand we've never invested as much in hardware & software optimization as we do now Fat lot of good that does me: all the client-side software I use is as bloated as ever.
- ASalazarMX 10mo agoBut, you see, programmer time is expensive, hardware is cheap in comparison. Incredibly cheap when it's your user's hardware.