cman1444

Very case dependent of course. There are loads of small towns that have stagnant or shrinking populations all across the US.

Shhhhh, it's way more fun to spout cynical and clever quips about a publication without backing it up with any reasoning.

Why?

Wow, I find economist to be one of the best publications to read about global events. Can you say more about what you think they lie about?

The blog actually spells it "Artic", not "Arctic". I wonder if the blog or the company misspelled it.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/beauty

What is the difference between "beauty" and "elegance" of a proof?

The middle east is in Asia, no?

Reminds me of the doherty threshold. When will AI respond in less than 400 milliseconds?

By this logic all money is inherently worthless too, and every time you buy a sandwich at the local corner shop you're just passing off that worthless piece of paper to the next schmuck.

In reality, things have value because people believe they have value. That doesn't mean every company that doesn't pay dividends is a speculative tulip bubble.

That ".125% is not much to matter" argument also cuts the other way, against the Matt Levine argument that the S&P is excluding trillion dollar companies and should adjust the rules for them.

Should S&P really adjust the rules for such a small portion of the index?

Because for many people who pursue these fundamental truths, the reward is not necessarily personal fame, fortune, or even personal understanding. Advancing humanity's total knowledge (even if that knowledge is by proxy through AI) is reward enough.

Legal has lots of institutional inertia behind it though. I think AI will be very very useful for lawyers..... at their desk in private. But I don't see it replacing them. The legal system is heavily personal and relies a lot on reputation and tradition. I think you'll see courts, bar organizations, etc frowning on using AI too heavily, and certainly not using it to automate "official" processes.

This is why a lot of my favorite shows/movie series are ones only a few episodes long, but which really give a good feel for the world they take place in.

Bladerunner and HBO's Chernobyl are two of my favorites that fit this.

I have a suspicion that, once self-driving cars make up the lion's share of driving, accidents caused by humans will actually increase on a per-mile driven basis.

I think humans will eventually fall out of practice of driving when they use SDVs for most travel. And then every once in a while they'll take their ol' 2026 classic car from highschool out for a spin and find they have forgotten how to drive!

I mean... That was exactly the point.

Great. So we agree it is cherry picked.

Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area.

I don't follow the logic here. Why would 2015 be the tipping point? What's so special about that year? The US has been increasingly urbanizing since WW2.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

You might have cause and effect confused here.

Just to be clear, you're suggesting that people are having fewer kids (fertility had a recent peak in 2007) because new builds (which are just a small percentage of total housing stock!) have lost a few square feet? I find that to be laughable.

Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless.

1. There are more than just offices in CBDs. There are also retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, residential, etc.

2. This ignores the benefit to the worker. And employer/employee relationship goes two-ways. You assign all the benefits to the employers (who gain access to a larger talent pool), while ignoring the fact that this benefits workers too by increasing the pool of jobs they can reliably and comfortably commute to.

3. Economic gains for employers are not purely extractive. A thriving and dynamic centeral business district helps provide income for residents, drive increased investment, and foster innovation.

And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household.

Sports venues. Concerts. Festivals. Parades. Any large gathering of people. Not to mention that it's still a good thing to have for general use to go anywhere, even at non-max-capacity times.

https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/sound-transit-3-34-5-bi...

Not seeing that $150k per household number anywhere in that article. Looks like $10k per person is the number they come up with. Expensive to be sure, but not quite the number you somehow arrived at.

Care to explain the cherry-picking? The average square footage was growing steadily (except for the 2008 crisis) and the inflection point happened around 2012 when the death spiral started in earnest.

It is clearly cherry picked because the graph begins in 2015, which (as you can see in the one I linked) is the exact peak of the new build house sizes. A more honest article would show a larger date range.

Additionally, I feel it makes sense that new builds are getting smaller. People are generally having fewer children these days, so there shouldn't be as much need for huge houses.

Except that the increased salary does NOT compensate for the increased cost of living. And firms absolutely don't pay for their impact on infrastructure.

It may not entirely make up for the cost of living, but in most cases I would say it certainly makes a big dent. And the rest of the difference can just be explained by the fact that people want to live in cities. So shouldn't it make sense that the cost of living is higher in these areas given that there is more demand for them?

My favorite example: Seattle. Each household will end up paying around $150k in additional taxes for the new transit that will benefit primarily dense office holders in the downtown.

