American tech workers need to start paying attention to Chinese national policy, the National People's Congress is happening right now and it's how China sets long term goals and targets.
"Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now.
Yes. China's five year plans are translated into English and are quite readable.
Here's the 14th Five Year Plan, 2021-2025.[1]
Wikipedia has a summary.[2]
This is China's business plan. The top level is expanded into more detailed plans at lower levels. For example, here's the plan for Fujian province.[3] Further down, here's the transition plan for IPv6.[4]
You can go back and read previous five-year plans. The success rate for the individual goals is reasonably high.
In this case it is quite rational love. Some US universities have more IPv4 addresses than entire China! Single IPv4 address cost like $50, it is impossible possible to buy large ranges.
I just meant that they REALLY love international standards. They have the assumption that a group of really smart people must have decided it democratically and fairly, so no matter what it is about they will get excited about it.
Sure beats sitting around discussing, complaining, and half assedly developing a replacement standard and getting nowhere. Perfect being the enemy of good and all that.
What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)?
This video about Argentina's economic failures mentions why free market capitalism failed in argentina, and why a "similar" opening up in china didnt fail (but not so much detail that another country could follow it and replicate the success). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MzfNTSk4A
Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success, or just a facade (aka, china would've had success regardless of what those 5 yr plans are)?
> What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)?
Soviets had more hardcore ideologues at helm most of the times until SU dissolution. They hardly allowed their ideology to be diluted without challenge, which made plans infeasible without real time feedback. China's Mao era was somewhat similar to that. After Mao, during fight between Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, realistic faction came on top with famous Deng saying "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice". Also China does experimentation at province and city level, with people succeeding promoting to national level, containing pitfalls of bad policy.
highly meritocratic system all the way from bottom to top. incredible indeed. in china you start as a low level official managing a village, if you succeed - you're promoted to town etc.
they keep detailed records of your performance in school from kindergarten and a comprehensive dossier is compiled to evaluated by party officials.
that means you will never have a nincompoop in charge at any level.
maybe chinese nationals / or ccp members can correct or add some things.
> they keep detailed records of your performance in school from kindergarten and a comprehensive dossier
this also means you want your record pristine. And it is also why officials cover up problems rather than report it up.
But their current success to out-maneuver the US in terms of trade, as well as capacity, is testament to perhaps the success of such a system. I do recall there was a massive purge on corruption over the past decade(s), which is probably helped a lot. This did not happen in soviet russia.
That massive corruption purge is mainly Xi purging rival factions like Shangai and Jiang. Sure, it also targeted corrupt officials, but main target is rival factions in consolidating Xi grip on power. There isn't lot of taboo about corruption if you align with the correct faction.
And also stay aligned with the correct faction. This also provides golden handcuffs: should one's alignment change, past misdeeds will instantly be remembered.
Rooting out corruption in russia is simply not possible when biggest thief is at the top of the pyramid (absolute minimum stolen from russian nation is on the order of 100 billions $$ stashed all over the world, but its hard to count when its spread across many 'representatives').
He also actively promotes corruption of his underlings, but the important point is - within hard limits of their position. Get greedy and overstep that and either modern gulag or window for you. Good luck saying to the rest of population 'don't steal!'.
Xi is not flaunting his billion dollar mansions with golden toilets or megayachts while his kids grow up in Switzerland, is he.
Meanwhile the USA now has an openly corrupt president (openly favors his pal Elon Musk's companies in his daily speeches, lets Musk shut down the same agencies that regulate Musk's companies, etc) who is shielded by his party from impeachment.
China is starting to look quite well run by comparison.
You can express that the emperor is naked in europe, without the emperor sending you to prison, thus guarantee a constant churn and renewal, that leaves behind the cherished product of science - something more truthish.
Argentinas economy is a mess because of a long history of corruption. The CCP embraces markets while also having state ownership of everything by basically acting as venture capital funding different companies combined with heavy subsidies. So the 5 year plans are for signaling for which industries are going to get funding in the near future. My understanding is that this does have a pretty big impact and funding priorities change pretty drastically based off these plans.
Not to mention the orders of magnitude of difference in population capital and that the people of Argentina are not under a regime that promotes basically slave labor for the benefit of their economy. Even if they did I don’t think they’d be able to produce as much just because they don’t have enough people.
That video is pretty… weak. Argentina can’t be looked at on a GDP graph and say “oh yeah let’s find some random country that’s similar in this graph”. Most of Argentina’s problems are self inflicted sabotage. The graphs are also very misleading in the video, not only in the axis scales.
It's about the execution. The plan is just the first step.
Basically, China is centralized politically and decentraliced economically. The soviet centralized everything... even meat prices, a recipe for disaster.
They plan the outcome, but let the governing to the different provinces and the implementation to the (mostly) private sector. These actors are forced to compete, among other things, via export discipline that cannot be faked.
And somehow, despite facing the same corruption and cronyism problems we do in the west, they seem to get better results.
It's much more just population. Rapid population growth and then a one child policy has left China with a population bulge. Right now that bulge is 25-60ish which gives China a large amount of workers compared to children and the elderly. In 20-30 years that's going to switch and they will have a large amount of retirees supported by a relatively small amount of workers.
The Soviets were insanely successful: From the 1920s to 1960s they raised the USSR to space age, industrialized it to become the 2nd superpower, won a world war, upgraded citizens from village huts to apartments, from being barefoot to cars and subways.
What 'went wrong' was the economic war that Kennedy admn. started to starve the USSR of GDP by starting an arms and space race. The USSR did not bite the space race bait, but arms race was impossible to not participate. So it did. Then in the 1970s, the US started an economic warfare against the USSR with the help of its Gulf allies by manipulating oil prices. That wasn't enough either, so Reagan started another arms race. In the end all of that combined, crippled the USSR and it went bankrupt.
The US also went bankrupt, but it was able to delay it for ~15 more years by printing money and pumping it into the stock market and real estate thanks to the reserve currency status of the dollar. That came crashing down in 2008. The US did some more of the same and dragged it a decade and half more and here we are, where everything is finally crashing down.
China avoided most of that economic warfare by sitting on the sidelines and taking lessons. Sometime a decade ago, it passed the threshold of being too well-rounded and large to fail. To the point that it became a driving engine of the world economy, but backed with actual goods and services instead of the financial voodoo that the US built everything on.
> Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success
Yes, if your country can keep the private interests and capitalists under control. Otherwise, they derail every plan to maximize their profit by siphoning off state resources for little actual progress. Like how the last US administration's 'build back better' plan was derailed.
In 1916 the communists dud not want to take over Russia. In 1917, Lenin said they should take the opportunity to take over Russia, and wait for Germany to become a left wing government, the real revolution. This did not happen, big business at the 1933 Geheimtreffen decided to back a right wing government in Germany, and the divided left was pushed aside by a united right when the Catholic Center party signed the Enabling Act.
Russia knew from 1917 it needed political winds in the west, but they blew the other way. Continental Europe invaded Russia in 1941.
Then in 1953, Khrushchev shifted capital spending to consumer spending, one of the main blows to the Sividt economy which was humming along from 1933 to 1953.
Karl Marx basically said communist revolutions can't succeed in backwards countries, only the biggest and most advanced countries.
Good points. Though, the Soviet attempt has been extremely successful in many ways. We owe the social state we have in modern society to the Soviets succeeding in establishing all those practices and programs and showing that they can be done. In the 1930s the capital was doing incessant propaganda saying how social programs would cause a society to collapse. Soviet union proved all of them wrong and it became impossible to prevent implementation of the modern social state we have today.
The early industrialization 5 year plans actually worked better for the Soviets than the Chinese, and I think it comes down to execution? Stalin being the more numerate psychopath?
The last 30-40 years it's different, the Chinese have navigated market liberalization and transitioned from copying to leading in a number of areas, while still having a central planning aspect. It could be that some amount of central planning is preferable to pure ideological communism or capitalism.
China to a large extent is following the Japanese and South Korean playbooks, to the point where the Chinese financial system runs under the concept of window guidance invented by the Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_guidance
The question is whether or not this blows up in China’s face when they stop accurately picking winners. We are already seeing the property bubble collapse in a manner similar to Japan’s.
> the question is whether or not this blows up in China’s face
Japan didn't "blow up" due to picking wrong. The US and allies negotiated the value of the yen up (the plaza accords) when the trade imbalance started to rack up against the US. This popped japan's bubble, which ultimately caused their lost decade.
China, on the other hand, would be unlikely to sign any sort of similar treaty with the US. Their property bubble collapsed, but i dont think to the same extend as the japanese one. Not to mention that it was triggered by gov't, so it popped earlier than japan's one in the lifecycle - therefore, it must be the case that it's less bad.
I think there are different ways of defining bad. In Tokyo in 1990, the ratio of median house price to median income was 15. In Shanghai when the bubble popped, that figure was above 40, and even today it is at 36.
To put this in perspective, San Fransisco, a city considered to have a housing crisis, has a ratio of 9.
Yeah, but the mortgage rate in China is around 3%. Individual income taxes are under 10% [0]. And there's your multiplier for affordability comparisons.
Free market capitalism and soviet state socialism or communism is just editorial masturbation. Regardless of the economic system, the everyday tasks are done by regular humans. The system can organize them but if they don't want to do the work, the work won't get done. There is no magic system for that.
Over a decade ago, I worked in a public hospital with a really tight budget. The Pneumology section was clean, orderly and provided service to patients as they came with no waiting time. The service in the building nearby could well fit in the definitions of crimes against humanity. Same hospital, same financing, same system, just a different boss.
They really did the bulk of Wehrmacht killing on European mainland. But they didn't collapse only due to massive US support, be it in armament, equipment, medicine etc. Absolutely massive. Also it was basically due to bad German planning and preparation for winter, not some soviet strategic brilliance, which was very hard to be found on eastern front, just meatwave after meatwave till german machine gun barrels literally melted.
You could see tons of US equipment during WWII reels on eastern front including heavy machinery, soviets tried desperately to remove such footage (just like photos of soviet soldiers wearing 3+ watches on each hand... err borrowed from friendly locals) but truth has this behavior of seeping back to light.
Capitalism works pretty well in any moral society actually, much better than any other system thats for sure.
Right now, I try to consume content directly from the dragon's mouth with official news and reports, but it requires a bit of experience knowing how to read between the lines and having a strong bullshit parser.
Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that??
Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
At this point all China needs to do is the gaben strategy, doing nothing while America keeps shooting itself in the foot. Trump seems to have unlimited bullet supply.
If the goal was "be better than the US" then sure. But presumably their strategy is aimed at actually improving their country as it is for it's own people to live in. Much of which has nothing to do with the US.
Why would you presume that? CCP has become far more autocratic, and the goals of autocracy:
1) maintain the autocracy
2) have a strong police to preserve the autocracy from rebellion
3) have a good enough economy to defend the autocracy from external threats
... ten more "for the autocracy" points ...
improving the country for the people
Also, Zeihan overselling or not, China is facing an unprecedented demographic decline. So to the parent comment about "not doing anything and winning", honestly the US can do the same and watch China implode demographically.
CCP under Xi has reverted to form after some temporary loosening up, but it's still way less autocratic than it was during the Mao era.
Also, the CCP ultimately derives its legitimacy from materially improving the country for the Chinese people: back in the day fighting back against the Japanese and corrupt warlords, now economic progress. Both the Chinese people and the CCP know well what it means if they stop delivering and the "Mandate of Heaven" expires.
China's demographic decline will take decades and unless the CCP really fucks things up (eg. invading Taiwan and failing miserably at it), it's going to be a Japan/Korea-style slow-motion stagnation, not a dramatic implosion.
The closest analogue would be the culling of the buffalo, an intentional effort to destroy the food supply of the natives.
Americans don't like to acknowledge this.
But even that's a little different. Application of new farming practices is not an intentional genocide. The culling of the buffalo was an intentional genocide.
I'm a strong China hawk. But Beijing currently has an opportunity to craft a global alliance that balances the U.S. in a way that America has historically excelled at. Put another way, the idiots who voted this man in have turned America into an Axis power.
That is normal; the world worked that way prior to 1990.
