crossbody

Sounds more like people retire somewhat early - for 25-54yo labor force participation near all time high: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

And here is one for 55+yo: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230

All is fine

What happens if large cohort of Boomers retires and stop working, instead living on their savings? Labor share of income drops. If you remove this effect, the labor share of income is flat - confirmed by last week's analysis in The Economist.

True, makes total sense for kids

Sounds like a fun project.

Honest question: why would one switch from a much more capable "carry everywhere" smartphone camera to this? Especially since phone is truly carry always & everywhere and that computational processing squeezes out insane amount of photo quality from already excellent phone cameras.

It doesn't negate the influence gain, however the Putin and Trump examples show that this influence is often (very) limited and short lived, not "tremendous"

How massive relative to everything else in the economy that is not zero sum? 1%?

Also, disagree on options and futures market. They do provide important economoc function of price discovery and insurance against risk

Can't see that far... All seems flat to me

Yes, people are getting wealthier in real terms, including the poor. Especially if you quantify it the right way: absolute consumption/expenditures, not relative % from median income (relative count will always show there are poor people even if they would appear insanely "rich" to a poor person from 100 years ago or from Afghanistan).

On lived experience: my lived experience tells me the Earth is flat.

How much bending is actually happening vs just hypotheticals thought? Elon Musk donated a lot and then suddenly Big Beautiful Bill hit Tesla very hard. Doesn't sound like he got a favor paid back. Also, not that we should emulate Russia (not at all) but since 2000s there any oligarch trying to do anything political goes to jail or "falls out of their window". So possible in principle to remove the influence (I don't approve of the method though).

Sure, HTF is zero sum. I just think that focus on it is excessive. 99.9% of businesses are not. Regret would be nice to include in consideration but I doubt one can reliably measure it in practice

I just see political influence as separate issue. Make sure they cannot lobby/donate (prison if they do) and problem solved.

Why being tangiable so important? E.g. a billionare made it on physical music CD cs one made it on music streaming? As long as it's legal, why prioritize physical form?

And I agree that _some_ redistribution is necessary for a healthy society. But the cost of slowing growth must be weighted agaist it. And populist calls for "no billionaires" etc are going to be bad for all, including the poor, in the end

"seems" as based on vibes? Beware of nostalgia bias!

It is true that middle class has been shrinking. What is often overlooked though ks that the majority of that middle class moved on to the upper class, so not bad at all and aligns with "growing pie"

Exactly, and thankfully those have been made based on natural experiments like the ones I shared. And the consensus among serious modern economists (not those making money on selling popular books) is that redistribution negatively affects economic growth with all else being equal

My bad, wrong chart (it's in real terms though)

Here is net wealth increasing for all, let's celebrate: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1962-_Net_personal_w...

My point is that the pie is growing and all are benefitting. Yes, rich may be getting more but not at the expense of poorer people as their wealth is increasing too. It's rather unfortunate but it seems that the pies grows fastest (and poor benefit from that growth too) when wealth is allowed to accumulate and yes that means more inequality but if all get better off, that's the price we have to pay for faster growth of total pie

Can we? Do we even know the counterfactual? Perhaps Norway would have been 2x richer (incl. their poorest people) if they implemented ultra aggressive libertarian policies.

The best we can do is learn from natural expriments like Finland and Estonia being about as rich before ww2, then by 90s the gap got massive since one was forced adopt more redistributive policies. Same with North / South Korea. Here we have at least some hope of extracting causality

Well, if Norway managed to pull it off, we can just ignore all the countless counter examples

If your logic is right, people back in the Stone Age were all like Jeff Bezos with mega yachts and stuff... It all went downhill from then - the population has increased so much and everyone has gotten so much poorer :(

Is your worry based on vibes?

Because statistics clearly show median real wealth growing rapidly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Yes, that is a fair point. However, the cost of drone versus latest generation ballistic missile that has a chance to reach us naval ship is very different. And in that sense, iterating on a drone is closer to iterating on a line of code because one drone would cost you a thousand bucks and your iteration is a small tweak like adding a different grenade triggering mechanism. Rockets require custom design, custom manufacturing lines, and generally much more difficult to modify and make more effective.

You also have a lot more tries with cheap drones since the target is lower value, so you have hundreds of data points on how each iteration performs vs hitting a naval ship which is an extremely rare event, so it's hard to see whether your iteration on a rocket actually succeeded.

Iterating on a rocket design is not like making a tweak to a line of code. It needs production line changes, manufacturing, testing, (repeat X times) where the process takes weeks, months or even years untill desired results can be achieved. And their manudacturing sites have been reduced to rubble, so that slows things down too.

And the age was set to 42.0

You quote correlation and then jump to causation. Any high quality evidence for causation that make you confident it's not depression that drives SM use (or something else entirely driving both)?

The EU is rich enough but will they stay "willing enough"? Unfortunately, many EU parties that are gaining popularity are also against spending money on Ukraine

I see your point, however, consider this: to a farmer in 1900, our modern food system is already "end of history" post-scarcity sci-fi. Back then, one farmer fed ~4 people. Today, thanks to automation, GMO and fertilizers, one farmer feeds ~170. We effectively solved the "calorie problem" for the developed world.

But the economy didn't flatline just because we hit THAT manufacturing ceiling. Value simply migrated from manufacturing (growing wheat, assembling cars) to services (Michelin dining, DoorDash, TikTok influencers). Radio did not turn out to be the last useful invention it was predicted to be. Knowledge generation has sped up dramatically.

Your point is fair regarding hardware - eventually you do run out of stars or hit the Landauer limit. But this is exactly Deutsch’s distinction between resources (finite) and knowledge (infinite). Even in a bounded physical system, the "software" (the art, explanations, and social structures) isn't bounded by the clock speed. We don't need infinite atoms to have infinite creativity and knowledge

You're describing a standard S-curve (logistic growth), which is definitely what happens to parameter counts or user adoption (like The Internet). But Amodei is applying this to scientific discovery itself. He’s effectively saying the "S-curve of Science" flatlines because we figure out everything that matters (curing aging, mental health, etc.). My whole point was that science doesn't have a top to the S-curve - it’s an infinite ladder (as per Deutsch).

The concept of the "end of the exponential" sounds like a tech version of Fukuyama's much mocked "End of History". Amodei seems to think we’ll solve all the "useful" problems and then hit a ceiling of utility.

But if you’ve read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, Amodei’s view looks like a mistake. Knowledge creation is unbounded. Solving diseases/coding shouldn't result in a plateau, but rather unlock totally new, "better" problems we can't even conceive of yet.

It's the begining of Inifinity, no end in sight!

there is art in getting other people's tax money, so yes

Anyone can become an artist with no skill and minimal effort while being a carpet installer requires skill and effort. If you are a carpet installer just call it art and get the money

Not true, the share of income going to living necessities has steadily dropped. Even not true for sunlight - the air quality was so much worse that you couldn't see much of the sun anyway

Would you say all people have the same level of intelligence and conscientiousness? If not, we need _some_ way of saying who is, so that they could be matched to higher complexity jobs. It's far for perfect but it works somewhat