5 ms·

it's almost telling how Super Bowl commercials tell the mood of the country's population and economy latest edition was A.I, prediction markets, GLP-1s -- all

• jonas21 9mo ago
  What do AI or GLP-1s have to do with a casino economy?
  • unethical_ban 9mo ago
    AI, being a boom with a lot of companies trying to make something out of nothing. GLP, not sure.
    • bawolff 9mo ago
      I don't really agree, but you could argue that GLP is targeting people who want a magic solution just like casinos.
      • toomuchtodo 9mo ago
        GLP-1s target humans who need a pharma intervention to assist in making their reward center in their brain more defensive against the system they are forced to exist in. We don’t need ads for it, we should hand it out over the counter to anyone who wants or needs it, but I digress.
        • kakacik 9mo ago
          Which evil system do they live in? Veggies are the cheapest stuff I can find in supermarkets anywhere. I agree their reward systems are fried, but thats a result of decades of over-eating on the worst junk mankind ever produced, while this whole 'evil system' screams on them from all sides how stupid and suicidal this is, how sugar is same as cocaine and so on. Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland this is general consensus among doctors and I have one for wife), and an attempt to solve it anywhere else down the decision line apart from the head is just (temporarily, in case of glp) fixing the consequences.
          • birthdaywizard 9mo ago
            Not every gas station, convenience store and pharmacy is stocked with aisle after aisle of cocaine. I don't know I would call it 'evil' but I agree it is a system most people are forced to exist in. If we're appealing to authority, my mother, my father, and my sister are all highly accomplished doctors, and they believe GLP-1s will become part of a standard drug package to older adults like Statins because it's far more achievable than education we don't have and wouldn't work in the food system that exists in the US.
          • autoexec 9mo ago
            > Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland Ah, that might explain why you'd think that healthy food is easily available and affordable everywhere. I haven't seen what stores are like in Switzerland for myself, but it sure sounds like a massive improvement and may be part of why the obesity rate there is around 10% instead of over 40% like it is here.
          • array_key_first 9mo ago
            > Its all a mental problem Yes, so let's just solve it. Okay, no more mental problem. What's that? I didn't actually say a solution? Yeah, that's because I don't have one, and neither do you. We can't just make people good people. It doesn't work, it's never worked, and it will never work. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. If you still think otherwise, you should think less because obviously it's not doing you any good. We can sit here alllll day and tell people not to inject heroine or smoke cigarettes. But guess what? So long as the human brain is how it is, and we have those things available, people WILL continue to do them. So while you have fake solutions you've made up in your head and can't even articulate, we have real solutions. GLP-1s. They work, as in they actually work. They actually help solve the problem. So on one hand, you have an imaginary solution. On the other hand, you have a real solution. Hmm, which one should we gravitate towards? What a tough call!
      • polski-g 9mo ago
        But GLP-1's are a magic solution...
        • Izikiel43 9mo ago
          Yeah, it's actually revolutionary if you think about it, easy loss weight vs previous approaches, and it seems to help with smoking/alcohol as well. The side effects are minor compared to the wins.
  • thrance 9mo ago
    The last times so many tech ads made their way to the Superbowl was during the crypto craze and the dot-com bubble. These are symptoms of an overly speculative economy.
• saubeidl 9mo ago
  >the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity > because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building What you're describing is referenced to as Fictitious Capital in Marxist thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_capital
  • schmidtleonard 9mo ago
    Brains turn off if you say Voldemort's name out loud. These ideas need to be rediscovered and rebranded.
    • saubeidl 9mo ago
      Personally, I think it's better to normalize and point out there are a lot of valid points made. But I suppose change needs both strategies.
      • 1-more 9mo ago
        Every business leader who makes money is a Marxian! Capturing the surplus value of the labor of others is how a business makes money and that is a value neutral statement.
    • Terr_ 9mo ago
      In some of those circles, you can play a little game of using statements from Adam Smith, and seeing which ones draw knee-jeek criticism as "Marxist."
      • dlisboa 9mo ago
        Same for Keynes.
      • mothballed 9mo ago
        Adam Smith had a bit of a Marxist view (though, he did come up with it first) on the land value of real property, considering deriving rent from it as "unearned" without labor, which looks a little too close to comfort to appealing to what we would call today the "labor theory of value" which we now know is a largely useless device for creating or observing markets intended to provide voluntary ~free exchange of the fruits of capital and labor. Most modern capitalist views do not subscribe to labor theory of value or "earned" value. Though views on landlordism do originate more with Smith than with Marx, it's not wrong to also attribute many of those thoughts to Marx.
• mothballed 9mo ago
  I don't gamble to become a winner, I gamble to keep myself break even desperately trying to hold to some asset that isn't inflated into oblivion by misinformed economic and fiscal policy.