The real change is that the US economy isn't obviously superior to the next however many economies combined. Consequently the US is losing the ability to impose its opinions on others as fundamental truths. It looks like everyone in the West will have to re-learn negotiation and it'll probably be a rocky process.
Sort of. I’d move the needle to the 1970s, when Soviet power was on an obvious downside. Realpolitik would dictate, at that time, for Europe and Asia to balance America. But we were a good ally. So balancing wasn’t seen to be necessary.
Wasn't seen as possible, an important distinction. The Australian experience so far is the US demands we ... basically commit war crimes every so often. Or whatever the term is for invading countries without justification. It is a lot like being good friends with a shark; it is important to keep them pointed at other things and the shark isn't ever going to go out of its way for you unless it is hungry and the friendship is ending.
The world was probably better for us when the US was unconstrained by reality; but the reality is the US have been behaving very irresponsibly for decades. Trump is on the upper end of the presidential scale in recent history, the world can't cope with another Bush or Biden. Obama might have been able to get better diplomatic results.
I mean, US was the shining beacon of supposedly the best capitalistic policies are, but look at where it got us.
Meanwhile, China has been getting better and better, looking at US as an example, and correctly avoiding providing the "freedoms" given to us in US in avoiding the same fate.
China is automating [1], they know the demographics dividend is ending. More industrial robots are built and sold in China than anywhere else in the world. They are going high tech [2], and will outcompete the US in high tech (based on all available info). They have the will, the US does not (too busy chasing short term gains and ideological wins), based on all available evidence [3].
> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
How does Valve put out one of the worst releases of all time in Artifact and not get dragged through the coals ever for it? The only working strategy Valve has succeeded in running in the last 10 years is making passive income from Steam and that won't last forever.
> This occurred to me. April 2001, US Navy plane crashes into Chinese J8 jet, kills pilot, lands on Hainan Island without authorization
An interesting interpretation of events. Let's continue.
"Then the air crew donates their airframe & technology to the Chinese Communist Party. And when they return they come up with a lie that they had been buzzed several times by the J8 pilot until the crash. Also they faked distress calls recording it. All to prove that the United States is a paper tiger intent on disrupting the Chinese people's rightful claim to all East Asian territory."
Maybe you don't remember that only 2 years earlier the US CIA "mistakenly" bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese government workers and nearly sparking war, with Bill Clinton personally calling to apologize.
It really is interesting to see this point of view. Are apologies admissions of guilt in your family/hometown? Do you think it was in the United States' interest to destroy the embassy of a non-belligerent in that war?
The account was created 3 months ago. Might be actual person. But also might be troll or bot.
I do know real people that hold views like this, but they also apply similar lens to other large countries with global footprint. So at least a consistent approach.
I agree. With how much time we collectively spend online, money spent on online propaganda would be extremely high value for money for belligerent governments.
That would make American businesses very happy, but what would be so good for China? There's a reason they made the decision to artificially suppress domestic consumption in favor of building a strong manufacturing base and export-focused economy, and it seems to be working well for them.
Hyper-consumerism took off in the US because it’s a false economic indicator. It makes lines go up, but doesn’t materially improve anyone’s lives.
We’re seeing the effects of ~70 years of hyper-consumerist behavior. It worked for a while, but now the costs have accumulated. There’s shit everywhere, and everything either breaks or is poison. Or both.
Some authors of this piece are deeply involved themselves in building robots and other hardware technology. They should be taken seriously. The US is moving into a trade war, however unwise, with the country that supplies components for everything we make and need. That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.
China has been methodically preparing for trade war and decoupling for the better part of the decade. US went in full throttle with zero preparation. This is not going to end well.
I wonder if this is a consequence of the political systems of China vs the US. China tends to think and plan longer term, where as the US seems much more transactional; what will win me the next election / midterm etc.
Pull the other one, we saw how they went in the 20th century. Large centralised governments have never managed to systemically outplan democracies.
The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists. As a result they aren't the leader of the industrial world. This has been planned for a long time and a bunch of people were celebrating it the entire way along. You try standing up and saying "we should prioritise industry!" anywhere in the west - it is a bruising experience as soon as it gets to the specific policies that are likely to be successful.
Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations. That isn't bad planning, that was an explicit rejection of the outcomes China achieved.
I'm most of the way through reading Moral Mazes which covers this part of American culture in-depth as it relates to chemical and textile manufacturing. Specifically, it discusses psychological attitudes to perception of chemical manufacturing as being dirty, and the rationalizations employed by middle managers towards their work.
What Moral Mazes lays out is the idea of the tension between the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of practicality (as seen by manufacturers), and the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of purity (as seen by activists and lawyers).
It is a great book I would recommend to anyone, although being primarily an observation of the psychological processes at play, there are of course no solutions offered.
Feels like Chip Wars more aptly lays out the material reality of why and how we historically ended up here if you prefer that to what shape the propaganda took.
"We want even bigger profit margins. We sought the globally cheapest labor pool we could. Whoopsie, they got better at it than us and started competing. Let's catch up with government subsidy to compete or get SotA at a different piece of the market. Ok we caught up with state money, time to offshore a different piece of the puzzle to an even cheaper labor pool for even bigger profits." repeated until: "Whoopsie, an island off the coast of our 'rival' makes 90+% of one of the most vital products in the world."
> The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists
> Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations.
Come on. For the west to combat the “anti-industrialists”, you would have to suppress the choices and decisions of normal people, who don’t want to see others die for the sake of factory owners.
Just outright say that democracy doesn’t work, and that Chinese style autocracy does.
Get to the actual heart of the debate. Trying to replicate the Chinese economic model, while dodging the moral and philosophical choices that supports it, results only in deception and prevarication.
Anti-industrialists is arguing via classification and nouns; it just grants a short term win which fails to live up to its pomp when it hits an obvious counter point.
Seize the major question, have people accept and acknowledge the tradeoffs in all their misery and glory.
> Just outright say that democracy doesn’t work, and that Chinese style autocracy does.
There is no evidence of that to date. Western liberal democracies are much nicer places to live than China and at some point the Chinese autocrats will probably collapse internally - they're gambling on the CCP being competent which isn't a winning strategy long term. The problems are a bit more subtle - things like security implications and rates of progress.
Politics and propaganda tend to dominate national "learning", and those forces tend to escalate to prevent awareness. So not a lot of learning happens, historically ("history tends to repeat itself"; "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes", etc)
If facts don’t work, intelligent, rational discourse and compromise don’t work, and economic pain don’t work, well, you’re out of options (at least options that can be discussed here).
It's not even about China. Asia as a whole has seen massive economic growth in the last 40 years. Countries like Indonesia and Vietnam are self confident enough to no longer kow tow to America.
>The US once had a solid base to spin up heavy industry factories, but this withered away as cheaper overseas manufacturing cut US producers out and the American economy shifted toward leading edge technology and services.
The Americans in charge of the "economy" settled for "leading edge" technology and services.
We can eventually automate our economy by buying software and hardware from China. By electing Trump, we basically missed the chance to lead on anything, and instead decided to engage full time in trade and culture wars that aren't really going to yield anything. But as long as the work gets done, even if in China, we should be able to enjoy it.
It's funny you invoke some trad/conservative appeal to tradition, and meanwhile China's imperial history of bureaucratic machinery is never pointed to as an example of "look, technocratic meritocracy works".
> Under Charles Grant, the East India Company established the East India Company College at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the imperial examination system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.[10]
> William Ewart Gladstone, in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for Stafford Northcote, private Secretary to Gladstone who, with Charles Trevelyan, drafted the key report in 1854.[11]
And western countries accepted it as part of the base assumption how government should work, then nobody points to its origin since now it's so obvious (from modern perspective).
Although it is worth recognizing that although the Imperial Chinese did have an examination-based civil service, it wasn't examinations on anything actually relevant to their jobs as in modern merit-based civil services. Instead, people wanting to enter the Imperial Chinese Civil Service were tested on their ability to recall trivia from classic Chinese literature. Great if the job was Jeopardy! contestant, less so for anything practical.
Parkinson's Law contains a nice (tongue in cheek) summary of the influence of the Chinese system on the British Civil Service:
> The Chinese system was studied by Europeans between
1815 and i830 and adopted by the English East India
Company in 1832. The effectiveness of this method was
investigated by a committee in 1854, with Macaulay as
chairman. The result was that the system of competitive
examination was introduced into the British Civil Service
in 1855. An essential feature of the Chinese examinations
had been their literary character. The test was in a knowledge of the classics, in an ability to write elegantly (both
prose and verse) and in the stamina necessary to complete
the course. All these features were faithfully incorporated in
the Trevelyan-Northcote Report, and thereafter in the
system it did so much to create. It was assumed that classical
learning and literary ability would fit any candidate for
any administrative post. It was assumed (no doubt rightly)
that a scientific education would fit a candidate for nothing
- except, possibly, science. It was known, finally, that
it is virtually impossible to find an order of merit among
people who have been examined in different subjects.
Since it is impracticable to decide whether one man is better in geology than another man in physics, it is at least
convenient to be able to rule them both out as useless.
When all candidates alike have to write Greek or Latin
verse, it is relatively easy to decide which verse is the best.
Men thus selected on their classical performance were then
sent forth to govern India. Those with lower marks were
retained to govern England. Those with still lower marks
were rejected altogether or sent to the colonies. While it
would be totally wrong to describe this system as a failure,
no one could claim for it the success that had attended the
systems hitherto in use. There was no guarantee, to begin
with, that the man with the highest marks might not tum
out to be off his head; as was sometimes found to be the
case. Then again the writing of Greek verse might prove to
be the sole accomplishment that some candidates had or
would ever have. On occasion, a successful applicant may
even have been impersonated at the examination by some-
one else, subsequently proving unable to write Greek verse
when the occasion arose. Selection by competitive examination was never therefore more than a moderate success.
I didn't know this and have always wondered why in the UK we didn't have something like the Chinese system for civil service.
Ironically the civil service is full of intelligent people and it's a competitive grad programme, but it's also wholly undesirable as a career path for many.
I know plenty of smart driven people who want to make a difference who won't go anywhere near the civil service for fear or bureaucracy or salary sacrifice or both. I also know plenty of people who left the civil service jaded by the whole experience.
I don't know what the solution is but I'm always a bit saddened that people end up moving money around or optimising clicks because there's no alternative if you don't want to get left behind
In ancient China, power and social status were gained through official positions, and merchants were considered the lowest of respectable occupations. This led to the exams attracting many of the "best and brightest" to government service. In modern western countries, being wealthy is the best way to get respect and adulation. The "best and brightest" spend their education learning how to extract value from the rest.
China isn't really that different these days. Everyone is thinking about being wealthy, but especially the Chinese. Hopefully the official class evolves to something like what Singapore has, or its going to be a constant brain drain on the government as smart kids continue to prefer the private sector.
Indeed, no one sane will invest in building factory systems on US soil under a Kakistocracy.
Robot platforms are already a difficult business model in the private sector. With the exception of robot vacuums the market just isn't viable in the US yet. Best of luck =3
"Just decided" =/= decided today. They decided months if not years ago, after months of negotiations with local authorities. Don't look at plants opening now to judge the current administration. Look at it 2 years from now.
I don't know - the article specifically said Honda will produce the cars "to avoid potential tariffs". I don't think the Trump tariffs were in place "years ago"...
Of course, a marketing line to fit the current situation (and curry favor with the current vindictive administration) is easily added/updated at press time.
This does not mean the making of the deals and building the factory had anything to do with it at the time, but stating that those past decisions also have benefit in today's situation is not surprising.
It also does not mean that this has anything to do with the actual reason the deals and investments were made years ago. As you point out, those deals & investments years ago couldn't have anything to do with this week's tariffs.
Yeah I didn't understand how this was news. Civics and Accords for the US market have been produced in the US for decades. This isn't anything new to my eyes, maybe I missed something though.
>how this was news
I'll explain. It's a 'news' article from an arm of a multinational conglomerate trying to massage the economic harm the isolationist fascists currently in charge of the us govt are doing for (hopefully) obvious material reasons. see also: literally any of wapo's recent journalistic history, the nyt on gaza, social media like twitter's political shift, the tech ceo's in the front row of trump's inauguration, or if you prefer books, manufacturing consent, technofuedalism (yanis), surveillance capitalism, etc, etc, etc. capitalists stick together.
