I suspect this may be the case. There’s inherent inefficiency in having a human forced to translate everything into context for the LLM. You don’t get the full benefit until you allow it to be fully plugged in.
You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement.
If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.
That's exactly the point of the essay though. The way that you're implicitly modeling labor and collaboration is linear and parallelizable, but reality is messier than that:
> The most important thing to know about labor substitution...is this: labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. The question isn’t whether AI can do specific tasks that humans do. It’s whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone: in other words, whether there is any way that the addition of a human to the production process can increase or improve the output of that process... AI can have an absolute advantage in every single task, but it would still make economic sense to combine AI with humans if the aggregate output is greater: that is to say, if humans have a comparative advantage in any step of the production process.
Right, it doesn't help pay the bills to be right in the long run if you are discarded in the present.
There exists some fact about the true value of AI, and then there is the capitalist reaction to new things. I'm more wary of a lemming effect by leaders than I am of AI itself.
Which is pretty much true of everything I guess. It's the short sighted and greedy humans that screw us over, not the tech itself.
Wasn't that the point of mentioning Jevon's Paradox though? Like they said in the essay, these things are quite elastic. There's always more demand for software then what can be met, so bringing down the cost of software will dramatically increase the demand for it. (Now, if you don't think there's a ton of demand for custom software, try going to any small business and ask them about how they do bookkeeping. You'll learn quite quickly that custom software would run much better than sticky notes and excel, but they can't afford a full time software developer as a small business. There's literally hundreds of thousands of places like this.)
The problem is, you won’t necessarily know which 20% it did wrong until it’s too late. They will happily solve advanced math problems and tell you to put glue on your pizza with the same level of confidence.
What happens if you lay off 80% of your department while your competitors don't? If AI multiplies each developer's capabilities, there's a good chance you'll be outcompeted sooner or later.
At some point soon, humans will be a liability, slowing AI down, introducing mistakes and inefficiences. Any company that insists on inserting humans into the loop will be outcompeted by those who just let the AI go.
In reality that would probably mean that something like 60% of the developer positions would be eliminated (and, frankly, those 60% are rarely very good developers in a large company).
The remaining "surplus" 20% roles retained will then be devoted to developing features and implementing fixes using AI where those features and fixes would previously not have been high enough priority to implement or fix.
When the price of implementing a feature drops, it becomes economically viable (and perhaps competitively essential) to do so -- but in this scenario, AI couldn't do _all_ the work to implement such features so that's why 40% rather than 20% of the developer roles would be retained.
The 40% of developer roles that remain will, in theory, be more efficient also because they won't be spending as much time babysitting the "lesser" developers in the 60% of the roles that were eliminated. As well, "N" in the Mythical Man Month is reduced leading to increased efficiency.
(No, I have no idea what the actual percentages would be overall, let alone in a particular environment - for example, requirements for Spotify are quite different than for Airbus/Boeing avionics software.)
"Work" isn't a finite thing. It's not like all the people in your office today had to complete 100% of their tasks, and all of them did.
"Work" is not a static thing. At least not in positions of many knowledge-worker careers.
The idea of a single day's unit of "work" being 100%, is really sophomoric.
Also, If 100% of a labor force now has 80% more time...wouldn't it behoove the company to employ the existing workforce in more of the revenue generating activities? Or find a way to retain as much of the institutional knowledge?
Doom, fear-mongering and hopelessness is not a sustainable approach.
I don’t know if we can assume that humans will always be a value add. It’s very possible that for many thing in the medium term, putting humans in the loop will be a net negative on productivity.
Then why do parents put their children's drawings on the refrigerator? I'm not sure if your comment is completely utopian or dystopian. Either way, productivity without human evaluation is not productivity. It's a roomba stuck in a corner.
There would be a lot of economic pressure to figure it out.
Amazon fulfillment centers are a good example of automation shrinking the role of humans. We haven't seen total headcounts go down because Amazon itself has been growing. While the human role shrinks, the total business grows and you tread water. But at some point, Amazon will not be able to grow fast enough to counterbalance the shrinking human role in the FC and total headcount will decrease until one day it disappears entirely.
It seems that a lot of people would rather accept a relatively high risk of unfair judgement from a human than accept any nonzero risk of unfair judgement from a computer, even if the risk is smaller with the computer.
How do we even begin to establish that? This isn't a simple "more accidents" or "less accidents" question, its about the vague notion of "justice" which varies from person to person much less case to case.