• anonymars 9mo ago
  I think this illustrates another pernicious effect of excessive inequality: where does it lure talent? The best and brightest, lured [to] speculation to ads to blockchain to AI to... Edit: clearer word choice
  • saubeidl 9mo ago
    Yup, it's the tragedy of the system we have set up. There's a potentially civilization-ending disasters looming over us (the climate crisis, increasing escalation between the major powers, rising risk of insurrection due to mismanagement and inequality) and what are the smartest people of our time doing? Making sure you click that damn ad or create technology that lets you create slop ads more easily.
    • kilroy123 9mo ago
      To be fair, I'd rather have smart people pursue AI and LLMs than ad tech.
      • yifanl 9mo ago
        They're one and the same. https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/ https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/
      • dgb23 9mo ago
        That's mixing up the tool with what it is used for.
      • kakacik 9mo ago
        Ad tech is annoying at worst, it doesn't take literally your job and most of job market with it. Without any seemingly easy way to move to fields which are booming so overall it would stay the same. I hate ads with passion for past 20 years and (very) actively avoid them at all costs, but I'd take those over what world llms seem to be bringing in soon.
      • throwawayqqq11 9mo ago
• niggernagger 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• giantg2 9mo ago
  "because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building" Executives won't build on-shore capacity when they'll just get undercut by off-shore shops. It's less risky to just outsource.
  • criddell 9mo ago
    Isn't that one reason for tariffs? VW, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda, Subaru, Nissan, and Kia all have some US or Canadian factories.
    • alistairSH 9mo ago
      Yes, in theory. But, there are at least three problems with that... 1. Tariffs are frequently not targeted/precise enough, so come with lots of side effects. 2. Other countries retaliate, leading to trade wars and economic disruptions in both places. 3. Lower prices are usually better for local consumers - it leaves them with more money to buy other stuff. And tariffs do the opposite, as they are rarely 100% absorbed by the manufacturer.
    • giantg2 9mo ago
      Yeah, tariffs can be one part of it, especially things like anti-dumping. But there is no tariff for outsourcing virtual work. The US outsources something like 300k jobs per year, and tariffs won't fix that.
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
• ls612 9mo ago
  ??? How are AI and GLP medications in the same category as Kalshi or sports betting? One is (economically at any rate) a tool to produce code and the other is a weight loss drug that actually works. Neither are a “casino” in any meaningful sense.
  • irishcoffee 9mo ago
    Nit: One is an appetite suppressant, not a weight-loss drug. It doesn't burn fat, your body does that part. You just eat less.
    • SanDiegoSun 9mo ago
      Incorrect, newer GLP's upregulate metabolism and increase insulin sensitivity by acting as agonists on GIP and Glucagon receptors. Please don't comment on pharmacodynamics without a solid understanding of the underlying mechanisms.
      • irishcoffee 9mo ago
        Which in turn regulates (suppresses) appetite. Please don’t be a dick.
• dlisboa 9mo ago
  I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out". People trying all sorts of moonshot ideas in crypto, day trading, live streaming, etc. The idea of slowly chipping away and climbing the social leader seems very distant from what I see.
  • zingababba 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    • alphawhisky 9mo ago
      It's like you took a coherent and reasonable comment and added the words "H1B", and "DEI". It's just nepotism in different flavors, all the way down.
    • Larrikin 9mo ago
      It must be so tough for you being white
      • zingababba 8mo ago
        I'm Indian
  • NoGravitas 9mo ago
    A lot of it is simply the rising price of housing and stagnating wages meaning that for a lot of people, the "chipping away" path their parents took toward home ownership is never going to bear fruit. Gambling and grifts of one kind or another are seen as the only alternative.
  • autoexec 9mo ago
    > I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out". However bad their odds are gambling it's often the case that it's still the best chance they'll ever have to meaningfully improve their standard of living.
• jaredklewis 9mo ago
  GLP-1s are miracle drugs that (to my mind) seem one of the great accomplishments of medicine along side things like vaccines and antibiotics. They are a cure for all manner of metabolic conditions. How are they a “gamble?” For patients, their efficacy rates are stunning. If you meant from an investing perspective, Eli Lilly and novo nordisk have very down to earth valuations when compared with AI companies.