It I had a watch company and I rolled out new models of watches every week;
1. Either there would be so little variation that people would have choice paralysis.
2. People would wonder why I couldn't keep a consistent product line with concerns of product quality.
3. People would have major concerns about repairs and service parts availability since the next new things was not a couple years ago but quite literally, last week.
Indeed, products for domestic markets may have some incentives to avoid international supply chains.
The policies likely will just lead to multiple heavily coupled regional factories producing identical products at higher COGS. Controlling supply and demand in theory also makes communism more efficient, but in practice eventually has unintended economic consequences.
We shall see how this evolves... May our popcorn be plentiful =3
Amazon acquired that facet of its business, and should not be considered a B2B product.
Most general purpose robot firms just don't do well domestically, and rarely make it past a business cycle. I would partner with Festo Germany before touching US markets. =3
Most general purpose robot firms don't do well at all, because until very recently, general purpose robotics have fallen short of being useful in general purpose scenarios. Amazon acquired Kiva 13 years ago. Kiva was itself founded and headquartered in the U.S.
My point was robotics startups don't typically survive with generic products very long. They are acquired or go under even after they reach TRL launch stage.
Is it a rhetorical question? In my opinion this dispute is closely tied with Taiwan claim. When China gets Taiwan - it gets most of the critical area containing shipping lines and oil/gas fields.
Not gonna happen. On the 1% chance we have a fair election next time around and Dems get elected, they will be too busy cleaning up the Republican mess, and nobody will notice. Just like what happened under Biden.
China ironically can end US by simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
> simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
I dont believe those tech workers would wish to move, unless the political system in china changes to one that is more amenable to democracy; not to mention that having high salaries in the US, it will be impossible to achieve similar levels in china after migration (even if the PPP remains the same!).
I mean, you are going to see an exodus of tech workers regardless as US economy withers up and other countries (probably in EU) pick up the slack.
China won't even have to have high salaries, all they would need to do is basically set up immigrant neighborhoods that have all the familiar things that US people like, and through the nature of just being around people of similar status, whatever the salary everyone gets paid gets normalized - there isn't anything you would be able to buy to "flex" on your peers, and everyone would be in the same boat.
China isn't interested in immigration. In a relatively liberal and democratic country like the US, immigration is a boon because we don't care all that much about political or economic stability and are used to not having it. In an authoritarian oligarchy like China it's poison because an unstable environment will see the government in trouble quickly when people lose confidence in the party and leadership.
But if China starts importing immigrants, it will be just another shithole. Their quality and success come from their own population. Importing foreigners is just poisoning yourself your culture and future.
Yes, and I think this is the core motivation behind the Trump messaging - bring it back to the US if possible. In fact, he wants to bring back commercial and maritime ship building back[1]. Pretty cool! Hopefully this will employ lots of people.
see also: his attacks on the "horrible" CHIPS act [0]. If anyone think he's doing anything good for anyone but billionaires, contact me. I've got some trump coin to sell you.
Talk is cheap, as they say. It's one thing to want something to happen, it's entirely another to actually make it so.
Generally disassembling the machinery of state and starting trade wars is not an effective way to achieve your policy objectives unless your policy objective is economic and social chaos.
"Back" as in undermining EV manufacturing? And non-fossil power generation?
"Back" as in massively increasing input costs?
"Back" as in alienating close allies who are a large part of our customer base?
"Back" as in repeatedly disrupting the supply chain by flip-flopping on tariffs without a clear plan?
"Back" as in undermining research across the board?
The current policy will not employ lots of people. It will have lots of people out of work fairly soon, if we continue on the current path. It will diminish our industrial base further, and reset our manufacturing skills to the 80s or earlier. But hey, at least toy manufacturers are hiring, that's a really important industry.
Setting aside any questions about intentions, the effects of the current policies are hugely deleterious.
This is Chinas greatest strength and their greatest weakness. They can actually commit to policy positions when they're effective, but they also commit to policy positions when they're not effective.
Words and desires are easy. Crafting, marketing and enacting policy to achieve the goals set by your words and desires is difficult. The world is complex and reacts in complex ways, but try to say that to a Trump voter and get called a disconnected elitist.
Gonna build boats with steel and aluminium tariffs at 50% or more? Good luck with that.
This isn't something you turn around in a few years by adding tariffs, it's a long term strategy that requires high investments and tariffs. Like the chip act, but Biden did that so that cant happen either.
No one is trying to make war, but naturally China is looking at changing the order of things, at least regionally. To make that happen it needs USA to move out, and create its own coalition of countries around the area.
Telling a sovereign nation, and the US’s closest ally, it should become the 51st US state isn’t making war, but it’s way more than imposing tariffs in contravention of treaties this president signed in his last term.
It's just a joke. A bad joke, but just a joke. Republicans are afraid to add Puerto Rico as a state for fear of it voting Democrat, they would never allow Canada to become a state even if you wanted to (or rather, 10 states), because they would never win an election again.
Canada isn't bound to the monarchy or to the UK. The king is just a figurehead, and the king's representative (the Governor General) is a powerless rubber stamp.
Now, to be clear, the (conceptual) figurehead is taken seriously. When the queen died, a great renaming happened, changing each province's court of queen's bench to the court of king's bench, Queen's Counsel are now called King's Counsel, and of course new currency is being minted with images of the king. But, none of that means the actual King Charles the person has any power at all.
The issue under Biden was protectionist/preferential policies which were challenged and got changed through the dispute mechanism[2]. The changed policy was then disputed again but the US lost the dispute[3].
The US has never gotten close to surpassing the tariff-rate quotas so the tariffs haven't applied.[4] Though the American dairy industry claims that's because of further protectionist policies.[5]
I'm not an expert on this so if you have more specific information please share sources.
America repeatedly threatened annexation and wanted water. It demands registration of goverment citizens. They call premier governor. Tariffs seem ti be preparatory steps meant to weaken Canada as a preparation for further attacks.
In general, conservatives are nowhere near to do the awful thing they say loudly they will do - and then, each time, they do that exact thing. Again again and again. These are plans and ignoring them is a self delution.
USA needs to move out and stop trying to start a war with China. Taiwan is China. Historically, legally, even according to the US's own policy. The KMT lost. This fantasy the US has of toppling or splitting up the PRC in a proxy war is extremely deranged.
China has exercised incredible restraint over the actions of a belligerent warmonger US.
I don't agree with most of what you've written, however, if the US has only mineral-profits interest in defending Ukraine from Russia, then there's only slightly above zero chance that the US will be rushing to defend Taiwan from China. What seems more likely is that the US will agree to let China take Taiwan in return for allowing the trade of TSMC chips to continue.
TSMC is the majoity (only?) value proposition the US has in Taiwan, and, from memory and a cursory Wikipeding, it seems that TSMC has been 'de-centralising' into Japan, the US, and Europe of late.
Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.
UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want.
And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
This becomes less of a difficult pill to swallow if a) we're involved in a trade war, b) the economy has crashed and we must work our way out of it "for the country", c) the right people get enough money.
They're too smart for mass murder because that would actually spark a resistance, not to mention get other nations involved. I don't think a sweatshop labor economy will spark a resistance because we can't even resist our current labor abuses (and neither can that segment of China's population).
> What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
Still too optimistic on how long-term the American approach will be. There won't be a UBI, the oligarchy will be paid directly from government coffers. The deficit, bonds and other government instruments will paper over the collapse of tax-revenue and population for a while, before the whole house of cards collapses[1]. I think the billionaires hope to be in space habitats or dead by then, if not, there's always their bunkers in New Zealand - their cache of gold bars should still work there after they ravage the USD. Capital knows no borders.
1. See late 1990s Russia. Only simple, extractive industries will chug along.
> If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power.
Only in a democracy.
China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway.
America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
The trouble is those populist politicians, in the US at least, are the very same billionaires at the top of the system who have somehow convinced the working class people they are on their side.
>The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
I agree that people will still want/need meaning, and some may lose it, along with their jobs, but having the money for basic needs by default gives you the ability to explore your interests with less risk. You can spend 6 months learning to paint or program or write stories without worrying about food and bills if UBI is properly implemented. If you miss your tech support job, you can go idle in 30 channels on Libera and help people that wander in asking questions about whatever software.
What am I missing here? People giving up without trying to find something to do? People who feel useless if they aren't the family breadwinner? I personally look forward to a day when most people don't need to work, and instead can "work" on what they choose.
Or, less pessimistic, a lot of people are happy to consume human relationships all day.
That’s what life has always been about for a large segment of people, going back thousands of years. Media is more or less a bandaid. People are busy, people are anxious, people don’t want to bother to spend money - media can give the sensation of human interaction without the hard bits.
But ultimately, if I could never work but I was surrounded by my loved ones forever, I would be pretty happy with that. We can find stuff to do, or just do nothing at all. With them, it’s always a blast.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
It's not like most jobs in this economy provide purpose and meaning now as it is. People on UBI can find meaning in hobbies, art, hiking, friendships, and other things that they currently don't have time for. Volunteering is another route. Remember how everyone started baking sourdough bread and making home cooked meals when the pandemic started? We'll find other ways to have purpose and meaning. UBI will be a lot like retirement is now only it will last for a much longer portion of the lifetime.
UBI won't fix much for a far more trivial and mechanistic reason: adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income merely gives landlords the ability to charge ($1,000*n bedrooms)/mo more in rent.
I always disagree with this moving freely argument. Certainly some live where they do specifically for work, but some are also there to be close to family. They will not be interested in relocating to save a buck.
In other words, the real estate market is sticky. There are large costs to moving, so consumers put up with price increases more readily than they do in other markets.
But there's a big gulf between "sticky" and "laws of supply and demand don't apply".
People on UBI will be much more price sensitive than those supplementing with wage income since the UBI dependent will be time rich and money poor. Landlords will have less power over them. They'll still have some power because of the stickiness.
There's a big gulf between "eventually all marginal productivity increases are eaten by rising land rent" and "laws of supply and demand don't apply."
You have no reason to believe people with new marginal income from UBI would move to lower COL areas. We have strong reason to believe they'd spend that money to move toward high COL areas. Evidence for this is the fact that people, when they have money, choose to live in high COL areas.
People living solely on UBI will be the poorest people in the country. It's absurd to believe that UBI will be generous enough to cover more than basic living expenses. They're not going to behave like "people with money".
I didn't say anything about "people living solely on UBI"
Your claim is, I guess, that people supplementing wages with UBI will move to poorer locations, because they are less tied to their jobs, and then the poorest of the poor (those who already live in bottom-percentile COL locations) will... move to even poorer locations?
Seems like a wacky argument relative to: "people will do what they literally always do with new marginal income, which is move to nicer areas, and since everyone is doing it simultaneously without new supply, prices will go up and nobody will improve their lifestyle."
Landlords can't simply arbitrarily raise rents like that. If they could, they would already charge every individual tenant 100% of their income. Renting is a market like any other, and markets have limits and competition. The renters that do try to increase rent by $1000 will simply not have tenants anymore, and those that didn't, would, because UBI means people can basically move anywhere, any time they like.
It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
That can happen because of a new subway station, a hot new employer nearby, or simply because money appeared in their pockets.
If money were no object, more people would live in high COL areas, not fewer. You know this is true because you see it in the prices.
To prevent rent increases you’d need people all to have $n appeared in their pockets and to have a pact not to then spend $n to upgrade their living arrangements. The cruel irony of course being if everyone attempts to upgrade, then no one achieves an upgrade but they do achieve spending their new money!
Additional income is not additional willingness to pay 100% of that income forthe currently-purchased quality and quantity of one particular good or service, and even if it was that's a demand shift which without a supply change, will still result in a smaller increase in rent.
UBI, which any realistic method of implementing makes a shift in income from somewhere higher on the income spectrum to somewhere lower (the exact shift being defined by the UBI level and financing mechanism), most likely (if it replaces existing means tested welfare programs) most favoring a level somewhere above where current welfare programs start tapering off, does have some predictable price effects, but they aren't “all rents go up by an amount equal to the UBI amount times the number of recipients typically living in similar units”.