But who controls the computer? It can’t be the government, because the government will sometimes be a litigant before the computer. It can’t be a software company, because that company may have its own agenda (and could itself be called to litigate before the computer - although maybe Judge Claude could let Judge Grok take over if Anthropic gets sued). And it can’t be nobody - does it own all its own hardware? If that hardware breaks down, who fixes it? In this paper, the researchers are trying to be as objective as possible in the search for truth. Who do you trust to do that when handed real power?
To be clear, federal judges do have their paychecks signed by the federal government, but they are lifetime appointees and their pay can never be withheld or reduced. You would need to design an equivalent system of independence.
It not the paychecks that influence federal judges; these days it's more of quid-pro-quo for getting the position in the first place. Theoretically they are under no obligation but the bias is built in.
The problem with a AI is similar; what in-built biases does it have? Even if it was simply trained on the entire legal history that would bias it towards historical norms.
I think it is usually the opposite - presidents nominate judges they think will agree with them. There’s really nothing a president can do once the judge is sworn in, and we have seen some federal judges take pretty drastic swings in their judicial philosophy over the course of their careers. There’s no reason for the judge to hold up their end of the quid-pro-quo. To the extent they do so, it’s because they were inclined to do so in the first place.
“Fair” is a complex moral question that llms are not qualified to answer, since they have no morals or empathy, and aren’t answering here.
Instead they are being “consistent” and the humans are not. Consistency has no moral component and llms are at least theoretically well suited to being consistent (model temperature choices aside)
Fairness and consistency are two different things, and you definitely want your justice system to target fairness above consistency.
I'd rather get judged by a human than by the financial interests of Sam Altman or whichever corporate borg gets the government contract for offering justice services.
> nonzero risk of unfair judgement from a computer
I feel like this is really poor take on what justice really is. The law itself can be unjust. Empowering a seemingly “unbiased” machine with biased data or even just assuming that justice can be obtained from a “justice machine” is deeply flawed.
Whether you like it or not, the law is about making a persuasive argument and is inherently subject our biases. It’s a human abstraction to allow for us to have some structure and rules in how we go about things. It’s not something that is inherently fair or just.
Also, I find the entire premise of this study ludicrous. The common law of the US is based on case law. The statement in the abstract that “Consistent with our prior work, we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges. In fact, the LLM makes no errors at all,” is pretentious applesauce. It is offensive that this argument is being made seriously.
Multiple US legal doctrines now accepted and form the basis of how the Constitution is interpreted were just made up out of thin air which the LLMs are now consuming to form the basis of their decisions.
Hate to see this downvoted. The definition of “overpopulated” shifts as technology improves our ability to produce and distribute resources, but we’re arguably approaching that threshold for current technology. As it stands, we’re only getting by because a small fraction of the world consumes at American levels.
When you say "nearly limitless" source of borrowing, the limit is the gain in global wealth. The US has been siphoning off a huge chunk of world wealth by printing dollars to serve as the currency for that wealth.
All the people complaining about "US Debt" and $26T of "net investment" or whatever don't realize that this is/was the benefit of the US being stable, strong, and friendly.
When the US is unstable, weak, and a bully, as it is now, all that goes away. The bill comes due, and the US will pay dearly. The rest of the world will pay nothing.
> Its baffling that you think the collapse of the USD would have no negative ramifications on the rest of the world.
Empires rise and fall, pax Americana was not the world's first hegemony. The end of the British Empire is within living memory - while they sowed seeds of instability in a handful of former colonies that still flare up today, the rest of the world is fine. Britain, on the other hand, has had to enter a "managed decline", and is a much smaller player in world politics than it was a century ago.
What do you think the US is going to do for that bang? How could a bang ever bring the wealth and peace that its prior friendship with allies brought?
The US doesn't have the cards to play, because the current US Government doesn't even understand where the wealth has come from. That US Government has risen to power by tricking the public into thinking that the very things that make the US wealthy and powerful are actually a scam making them poorer.
The current US Government has already broken the trust that makes the US strong. The repercussions will take years to become fully visible, and without immediate course correction those future repercussions will get far far worse.
> What do you think the US is going to do for that bang?
Literally a bang.
Or many bangs. The largest military in human history going YOLO won’t be a pretty sight. (The only way it sucks more in America than it does abroad is if we go civil war. But even then, it’s almost certain to go global.)
This may be recency bias. The current age just has more immediate, global communications. "The sun never sets on the British empire" had a literal meaning based on how globalized it was then. They even laid intercontinental undersea cables.
The negative ramifications seem to be better than being invaded by the US or having regional entities invaded by the US, and the ensuing instability as a result.
If its going to be like this the rest of the world might as well cut its losses
You seem to have a very limited view of the world if you think the US doesn't have fans of totalitarian rule and that the "rest of the world" is exclusively against US global strategy. I am going to guess that you actually have no idea what the negative ramifications of the collapse of a currency that underpins the foundations of our world are, because it is something that is near impossible to predict.
