8 ms·

And what happens if the market settles back down or the leading memory tech pivots away from what you invested all this capital and time chasing? You'd need a

And what happens if the market settles back down or the leading memory tech pivots away from what you invested all this capital and time chasing? You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.

shimman 5mo ago
Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare this to America where there is maybe one or two players in the entire nation. Quite pathetic, but we live in a pathetic world so it tracks.
- hcurtiss 5mo ago
  You think Chinese businesses aren’t in it for the profits?
  - xbmcuser 5mo ago
    While these private companies exist and are in it for the profits, they don't control the government, meaning any potential price gouging is strictly regulated. The Chinese government actively prevents private companies from becoming too powerful or dominating an industry in the public eye. Instead, they foster competition by promoting and building up alternative companies. A great example of this is how they handled digital payments. While Visa and Mastercard maintain a monopoly in the West, China faced a similar situation when private mobile payment systems began dominating the market. In response, the government stepped in and forced the ecosystem to open up to competitors.
    - sroussey 5mo ago
      But not open up to competitors like Visa.
      - cwillu 5mo ago
        Correct. A level playing field for all companies regardless of other factors is explicitly a non-goal.
      - ceejayoz 5mo ago
        Credit card processors are, as a natural aspect of their purpose, a deeply useful surveillance network.
        handle584 5mo ago
        In the opposite direction unionpay works at major US retailers directly or at least through a partnership with discover, even Alipay is available at CVS, while us processors presence in China is next to zero.
        slaw 5mo ago
        Alipay is available only through Discover. Chinese processors have no presence in the US. In the same way in China you can use Visa and Mastercard through WeChat.
        handle584 5mo ago
        Source about alipay/discover partnership? I could not find any and it is hard to imagine how a card-based network can support a qrcode-based system. The acceptance of Alipay at CVS/Walgreens is native, meaning you pay by qrcodes, exactly what you do in China. Major merchants in the US do support UnionPay, even USPS(!) displays its logo. The problem used to be small/local merchants, but with the advent of modern PoS like square/clover it is getting better. In what same way? Even registering a Wechat account is no trivial task, just look at all those ppl asking help scanning their signup codes. Suppose you did KYC and seasoned the acct enough to get it finally working, it is still limited to business codes (think of bigbox stores), not personal codes (think of farmers market, local mom-and-pop place, etc). The latter actually dominates the daily life in China. IMO using V/M through wechat/alipay is like in the world you described and I was arguing UnionPay works in the US because ppl can buy gift cards at PO then use them at merchants, which is actually smoother comparing to this w/a business, but at the same time quite ridiculous.
  - shimman 5mo ago
    They are but the difference is that China doesn't want to encourage monopolies and have zero qualms in jailing or executing bad business leaders.
    - hcurtiss 5mo ago
      There absolutely are monopolies. There are, in fact, many state run enterprises. Where do you get these ideas?
      - wmf 5mo ago
        My understanding is that the Chinese government prefers to have multiple successful companies in each field and they don't like it when one company becomes too powerful.
        tick_tock_tick 5mo ago
        They pivoted away from that quite a while ago now they just disappear people for a week or two and randomly completely crush a business here and there to make sure they understand their place.
        coldtea 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        inglor_cz 5mo ago
        If you have no practical experience living in a totalitarian country, don't wish that upon yourself and your family. That momentary feeling of triumphing over your enemies won't compensate for what you'd lose. This is a mistake that was made by numerous intellectuals in history.
        transcriptase 5mo ago
        Everyone thinks they’re getting the cushy office job working for the party, until they’re handed a shovel by someone with a gun.
  - mjanx123 5mo ago
    In China the desire for profits serves the society. In the US the society serves the desire for profits.
    - strangegecko 5mo ago
      Oh sure, Chinese investors and business people share their profits with everyone out of the goodness of their heart. Nice fairy tale.
- prewett 5mo ago
  Society should care about people making profits because otherwise those people do something else instead of providing goods and services. What happened in Communism is instructive on this point. Now if you want to argue that the pursuit of maximum profit as an end is a problem, there's a case to be made. The US had something like a marginal tax rate of 90% around the 1940s/1950s, if I recall correctly, and it obviously didn't hurt innovation, but people got paid in perks and corner offices and status instead of just money. I think people are misled by Marx and derivatives, and misdiagnose the problem. I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources". However, the philosophical materialism of Marx & Co. pretty much makes this inevitable. (The secular view is also materialism, so you get it on both sides.)
  - shimman 5mo ago
    Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans. Notice in my comment I mention nothing about taxes? Maybe people are mislead about neoliberalism? All it has done was sell out American jobs, get civilians addicted to drugs, and manufactured a political class that cares about donations over material needs. This is an economic system that isn't even 50 years old and you're already going with the Marx scare quotes as if US branded capitalism hasn't already killed 10s of millions of Americans in the pursuit of profit. Let's not even peel back the founding of this nation, a colonial white slaver state with minority protections baked into the constitution to impede people's chances of progress with every life.