First order, they are some price increases across goods and services disproportionately demanded by the group benefitting in net, with some price decreases across those disproportionately demanded by the group paying in net. These will vary by elasticity, but in total should effect some (but less than total) compression of the time money shift, reducing somewhat the real cost to those paying and the real benefit to those receiving, but with less effect on those paying because of lower marginal propensity to spend with higher income.
Beyond first order is more complicated because you have to work through demand changes,and supply chnages caused by labor market changes from reduced economic coercion, increased labor market mobility and ability to retrain for more-preferred jobs, which are going to decreased supply for some jobs, increase supply for others (though on different schedules), etc.
> It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
The only landlords who can afford to operate this way own many, many units. A long term tenant who pays in a predictable manner and isn't actively damaging property is worth their weight in gold, and you can't afford to roll the dice on the next tenant unless you're able to spread the risk and cost of the churn around.
All rents are set by the market's willingness and ability to pay.
No matter whether you're the 40th percentile (a vacancy-sensitive landlord) on price or the 90th (a vacancy-insensitive landlord), the dollar value of the underlying distribution is defined by the market's willingness and ability to pay. If that goes up, the entire distribution moves to the right.
Does your rent go up by the precise amount of your increase in income every year? Mine doesn't. My landlord isn't checking my W2 or tax statements for extra rent money, that isn't how it works.
The assumption that all rents, everywhere, would go up by the amount of UBI is the definition of "arbitrary."
>Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount?
What does it matter?
You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
Rents can rise based on minimum wage, but all renters do not raise their rents precisely by the increase in minimum wage.
And when high paying employers come to an area, not all renters raise rents accordingly.
You're ignoring that market forces exist affecting rent other than the simple greed of landlords. Not every landlord would increase rent by the amount of UBI because there is an obvious market opportunity in not doing so, and because not every property could justify that, even with UBI.
> You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
I'm a landlord. My agent figures out the rent to charge on my behalf. They do this by making an informed guess as to what the market can bear — sometimes they've been wrong, and had to reduce the asking rate.
That is, mechanistically, how they discover what the market can bear.
If everyone gets £1000 UBI money each month, everyone can afford to pay £1000 more rent than before. Some agents will guess this means everyone can afford £500 more rent, some will guess higher, some will guess lower. They'll discover through this process of guessing and seeing what happens, how much people can actually pay.
This is complicated by all the other concurrent changes, including:
(1) the scenario of no-more-work-needed suggests that some of the tenants will move to wherever the rent is lowest rather than where their previous commute was shortest
(2) no-more-work-possible meaning money supply goes down rather than up
(3) people won't need to spend a huge amount of money commuting, not just time, which may increase personal money supply (just not by as much as the loss of income from not working)
(4) if they actually like the homes enough to want to spend all day in them, rather 5 hours awake and inside because the other 19 hours of the day are 8 asleep, 2 commuting, 8 working, and 1 lunch break; UBI being claimed by 500 people who all officially live in the same 1 bed flat in a Norfolk village, but they're all actually spending their money on living in relatively cheap safari cabins in Botswana or whatever, is a very different dynamic than everyone staying put to keep close to friends and family.
(On the plus side, if we have robot workers so cheap there's no point hiring humans any more, then we may also get a lot more high-quality housing for a price of next-to-nothing).
No landlord is looking at a particular tenant's income under the microscope and adjusting their rent. But, of course they do it in aggregate based on averages. UBI shifts the overall demand curve, and every supplier of goods will adjust their prices proportionally.
Increasing the rent price makes it much easier for new rentals to come online, as long as the government isn't effectively stopping new competitors. Much the reason why grocery stores, car mechanics, etc. aren't going to raise their prices by an average of $1k/mo.
Applying it to rent is arbitrary. The general point is that it is inflationary for all goods and services.
That is assuming UBI is funded through government borrowing as we saw with COVID stimulus. If funded through new taxes the inflationary impact should be much less.
(I don’t have enough economic training to determine how much less.)
Well it's not quite arbitrary because it will induce supply in other goods and services. Rent in high COL areas is driven primarily by land rent (i.e. cost of land, regardless of whether that land is actually rented to the building on top of it or not), which has zero supply elasticity.
And then the other portion of rent (the building itself) is also pretty darn supply-inelastic as well, though not entirely.
i live in a high COL area and rent is not high because of land costs. there are several empty lots that people want to build on but the discretionary review process for entitlements make it too easy to wreck the permit process (everybody knows this in the entire world; this is the YIMBY line which has truth to it). another factor is the cost per bedroom to build is very high, due to the cost of building in the market (labor, cost of goods, etc). so it's actually everything to do with the building/entitlements and nothing to do with land cost. at least where i live right now. proof: the college cancelled a massive housing project because it was gonna be too expensive per bedroom. this wasn't because of land costs but building costs.
aside, while i'm at it, let's take another swipe at free market and housing: the YIMBY line has truth about regulations preventing building, but if you look at build starts for like the 10 years after the 2008 crisis, you'll see a lack of buildings that happened during that time. they had record housing starts leading up to the crisis, and you know what also existed then? the same regulatory regime that we are now tearing down to help us build what we need. but after the crisis, the builders stopped building because they were fearful about the market. this suggests to me that "regulations prevent building, just let the free market take care of it," is too simplistic and ignores very real data. the market took care of it by not building.
So 1) yes construction costs are a huge, huge factor (especially right now), but 2) land is about $1.5MM/ac in Burlington VT. A few miles outside of it, land is about $150,000/ac.
Consider a 2 acre project:
$3MM in land costs inside Burlington
$300,000 in land costs right outside Burlington
What projects would could you do on the $300,000 lot that you can't possible do on the $3MM? Basically all of them!
Regarding the UVM project: they should sell that parking lot to bring the $1.5MM/ac costs closer to $300k/ac so people can build stuff instead of a place to store asphalt :)
No, those are real numbers spot-checked from Zillow. I was on my phone and, ya know, it's an Internet argument, so they're definitely ballparked, but they are from real actual land sales inside Burlington and then a few miles outside of Burlington.
I suppose the delta is surprising to you?
It's expensive because it's productive. The marginal productivity of living/working in Burlington means the market can sustain higher costs, ergo the costs go up.
This is more problematic than every other good because 1) they cannot add more land inside Burlington and 2) the land doesn’t actually have higher carrying costs by virtue of being more expensive (unlike roughly every other asset).
i look at zillow multiple times per day so i'm well aware of the local market, so no it's not surprising me. zillow doesn't give the full picture of what is happening locally. zillow list price for vacant land doesn't consider all the vacant lots held by people who aren't building for various reasons nor does it consider the surrounding suburbs etc. or the land uvm holds but doesn't develop (who they gonna sell to? they have more money than anybody). there are a lot more variables than just zillow!
> Zillow list price for vacant land doesn't consider all the vacant lots held by people who aren't building for various reasons nor does it consider the surrounding suburbs etc. or the land uvm holds but doesn't develop (who they gonna sell to? they have more money than anybody). there are a lot more variables than just zillow!
What? Yes it does. That's how prices work. If UVM sold all of their land, prices would go down, but they aren't selling all of their land, so the prices are higher.
I never said "all land is being used productively." I said "land prices are the primary source of cost in high COL areas." One contributor to high land prices are all the things you mention: people withholding their unused land from the market.
No, there are not more variables than just the sale price. The price of land is the price of land, and it factors in all the variables you mentioned.
of course land price contributes to housing cost but "land price" isn't the full picture. i wish it were that simple.
> That's how prices work. If UVM sold all of their land, prices would go down, but they aren't selling all of their land, so the prices are higher.
yes exactly how prices work in a textbook but a textbook is not a local market with all sort of dynamics. imagine the political process of UVM choosing to sell all their land, that is just absurd to be like "they can do that and the price problem is solved!" they probably got the land for very cheap and clearly want to develop but they can't because they can't afford construction costs, for a number of reasons (price of land being only one).
UVM’s internal politics are, in fact, accounted for in the price of land.
Yes, for that particular plot of land, which they already owned, the land price is not what prevented construction. That particular project’s failure is not a major driving force of the price of living in Burlington.
The fact that 2 acres costs $3MM is a major driving force.
Meh, I just shared the fact that for the same scale of project outside of Burlington, anyone can literally 10x their budget for construction costs based solely on land price differences.
Of course the counterpoint is: a single stalled project with extremely unique economics (built for students and on land that was already owned)
you continually show your lack of information about burlington's real estate situation with each comment. very entertaining to me. thank you for the entertainment as well.
This is why UBI isn't a good solution to the massive glut of problems we're facing.
Which is why universal basic services[1] provide a much better solution, because they make it the government's problem to handle the logistics of creating or procuring the resources people will need.
But after decades of red scare, I don't have much faith the U.S. government will move in this direction, and even the working class may protest it due to how conditioned they are to reject anything they might associate with communism.
No, it doesn't, and the proof of that is that landlords don't already charge 100% of income.
You seem to be assuming housing rental is an perfectly monopolistic market, which it isn't, and any place where it even loosely approximates that needs to correct that whether or not UBI is adopted.
I had to move out of an apartment a few years ago and into a spare half-story at a friend's house. The apartment was attempting to raise my rent, while not to 100% of my income (yet), a significant amount. Their excuse was "that's the market rate now," and when I told them to F off and went to check other nearby apartments, they were correct, that was the "market rate."
I have absolutely zero doubt that if the government had paid me the difference they were trying to charge (as UBI or any other stipend), they would've raised the rate again by the same amount very quickly. In fact, going by the idea that supply & demand are what caused that (rather than simple landlord greed that I generally see it as), UBI definitely can't fix it, since UBI will not increase supply or decrease demand-- they'll still need to charge just enough that some people can't afford it in order for there to be "enough."
You're somewhat correct in that the solution (building more housing, I guess) is not really related to UBI.
This is correct, it does apply to all forms of wage increases. I wouldn't say "instantly," but yes that's why cities are perpetually expensive despite constantly increasing productivity. They are highly productive ergo they have high wages ergo they can sustain high rents ergo they have high rents ergo they "are expensive" compared to adjacent markets.
Mentioned above but I'll put it here too for other readers: the reason rent is unique is that in high COL areas, it's driven primarily by the price of land which is has zero supply elasticity. Higher prices induce supply in all other forms of goods and services.
Regulations are causing the fact that housing prices follow purchasing power of potential buyers: it causes a shortage in supply, which means supply side can dictate prices. Prices will be what buyers can afford. Just wait for the next recession, housing prices will fall, even with the same regulations.
Actually, I contend that it can increase supply of "housing sufficiently near sufficient income" by improving some marginal (existing or potential) housing.
Most participants in mature markets know approximately what percentage of the public's wallet they can grab. Obviously it's not 100% for any of them, but they all know what they can get away with.
My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income, landlords would respond by raising rent by about $400-$500 or so, grocery stores would raise their prices by a percentage of that new income, and so on for all businesses, until all $1,000 was soaked up and the public is no better off than they were before.
> My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income
Aside from whether the prediction is realistic under this assumption, UBI under any realistic financing scheme doesn't do that. It replaces (and potentially increases the net benefit of) means-tested welfare at the bottom end of the income distribution and spreads the clawback from a set of relatively sharp cliffs that occur between working poor and middle income levels to a much more gradual effective trail-off over nearly the whole income distribution as part of progressive income taxation.
Has anyone considered something like UBI but instead of income make it UBG--Universal Basic Goods.
The idea would be that when automation advances to the point that something can be made with very little labor the government would build automated factories to produce that thing and make the output available for free.
There would still be room for private companies to make those things too. They could make fancier or higher end models for those people who want something more than the free models from the government.
The only scenario where UBI/UGI would make sense is one where AI can replace most/all humans at any job they could have. At that point it makes no sense for there to be a economic hierarchy at all.
No, UBI makes sense right now (the exact level that makes sense changes over time), it is a lower-bureaucracy, lower perverse-incentives alternative to means-tested welfare (and, possibly, also minimum wages) as a means of providing a support floor (its not really a flat addition because any means of financing it will provide some form of clawback, and if done through the progressive income tax, it becomes redistributiion that compresses the pre-benefit-and-supporting-tax income distribution.