I agree that at some point, governments and people will need to step up and fight back, but the idea that the US will somehow fall in a vacuum and everyone else will live happily ever after is laughable.
IT will be painful, but we (the rest of the world) will weather the storm, and come out to a brighter and cleaner world. The greatest con the US pulled was to scare the rest of the world of being bullied by powerful fascist nations whilst becoming the most powerful fascist bully.
Yes but you have a) no idea how bad the suck will be b) no idea how long the suck will last and c) what the "better" will look like.
I am not advocating that the status quo should go on, I am just saying that the repercussions will be vast and long lasting, likely resulting in a world war, and whatever follows after that(if anything).
You do realise it is arthimetically impossible to balance all the desired export surpluses of the EU, China, Japan, etc together without the US as the demand sink right? Whatever adjustment comes is certainly going to require somebody to act in a manner contrary to their current strategies, and it's going to be a painful adjustment.
And which is harder? Bringing back production to satiate domestic demand or increasing domestic demand? Historically, demand deficiency is much harder to restore.
That furthers the imbalance to the detriment of the US and in favor of the holders of whichever currency replaces USD.
Dedollarization means that the US market is far poorer and can't import as much as before, yet the new reserve currency(ies) make holders that much richer, enabling greater demand for either imports or self-consumption.
It will be an adjustment, but there will be many winners, none of which are the US. There may be some losers who do not negotiate trade deals or can't find new markets, but it's unlikely. The supposed US trade war on China has resulted in their GDP growing by a massive 5% last year. Canada, losing its exports to the US, negotiates deals with other countries.
The pain for other countries is more organizational than anything economic. The US will face massive economic disaster in the form of devalued dollars and the need to close the government deficit after decades of being addicted to massive reserve-currency-enabled deficit spending. The US will be plummeted into massive recession by those sudden changes, while the rest of the world merely trades with whoever are the winners.
If, for example, China decides that it finally wants a consumer economy, and the Renminbi becomes a partial reserve currency, the consumer demand will be absolutely massive. Europe may have a harder time signaling to Europeans that they are far wealthier, but make imports cheaper for Europeans, and people who find that they suddenly have a lot more left in their bank account at the end of the month usually find ways to spend at least part of it.
> If, for example, China decides that it finally wants a consumer economy
This is a fantasy that the CCP leadership will not entertain, because it would mean losing their control as the (export/industrial) king. Their national security descends from having that crown firmly in their hands & making everyone else reliant on their industries, and will do as much as they can to make sure it stays that way.
A strong currency runs counter to what the CCP leadership wants, having seen how it has hollowed out the US' industrial capacity (as a result of strong currency demand leading to comparatively higher labor costs).
The CCP aspires to climb the value chain up to where the US is, which means shifting away from manufacturing to the high profit margin tech, biotech, and other science related industries.
The manufacturing stage is just a stepping stone to getting to where the US already is.
The end goal of the CCP is not to be a middling power, with middling wealth. It's to be the greatest power. That some in the US want to go down the value chain and take China's manufacturing spot just as China zooms ahead of the US, is, well... It would be comical if it weren't so sad.
> The CCP aspires to climb the value chain up to where the US is, which means shifting away from manufacturing to the high profit margin tech, biotech, and other science related industries.
None of that requires a strong currency, only a strong industry.
That's what the CCP has done with their own currency, by deliberately weakening it & funneling the strength into drowning the global market with their industry's products. A strong currency runs counter to that by making their products more expensive as a result.
Had the RMB continued its original trajectory (2003-2015), it would've wound up at approximately 1EUR ~= 5RMB. Instead, the CCP made the decision to weaken the RMB to maintain industrial capability, and further expand into technological ventures without abandoning the other industries they've captured before.
> That some in the US want to go down the value chain and take China's manufacturing spot just as China zooms ahead of the US, is, well... It would be comical if it weren't so sad.
1) China is able to "zoom ahead" because they have a strong industry within their own borders, buffered from the political decisions of other countries.
2) The value of the lower parts of the chain is not obligated to be lower than the upper parts of the chain.
>The supposed US trade war on China has resulted in their GDP growing by a massive 5% last year.
I'd take those numbers with a grain of salt. China is known to play with the numbers to hit goals when they feel that they need to.
>The US will be plummeted into massive recession by those sudden changes, while the rest of the world merely trades with whoever are the winners.
The massive devaluation in the dollar would mean that the country would become incredibly attractive for manufacturing exports, which would prevent a massive recession.