    - simonh 5mo ago
      >Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans. Things that are paid for by economic surpluses. No profits, no investment, no taxes. It's very much a matter of balance, you're not wrong that those services you mention are vital as are many others generally provided by governments. However it's all funded by a dynamic efficient economy. The question of private wealth is the hardest, but private wealth by itself isn't a problem. The question there is, who should own and run productive economic activity. If it's not the state, it's private individuals. The wealth of billionaire industrialists doesn't consist of one big pile of money they wallow in, like Scrooge McDuck. It consists of their ownership and control of companies that do things in the economy. Taking away that wealth means taking away those companies, and doing what with them? if you sell them to other private individuals, now they own and run those companies. If you can just take companies away from people like that, why would anyone build or buy them? If you take the companies into public ownership, now they're run by civil servants and politicians, but you'd have to pay for the companies, right? If you just seize assets, nobody is going to invest in anything that can be seized. I do think inequality is a growing problem, but there are no easy answers.
- mr_toad 5mo ago
  > This is why China is eating the West. Nothing to do with cheap labour.
  - autoexec 5mo ago
    We're also eagerly taking advantage of their cheap labour and we're taking advantage of plenty of people here at home, sometimes to the point of literal slavery (it's okay when they're prisoners or immigrants)
  - shimman 5mo ago
    Labor has very little to do with it and more about a political class that has to increase the material needs of a nation if they still want to stay in power. What has the US government done for American's lately outside of forcing people to buy healthcare and providing monetary support for families for a small window during covid? All we have is a political class that wants to fuck Americans raw until they pump every cent out of us. Also the US has one of the most weakened labor classes in the world, come the fuck on. Corporations convinced our governments to sell out labor at every opportunity. You're acting as if it was the 1930s where there was a national strike every month until the Wagner Act.
    - libertine 5mo ago
      Why are you stating China competitiveness isn't related to labor, and then pivot to US labor? Before you go there, you should answer: what has the Chinese government done for the Chinese lately? Is everything well in their society, labor and economy wise?
  - suddenlybananas 5mo ago
    Chinese labour isn't very cheap anymore.
  - coldtea 5mo ago
    No, nothing to do with that. Even Steve Jobs said so back 20+ years ago, about why Apple can't just get out of China manufacturing. He said the labour cost is neghigible and not qualitatively different to the US. It's the availability of every part and tech you need in nearby supply centers and factories, the huge supply of appropriate resources, including the ability to have tens of thousands of expert workers on command for a fast new production run.
- JuniperMesos 5mo ago
  I own FAANG stock because I own the S&P 500 in my retirement accounts, and so do managed pension funds. There's a lot more than billionaires who benefit from FAANG shares going up in value.
  - technoloch 5mo ago
    I agree, the sentiment that billionaires are the only beneficiaries of share value increases is misinformed, but the mentality of profit chasing is a long term security risk not just to the nation, but to the continued rise in value of said shares. Once China has enough of a grip on their domestic attempts at semiconductor fabrication, these company's supply chains will be completely compromised, allowing China to practically swap out any of these FAANG companies for Chinese counterparts over time. As long as the US, UK, EU and FAANG continue to do next to nothing to develop domestic chip fabs and supply chains, it is only a matter of time.
    - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
      This is a general argument in favor of protectionist tariffs and against free trade.
  - ajb 5mo ago
    It's true that the current pension provision depends on this. But if pensions are mainly funded by companies which extract monopoly rent, then it would actually be more efficient and be less distortionary to the competitive market to fund them directly out of taxation - one big, simple rent instead of 100,000 different ones clogging everything up.
    - twoodfin 5mo ago
      Are US retirement accounts largely growing on the back of “companies which extract monopoly rent”? That seems outlandish. My iPhone isn’t “rent”, neither is an Nvidia GPU, or an Instagram ad.
      - 5mo ago
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  > Why should society care about people making profits? The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.
  - coldtea 5mo ago
    Nope. They're the ones making those more expensive, via collusion, rent-seeking, monopoly capture, and lots of other ways.
  - csomar 5mo ago
    No, the real people providing the food, shelter and electronics are the generally the lowest paid in society.
    - roenxi 5mo ago
      But they are making a profit. Otherwise they'd have to stop providing stuff, because they'd be broke.
  - kakacik 5mo ago
    Well I am still waiting for my google home and my meta steaks. Reality is, those companies don't give anything back, just siphone all profits into tax havens so owners can take as much cash out of it as possible, in one form or another. Their goal is to provide nothing back as much as they could. Look at their actions, not some empty PR statements.
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      > Reality is, those companies don't give anything back California, Washington, and New York are about to find out what happens when they drive the wealthy businesses out of the state. Massachusetts found out a few years ago. They decided they were going to heavily tax yachts that were built by the yacht industry in the state. What happened is the wealthy bought their yachts elsewhere, and the local yacht industry collapsed, and many thousands of skilled craftsmen lost their jobs. The tax was rescinded.
  - 5mo ago
- csomar 5mo ago