I think it's strange to frame public transit as primarily benefiting dense office-holders. There are tons of other entities in cities besides just companies in offices. It's a public good, and transit generally benefits everyone. Citizens, companies, government, educational institutions, etc.

Also please link to where I can read more about the $150k number.

That st louis fed link doesn't seem to show any clear trend to me. Looks like we're actually on a downturn after a peak.

Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.

That article has cherrypicked dates.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPSFLAM1FQ

Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.

This is the first time I've heard of this locational jobs crisis. Where did you learn about this? I would like to read more about it

The same way you own anything. You buy it or make (breed) it.

Because the global economy is one gigantic system of systems standing on top of the US financial system. When the US has a gigantic economic shock it ripples worldwide. But de-dollarization is gradual, so it will be a gradual drawdown in international economies.

This is where you're losing me. You seem to be suggesting that de-dollarization will cause a US financial pain large enough that it will cause significant pain to other countries, AND that it will happen so fast that the de-dollarization itself (which was the impetus for this pain!) will not be sufficient to shield them from it.

The US is where people put their money because putting it elsewhere was riskier. But now the US might be more risky. So you diversify... to the places that were risky before. So you can only move to risky places. That risk eventually leads to some loss. It's a "least-worst option" situation, but the end result isn't going to be great.

Lots of assumptions here: 1. That the US is in fact becoming a much riskier place to invest (mostly only true for countries at risk of sanctions). 2. Other countries have stayed as risky as they always have been (do we know this isn't the case?). 3. That despite the inherent risk advantages of diversification to a wide range of countries/currencies is not significant enough to overcome the level of risk that the US has increased recently.

That's now how capitalism works, that's how rich people work. The echo chamber of HN is full of upper-middle-class people with disposable incomes that are happy to waste money to feel emotionally better about their choices. But businesses aren't emotional, they're competitive. They want lower costs and higher profits. That means spending less. If a business can use a model that's 1/6th the price to get approximately the same results, they're going to do that, in order to gain a competitive edge. China is the place you go when you want to cut costs.

It is how capitalism works sometimes. If the cost of using the new technology is very cheap AND top-of-the-line options result in significant productivity increases, most companies will be willing to pay higher multiples of cost for even marginal increases in performance.

If I'm so-and-so software company spending millions on various business costs, I dont care if I'm spending .5% of my costs on claude code when I could be spending .1% on deepseek. I want the best one (even if it's just slightly better) because the costs are marginal anyway.

To be honest this comment kind of reads like anti-US fanfiction.

That diversification helps everyone else, but will hurt the US, which hurts financial markets, and thus everyone else.

These are huge jumps in logic, I'm not even sure where to begin. I guess the most glaring question is: If other countries are actively diversifying from US assets as you claim, why would they still be so hurt by a US financial market downturn?

And once they're all divested, the diversification will add risk and losses.

Since when does diversification ADD risk, and how would losses be incurred?

which of course China is leading the world in, as nobody cares about "better", they care about "cheaper"

Also a huge claim to make. You'll find plenty of people who want the best models and are pretty price-insensitive, especially among those who get the most economic value out of AI.

In extreme scenarios it is certainly possible for the US to ban exports of certain fossil fuels, effectively making an internal US market that is isolated from the rest of the world and basically energy independent.

Yes, we would need to build more refining capacity to use it all effectively, but in a cataclysmic event (i.e. a world war or something) the US would be much much better off than most other countries.

This is exactly why I don't think it's a huge risk to be reliant on China for solar panels. If relations between your country and China go bad, it can't be that much of an emergency when they stop exporting them to you. All the panels you already bought still work!

Unless there is some hidden cybersecurity risk of them shutting off panels remotely?

Still not very high by historical standards. In fact, it really just seems like we're approaching the pre-pandemic norm.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12536

I agree. It's not trendy to have much appreciation for capitalism these days, but it's hard to ignore that the fierce competition in this space seems like it's going to result in commoditized productivity gains for the masses rather than monopolistic/oligopolistic extraction. At least for the near future.

There are plenty of entities that don't pay property taxes. Charities, religious facilities, some disabled people, spouses of fallen service members.

But then in the second portion of your comment you seem to be implying that it's all hype and nothing to worry about.

Just because something more powerful will be out in a year, doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about the one arriving in 6 months.

This comment must be a joke. It is not even remotely debatable that the US has the strongest military in the world.

Outside of nuclear MAD, if the US were in a total war scenario against any other country in the world, the US would win every time with the sole exception on maybe China.