>If, for example, China decides that it finally wants a consumer economy, and the Renminbi becomes a partial reserve currency, the consumer demand will be absolutely massive.
If you think that China is going to shut down the majority of its factories, move them to other countries, and let their currency float freely (well, freer than it is today), you're delusional.
> the country would become incredibly attractive for manufacturing exports
First, the US will not be attractive in any way for investment because it is run by a madman that has ridiculous tariff policies that make starting manufacturing supply chains nearly impossible.
Second, even if the US could transition its economy back to manufacturing, that's a massive slide down the value chain to far less profitable industries than our current tech, biotech, and service driven economies. The idea as presented is a serious downgrade in quality of life compared to today.
> If you think that China is going to shut down the majority of its factories, move them to other countries, and let their currency float freely (well, freer than it is today), you're delusional.
China wants to transition its economy up the value chain to the high tech industry that the US currently has. It has the educational system and the brain power, and the biggest impediment, brain drain to the US, has now been shut off.
If climbing the value chain, out of manufacturing, requires China to shut down factories or open up currency somehow, they are far more likely to do that than to abandon their ambition of economic growth.
> balance all the desired export surpluses of the EU, China, Japan, etc together without the US as the demand sink
in 2022 China, Russia exported around 630 billion USD, US imported around 950 billion USD. maybe the world will not end if these three just go and play in a separate sandbox;)
> it's going to be a painful adjustment.
even if demand falls a bit it's not the end of the world if it becomes more sustainable afterwards (less overproduction, consumer waste, gassing the environment)
Think one step further. When a different currency becomes the reserve currency, the currency rises in value, the holders become far wealthier, get their imports for cheaper, and suddenly they can even subsidize their local industries that rely on exports to the point that it's a smooth transition to more of a consumer economy.
> subsidize their local industries that rely on exports to the point that it's a smooth transition to more of a consumer economy.
There's an implication here that the country *wants* to become a consumer economy, and not remain an export economy.
Furthermore, it relies on the leadership wanting to wind down that production, and not use that subsidy to further bolster their industrial capacity & crush global prices, in an attempt to wash out the others & only have their country be the sole remaining place capable of meeting demand at that subsidized point.
Why would a country want to remain a manufactured-good export economy, rather than having the stronger position of a consumer economy that lives off the wealth of the rest of the world?
Why grind away relentlessly in industries with tiny profit margins, when there are high-margin innovation-driven industries that your economy can advance to?
Why stick with producing clothing, when you can move on to cars? Why stick with cars, when you can move on to chips? Why stay with chips, when you can move on to the next new technology that the entire world wants, but which only your economy can produce because it grew the industry from scratch and everybody is playing catch up?
Dictators love autarky because it gives them complete control of the population. Populations should not love autarky, because it makes them poor and robs them of wealth and opportunity.
> Why would a country want to remain a manufactured-good export economy, rather than having the stronger position of a consumer economy that lives off the wealth of the rest of the world?
1) A consumer economy is not required to extract wealth from other countries.
2) A consumer economy is metastable by design:
(2a) It inherently requires the buy-in of other nations to want to export to you in the first place, which is not guaranteed.
(2b) The wealth of the consumer economy is primarily derived from salesmanship and not the product itself, which is also metastable.
3) Knowledge work is not barred to an export economy, and can similarly be performed there without having to become a consumer economy.
> Why grind away relentlessly in industries with tiny profit margins, when there are high-margin innovation-driven industries that your economy can advance to?
(Previous point (3) similarly applies here)
> Why stick with producing clothing, when you can move on to cars? Why stick with cars, when you can move on to chips? Why stay with chips, when you can move on to the next new technology that the entire world wants, but which only your economy can produce because it grew the industry from scratch and everybody is playing catch up?
1) None of these decisions are mutually exclusive. Why throw away the $10 you picked up just because you saw $100?
2) Establishment of a new industry is not assured. Failure can still occur, even when billions are thrown. (see Abu Dhabi & GlobalFoundries semiconductor fab venture)
2b) Not very new industrial move needs to be made. Tech leapfrogging can occur at a later date.
3) The demand for those """lower end""" products do not evaporate. Unless a sensible smartphone-like revolution comes for clothing / cars (i.e. The unification of multiple former products under a new product), the industry's products & demand will rarely change. The tastes will shift, but the fundamentals of the product & the industry will remain.
4-IMPORTANT) Margins are not obligated to trend towards zero, and can in fact increase as more people make the same mental conclusions as described and abandon their own industries, eventually leading to an oligopoly / monopoly scenario that is harder to retake back.
> Dictators love autarky because it gives them complete control of the population. Populations should not love autarky, because it makes them poor and robs them of wealth and opportunity.
