- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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It is how its done today.
Every semi-big or big corpos gamble their money trying to be the one coming on top and capture the market.
So it is not surprising to see that.
Imagine what the economy would look like if they spent 30 billion on wages.
If we’re just talking about the USA, then the ~200 million working people would get $150 each.
We could always just confiscate all fortunes over 900 million dollars.
The 5 richest billionaires have a combined $1.154 trillion, which divided by $340 million gives us $3,394 per American citizen. That’s literally just the top 5. According to Forbes there were 813 billionaires in 2024. Sounds pretty damned substantial to me. We’re talking life-altering amounts of money for every American without even glancing in the direction of mere hundred-millionaires. And all the billionaires could still be absurdly wealthy.
Does the 30 billion also account for allocated resources (such as the incredibly demanding amount of electricity required to run a decent AI for millions if not billions of future doctors and engineers to use to pass exams)?
Does it account for the future losses of creativity & individuality in this cesspool of laziness & greed?
This is where the problem of the supply/demand curve comes in. One of the truths of the 1980s Soviet Union’s infamous breadlines wasn’t that people were poor and had no money, or that basic goods (like bread) were too expensive — in a Communist system most people had plenty of money, and the price of goods was fixed by the government to be affordable — the real problem was one of production. There simply weren’t enough goods to go around.
The entire basic premise of inflation is that we as a society produce X amount of goods, but people need X+Y amount of goods. Ideally production increases to meet demand — but when it doesn’t (or can’t fast enough) the other lever is that prices rise so that demand decreases, such that production once again closely approximates demand.
This is why just giving everyone struggling right now more money isn’t really a solution. We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Of course, it’s only profitable to increase production if the cost of basic inputs can be decreased — if you know there is a big untapped market for bread out there and you can undercut the competition, cheaper flour and automation helps quite a bit. But if flour is so expensive that you can’t undercut the established guys, then fighting them for a small slice of the market just doesn’t make sense.
Personally, I’m all for something like UBI — but it’s only really going to work if we as a society also increase production on basic needs (housing, food, clothing, telecommunications, transit, etc.) so they can be and remain at affordable prices. Otherwise just having more money in circulation won’t help anything — if anything it will just be purely inflationary.
You are repeating indoctrinated capitalist think patterns. In reality the market most often does not react like that.
The example as given by you is how you basically teach the concept of market balance to middle schoolers. However, it’s a hypotetical lab analogy. It’s over simplified for lay people. Comparable to the famous “ignore air resistance” in physics.
Markets are at times efficient, at other times inefficient. They may even be both concurrently.
First, economists do not believe that the market solves all problems. Indeed, many economists make a living out of analyzing “market failures” such as pollution in which laissez faire policy leads not to social efficiency, but to inefficiency.
Like our colleagues in the other social and natural sciences, academic economists focus their greatest energies on communicating to their peers within their own discipline. Greater effort can certainly be given by economists to improving communication across disciplinary boundaries
In the real world, it is not possible for markets to be perfect due to inefficient producers, externalities, environmental concerns, and lack of public goods.
We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Then we should do that over and over again.
This is not true. We have enough production. Wtf are people throwing away half their plates at restaurants? Why does one rich guy live in a mansion? The super rich consume more than people realize. You are wrong on so many levels that I do not know where to start. You sound like a bot billionaire shill.
We have enough production in some areas — but not in others. Some goods are currently overly expensive because the inputs are expensive — mostly because we’re not producing enough. In many cases that’s due to insufficient competition. And there are some significant entrenched interests trying to keep things that way (lower production == lower competition == higher prices).
And FWIW, the US’s current “tariff everything and everybody” approach is going to make this much, much, much worse.
I am certainly not the friend of billionaires. I’m perfectly fine with a wealth tax to fund public works and services. All I’m against is overly simplistic solutions which just exacerbate existing problems.
You sound like a dad after reading the morning press.
There are more empty homes than homeless in the US. I’ve seen literal tons of food and clothing go right to the dump to protect profit margins.
Do you have any sources to back up the claim that we need to make more shit?
STOP CALCULATING KEEP SHOVELING
Pets.com all over again
Imagine how much more they could’ve just paid employees.
You misspelled “shares they could have bought back”
Nah. Profits are growing, but not as fast as they used to. Need more layoffs and cut salaries. That’ll make things really efficient.