  It's a cycle. The zeitgeist moves from communism to capitalism and vice-versa every 30 years or so.
  - simonh 5mo ago
    The zeitgeist yes, but in terms of actual politics socialism nowadays is really a vague aspiration rather than any actual policies. Certainly here in the UK our Labour governments since the 90s have confined themselves to just tweaking the settings on the economy Maggie built in the 80s. I'm just about old enough to remember what actual socialist economic policies looked like.
    - Der_Einzige 5mo ago
      Corbyn tried to make Labour do something different but we saw how we got treated all because he wasn't willing to kowtow towards Israel.
- duskdozer 5mo ago
  Society shouldn't. But it's not society making that decision, it's the corporations and people with lots of wealth that want to get even more wealth.
- Aerroon 5mo ago
  You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer. Capitalism is about producing stuff. To create a large variety of (useful) products for society. You need capital to make pretty much anything. Somebody has to come up with a large amount of resources (money) put upfront into the venture. Capitalism creates the incentive for that - if the gamble pays off, then the investors get more value back. If it doesn't work out, then investors lose money. Most businesses fail early and do not provide a return for the investment. The point of capitalism is to keep this system running. As a result of it we have made an ungodly amount of technological and quality of life improvements. Some people have become filthy rich from this, but typically they also provided the world with goods or services that people like and use. Tesla made Elon filthy rich, but it also made electric vehicles popular.
  - hackyhacky 5mo ago
    > You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer. Making the rich richer isn't necessarily the point, but it is an unavoidable consequence. > Capitalism is about producing stuff. Humans have been producing stuff well before the concept of ownership was invented, and certainly well before the massive wealth accumulation that is the hallmark of capitalism.
    - hcurtiss 5mo ago
      And almost for the entirety of that period, humans lived in abject poverty. The rise of capitalism perfectly correlates with the most spectacular increase in human flourishing and prosperity in the history of our species. Even in the last fifty years, liberalizing economies, private ownership, and contract law have lifted tens of millions out of poverty, mostly in SE Asia.
      - hackyhacky 5mo ago
        And yet many in capitalist society lived and still live in abject poverty, despite the fact that there are enough resources so that no one should be left wanting. Nevertheless, you've somehow convinced yourself that those people either (a) don't matter, (b) deserve it, or (c) can't be helped. If the goal is to reduce poverty, I fail to see how the existence of billionaires is a positive outcome, either now, in the form of Musk and his ilk; in the form of the robber barons of the late 18th century; or in the form of the noble lords of the feudal period to owned a lot but contributed nothing.
lesuorac 5mo ago
> And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet. Idk if you can read into it that way. All these companies have cafeterias but you don't see them investing into farmland so they can get their bananas a few cents cheaper. But also why bother spending 20B on a fab when you can invest 20B into TSMC and let them build the fab?
- dyauspitr 5mo ago
  Because having every major company in America’s eggs in one basket is as insane as it gets, especially with China bearing down on Taiwan.
  - eecc 5mo ago
    That’s an entirely different framework, one that doesn’t concern investment decisions of Apple or Google. I do agree that USA and EU could foot the bill and subsidize a couple billions in such industrial infrastructure, perhaps taking back a cut of the profit rather than privatizing all of it. But they’re not doing it, or are making pitiful efforts at that
    - Maxion 5mo ago
      It's just an insane amount of money to invest with the long-term effect of you oversaturating the chip market. Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow to the EU auto industry.
      - simonh 5mo ago
        They'd more likely split themselves laughing. The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the resulting goods. We probably both agree it's an absurd fantasy, and the people trying to make stuff like this happen are implementing policies that ensure that it won't, such as putting tariffs on the inputs they need to build out this domestic manufacturing capacity in the first place.
dyauspitr 5mo ago
Meta spent more on the Metaverse, it’s all the most certainly something they can afford to take a hit on and they won’t because memory and CPU usage is only going to go up from this point on.
tw04 5mo ago
> And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet. It says they are no longer worried about being punished for monopolistic behavior and have bet a “ballroom donation” will exempt them from another round of punishment. I feel like folks around here have already forgotten about the last time the memory suppliers quietly agreed to keep raising prices and stop competing with each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
Eric_WVGG 5mo ago
I’m of the (possibly unpopular) opinion that ~80% of these new data centers are never going to see the light of day. None of the economics or supply needs of these things make any sense. The water is generally not there, electric transformers are next to impossible to acquire. I just read about one in Utah that’s supposed to be 2.5x the size of Manhattan?? https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/utah-stratos-project-data-center-kevin-oleary https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u... I could be wrong, but I think a lot of this was planned by software guys who are used to brute-forcing their way through “impossible” problems. But those were software problems, where the limits are mostly theoretical. In the world of atoms, limitations are real.
- throwaway85825 5mo ago
  Neither transformers or water are the limiting factor, cash is. Right now the big 3 are taking all their profits and building data centers. If there's not an ROO they'll stop. Transformers aren't so complex that production can't increase. Most water is used for agriculture and right now the data centers can pay more for it.