Wealth does not inherently manifest from (the ether / nothing), and neither does opportunity. Even in the EU, wealth is derived from the decisions of the State to create / retain wealth.
> no armies, can’t defend itself, can’t make energy.
Look I love dumping on the Europoors as much as anyone, but even I can see that this is a bit extreme. "Decadence?" What does that even mean here? That people are happy and secure and have good qualities of life, without worrying about everything falling apart?
The US is not fine, and is falling apart. The US is living decadently on its reserve currency status, which enable things like ridiculously wasteful and unproductive military spending. Even its military spending on things like the, say, F35, require external customers in order for it to make any sense at all. But all that decadence is at risk. Decadence is good, I want it, I don't want austerity. Give me this awesome US decadence or I'll have to settle for the fake European "decadence" which is mere economic and health security without all the extra spending that US consumers get to make.
We've asked you before not to break the guidelines. Political/ideological flamebait is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. You can discuss these themes in curious ways, rather than inflammatory ways; indeed, you must, if you want your comments to avoid being killed by flags. Eventually we have to ban accounts that continually flout the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HN is a community that exists for a specific purpose and that purpose is curious conversation. The guidelines are designed to keep activity aligned with that purpose, and HN is a place where people want to participate because enough people make the effort to follow the guidelines and raise the standards rather than drag them down.
What is acceptable in your circles is not relevant here. What matters here is preserving HN as a good place for curious conversations.
We don't need mini-sermons or defiant strutting. Just respect for the community and the groundrules that make this a place people care about preserving. The guidelines are simple, and have been in place and stable for nearly two decades. If we didn't uphold them, this site wouldn't exist for you to denigrate like this.
That idea has been so destroyed by current events that I can only imagine that you are trolling or have been living in a cave for a few weeks. Check the news!
To be fair, has it? The EU is talking about activating its anti-coercion thing, which would anyway only kick off a year-long consultation and voting process before anything happened. To my knowledge, there have been no consequences to America annexing Greenland put forward that would hit before the midterms.
The US is more stable than the powers of Europe (which have constant political upheavals, snap elections that completely remake the political landscape, etc). You're confusing Trump's mouth with how the US political system actually functions.
Just because the US changes political direction, that doesn't equate to instability. Its aims are changing, like it or not, good or bad. The US deciding it wants Greenland is not a proof of instability, it's a change in the strategic goals held by the people controlling the superpower.
And the US is at a high level of strength, not weakness. Its large corporations hold sway over the globe in a manner the likes of which has never been seen before in modern history. Its military has force projection to nearly every point on the globe, with hundreds of global military bases. Its national wealth is at an all-time high. Its stock markets are at all-time highs. Its median income is at an all-time high. Its median disposable income is at an all-time high. Its housing wealth is at an all-time high.
> The US is more stable than the powers of Europe (which have constant political upheavals, snap elections that completely remake the political landscape, etc)
How many European powers have had their incumbent head of state violently attempt to hold onto power after losing an election after January 6th, 2021?
A stable country would do what South Korea or Brazil did: imprison the criminal.
Instead, in the US, we have our supposed captains of industry wielding chain saws on stage to publicly support the wannabe tyrant, and donating billions behind the scenes to privately support the wannabe tyrant.
In a war type scenario between US and Europe, what do you think will happen to those large corporations 'sway'? Their assets will be confiscated, their systems cut off or repurposed. It will immediately end any sway those corporations had
> Its military has force projection to nearly every point on the globe, with hundreds of global military bases
How are the hosts to all those bases going to react when suddenly the guest acts belligerent? When the ally drops down to an occupier, that force projection suddenly starts looking like occupation, which becomes a lot more expensive to maintain.
And the expense has worked until now because everyone else has wanted our currency so what's a bit more currency printing, but when we kick our own global reserve currency status because we fucked all of our allies, well now that "force projections becomes a lot more expensive" actually becomes expensive^squared.
This is absolutely idiotic for anyone who indulges in the privileges of empire.
> You're confusing Trump's mouth with how the US political system actually functions.
I'm not confusing anything, right now Trump's mouth IS the political system in the US. Republicans control every aspect of the government completely, all the way through to the checks of the US Supreme Court.
No Republican has enough backbone to stand up to Trump, and if they do gain a backbone to stand up to Trump at all, like MTG, they exit politics quickly. Thomas Massie is the closest to somebody who is standing up to Trump. If Republicans in the Senate were willing to stay in office yet defect from the party, that would be enough to stand up to Trump, but even that's not happening.