Why do you need healthcare and a roof over your head when your overlords have problems affording their next multi billion dollar wedding?
I really understand this is a reality, especially in the US, and that this is really happening, but is there really no one, even around the world, who is taking advantage of laid-off skilled workforce?
Are they really all going to end up as pizza riders or worse, or are there companies making a long-term investment in workforce that could prove useful for different uses in the short AND long term?
I am quite sure that’s what Novo Nordisk is doing with their hire push here in Denmark, as long as the money lasts, but I would be surprised no one is doing it in the US itself.
My theory is the money-people (VCs, hedge-fund mangers, and such) are heavily pushing for offshoring of software engineering teams to places where labor is cheap. Anecdotally, that’s what I’ve seen personally; nearly every company I’ve interviewed with has had a few US developers leading large teams based in India. The big companies in the business domain I have the most experience with are exclusively hiring devs in India and a little bit in Eastern Europe. There’s a huge oversupply of computer science grads in India, so many are so desperate they’re willing to work for almost nothing just to get something on their resume and hopefully get a good job later. I saw one Indian grad online saying he had 2 internship offers, one offering $60 USD/month, and the other $30/month. Heard offshore recruitment services and Global Capability Centers are booming right now.
We had that recently. 10% redundant and pay freeze because we were not profitable enough. Guess what, morale tanked and they only slightly improved it by giving everyone +10 days holiday.
Someone somewhere is inventing a technology that will save thirty minutes on the production of my wares and when that day comes I will tower above my competitors as I exchange my products for a fraction less than theirs. They will tremble at my more efficient process as they stand unable to compete!
It’s as if it’s a bubble or something…
And the next deepseek is coming out soon
The first problem is the name. It’s NOT artificial intelligence, it’s artificial stupidity.
People BOUGHT intelligence but GOT stupidity.
Artificial Imbecility
the ceo and csuites did, they hyped all up and was excited for its innovation.
It’s frustrating because they used the technical term in a knowingly misleading way.
LLMs are artificial intelligence in the same way that a washing machines load and soil tuning systems are. Which is to say they are intelligent, but so are ants, earthworms, and slime molds. The detect stimuli, and react based on that stimuli.
They market it as though “artificial intelligence” means “super human reasoning”, “very smart”, or “capable of thought” when it’s really a combination of “reacts to stimuli in a meaningful fashion” and “can appear intelligent”.
It’s a search engine with a natural language interface.
An unreliable search engine that lies
It obfuctates its sources, so you don’t know if the answer to your question is coming from a relevant expert, or the dankest corners of reddit…it all sounds the same after it’s been processed by a hundred billion GPUs!
yup, i was looking some terms, or conditions up, it was USING stuff froma blog, and sites that just stole from other sites.
This is what I try to explain to people but they just see it as a Google thats always correct
Garbage in, garbage out.
That’s from back in the days of PUNCH-CARD computers.
People will accept either intelligence or stupidity. They will pay for a flattering sycophant.
So I’ll be getting job interviews soon? Right?
“Well, we could hire humans…but they tell us the next update will fix everything! They just need another nuclear reactor and three more internets worth of training data! We’re almost there!”
One more lane bro I swear
nope, they will be hiring outsourced employees instead, AI=ALWAYS indians. on the very same post on reddit, they already said that is happening already. its going to get worst.
Could’ve told them that for $1B.
A lot of us did, and for free!
Heck, I’da done it for just 1% of that.
Still $10m… ffs. Nobody needs $1B
Honestly it’s such a vast, democracy-eroding amount of money that it should be illegal. It’s like letting an individual citizen own a small nuke.
Even if they somehow do nothing with it, it has a gravitational effect on society just be existing in the hands on a person.
I have no proof, but I feel like the AI push and Turnip getting re-elected and his regression of the EPA rules sounds like this whole AI thing was an excuse to burn more fossil fuels.
If I was invested in AI, and considering AI’s thirst for electricity, I would absolutely make a similar investment in energy. That way, as the AI server farms suck up the electricity I would get at least some of that money back from the energy market.
We’re now at the “if you don’t, your competitor will”. So you really have no choice. There are people that don’t use Google anymore and just use chatgpt for all questions.
Wonder if the 5% that actually made money included companies that sell enterprise AI services, like AWS, Microsoft, and Google?
Nvidia?
Does anybody have the original study? I tried to find it but the link is dead ( looks like NANDA pulled it )