shimman 5mo ago

Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare this to America where there is maybe one or two players in the entire nation. Quite pathetic, but we live in a pathetic world so it tracks.

hcurtiss 5mo ago
You think Chinese businesses aren’t in it for the profits?
- xbmcuser 5mo ago
  While these private companies exist and are in it for the profits, they don't control the government, meaning any potential price gouging is strictly regulated. The Chinese government actively prevents private companies from becoming too powerful or dominating an industry in the public eye. Instead, they foster competition by promoting and building up alternative companies. A great example of this is how they handled digital payments. While Visa and Mastercard maintain a monopoly in the West, China faced a similar situation when private mobile payment systems began dominating the market. In response, the government stepped in and forced the ecosystem to open up to competitors.
  - sroussey 5mo ago
    But not open up to competitors like Visa.
    - cwillu 5mo ago
      Correct. A level playing field for all companies regardless of other factors is explicitly a non-goal.
    - ceejayoz 5mo ago
      Credit card processors are, as a natural aspect of their purpose, a deeply useful surveillance network.
      - handle584 5mo ago
        In the opposite direction unionpay works at major US retailers directly or at least through a partnership with discover, even Alipay is available at CVS, while us processors presence in China is next to zero.
        slaw 5mo ago
        Alipay is available only through Discover. Chinese processors have no presence in the US. In the same way in China you can use Visa and Mastercard through WeChat.
        handle584 5mo ago
        Source about alipay/discover partnership? I could not find any and it is hard to imagine how a card-based network can support a qrcode-based system. The acceptance of Alipay at CVS/Walgreens is native, meaning you pay by qrcodes, exactly what you do in China. Major merchants in the US do support UnionPay, even USPS(!) displays its logo. The problem used to be small/local merchants, but with the advent of modern PoS like square/clover it is getting better. In what same way? Even registering a Wechat account is no trivial task, just look at all those ppl asking help scanning their signup codes. Suppose you did KYC and seasoned the acct enough to get it finally working, it is still limited to business codes (think of bigbox stores), not personal codes (think of farmers market, local mom-and-pop place, etc). The latter actually dominates the daily life in China. IMO using V/M through wechat/alipay is like in the world you described and I was arguing UnionPay works in the US because ppl can buy gift cards at PO then use them at merchants, which is actually smoother comparing to this w/a business, but at the same time quite ridiculous.
- shimman 5mo ago
  They are but the difference is that China doesn't want to encourage monopolies and have zero qualms in jailing or executing bad business leaders.
  - hcurtiss 5mo ago
    There absolutely are monopolies. There are, in fact, many state run enterprises. Where do you get these ideas?
    - wmf 5mo ago
      My understanding is that the Chinese government prefers to have multiple successful companies in each field and they don't like it when one company becomes too powerful.
      - tick_tock_tick 5mo ago
        They pivoted away from that quite a while ago now they just disappear people for a week or two and randomly completely crush a business here and there to make sure they understand their place.
        coldtea 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        inglor_cz 5mo ago
        If you have no practical experience living in a totalitarian country, don't wish that upon yourself and your family. That momentary feeling of triumphing over your enemies won't compensate for what you'd lose. This is a mistake that was made by numerous intellectuals in history.
        transcriptase 5mo ago
        Everyone thinks they’re getting the cushy office job working for the party, until they’re handed a shovel by someone with a gun.
- mjanx123 5mo ago
  In China the desire for profits serves the society. In the US the society serves the desire for profits.
  - strangegecko 5mo ago
    Oh sure, Chinese investors and business people share their profits with everyone out of the goodness of their heart. Nice fairy tale.
prewett 5mo ago
Society should care about people making profits because otherwise those people do something else instead of providing goods and services. What happened in Communism is instructive on this point. Now if you want to argue that the pursuit of maximum profit as an end is a problem, there's a case to be made. The US had something like a marginal tax rate of 90% around the 1940s/1950s, if I recall correctly, and it obviously didn't hurt innovation, but people got paid in perks and corner offices and status instead of just money. I think people are misled by Marx and derivatives, and misdiagnose the problem. I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources". However, the philosophical materialism of Marx & Co. pretty much makes this inevitable. (The secular view is also materialism, so you get it on both sides.)