Right now, the US is in a position not unlike Imperial Japan, right before they launched an attack on the US, forcing the US into WW2. High Command wants somebody to stand up and stop the obviously bad action, but nobody is willing to make the short-term sacrifice for the long-term good.
Sorry, Trump insisting on annexing Greenland is not a "change in strategic goals", it's a toddler's petulant obsession. The US already had carte blanche from Denmark to do pretty much whatever it wanted in Greenland.
Besides Trump, I doubt there's another official in the WH who wants this. They are all just humoring the demented old man.
> And the US is at a high level of strength, not weakness. Its large corporations hold sway over the globe in a manner the likes of which has never been seen before in modern history. Its military has force projection to nearly every point on the globe, with hundreds of global military bases. Its national wealth is at an all-time high. Its stock markets are at all-time highs. Its median income is at an all-time high. Its median dispoable income is at an all-time high. Its housing wealth is at an all-time high
This is in part because other countries allow American countries to come in and take over markets.
> The US is more stable than the powers of Europe (which have constant political upheavals, snap elections that completely remake the political landscape, etc)
Can you name 26 countries with the same level of unity and cooperation with the US as what exists between the 27 members of the EU (and larger economic zone)?
The US is but one country. If you zoom into states, you’d see a lot more bickering and division - y’all just sent your military against your own people just now…
> The US is more stable than the powers of Europe ....... You're confusing Trump's mouth with how the US political system actually functions.
Eh?
If the US political system was stable and fit for purpose, the US would have got rid of the wannabe dictator by now; or at least held his power in check.
EDIT: Amusingly, I'm being downvoted by a class of American who refuses to believe their way might not be the best after all. Even when the facts are staring them in the face.
As a US citizen, I agree with you that if the US was a stable power we would have gotten rid of the dictator for good after the first term. And most definitely after trying to usurp an entire election. Or worst case after he issued pardons to all people involved in any way to usurp the election, including many hardened criminals. After all these things, even if we get control of the US government and place it into stable, hands, it will take a generation to rebuild the broken trust.
But I don't think that the people downvoting you are necessarily other US citizens. It feels like HN is very good at eliminating bots, but in these sorts of discussions lots of sleeper agent bots come out to try to shift discussion. Every bit of our social media is full of it and I think that the downvotes your comment probably come from that.
The combination of median disposable income and housing wealth being at all time highs is a big part of it!
Those with housing have locked others out of housing, causing lots of "wealth" that those with housing don't even consider to be wealth. They think it's just "normal" and don't realize the massive advantage it gives them over everybody stuck renting.
But that's symptomatic of all the other inequality. Housing is the biggest expense, and most obvious form of rent extraction that the wealthy use to exploit those without wealth, but it's not the only one.
The US used to be a much more homogeneous country, which certainly makes it a lot easier for everyone to be on the same page because of shared cultural values.
That has changed dramatically in the past few decades and with it, places where Americans can find common ground.
Other western countries are going down the exact same path, just a bit behind us.
Funny though how all those European countries everyone on HN and Reddit point to as "how things should be" are all pretty ethnically and culturally homogenous, though that's changing rapidly. Interestingly, cracks are starting to appear.
> And the US was always less homogenous than other "western" countries.
The US was 85-90% white in 1965. That's pretty homogenous.
What is considered "white" now certainly wasn't in the past. It took a long time before Italians were considered to be part of the in-group. Irish and Italian people were considered an inferior race and suffered extreme racial prejudice when lots of immigrants came from those nations.
And that evolution itself tells the story of the US itself. The people in non-homogenous neighborhoods are happy and harmonious, but outsiders scared of cultural differences cause racial strife and discontent.
Those who let themselves get worked up about racism are the problem, not the non-homogenous races.
That barely scratches the surface of the bigotry that existed. Protestant or Catholic, Jewish or Gentile/Christian, Eastern European or Western European, Anglo or non-Anglo, Anglo + German or non, Southern European or Northern European - these are all lines people use to discriminate upon that I can think of just off the top of my head. That's without even getting into skin color.
You're confirming what I said earlier. There are both happy and unhappy "homogenous" countries. There's literally no correlation.
Instead of stopping there you're regurgitating, and it's unfortunate I'm confirming Poe's law, Mein Kampf.
> The US was 85-90% white in 1965. That's pretty homogenous.
I think you know nothing about culture, ethnicity, or the history of bigotry, xenophobia, and racism in the US if you can confidently make that statement. You're reducing all the diverse peoples that made up the nation into a single group based on their skin color.
> There are both happy and unhappy "homogenous" countries. There's literally no correlation.