The way it does all these things is by adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income. That is what UBI is. Whether you choose to cut means-tested welfare or increase progressive taxation alongside it is up to you.
- Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI? Or only UBI? The premise upthread seemed to be UBI in response to mass unemployment caused by automation. Are you sure renters will still have more money in their pockets, even with UBI?
- If they don't have employment, and incomes are $0, then in the absence of UBI, would rent also drop to $0? If not, then I think we're better off with UBI.
- These higher prices for rent and groceries seem like strong incentives for competition. Maybe we can't expect that in NIMBY San Francisco, but without a jobs market, the only attraction to live there is the weather. Why not move somewhere cheaper?
> Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI
Any system with UBI requires other sources of income to exist (thr absence of such sources means that nothing of value is being produced for exchange, in which case any money printed is basically monopoly money and how you distribute it doesn't matter because it isn't doing anything), and a major premise of UBI has always been that it enables those transitionally deprived of income more freedom to reconfigure their lives and ramp up these sources of income (and does so with less redundant—with the progressive tax system—bureaucratic overhead) than do means- and behavior-tested welfare programs.
The particular mix of available other forms of income between wage labor, independent business, or capital don’t really change the basic arguments.
Well, my question implies that being a landlord would be a remaining source of income, for starters. But if that landlord also owns the automated farms and factories producing consumer goods without labor, then the people they're renting to really might not have any other income. At any rate, where a UBI is substituting for employment income that someone used to earn, but is no longer able to, then I don't think the renter gains purchasing power to pay more for rent. (They do gain free time though).
I'm not so sure about that. A few years ago I looked for historical university cost data. I didn't find much, but when I graphed what I did find I did not see any noticeable change in the rate costs grew between before the availability of cheap loans and after their availability.
Beat me to it and you're absolutely right. There's no need to guess what's going to happen here, we've already seen what happens elsewhere when the government injects a lot of money.
This seems reductive. Not all goods have inelastic demand and no substitutes or alternatives. Not every industry is supply limited. Said differently, not everything is immune to competition.
If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison. Instead of saving 500/mo by commuting, now you might save $1000 by relocating.
Rate limit edit: I said commuting, not going going to live in some random place.
> If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison.
Do you think "just move away from the city centers (where all the jobs that you used to need are) to random middle-of-nowhere wherever-we-have-space" will hold forever, and won't trail off once the initial phenomenon of everyone dispersing is finished?
If "meaning" was a good argument against UBI, then nobody would want pensions, because UBI is exactly the same as setting the state pension age to zero.
Leaving aside that older people aren't as enthused about FT work they've known for 30 years, many of them keep jobs or get bored and lonely without them. Not everyone wants to sit around crafting useless projects, or consuming. Creating value for others and connecting (and status signaling) can provide meaning, and granted in retirement there are other vectors for that made available such as volunteering.
It's not a good argument against UBI, but there are better arguments against UBI.
You don't have to make a binary choice between work and useless craft projects. Community projects and helping other people in their more meaningful projects can be useful and be fulfilling and make someone feel accomplished. Part of the problem with working as much as possible until retirement age is you never build any community presence or report and don't often make friends doing their own projects that would need your help.
I think volunteering could actually solve part of that. Butarge scale of volunteering work, thinking about the scale of unemployment in the future, might need governments to step in to create them.
I too worry about a future where the rich no longer have any need for the poor. I think the scenario where the rich end up just giving the poor a bit of money each month is an extremely optimistic one. Much more realistic is a slow genocide, where the poor simply die en masse in the streets due to having no homes, food, and healthcare, while such homelessness becomes both increasingly more unavoidable and more illegal.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
Aren't you too pessimistic? 1 kg of rice costs somewhere around $2 here and you won't eat it in a day. So with $20-30 you can have a month worth amount of rice. You don't need thousands of dollars to survive.
And giving everyone $30 every month won't break even developing country economy.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
Employment is the only - or even best - way of finding meaning in one's life?
i'm very far left ideologically and i think UBI in the current political economy is a bad idea because it's just gonna go to rent etc. all the capitalists will raise their prices.
The elites leaving common folk relatively alone would be a best case scenario. If people are free to build and supply for themselves with UBI then life wouldn’t be bad.
Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes?
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives.
Wealthy people would buy hundreds of millions of different phones? I strongly doubt it. Luxurious electronics for very rich people is usually something like iphone with diamonds covered back. This solves nothing and creates zero innovations.
Wealth =/= spending, and definitely doesn't equal consumption.
Elon Musk might have more wealth than 1,000,000 US households, but he doesnt eat 3 million meals a day, drive a million cars, or sleep in a million houses.
I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown of consumption instead of wealth, as competition for goods and services produced is where disparity has tangible impact.
However, the productivity of workers in relation to capital is a valid concern for their ability claim the goods produced.
> A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
As it stands right now, the common people having phones is what justifies investment in the cellular infrastructure. Without that investment, wealthy people can have plenty of phones but no service.
Is it realistic to think that the poors will start their own economy servicing each other? I'm sure there would be chaos and violence for a period but eventually it seems like the path upward would be a whole new economic system for that 98%. This system could even make use of the automation offered by AI.
Why are manufacturing jobs special? People will upgrade their tastes to consume more. Middle class houses with artistic stone work and well-manicured gardens. Skin treatments, massages, and health scans galore. More entertainment and more niche too. Banking apps that could win design awards. We are nowhere near the end of useful work.
Because you need manufacturing to win wars, or to be seen by outside great powers that you're in a position of winning wars. You're not winning wars based on git commit messages, but based on the steel any one country is able to produce at a certain moment in time (and to transform it into tanks/armoured vehicles and artillery shells).
That is manufacturing capacity, not jobs. A factory of ten people and a few hundred robots is fine. Other types of manufacturing like chips, aerospace and medical equipment are high value and low workforce.
Tariffs and industrial policy may increase the US' manufacturing capacity, but don't expect to see many manufacturing jobs from it.
> A factory of ten people and a few hundred robots is fine
Don't think that that is true when it comes to the steel industry when you include all the verticals, i.e. mineral extraction + transportation of said minerals + energy production + transportation of said energy. You need qualified people for that, lots of them. And I've yet to see the steel factory that can be run with only 10, 25 or even 100 people.
Yes, 10 people is a gross exaggeration, but manufacturing output has remained the same while manufacturing employment has fallen over the last few decades. Advanced robotics will continue the trend even if policy pushes manufacturing output up. There is no realistic way to drastically increase manufacturing employment.
aerospace in the US is very much NOT low workforce. It's quite the opposite. One of the highest employers of "traditional" manufacturing in some ways. I think you also underestimate how many employees are required for medical equipment manufacturing as well.
I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufacturing things cheaply abroad and having US workers move up the value chain.
Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with the us right? Specializing only works when line goes up forever. Heck sometimes line not going up as fast as yesterday is a "crisis".
> Is there not opportunity cost in both directions?
Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US.
> At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right?
We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism.
> Specializing only works when line goes up forever.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.
Your comment perfectly illustrates why communism doesn't work. The one-sentence summary of communism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" and clearly people's needs grow. I don't know how much longer CCP can still keep communism in its name; how will CCP leaders reconcile that the fact that only by abandoning communism did the country rise?
What happens when every single physical and mental job that could be done by humans is done by AI/robots? Sure, you'll always have people imagining and creating new things, but it doesn't seem wise to tie that to economic compensation when technology reaches a state where every single human being gets to experience an upper-middle class American lifestyle, unconditionally, from birth to death.
Communism, as you described, is an ideal. An horizon, a direction to walk. Therefore, it never was achieved, and it is not expected to be achieved in any short term. So, it does not make sense saying that only after abandoning communism China rose. What they abandonned was a soviet flavour of socialism. Communism never existed (at least not the flavor that you described), but it is still an inspiration and source of values. Perhaps in a far future, with more technology, and without existing an upper class above a lower class this could be possible.
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes
The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people.
This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc).
Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists.
Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly.
Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
So what? People have been misinterpreting and misusing knowledge, realizations, and stories since basically forever. That doesn't make the original works worthless or any less insightful. You would be hard pressed to link most of the policies of communist nations to things Marx said or advocated for. The vast majority of Marx's works is pointing out flaws in capitalism, not prescribing policies to use instead.
That was a fear the first time automation came around. (I have a vague memory of machines used for weaving textiles.) Turns out people bought more cheap clothes, and thus people were needed to run the machines.
I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen.
If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections.
Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.
When all the labor (physical or mental) is automated, you've basically solved a huge problem for humanity. Doesn't matter who owns the robots. They either share the products of the labor for close to nothing, or they are producing for themselves only. Someone will produce for the population.
Why is this difficult to imagine? The capitalists need human labor commodity as long as, well, human labor commodity is the only labor commodity that can do the job. Once it (if ever) isn’t? And they own all the robots that can do the work? And they own all the robot soldiers that can protect their ill-gotten wealth? (Just in short total automation) Well, no need for consumer capitalism any more. Then you just have totalitarian capitalism where everyone else will have to live out their lives at the total mercy of those overlords.
(It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
In past times this question was solved by the ruling class commissioning monumental buildings and fine art, as well consuming enormous amounts of luxuries. This gave at least some form of employment back to the people.
Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all.
The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
The plight of the poor is not an economic problem it is purely a political one. Progress in technology isn't really a root cause of poverty, rather a proximate cause with the root cause being "because the fruits of technology are not adequately shared by government policy", a policy issue.
Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up.
Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity.
Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do?
Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
> The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
I always wonder when people say things like that. What's the first thing a humanoid robot with human like intelligence do when you tell it to make a copy of itself?
Does it set up a backyard forge and start to cast new arms and legs out of discarded cans? Does it finish the parts on a manual Bridgeport or does it carve them out manually with a hand file?
When it needs silicon chips, does it make them itself or try to order more from the company that made it? Will it become a right to repair activist when it finds out the company won't sell components to individuals?
Maybe it has to pay for all this with a part time job at the local fast food joint.
Assuming a humanoid robot with human like intelligence it may also be able to enlist humans to accomplish it's task, either by paying them directly, or through intermediaries, or deceiving them into helping it.
If it is capable to human like intelligence and creativity it may be able to pioneer new manufacturing processes -- perhaps it will learn to grow parts for itself by using existing biological processes in ways that we haven't yet figured out.
The point isn't so much the how with a self replicator, the point is the exponential growth rate. You're right that the first machine will take a long time to build the second, but those two will certainly be able to build twice as many in at least the same amount of time -- probably less because they can use the infrastructure that the first set up to build the second.
Once humans make machines that are capable of self replication regardless of where it is on the spectrum from base matter and energy assembly to just off the shelf parts assembly you're going to see exponential growth.
And once certain kinds of creative people get their hands on these machines they will inevitably jailbreak them and make them work for them instead of the companies that will try and lock this kind of stuff down like they always try to do.
The war on general purpose computing will transition into a war on general purpose manufacturing and the same kind of people who want ot sell you devices that you can't compile software for without a license will try to do the same with self replicating hardware but they will fail.
>Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
Robots that can build things already exist and can be purchased second hand, but I haven't see this level of hacking them to self replicate. The logistics of getting enough parts, and having the general purpose ability to diagnose a very wide range of issues with used components, and similar seem to prevent this from being some sort of self replicating singularity.
If such a robot did already have the power to do such self replication, why would it wait for a second hand hacker instead of the builder of the robots using them to produce copies at reduce cost?
I've seen this plot in various movies, TV shows, and books. It definitely is a possibility. In the Dune universe the AI's are banned after a war against them.
There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce.
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
Perhaps we have differing definitions of "technical workers" ? Here in the Bay Area at least there are a number of companies which are replacing "senior staff" with an LLM and a junior engineer. The argument is that this combination is "cheaper" than the salary paid to the senior engineer. For me that is exactly analogous to replacing a factor worker with a robotic work station and a technician to maintain the robot. There is a ceiling on that junior engineer's career which occurs when they are themselves replaced by another junior engineer to reset the salary cost.
