myrmidon

39 ms·

751.
by myrmidon 2y ago
You misunderstand me. The US is making shoes-- just not as many as it imports from Vietnam or China. In fact enough shoes get made locally to export about 1$ billion worth of them (while ~$20 billion are spent on imports). But I don'
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> You've read too much Tyler Cowen and imagine AGI only adding .5% to GDP per year I did not know who Tyler Cowen is. I'm not making any assumptions about how much growth we would get from machine intelligence, I'm simply
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> In that sense yes, doing „low tech“ is valuable in the long run. Sure. But how much tax money do you want to throw at entire industries to hide the basic fact that wages are lower elsewhere? Where do you want to take the labor away fro
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by myrmidon 2y ago
The thing is also that absolutely nothing about the overall situation changed meaningfully over the last 50 years or so. People had the exact same concerns and fears when electronics manufacturing started shifting to Japan like 50 years ago
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by myrmidon 2y ago
Do you think that global hegemony by force is long-term (centuries) sustainable at all? What makes you confident that this could ever work on a longer term? The US is only ~5% of people globally, and I would expect any industrial/techn
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> This obviates all human labor that can be done on a PC Sure, this is massive for the actual people doing such things right now (designers, programmers, callcenter employees) because their work becomes almost worthless, and the impacted
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> If you build the first AGI you win capitalism. That's what is at stake here. Why? If you had a GPT version right now that was even more intelligent than an average human, what exactly would change? The big assumption is that you c
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> In the "west" currently, you are not allowed to publish anything looking favorably "east" in a serious way on mainstream networks "Not allowed" by whom ? There is a big difference between silencing journa
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at
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by myrmidon 2y ago
If you can make $5k/year by investing $100k into shoe-selling, then those profits have to rise at the same rate as base costs, otherwise, people will just invest into eggplant-selling, instead. Another perspective is that Footlocker wo
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by myrmidon 2y ago
Maybe there are some products that this argument works for, but certainly not footwear I'm sure. The US exports ~1 billion worth of shoes per year, and imports ~25 billion (mainly from Vietnam and China), according to https:/&#x2
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> I don't know if increased volume will decrease the prices by much, they're only higher than premium imports by a little bit. I don't think its reasonable to expect lower prices for domestic production at all, because the
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by myrmidon 2y ago
Self sufficiency is just not a credible argument here. This is about consumer footwear, not agriculture (nor all of manufacturing). The US (and most other nations that can afford to) is perfectly used to throwing ~$20 billion at the sector
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by myrmidon 2y ago
Gas peaker plants are not "the alternative" to nuclear power, they are exactly what nuclear power needs, too, because regulating nuclear plants down is not what you wanna do after investing billions into it-- you need those plan
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by myrmidon 2y ago
If that's what it takes to get some honesty out of corporate, is it such a bad idea? Why?
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by myrmidon 2y ago
Completely agree on the cost aspect. > It won't hurt if we try to bring it all back, but it will take the same amount of time and sacrifice China put in to take it. I think this is missing a huge aspect: Chinese workers are very che
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by myrmidon 2y ago
Not at all! That would be less than 10 by 10 kilometers; thats less than half the area of the Mangla Lake, a single artificial reservoir.
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> So you are okay with exploiting people for labour, often in inhumane conditions just so you can buy some unnecessary junk for cheaper? Do you think that better wages and working conditions in underdeveloped countries are a goal (or eve
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by myrmidon 2y ago
Do you honestly believe that there are significant numbers of US citizens lining up to take up low-margin manufacturing work as is currently done in China or elsewhere? Chinese manufacturing workers live on a $25k/y income ($15k withou
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> even though the US rates are far lower than the EU's What does "far lower" mean to you? Can you give examples? Because to me, the view "Trumps tariffs are only matching what foreign nations already do" is just
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> The idea the pickup trucks are wanted in Europe is hilarious. While demand is much lower than in the US, it's still not zero. But I'm talking about US import tariffs, not EU. "Light trucks" have like 80% market shar
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by myrmidon 2y ago
This is a very interesting take, and I agree with your perspective. I think the "anti-woke" messaging was a particularly effective example, because in reality this means completely different things to many voters (some of those
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> Cars for example, US had tariff of 2.5%, EU 10%. This is highly misleading: Pickup trucks, which is a major share of the US car market, had an import tariff of 25% since 1964 (so it was pretty much the same average tariff level but wit
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by myrmidon 2y ago
I fully agree with your view. My take is that the whole chinese room argument rests on extremely nebulous and shaky definitions/assumptions, rendering it worthless. It seems fairly obvious to me that the system of operator + rulebook
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by myrmidon 2y ago
My take is (and I somwhat agree with the article on this) that if you know requirements, interfaces and tasks precisely enough to give a reliable estimate, then that means that the majority of actual development was already done. But that
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by myrmidon 2y ago
> Are you seriously suggesting that the threshold is set at this level because of unpopularity rather than the power of the extremely wealthy? I absolutely think that significant estate tax is an unpopular concept-- significantly more
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by myrmidon 2y ago
I agree with almost all your points, except two: The US estate tax specifically got basically bigger exemptions every time it was touched (even adjusting for inflation), and returns have been falling precipitously for basically the last 25
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by myrmidon 2y ago
I absolutely see your point, but if you set inheritance tax higher than gift tax rate, then that rate difference does nothing for wealth inequality (because people are just gonna gift things in their 80's at the latest, or set things
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by myrmidon 2y ago
I think people will cheer for anything, given consistent positive reporting in mass media. And media is typically not controlled by people owning <$15M. If you wrap things nicely in populist rethoric and act in the best interests of med
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by myrmidon 2y ago
Absolutely-- but if you have to exempt like 99% of your population from a law then its probably not too popular a concept (compare income tax, which a lot more people are actually fine with paying). I still think this would have mainly ne

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