There’s multiple components to what “happiness” entails. One might argue that a society filled with numerous cultures and ethnicities all vying for their own interests can make for quite a bit of unhappiness. E.g., if everyone was white, there’d be no hand-wringing over white supremacy. If everyone was straight, there’d be no hand-wringing over LGBT representation, and so on. That’s not saying that other social ills can’t exist in homogenous societies, but they do have fewer due to having more shared identity and values. Don’t be dense just to make a point.
> You're reducing all the diverse peoples that made up the nation into a single group based on their skin color.
Like people do today when lumping everyone of various ethnicities into the “white” bucket and decrying “whiteness”? If it’s a valid classification today why can’t we use the same term retrospectively?
> E.g., if everyone was white, there’d be no hand-wringing over white supremacy... Don’t be dense just to make a point.
You think people didn't find other ways to dislike each other when they were all "white"? Like I already said you don't know history very well or you're the one being "dense to make a point".
> If it’s a valid classification today why can’t we use the same term retrospectively?
I can't speak for today or say if it's valid. But that's not how things were back then because the people themselves didn't believe that. You've never heard the slurs people used for different ethnic and religious groups that all hailed from Europe and had light skin? The amount of "hand-wringing" about JFK being the first non-Protestant president? There was no feeling of "homogeneity" back then either based solely on skin color.
> The US is more stable than the powers of Europe (which have constant political upheavals, snap elections that completely remake the political landscape, etc). You're confusing Trump's mouth with how the US political system actually functions.
this is satire right?
the UK's system is close to 1000 years old
I doubt the current US system will last another decade
> with hundreds of global military bases
all of which will evaporate the moment it does anything to Greenland
The UK's current system is realistically about the same age as the US, their first PM was in the 18th century. Unless you're claiming the King/Queen is still in control of everything. You can't have that premise both ways.
We're under active, malicious attack by 1/3 of our own eligible voters. Not clear how this will play out, as I can't think of any historical parallels.
It's not uncommon for democracies to be subverted by a minority party.
Nazis did it in Germany. They lost parliamentary seats in the November 1932 election, but remained the largest party with 33% of seats. The next year the country was already a dictatorship.
Communists did it in Czhechoslovakia in 1948. They led a coalition government but had just lost the previous election.
I'm worried that United States 2027 will be added to this list. If MAGA sees their grip on power starting to fade after November elections, they may try increasingly extreme measures.
At the other end of the spectrum, the two countries with the strongest form of proportional representation, also have problems: politics in The Netherlands is nearly paralyzed, it becomes harder every election to form a coalition. And Israeli politics radicalized anyway.
Maybe indeed the relatively best solution is in the middle: proportional representation with well-chosen thresholds.
It is 49.8% (people who voted Trump in 2024) of 64.1% (people who voted in 2024), or 31.9% or ~1/3 of the total eligible voting population, which is what your parent states.
That is the problem though - a third of the US population is basically lunatics... This will not go away. And one cannot keep a third of the population "down".
Yes, sorry; I added 'eligible' to emphasize how many people failed to vote at all.
Unfortunately, my understanding based on reported surveys [1] is that if the non-voters had voted, Trump's margin of victory would have been even greater. If that's the case, then those who say that my 1/3 figure is too low are correct.
You understand how statistics work, don't you? When you have 64% of the population voting, that's a pretty big sample size, enough so that you can reasonably extrapolate that the 49.8% share _probably_ holds across the rest of the population, give or take.
Put another way, if someone asked you to estimate what the split between the one third of the population that didn't vote was, what would you use as a reference point? Social media posts? Vibes? Or maybe polls leading up to the vote that showed the same roughly 50-50 split found in the actual results?
I don't think that you understand how that part of statistics works. You are said that we have sampled 64% of the population, so we can extrapolate to the rest. That works if the sampling is sufficiently random. But in this case the "sampling" is people who voted, so an entirely (self) selected population, and pretty much not random at all (i.e.: people who were mostly less decisive about their opinions/vote).
So I don't think we can extrapolate confidently at all. So we really don't know whether it holds for the rest of the population at all.
> So I don't think we can extrapolate confidently at all
But the parent was — the implication being that if the other third had voted, surely they would have voted in greater proportion for Democrats than Republicans. That’s based on nothing but vibes and assumptions. I argue that the 64% share of people that actually did vote give you a lot more confidence in how the remaining third probably would have voted than whatever the parent suggested. It’s at least a starting point for extrapolation.
Far far below 50%. The media tricked some people into supporting Trump by perpetuating his obvious lies unchallenged, but now that people see what Trump is doing he is underwater on all issues.
Most other contemporary and historical parallels of authoritarians show far higher popularity of the authoritarian. Trump is nowhere close.