We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search.
What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.
The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.
This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model.
Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind?
I mean, depending on the amount, yes it could be deciding all of the things you said. You would be limited in your choices depending on how much the ubi actually is.
This isn't a rebuttal, the only solution you're allowing space for is "kill everyone". The universe is finite and all things end.
1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility.
2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too.
3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work.
I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities.
But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
>Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity.
Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives.
UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
I think that there are definitely people who have been on welfare and used it to better themselves and there are people who thrive in the face of adversity, overcoming the worst situations.
I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
Fully agree. But I do believe that cultural norms and societal expectations and what people push you to do with your life play a big role, so these are all levers to be pulled if you want to make a more self-driven population.
> I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
People on welfare? I can imagine a lot of these people "accept" that the goal is to get themselves out of welfare, ASAP (especially if there's a deadline), but they can't see a way to that goal - e.g. applying for jobs but getting rejected left and right, and feeling dejected.
With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
No, there a lot of people who have no idea what to do when they have free time.
There are lots of older people who go back to work, not because they need the money but because the need the structure. In fact, there is an increased risk of death due to retirement.
>Available evidence suggests it is unlikely that changes in health insurance and income can account for the increase in mortality at age 62. So, to further examine the plausibility of retirement leading to higher mortality, Moore examines which causes of death increase when men turn 62, and considers the connection between those and decreased labor force participation.
>With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
People have need to feel like they are doing something. Usually something positive but they will settle for something negative, generally that ends poorly for society.
Also UBI would only, as my understanding is, take care of the basics. Food, shelter, medical care. So you would end up with a population that has enough to survive, hungry for more and no way to achieve it.....
You can achieve the need to do something by forming human connections. Mutual necessity between people, a form of fulfillment that long predates any economy.
We have the unfortunate combination of being uniquely individualistic and with too much time. Community-based societies, which we will have to transition to in a post-scarcity world, don’t have that problem.
I don't think anyone would choose to work in any way like today, especially if work is focused on generating wealth with a large portion of it being redistributed. Work would have to change to something more like volunteerism.
Well, many people would choose to work for the extra income that would bring them. Or some other status symbol that working could bring, welfare won't bring you that Rolex! Or some cultural shift that makes certain work "cool" (1). Or just fostering a sense of community and mission for doing certain work. People do many many many things motivated by other things than money. I agree that it's only a subset of the population, but if you decrease the work input needs to less than that percent of the population, that's doable. Still, as I said, we're not there yet and I believe we won't be there yet for a long long time.
1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
> 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table
It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?
How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.
The US has squandered its advanced manufacturing capabilities, warning bells have been sounding for decades, and yes, those chickens will eventually come home to roost. Not yet but soon.
Or China will come around one way or another. It is not like US did all the hard work.
Let me put it another way, even if China is a democracy, it will still compete with US in world economy. So many people there need work, the price will be low to produce things there.
Blame US's manufacturing woe fully on China isn't logical, Japan/South Korea are of the same breed, just lesser on China's scale.
Another arguably more important factor is the over regulation and bloated governance here, to a degree of being comical, just look at the California government.
Is this drawn out, lengthy democratic process really for anything of substance or just performative virtual signaling that essentially benefits no one in the name of benefiting everyone?
Anti manufacturing is a choice, made the government, thus by the populace themselves. And please, do not bring Trump, California has been in a Dem super majority since 2012.
When there's no social safety net and you live in a society which insists on "he who does not work, does not eat", anything which sidelines labor is not "perceived as" an existential threat, it is an existential threat. And recognizing it as such is not paranoia, but straightforward realism.
If you don't want the paranoia, then fix the system which causes people to (correctly) see automation as pure downside.
Once upon a time, a US president said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". His unconventional administration brought USA from deep economic depression into a golden age.
Meanwhile, the current ruling elite smears him as one of the worst presidents of all time, and has spent decades undoing that legacy and racing towards a repeat of 1929.
he also ran for reelection four times and made private ownership of gold illegal, and vastly expanded the power of the executive branch.
Reminds me a lot of the current guy and his obsession with another term, and whether or not the gold (that FDR largely stole from the people in the first place) is in Ft Knox.
I guess the biggest difference is DOGE but it's all too much centralized power for me
The difference between DOGE and FDR banning gold hoarding over $100 ($2K+ today) is that the latter targets the wealthy, while the former is focused on looting public goods to enrich the privately wealthy.
It could be seen as naked class warfare either way, but they are opposites. Increasing wealth inequality is fantastic path to social unrest and weakened institutions.
FDR was the leader of a republic, Musk is a classic robber baron.
IMO his expansion of the government was a best case scenario. The US was quickly barreling towards a socialist revolution. Any other president, particularly a greedy ultra-capitalist, would’ve stoked that flame.
The American people were angry about their exploitation at a level that hasn’t been seen since the creation of the US. He successfully bread crumbed the poor away from taking heads, literally. We so often forget that the most powerful people in this nation is Us, the People. We vote and we revolt. A nation-wide catastrophe is the perfect opportunity for mass organization.
Make no mistake, FDR was a staunch free market capitalist. He just wasn’t stupid.
Paranoia is the USA's way of life, when life always seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff: losing your job at a moment's time, losing your life savings for a healthcare emergency, losing your kid to a school shooting, losing your stuff to burglars. Any of these have a very low chance of happening but they can be so life-changing that Americans seem to always be in some state of paranoia, a low-trust society with few safety nets and a highly-competitive mindset is primed for that.
American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist".
I've observed this as well, I do wonder though if that doesn't strongly encourage competitivity(is this word right? autocorrect highlights it, huh) and make people work... well, more. More effective, more time, more angry. It's certainly one possible explanation for why they dominate in many areas. But it does sound like such an exhausting thing.
I don't think it makes us work more, but I think it makes us less satisfied with our lives. Which ultimately fuels the consumerism and pleasure-seeking.
The production side of things comes from exploitation - the US is the strongest imperialist force in the world. We don’t just exploit the periphery, we also exploit our own citizens to the maximum they can bear.
Well if it's worked so well thus far, why change it up? I suspect that if a country is not at least a little paranoid about the competition that it doesn't stay #1 for long.
To me it's a problem of causality, does it actually made the USA be "#1" for long? Is it helping society to be this paranoid about everything and everyone?
I'm no sociologist to answer that but I question if it's a causal link or if it's more a case of "despite the", what if the USA could be doing better without the paranoia, maybe it's a drag and not a push... It surely seems to be dragging society down into a dark path.
The sub-title of the article is completely unhinged:
> China's Dominance Playbook, General Purpose Robotics Is The Holy Grail, Robotic Systems Breakdown, Supply Chain Hardships, The West Is Positioned Backward And Covering Their Eyes, China's Clear Path to Full Scale Automation, Call For Action
I closed the page quickly despite the subject matter is something I am interested in. Also the AI generated images that have no raison d'etre of being there.
>This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities.
This is not an "existential threat". It's an existential threat to the US being the top production economy. But the US can still thrive as an economy. I don't mind the US benefiting off of Chinas super productivity. Also there's really no hope, China will surpass the US in this area so it's a bit pointless to try.
Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside, the West has put itself all by itself in this position, for too long it had thought that it could still rule the world based on the services industries and on the financialization of the world economy. It seems like they bet wrong.
I've singled out The Economist because I used to read them until not that long ago so that I can confirm first-hand that they also use that rhetoric (but can't be bothered to look for an online source right now).
Later edit: A X [2] post pointing to an Economist article [3] that does just that, but, as I said, the examples are too numerous, just purchase a Economist issue and go through their China section, you'll see it right there
Surprising that they skip over autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their survey of types, but perhaps that's because it's a weird interstitial with high interaction with Humans for less-general usecases (material movement, but no material handling/auto-interfacing with other automation besides e.g. an attached conveyor). Also, less clear success in the market. I think Locus robotics probably qualifies as the most widely used AMRs (vs Kiva/Amazon being posterchild for AGVs)
This article, like many conversations I've had, covers "making competitive hardware", but skips a lot of the "how to do things with the robots" successfully /for multiple uses/, which is also a hard problem.
I assume that future AGI which is smart enough to control "general purpose robotics" is probably smart enough to design robotic forms that make all the current stuff obsolete anyway.
Like the article says, physical world data is too scarce to jump straight to powerful robotics first.
The problem is that, at some point, the west decided to stop rewarding excellence in tech and started rewarding people for their social networking abilities. Now we have a lot of people who are good at talking and few people who are good at tech who have money to invest in robotics. Had I been even moderately rich, I'm certain I would have been investing in robotics right now. But instead, I'm working on document management software for government... While extroverts who got rich from Facebook IPO get to build Instagram for dogs...
I think the decline coincided with the crackdown against cryptocurrency. Had it been allowed to develop normally instead of being suppressed and corrupted (by governments), things might have looked very different.
Now I don't believe the system has any integrity so it makes no sense for me be productive. I actively look for the highest paid, most unproductive jobs I can find... Fortunately, there are MANY of those available in our system.
I've made it my life's mission to exploit the system's flaws, while simultaneously complaining about them. Helping the bad guys self-destruct while earning a living is about as rewarding as it can be for me.
A lot of other people my age are in the same boat, some knowingly, most unknowingly. I hope situation will change soon. There are some signs but it's going to take some big changes.
I would like to see a robot hand try and plug in a MCIO or OcuLink connector to its MB port because even my fat fingers have trouble seating them in correctly.
you know that pick and place robots are used to put and solder the components onto the board that you're trying to plug the OcuLink connector to, right?
Ai and robotics will push us into a golden area for x years until they become so good that we better have an answer to the implications of full automation of everything.
Also the laber shortage is pushing this transition even faster in potential traditional/ slow areas.
Where can one go and keep up with the latest in special purpose robotics? E.g., if I wanted to know about every new robot in the construction industry and similar labor intensive trades, is there a place that covers that?
We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders. If that meant parting out our industrial base to our main geopolitical rival, that's what that meant.
In the US, capitalism has mostly replaced nationalism and patriotism. In China, it augments those things.
I believe a lot of this is where China's current deflationary pressure is coming from. China has driven the cost to produce energy and goods right down to the floor through tremendous scale and efficiency. There doesn't seem to be any sign prices have reached the bottom yet. A lot of parallels to "The Great Deflation" [1] of the late 1800s.
Quoting Wikipedia,
"The prices of most basic commodities and mass-produced goods fell almost continuously; however, nominal wages remained steady, resulting in a pronounced and prolonged rise in real wages, disposable income and savings – essentially giving birth to the middle class. Goods produced by craftsmen, as opposed to in factories, did not decrease in price"
China's system really prioritizes worker and middle class prosperity. Over here in the west we're too busy sliding into a rent seeking oligarchy that we haven't noticed yet.
> Comparing a robotic system to a human, the current labor force is lower skilled, lower ability, and a much higher attrition rate. ... The US must take part in the robotics revolution before all labor is handed over to China to own in perpetuity.
The US capitalists must monopolize all upcoming labor commodities (all-robot) before China does it. Definitely some projection here.
I take it you haven't seen any Chinese cars lately. Particularly in the EV space they're demolishing the competition in price and quality, and a huge part of that is thanks to automation with the robots described here.
Check out eg the Xpeng G6, which delivers an Audi ride but undercuts the Tesla Model Y on price:
And the 2025 xpeng g6 is so much better than previous model, 5C charging battery, better ride, even better energy efficiency, better looks, better interior design, 30% of car parts are updated. And they delivered this update 2 years after the first model, when normally it takes other companies 5 years for an upgrade of this size. They have positive margins on a 17-20k RMB, 270 miles+, 350KW charging, FSD like autonomous driving EV, even though they have to price it this low due to ultra-competitive market. They can't do this without Chinese supply chain. Speed of iterations, innovations, fast time to market, efficiency is this all about.
China creates the most high end drones and 3d printers, and my Hisense TV is better and cheaper any of my Samsung's. This is from personal experience of things I have purchased.
China is definitely growing quickly. At the trade shows I go to where some of the robots in the article are presented, Chinese companies have become quite prominent in the last few years when they were completely non-existent 10 years ago.