- shimman 5mo ago
  Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans. Notice in my comment I mention nothing about taxes? Maybe people are mislead about neoliberalism? All it has done was sell out American jobs, get civilians addicted to drugs, and manufactured a political class that cares about donations over material needs. This is an economic system that isn't even 50 years old and you're already going with the Marx scare quotes as if US branded capitalism hasn't already killed 10s of millions of Americans in the pursuit of profit. Let's not even peel back the founding of this nation, a colonial white slaver state with minority protections baked into the constitution to impede people's chances of progress with every life.
  - simonh 5mo ago
    >Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans. Things that are paid for by economic surpluses. No profits, no investment, no taxes. It's very much a matter of balance, you're not wrong that those services you mention are vital as are many others generally provided by governments. However it's all funded by a dynamic efficient economy. The question of private wealth is the hardest, but private wealth by itself isn't a problem. The question there is, who should own and run productive economic activity. If it's not the state, it's private individuals. The wealth of billionaire industrialists doesn't consist of one big pile of money they wallow in, like Scrooge McDuck. It consists of their ownership and control of companies that do things in the economy. Taking away that wealth means taking away those companies, and doing what with them? if you sell them to other private individuals, now they own and run those companies. If you can just take companies away from people like that, why would anyone build or buy them? If you take the companies into public ownership, now they're run by civil servants and politicians, but you'd have to pay for the companies, right? If you just seize assets, nobody is going to invest in anything that can be seized. I do think inequality is a growing problem, but there are no easy answers.
mr_toad 5mo ago
> This is why China is eating the West. Nothing to do with cheap labour.
- autoexec 5mo ago
  We're also eagerly taking advantage of their cheap labour and we're taking advantage of plenty of people here at home, sometimes to the point of literal slavery (it's okay when they're prisoners or immigrants)
- shimman 5mo ago
  Labor has very little to do with it and more about a political class that has to increase the material needs of a nation if they still want to stay in power. What has the US government done for American's lately outside of forcing people to buy healthcare and providing monetary support for families for a small window during covid? All we have is a political class that wants to fuck Americans raw until they pump every cent out of us. Also the US has one of the most weakened labor classes in the world, come the fuck on. Corporations convinced our governments to sell out labor at every opportunity. You're acting as if it was the 1930s where there was a national strike every month until the Wagner Act.
  - libertine 5mo ago
    Why are you stating China competitiveness isn't related to labor, and then pivot to US labor? Before you go there, you should answer: what has the Chinese government done for the Chinese lately? Is everything well in their society, labor and economy wise?
- suddenlybananas 5mo ago
  Chinese labour isn't very cheap anymore.
- coldtea 5mo ago
  No, nothing to do with that. Even Steve Jobs said so back 20+ years ago, about why Apple can't just get out of China manufacturing. He said the labour cost is neghigible and not qualitatively different to the US. It's the availability of every part and tech you need in nearby supply centers and factories, the huge supply of appropriate resources, including the ability to have tens of thousands of expert workers on command for a fast new production run.
JuniperMesos 5mo ago
I own FAANG stock because I own the S&P 500 in my retirement accounts, and so do managed pension funds. There's a lot more than billionaires who benefit from FAANG shares going up in value.
- technoloch 5mo ago
  I agree, the sentiment that billionaires are the only beneficiaries of share value increases is misinformed, but the mentality of profit chasing is a long term security risk not just to the nation, but to the continued rise in value of said shares. Once China has enough of a grip on their domestic attempts at semiconductor fabrication, these company's supply chains will be completely compromised, allowing China to practically swap out any of these FAANG companies for Chinese counterparts over time. As long as the US, UK, EU and FAANG continue to do next to nothing to develop domestic chip fabs and supply chains, it is only a matter of time.
  - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
    This is a general argument in favor of protectionist tariffs and against free trade.
- ajb 5mo ago