  • Balgair 9mo ago
    I agree that their large scale rollout will be very beneficial on the whole. The US is absurdly overweight and obese. But these are powerful medications that affect very highly conserved areas of tetrapod biology. We discovered GLPs in the mouths of gila monsters, after all. So you then can infer that that the mechanism is at least 300 million years old (our last common ancestor with lizards). Actually, I tried looking this up, and glucagon is likely 5-600 million years old, back to all chordates, the Cambrian explosion essentially, though likely even before that. So, incredibly conserved. Like, if you are a multicellular animal, odds are you have some glucagon-like thing for digestion regulation.[0] We're strongly messing with a system that is just tremendously old. Biology and evolution are ruthless about this stuff, it edits it out as fast as it possibly can. That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully. Like, clearly, other countries do not have these issues with weight. Yes, they are developing them, I know. But even the US didn't have these issues near as bad just two generations ago, a blink in biological terms. You and I both know that the solution is not a pill, but the root cause of the obesity epidemic itself. These injections and pill are just band-aids for a much deeper and more pernicious problem. But then again, you and I both know that we're not going to get at the root cause anytime soon either. [0] This is biology so you'll find exceptions everywhere though
    • Izikiel43 9mo ago
      > Biology and evolution are ruthless about this stuff, it edits it out as fast as it possibly can. That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully. As long as you have descendants, biology and evolution don't care, once that's done it's game over for them. > That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully. It's been tested for over 20 years, the weight loss bit is the recent one. > other countries do not have these issues with weight. Yes they do, some are much worse than the US (https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/ https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/), there are a lot of countries above 30% obesity rate. > both know that the solution is not a pill It's part of the solution, is how you help existing people with the issue. Doing a restrictive diet is not easy (I know, I've been dieting since october, lost 15 pounds, but I can go on autopilot for this, which is not the case for others), it requires a lot of discipline that most people don't have, and our bodies are optimized to store calories, as well as being very efficient in consuming them, because for most of history famines were common, last ~100 years being the exception to the rule for most of the world population. Future generations can be helped by better food culture and education, and that's the other part of the solution, long term.
• jselysianeagle 9mo ago
  > GLP-1s How do GLP-1s indicate a casino economy?
• yndoendo 9mo ago
  I would say the consolidation of small banks into the big banks has fostered this more the people want to admit. Since banks like Wells Fargo bought up local ones, the equality distribution changes dramatically. Wells Fargo wants the big players while that little bank wanted local players. This causes the market to lack marbling in competition while creating a massive group think economic bubble.
• coolThingsFirst 9mo ago
  Idiocracy pretty much
• AngryData 9mo ago
  I don't think the US is lacking labor capacity, I find it far more likely that capitalists are just too greedy to manufacture in the US because it would make their dividends and bonuses and valuations drop a few points. They lose nothing by outsourcing everything, worst case scenario they are handed government money and bailouts, meanwhile their dividends and bonuses still pay out the entire time. If the company fails because of that? Like the last time GM cut pensions using the excuse of bad financials they gave all their managers and c-suite massive bonuses. If their financials are bad enough to cut legally obligated pensions, how can they afford larger bonuses? Didn't they need that money to keep the business running? Anyone in the company with the power to change any of those things is also wealthy and connected enough from all that to jump ship without a problem. Labor costs are a minority of expenses even in labor-heavy industries and most corporations profit margins far exceed even "ridiculous" raises in wages and pay for their average worker. But there is zero incentive to benefit average employees and customers and every incentive to try and screw as many over as possible. Why earn 5% margin on a stable growth path that will remain secure 20+ years down the line when they can earn 10% margin through exploitation and outsourcing and then jump ship and reinvest that money in other business later on.
  • senordevnyc 9mo ago
    My guess is that you don’t work in manufacturing and haven’t done any comparisons to see what it would cost to manufacture here vs other countries? Hint: it’s far more than a few percentage point difference. It usually means that you can no longer make a profit, because your product will have to be far more expensive than your competitors, and most people don’t care enough to “buy American” vs save a lot of money. And for some products, manufacturing here is literally just not an option at all.
    • AngryData 9mo ago
      It is difficult to manufacture here, but not because of labor costs. It is because we outsourced all these businesses so many simply aren't available. The few that exist don't want the odd or one-off jobs, they don't have the equipment just sitting around unused or the trained employs sitting around waiting for work. They either got sold off decades ago, or got the business got destroyed by all the buyers chasing the pennies that outsourcing temporarily offered in the past. Very few place are still holding onto older equipment because the places still operating cleared the floor space for higher speed higher volume equipment to try and maintain contracts with big purchasers that did or were threatening to leave to get that cheap unregulated foreign production. Turns out that didn't last forever, China isn't letting companies freely pollute anymore nor are they dumping subsidy money into manufacturing businesses to buy new equipment, but they still have all the equipment running, while much of the US equipment was either sold off or sat decaying and unused for decades. Even if you could prove starting up a US manufacturing business to satisfy these demands was profitable, who is going to put up the investment money? There is no way such a business is going to be able to promise the same kind of returns as investing into tech companies, financial companies, or the overall stock market, and so they continue to mostly not exist. People with the capital to change things are seeking the greatest profit, not mediocre profits, and manufacturing in the US is mediocre profits for all but a few specialized industries. TL;DR New US manufacturing production and capabilities lacks capital investment because profit margins are not super high and there is basically zero chance of an investment windfall.
• duxup 9mo ago
  It’s funny too because the casino game that is being advertised…. most people’s sentiments regarding AI is very negative.