It "was known" in the 60s that Japanese electronics and cars were inferior in design and quality. Chinese products are going through the same trajectory.
China has multiple 100% indigenous fifth-gen fighters man. They have domestically designed and built nuclear reactors. They have a 100% indigenous space station.
I wish there was an app for renting humanoid (android) robots. Maybe from Unitree or TeslaBot or something, or a US-based robot if there is one that is actually being manufactured and similar.. maybe combined with a built-in AI system.
America definitely seems to be a little bit behind in terms of android manufacturing. They have some pretty competitive robots but they seem more expensive and to be being built inefficiently.
Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup that can build a stack and integrate it into one or more off-the-shelf robots to provide the intelligence part. Because a lot of the demos of android are teleoperated since the AI is still quite difficult.
Combining the AI and a rental service would be so powerful.
We might be one or two years away from that being practical.
The sheer quantity of completely ridiculous, absurd economic and political beliefs, and predictions on this comment thread is amusing, all the more so when you consider that so many on HN who deride the wealthy are themselves part of the global 1% of elites in terms of income and access to resources, and have made their way to this position in the very same market economies that are supposedly bringing us all to slavery and misery of nearly feudal proportions.
For a site whose readers like to tout the general trend here as being of people with above average intelligence, ignorance and blindness to the obvious is rife.
American tech workers need to start paying attention to Chinese national policy, the National People's Congress is happening right now and it's how China sets long term goals and targets.
"Made in China 2025" was a massive national strategic plan that was 10 years in the making, and was designed in 2015. It laid out all of the key sectors for "value added manufacturing", and by most accounts, they've been delivering and meeting their targets despite all the number fudging you want to point out. None of this is particularly secret or pernicious like western media tries to portray. Just follow the news. The next 5-year plan is being set now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
Yes. China's five year plans are translated into English and are quite readable. Here's the 14th Five Year Plan, 2021-2025.[1] Wikipedia has a summary.[2]
This is China's business plan. The top level is expanded into more detailed plans at lower levels. For example, here's the plan for Fujian province.[3] Further down, here's the transition plan for IPv6.[4]
You can go back and read previous five-year plans. The success rate for the individual goals is reasonably high.
[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0237_5th_Ple...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_five-year_plan
[3] https://ccci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Policy%20Brief...
[4] https://www.cac.gov.cn/2021-07/23/c_1628629122784001.htm
Oh, cool, someone is going to use ipv6
Chinese people have an irrational amount of love for international standards.
In this case it is quite rational love. Some US universities have more IPv4 addresses than entire China! Single IPv4 address cost like $50, it is impossible possible to buy large ranges.
What makes it irrational?
I just meant that they REALLY love international standards. They have the assumption that a group of really smart people must have decided it democratically and fairly, so no matter what it is about they will get excited about it.
Sure beats sitting around discussing, complaining, and half assedly developing a replacement standard and getting nowhere. Perfect being the enemy of good and all that.
https://xkcd.com/927/
What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)?
This video about Argentina's economic failures mentions why free market capitalism failed in argentina, and why a "similar" opening up in china didnt fail (but not so much detail that another country could follow it and replicate the success). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MzfNTSk4A
Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success, or just a facade (aka, china would've had success regardless of what those 5 yr plans are)?
> What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)?
Soviets had more hardcore ideologues at helm most of the times until SU dissolution. They hardly allowed their ideology to be diluted without challenge, which made plans infeasible without real time feedback. China's Mao era was somewhat similar to that. After Mao, during fight between Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, realistic faction came on top with famous Deng saying "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice". Also China does experimentation at province and city level, with people succeeding promoting to national level, containing pitfalls of bad policy.
So China introduced market competition at the political level and at the economic level.
And they did it while remaining authoritarian. Incredible.
highly meritocratic system all the way from bottom to top. incredible indeed. in china you start as a low level official managing a village, if you succeed - you're promoted to town etc. they keep detailed records of your performance in school from kindergarten and a comprehensive dossier is compiled to evaluated by party officials. that means you will never have a nincompoop in charge at any level.
maybe chinese nationals / or ccp members can correct or add some things.
> they keep detailed records of your performance in school from kindergarten and a comprehensive dossier
this also means you want your record pristine. And it is also why officials cover up problems rather than report it up.
But their current success to out-maneuver the US in terms of trade, as well as capacity, is testament to perhaps the success of such a system. I do recall there was a massive purge on corruption over the past decade(s), which is probably helped a lot. This did not happen in soviet russia.
That massive corruption purge is mainly Xi purging rival factions like Shangai and Jiang. Sure, it also targeted corrupt officials, but main target is rival factions in consolidating Xi grip on power. There isn't lot of taboo about corruption if you align with the correct faction.
And also stay aligned with the correct faction. This also provides golden handcuffs: should one's alignment change, past misdeeds will instantly be remembered.
Rooting out corruption in russia is simply not possible when biggest thief is at the top of the pyramid (absolute minimum stolen from russian nation is on the order of 100 billions $$ stashed all over the world, but its hard to count when its spread across many 'representatives').
He also actively promotes corruption of his underlings, but the important point is - within hard limits of their position. Get greedy and overstep that and either modern gulag or window for you. Good luck saying to the rest of population 'don't steal!'.
Xi is not flaunting his billion dollar mansions with golden toilets or megayachts while his kids grow up in Switzerland, is he.
Meanwhile the USA now has an openly corrupt president (openly favors his pal Elon Musk's companies in his daily speeches, lets Musk shut down the same agencies that regulate Musk's companies, etc) who is shielded by his party from impeachment.
China is starting to look quite well run by comparison.
If you appear to succeed- all that is needed is a face of success and connections to others who appear to succeed.
How does this differ from the US or western Europe?
You can express that the emperor is naked in europe, without the emperor sending you to prison, thus guarantee a constant churn and renewal, that leaves behind the cherished product of science - something more truthish.
It is amusing that Mao's fatal flaw was adherence to a foreign economic theory.
Argentinas economy is a mess because of a long history of corruption. The CCP embraces markets while also having state ownership of everything by basically acting as venture capital funding different companies combined with heavy subsidies. So the 5 year plans are for signaling for which industries are going to get funding in the near future. My understanding is that this does have a pretty big impact and funding priorities change pretty drastically based off these plans.
Not to mention the orders of magnitude of difference in population capital and that the people of Argentina are not under a regime that promotes basically slave labor for the benefit of their economy. Even if they did I don’t think they’d be able to produce as much just because they don’t have enough people.
That video is pretty… weak. Argentina can’t be looked at on a GDP graph and say “oh yeah let’s find some random country that’s similar in this graph”. Most of Argentina’s problems are self inflicted sabotage. The graphs are also very misleading in the video, not only in the axis scales.
It's about the execution. The plan is just the first step.
Basically, China is centralized politically and decentraliced economically. The soviet centralized everything... even meat prices, a recipe for disaster.
They plan the outcome, but let the governing to the different provinces and the implementation to the (mostly) private sector. These actors are forced to compete, among other things, via export discipline that cannot be faked.
And somehow, despite facing the same corruption and cronyism problems we do in the west, they seem to get better results.
It's much more just population. Rapid population growth and then a one child policy has left China with a population bulge. Right now that bulge is 25-60ish which gives China a large amount of workers compared to children and the elderly. In 20-30 years that's going to switch and they will have a large amount of retirees supported by a relatively small amount of workers.
The Soviets were insanely successful: From the 1920s to 1960s they raised the USSR to space age, industrialized it to become the 2nd superpower, won a world war, upgraded citizens from village huts to apartments, from being barefoot to cars and subways.
What 'went wrong' was the economic war that Kennedy admn. started to starve the USSR of GDP by starting an arms and space race. The USSR did not bite the space race bait, but arms race was impossible to not participate. So it did. Then in the 1970s, the US started an economic warfare against the USSR with the help of its Gulf allies by manipulating oil prices. That wasn't enough either, so Reagan started another arms race. In the end all of that combined, crippled the USSR and it went bankrupt.
The US also went bankrupt, but it was able to delay it for ~15 more years by printing money and pumping it into the stock market and real estate thanks to the reserve currency status of the dollar. That came crashing down in 2008. The US did some more of the same and dragged it a decade and half more and here we are, where everything is finally crashing down.
China avoided most of that economic warfare by sitting on the sidelines and taking lessons. Sometime a decade ago, it passed the threshold of being too well-rounded and large to fail. To the point that it became a driving engine of the world economy, but backed with actual goods and services instead of the financial voodoo that the US built everything on.
> Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success
Yes, if your country can keep the private interests and capitalists under control. Otherwise, they derail every plan to maximize their profit by siphoning off state resources for little actual progress. Like how the last US administration's 'build back better' plan was derailed.
Some other factors -
In 1916 the communists dud not want to take over Russia. In 1917, Lenin said they should take the opportunity to take over Russia, and wait for Germany to become a left wing government, the real revolution. This did not happen, big business at the 1933 Geheimtreffen decided to back a right wing government in Germany, and the divided left was pushed aside by a united right when the Catholic Center party signed the Enabling Act.
Russia knew from 1917 it needed political winds in the west, but they blew the other way. Continental Europe invaded Russia in 1941.
Then in 1953, Khrushchev shifted capital spending to consumer spending, one of the main blows to the Sividt economy which was humming along from 1933 to 1953.
Karl Marx basically said communist revolutions can't succeed in backwards countries, only the biggest and most advanced countries.
Good points. Though, the Soviet attempt has been extremely successful in many ways. We owe the social state we have in modern society to the Soviets succeeding in establishing all those practices and programs and showing that they can be done. In the 1930s the capital was doing incessant propaganda saying how social programs would cause a society to collapse. Soviet union proved all of them wrong and it became impossible to prevent implementation of the modern social state we have today.
> Yes, if your country can keep the private interests and capitalists under control.
how come in your scenario, the state can do no wrong then?
The early industrialization 5 year plans actually worked better for the Soviets than the Chinese, and I think it comes down to execution? Stalin being the more numerate psychopath?
The last 30-40 years it's different, the Chinese have navigated market liberalization and transitioned from copying to leading in a number of areas, while still having a central planning aspect. It could be that some amount of central planning is preferable to pure ideological communism or capitalism.
China to a large extent is following the Japanese and South Korean playbooks, to the point where the Chinese financial system runs under the concept of window guidance invented by the Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_guidance
The question is whether or not this blows up in China’s face when they stop accurately picking winners. We are already seeing the property bubble collapse in a manner similar to Japan’s.
> the question is whether or not this blows up in China’s face
Japan didn't "blow up" due to picking wrong. The US and allies negotiated the value of the yen up (the plaza accords) when the trade imbalance started to rack up against the US. This popped japan's bubble, which ultimately caused their lost decade.
China, on the other hand, would be unlikely to sign any sort of similar treaty with the US. Their property bubble collapsed, but i dont think to the same extend as the japanese one. Not to mention that it was triggered by gov't, so it popped earlier than japan's one in the lifecycle - therefore, it must be the case that it's less bad.
https://old.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/rvid0x/why_did_japan... has some details in the comments.
I think there are different ways of defining bad. In Tokyo in 1990, the ratio of median house price to median income was 15. In Shanghai when the bubble popped, that figure was above 40, and even today it is at 36.
To put this in perspective, San Fransisco, a city considered to have a housing crisis, has a ratio of 9.
Yeah, but the mortgage rate in China is around 3%. Individual income taxes are under 10% [0]. And there's your multiplier for affordability comparisons.
[0] https://taxfoundation.org/blog/us-china-tax-policy/
IIRC the Soviets got that done with a lot of help from the US.
Free market capitalism and soviet state socialism or communism is just editorial masturbation. Regardless of the economic system, the everyday tasks are done by regular humans. The system can organize them but if they don't want to do the work, the work won't get done. There is no magic system for that.
Over a decade ago, I worked in a public hospital with a really tight budget. The Pneumology section was clean, orderly and provided service to patients as they came with no waiting time. The service in the building nearby could well fit in the definitions of crimes against humanity. Same hospital, same financing, same system, just a different boss.
nice anecdote. but how do you explain systemic differences in general if you really believe the way you organize stuff doesnt matter?