  It's true that the current pension provision depends on this. But if pensions are mainly funded by companies which extract monopoly rent, then it would actually be more efficient and be less distortionary to the competitive market to fund them directly out of taxation - one big, simple rent instead of 100,000 different ones clogging everything up.
  - twoodfin 5mo ago
    Are US retirement accounts largely growing on the back of “companies which extract monopoly rent”? That seems outlandish. My iPhone isn’t “rent”, neither is an Nvidia GPU, or an Instagram ad.
    - 5mo ago
WalterBright 5mo ago
> Why should society care about people making profits? The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.
- coldtea 5mo ago
  Nope. They're the ones making those more expensive, via collusion, rent-seeking, monopoly capture, and lots of other ways.
- csomar 5mo ago
  No, the real people providing the food, shelter and electronics are the generally the lowest paid in society.
  - roenxi 5mo ago
    But they are making a profit. Otherwise they'd have to stop providing stuff, because they'd be broke.
- kakacik 5mo ago
  Well I am still waiting for my google home and my meta steaks. Reality is, those companies don't give anything back, just siphone all profits into tax havens so owners can take as much cash out of it as possible, in one form or another. Their goal is to provide nothing back as much as they could. Look at their actions, not some empty PR statements.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    > Reality is, those companies don't give anything back California, Washington, and New York are about to find out what happens when they drive the wealthy businesses out of the state. Massachusetts found out a few years ago. They decided they were going to heavily tax yachts that were built by the yacht industry in the state. What happened is the wealthy bought their yachts elsewhere, and the local yacht industry collapsed, and many thousands of skilled craftsmen lost their jobs. The tax was rescinded.
- 5mo ago
csomar 5mo ago
It's a cycle. The zeitgeist moves from communism to capitalism and vice-versa every 30 years or so.
- simonh 5mo ago
  The zeitgeist yes, but in terms of actual politics socialism nowadays is really a vague aspiration rather than any actual policies. Certainly here in the UK our Labour governments since the 90s have confined themselves to just tweaking the settings on the economy Maggie built in the 80s. I'm just about old enough to remember what actual socialist economic policies looked like.
  - Der_Einzige 5mo ago
    Corbyn tried to make Labour do something different but we saw how we got treated all because he wasn't willing to kowtow towards Israel.
duskdozer 5mo ago
Society shouldn't. But it's not society making that decision, it's the corporations and people with lots of wealth that want to get even more wealth.
Aerroon 5mo ago
You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer. Capitalism is about producing stuff. To create a large variety of (useful) products for society. You need capital to make pretty much anything. Somebody has to come up with a large amount of resources (money) put upfront into the venture. Capitalism creates the incentive for that - if the gamble pays off, then the investors get more value back. If it doesn't work out, then investors lose money. Most businesses fail early and do not provide a return for the investment. The point of capitalism is to keep this system running. As a result of it we have made an ungodly amount of technological and quality of life improvements. Some people have become filthy rich from this, but typically they also provided the world with goods or services that people like and use. Tesla made Elon filthy rich, but it also made electric vehicles popular.
- hackyhacky 5mo ago
  > You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer. Making the rich richer isn't necessarily the point, but it is an unavoidable consequence. > Capitalism is about producing stuff. Humans have been producing stuff well before the concept of ownership was invented, and certainly well before the massive wealth accumulation that is the hallmark of capitalism.
  - hcurtiss 5mo ago
    And almost for the entirety of that period, humans lived in abject poverty. The rise of capitalism perfectly correlates with the most spectacular increase in human flourishing and prosperity in the history of our species. Even in the last fifty years, liberalizing economies, private ownership, and contract law have lifted tens of millions out of poverty, mostly in SE Asia.
    - hackyhacky 5mo ago
      And yet many in capitalist society lived and still live in abject poverty, despite the fact that there are enough resources so that no one should be left wanting. Nevertheless, you've somehow convinced yourself that those people either (a) don't matter, (b) deserve it, or (c) can't be helped. If the goal is to reduce poverty, I fail to see how the existence of billionaires is a positive outcome, either now, in the form of Musk and his ilk; in the form of the robber barons of the late 18th century; or in the form of the noble lords of the feudal period to owned a lot but contributed nothing.

