epsteingpt

HN has no chill these days. Whoever is downvoting a sarcastic comment about Halloween... woof and BOO too you.

Totally crass. Who wants an excuse to have fun, have kids and co-eds dress up in flirty clothing, and eat candy?

Who would EVER think that's a good idea.

America sucks.

YouTube is crushing our national TV product, so let's tax YouTube.

It seems... fine.

But legislators are slow and companies are smart, so likely what would happen is something like: 1. Tax goes in place. 2. YouTube decreases the quality and starts broadcasting in 640x480 VGA. 3. France gets pissed. Forces them to 'distribute content at world standards with a law' 4. YouTube challenges the law in court. 5. The case costs the French more than the revenue provided in the meanwhile.

Or YouTube leaves France.

Who is winning here?

FDIC insured, no doubt.

underrated comment

principles* (GAAP)

According to "Generally Accepted Accounting Principle" my friend.

They are costs.

Derivative liabilities, SAFEs - those are basically taking cash from RETAIL shareholders and giving them to employees and early investors INSTEAD of using it to fund the business.

Let's have that discussion if you want, but don't act like a thing that is CLEARLY a COST to the business isn't a cost.

The point is not that the poor aren't better off. They undoubtedly are.

It's the it's the nature of mercantilist systems to leave only scraps for the people at the bottom. The absolute bare minimum to stave off revolution in good times.

This is merely the nature of the beast.

We're way better off in capitalism than other systems (as you can see); but to assume that we just had better ideas like the article suggests to get there is laughable.

Capitalism was enabled by a superstructure of world power that, we must remember, very nearly didn't make it.

Leaving Omelas &c.

Hate taking down these articles, but this is a very, very bad take. Rationalists always fall down on human behavior.

There is a comforting fairy tale popular among tech optimists: that human history is driven by mental upgrades that trickle down to the masses.

The first part of that sentence is absolutely true. The second part has a much darker side that optimists conveniently ignore.

1. Mercantilism is alive and well. Please see Hormuz, Straight of. 2. Mercantilist rent-seeking is alive and well, just at a layer up of abstraction. See Google, Meta, Microsoft. No single player can compete with them. Ones that somehow manage to even threaten get bought. 3. Tech doesn't solve issues broadly: a modern worker with a battery-powered chainsaw has more productive power than an 18th-century frontier settler. Yet we still have homelessness. Riddle me this, techno-optimist.

But you'll say, we're overall better off. Of course we are. But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries. The idea that the dude can eat a variety of incredibly rare food sits on the backs of billions of impoverished people who don't spend time in our air conditioned offices on MacBooks.

Great men and discoveries move the world (see Musk, Elon) but their exploits spread wealth HIGHLY unevenly, and big nation states want to steal it in the most mercantile way possible - by forcing and scaling up supply (look at China for cars, steel, and basically any advanced manufacturing right now).

One man intelligence will be a boon for people with agency. But it's HIGHLY unlikely to undo the superstructure which captured the rules of mercantilism AND capitalism at the same time.

But you know - it would be funny if somehow Open Weights are the thing that completely save IBM

Yes - exactly.

Because all these newly trained models using the compute are doing really well and growing!

Because there's limited demand, and GPU capacity is like airline seats use it or lose it.

This will only get worse.