The biggest risk to the US is that the media is completely compromised, as are leadership at many institutions. Even in Silicon Valley, the loudest and most vocal leaders are self-destructively supporting this madness that will destroy the US's wealth, and their future wealth gains too.
The media tricked some people into supporting Trump
You could almost make this case in 2016, but anyone who fell for Trump in 2024 will just fall for the next con man to come along. At some point we have to take responsibility for our own choices and stop blaming the media.
The truth about Trump was out there, and it was not hard to find.
Added here due to rate-limiting:
2024 was right after voters had seen Biden at that debate, while all the "responsible" people insisted he was sharp and smart. It really was more unique than its given credit for.
Both candidates were a disgrace to the parties who propped them up. However, nothing Biden said was any worse than what Trump said about immigrants eating peoples' pet dogs and cats.
At the Biden/Trump debate, the choice was between malevolent, incoherent senility and plain old garden-variety senility, and the voters choose poorly. At the actual election, there were even fewer excuses for voting for Trump, as Biden was no longer in play.
No, it's largely the media. Compare what passes for political journalism from, say the New York Times to the rest of the world and it becomes clear that the US media politics coverage is in its best form mere both-sidesism.
Most people who were tricked were people who don't pay much attention, and might only get a few articles of news, if anything. When the media doesn't tell people that there are plans for mass deportations at numbers that require legal immigrants to be deported, then the media is lying to its consumers. When the media is not willing to report that Project 2025 is Trump's plan, and instead places Trump's lie about ignorance on the same footing as the reality of people saying it is his plan, then the media lies to people.
Media consumers expect that journalists will react normally to extreme news. But instead the media is normalizing extremely unpopular and ridiculous policies that everybody would hate if they knew what the media knew.
I know large families of Mexican descent who have lived in the US for generations, that had many Trump voters in the recent election, from people that don't follow much news, and believed ridiculous things like Trump being a "Peace President." As you might imagine, there's a bit of intense discussion these days about how they were tricked into voting for secret police that will imprison family members and detain them for days without cause. If somebody reads a single article, they shouldn't have to read 5 more in order to get the real story merely because the media was more concerned about normalizing Trump's views than it was about reacting like a normal person would to the insanity of Trump.
Do people have personal responsibility to be better informed? Sure! But when they go to CBS they should get a real news article, not glazing of the most radical opinions out there on the political spectrum.
2024 was right after voters had seen Biden at that debate, while all the "responsible" people insisted he was sharp and smart. It really was more unique than its given credit for.
Japan is the model of low interest rate debt and the US is not close to how low Japan was able to go, with a currency (Yen) vastly less potent than the global reserve currency.
Most of the US borrowing is domestic, very little of it is now foreign. No foreign entity can afford to absorb $2 trillion of new paper every year. That's equal to the total holdings of China + Japan. Going forward you might as well regard all US Govt borrowing as domestic, as that will essentially be the case given the scale. The UK holds $885b of treasuries, what are they going to buy annually that will make a difference at this point?
Every nation has a limitless ability to borrow internally via currency debasement, with obvious consequences. That USD debasement is why gold has gone up 10x in 20 years when priced in dollars. It's why healthcare and housing is so expensive - when priced in dollars. Cash pushed into gold in 2005, $100k, would now buy you a million dollar house. It's the dollar of course that has been hammered (among other currencies, the Euro has not done well against gold either).
The US won't stop being able to debase its currency and buy its own debt. What the US is doing is eating its hand. If it continues to get worse, it moves on to eating its arm, and so on (the US is de facto consuming its national wealth through stealth confiscation via currency destruction, rather than paying the bills with taxation directly).
>what are they going to buy annually that will make a difference at this point
Mechanically, "they" being sovereign banks serve as price-insensitive marginal buyers that close treasury auctions regardless of price because they buy treasury for storage/liquidity. VS domestic buyers (hedgefund insurance), who are price sensitive = raise rates to attract discriminate buyers who buy for yield/valuation = worse debt servicing = faster debasing. Foreign sovereign buyers still play governor role in making sure domestic buyers get a shit none-market deal, i.e. US gov gets a good deal which moderates velocity of debasing. Of course past certain level of debt brrrting, the ability for sovereign buyers to absorb is compromised, in which case it makes sense for US to fuck foreign buyers over and inflate away as much debt as possible while still reserve currency - US can inflate/soft default faster than world can unwind. And TBH US will probably be "fine" as long as US can still gunboat diplomacy. If can't be banker anymore, be the mob boss.
There will always be a market if the interest rates are high enough. But wanting to lower interest rates and introducing political instability seems like a bad combo.
Disease kills 99% of people: "That's not abnormal, statistically. Stop your whining."
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