lesuorac 5mo ago

> And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet. Idk if you can read into it that way. All these companies have cafeterias but you don't see them investing into farmland so they can get their bananas a few cents cheaper. But also why bother spending 20B on a fab when you can invest 20B into TSMC and let them build the fab?

dyauspitr 5mo ago
Because having every major company in America’s eggs in one basket is as insane as it gets, especially with China bearing down on Taiwan.
- eecc 5mo ago
  That’s an entirely different framework, one that doesn’t concern investment decisions of Apple or Google. I do agree that USA and EU could foot the bill and subsidize a couple billions in such industrial infrastructure, perhaps taking back a cut of the profit rather than privatizing all of it. But they’re not doing it, or are making pitiful efforts at that
  - Maxion 5mo ago
    It's just an insane amount of money to invest with the long-term effect of you oversaturating the chip market. Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow to the EU auto industry.
    - simonh 5mo ago
      They'd more likely split themselves laughing. The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the resulting goods. We probably both agree it's an absurd fantasy, and the people trying to make stuff like this happen are implementing policies that ensure that it won't, such as putting tariffs on the inputs they need to build out this domestic manufacturing capacity in the first place.

dyauspitr 5mo ago

Meta spent more on the Metaverse, it’s all the most certainly something they can afford to take a hit on and they won’t because memory and CPU usage is only going to go up from this point on.

tw04 5mo ago

> And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet. It says they are no longer worried about being punished for monopolistic behavior and have bet a “ballroom donation” will exempt them from another round of punishment. I feel like folks around here have already forgotten about the last time the memory suppliers quietly agreed to keep raising prices and stop competing with each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

Eric_WVGG 5mo ago

I’m of the (possibly unpopular) opinion that ~80% of these new data centers are never going to see the light of day. None of the economics or supply needs of these things make any sense. The water is generally not there, electric transformers are next to impossible to acquire. I just read about one in Utah that’s supposed to be 2.5x the size of Manhattan?? https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/utah-stratos-project-data-center-kevin-oleary https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u... I could be wrong, but I think a lot of this was planned by software guys who are used to brute-forcing their way through “impossible” problems. But those were software problems, where the limits are mostly theoretical. In the world of atoms, limitations are real.

throwaway85825 5mo ago
Neither transformers or water are the limiting factor, cash is. Right now the big 3 are taking all their profits and building data centers. If there's not an ROO they'll stop. Transformers aren't so complex that production can't increase. Most water is used for agriculture and right now the data centers can pay more for it.