Soviets might just really be bad at everything. Capitalism didn't work for them either.
If it wasn’t for the Soviets you’d be writing this comment in German :)
And Capitalism does not work for USA or anywhere else either (except for very few people at the very top of the pyramid (scheme…)
They really did the bulk of Wehrmacht killing on European mainland. But they didn't collapse only due to massive US support, be it in armament, equipment, medicine etc. Absolutely massive. Also it was basically due to bad German planning and preparation for winter, not some soviet strategic brilliance, which was very hard to be found on eastern front, just meatwave after meatwave till german machine gun barrels literally melted.
You could see tons of US equipment during WWII reels on eastern front including heavy machinery, soviets tried desperately to remove such footage (just like photos of soviet soldiers wearing 3+ watches on each hand... err borrowed from friendly locals) but truth has this behavior of seeping back to light.
Capitalism works pretty well in any moral society actually, much better than any other system thats for sure.
They’re good at throwing their population into the meat grinder, sure.
What they got wasn't capitalism, it was kleptocracy.
If you look how capitalism is actually implemented, it always has bigger or smaller kleptocratic component.
Of course, but it's the proportion of that that makes all the difference.
I agree. But that might be why soviets are bad at everything. They always get this proportion wrong, in all systems.
The non-working capitalism just kicked the collective butt of the entirety of NATO. Previously in Vietnam the non-working communism did the same.
Are there particularly good news sources to follow? I'm not sure what to follow to get either the source material or good commentary.
Right now, I try to consume content directly from the dragon's mouth with official news and reports, but it requires a bit of experience knowing how to read between the lines and having a strong bullshit parser.
Similarly, most English language analysis from mainstream media is comically bad - CNN and American news outlets sent reporters to Beijing this week and bombarded attendees and delegates walking into the congressional hall with questions about Trump and tariffs, in English. Who does that??
Admittedly, I do like the stuff that comes out of Stanford's Digichina group, https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/?page=1&sort_order=desc&..., they seem dedicated to doing an actual analysis and not just spewing brainless propaganda (HBR, looking at you). But yeah, it's hard out here to find any real meaningful information, so I've been debating starting up a substack myself, but with an additional academic research focus.
TP Huang has a pretty good substack[0].
Its a nice insider look. And its not fake stuff, its just looked at through the most red-yellow colored glasses there are.
[0] https://tphuang.substack.com/
There’s a ton of people I follow on twitter too, @beijingdai, @wmhuo168, @rnaudbertrand. All have great rants.
Have a feed I can add to mine?
At this point all China needs to do is the gaben strategy, doing nothing while America keeps shooting itself in the foot. Trump seems to have unlimited bullet supply.
If the goal was "be better than the US" then sure. But presumably their strategy is aimed at actually improving their country as it is for it's own people to live in. Much of which has nothing to do with the US.
Why would you presume that? CCP has become far more autocratic, and the goals of autocracy:
1) maintain the autocracy
2) have a strong police to preserve the autocracy from rebellion
3) have a good enough economy to defend the autocracy from external threats
... ten more "for the autocracy" points ...
improving the country for the people
Also, Zeihan overselling or not, China is facing an unprecedented demographic decline. So to the parent comment about "not doing anything and winning", honestly the US can do the same and watch China implode demographically.
CCP under Xi has reverted to form after some temporary loosening up, but it's still way less autocratic than it was during the Mao era.
Also, the CCP ultimately derives its legitimacy from materially improving the country for the Chinese people: back in the day fighting back against the Japanese and corrupt warlords, now economic progress. Both the Chinese people and the CCP know well what it means if they stop delivering and the "Mandate of Heaven" expires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven
China's demographic decline will take decades and unless the CCP really fucks things up (eg. invading Taiwan and failing miserably at it), it's going to be a Japan/Korea-style slow-motion stagnation, not a dramatic implosion.
[flagged]
Interesting tangent to bring up. How many people does America kill?
Mao killed his own people. The only possible historical analogue is what USSR argued about missing people from the Great Depression.
The closest analogue would be the culling of the buffalo, an intentional effort to destroy the food supply of the natives.
Americans don't like to acknowledge this.
But even that's a little different. Application of new farming practices is not an intentional genocide. The culling of the buffalo was an intentional genocide.
US mostly kills people outside its borders.
I'm a strong China hawk. But Beijing currently has an opportunity to craft a global alliance that balances the U.S. in a way that America has historically excelled at. Put another way, the idiots who voted this man in have turned America into an Axis power.
That is normal; the world worked that way prior to 1990.
The real change is that the US economy isn't obviously superior to the next however many economies combined. Consequently the US is losing the ability to impose its opinions on others as fundamental truths. It looks like everyone in the West will have to re-learn negotiation and it'll probably be a rocky process.
> the world worked that way prior to 1990
Sort of. I’d move the needle to the 1970s, when Soviet power was on an obvious downside. Realpolitik would dictate, at that time, for Europe and Asia to balance America. But we were a good ally. So balancing wasn’t seen to be necessary.
> So balancing wasn’t seen to be necessary.
Wasn't seen as possible, an important distinction. The Australian experience so far is the US demands we ... basically commit war crimes every so often. Or whatever the term is for invading countries without justification. It is a lot like being good friends with a shark; it is important to keep them pointed at other things and the shark isn't ever going to go out of its way for you unless it is hungry and the friendship is ending.
The world was probably better for us when the US was unconstrained by reality; but the reality is the US have been behaving very irresponsibly for decades. Trump is on the upper end of the presidential scale in recent history, the world can't cope with another Bush or Biden. Obama might have been able to get better diplomatic results.
I mean, US was the shining beacon of supposedly the best capitalistic policies are, but look at where it got us.
Meanwhile, China has been getting better and better, looking at US as an example, and correctly avoiding providing the "freedoms" given to us in US in avoiding the same fate.
Chinas demographics are a ticking time bomb
They’ve also massively overinvested in sectors like real estate
But maybe if Drumpf screws up the US enough, they will be able to weather these problems
Or perhaps AI will get so good it won’t matter
China is automating [1], they know the demographics dividend is ending. More industrial robots are built and sold in China than anywhere else in the world. They are going high tech [2], and will outcompete the US in high tech (based on all available info). They have the will, the US does not (too busy chasing short term gains and ideological wins), based on all available evidence [3].
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2024/03/11/how-innovative-is-c...
[2] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/critical-technology-tracker
> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338771
In contrast to North America which has under invested in real estate, having all that extra real estate sounds like a dream.
How does Valve put out one of the worst releases of all time in Artifact and not get dragged through the coals ever for it? The only working strategy Valve has succeeded in running in the last 10 years is making passive income from Steam and that won't last forever.
Think this was posted in the wrong thread?
> the gaben strategy
this was a reference to Gabe Newell and Valve
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> Yemen, which is doing a humanitarian intervention to help the Gazans.
Firing rockets indiscriminately at ships is not even in the same planet as humanitarian intervention.
Also, the Houthis are a paramilitary party, not the Yemeni state.
The US has certainly wasted much of their wealth since the end of ww2 trying to keep their imperialism 2.0 going.
Isn't this what Trump is trying to rectify now?
Trump is discussing annexation of my country. Maybe you're thinking of Imperialism 1.0?
I was thinking of talk of pulling out of NATO.
What I talked about was not NATO actions though.
> This occurred to me. April 2001, US Navy plane crashes into Chinese J8 jet, kills pilot, lands on Hainan Island without authorization
An interesting interpretation of events. Let's continue.
"Then the air crew donates their airframe & technology to the Chinese Communist Party. And when they return they come up with a lie that they had been buzzed several times by the J8 pilot until the crash. Also they faked distress calls recording it. All to prove that the United States is a paper tiger intent on disrupting the Chinese people's rightful claim to all East Asian territory."
Maybe you don't remember that only 2 years earlier the US CIA "mistakenly" bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese government workers and nearly sparking war, with Bill Clinton personally calling to apologize.
It really is interesting to see this point of view. Are apologies admissions of guilt in your family/hometown? Do you think it was in the United States' interest to destroy the embassy of a non-belligerent in that war?
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The account was created 3 months ago. Might be actual person. But also might be troll or bot.
I do know real people that hold views like this, but they also apply similar lens to other large countries with global footprint. So at least a consistent approach.
I agree. With how much time we collectively spend online, money spent on online propaganda would be extremely high value for money for belligerent governments.
Sadly, they really need to start consuming 100x what they are currently to even have a shot
That would make American businesses very happy, but what would be so good for China? There's a reason they made the decision to artificially suppress domestic consumption in favor of building a strong manufacturing base and export-focused economy, and it seems to be working well for them.
Hyper-consumerism took off in the US because it’s a false economic indicator. It makes lines go up, but doesn’t materially improve anyone’s lives.
We’re seeing the effects of ~70 years of hyper-consumerist behavior. It worked for a while, but now the costs have accumulated. There’s shit everywhere, and everything either breaks or is poison. Or both.
It looks like China is quickly becoming a domestic consumer economy.
Look at BYD sales and Ne Zha 2.
Their gaming industry and entertainment industries are starting to pull ahead of the US.
Some authors of this piece are deeply involved themselves in building robots and other hardware technology. They should be taken seriously. The US is moving into a trade war, however unwise, with the country that supplies components for everything we make and need. That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.
China has been methodically preparing for trade war and decoupling for the better part of the decade. US went in full throttle with zero preparation. This is not going to end well.
I wonder if this is a consequence of the political systems of China vs the US. China tends to think and plan longer term, where as the US seems much more transactional; what will win me the next election / midterm etc.
> China tends to think and plan longer term...
Pull the other one, we saw how they went in the 20th century. Large centralised governments have never managed to systemically outplan democracies.
The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists. As a result they aren't the leader of the industrial world. This has been planned for a long time and a bunch of people were celebrating it the entire way along. You try standing up and saying "we should prioritise industry!" anywhere in the west - it is a bruising experience as soon as it gets to the specific policies that are likely to be successful.
Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations. That isn't bad planning, that was an explicit rejection of the outcomes China achieved.
I'm most of the way through reading Moral Mazes which covers this part of American culture in-depth as it relates to chemical and textile manufacturing. Specifically, it discusses psychological attitudes to perception of chemical manufacturing as being dirty, and the rationalizations employed by middle managers towards their work.
What Moral Mazes lays out is the idea of the tension between the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of practicality (as seen by manufacturers), and the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of purity (as seen by activists and lawyers).
It is a great book I would recommend to anyone, although being primarily an observation of the psychological processes at play, there are of course no solutions offered.
Feels like Chip Wars more aptly lays out the material reality of why and how we historically ended up here if you prefer that to what shape the propaganda took. "We want even bigger profit margins. We sought the globally cheapest labor pool we could. Whoopsie, they got better at it than us and started competing. Let's catch up with government subsidy to compete or get SotA at a different piece of the market. Ok we caught up with state money, time to offshore a different piece of the puzzle to an even cheaper labor pool for even bigger profits." repeated until: "Whoopsie, an island off the coast of our 'rival' makes 90+% of one of the most vital products in the world."
> The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists
> Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations.
Come on. For the west to combat the “anti-industrialists”, you would have to suppress the choices and decisions of normal people, who don’t want to see others die for the sake of factory owners.
Just outright say that democracy doesn’t work, and that Chinese style autocracy does.
Get to the actual heart of the debate. Trying to replicate the Chinese economic model, while dodging the moral and philosophical choices that supports it, results only in deception and prevarication.
Anti-industrialists is arguing via classification and nouns; it just grants a short term win which fails to live up to its pomp when it hits an obvious counter point.
Seize the major question, have people accept and acknowledge the tradeoffs in all their misery and glory.
> Just outright say that democracy doesn’t work, and that Chinese style autocracy does.
There is no evidence of that to date. Western liberal democracies are much nicer places to live than China and at some point the Chinese autocrats will probably collapse internally - they're gambling on the CCP being competent which isn't a winning strategy long term. The problems are a bit more subtle - things like security implications and rates of progress.
> The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists.
Perhaps "anti-industrialist" and more the forces of "fictionalization"? That can distort companies that aren't industrial too.
* financialization, perhaps phone autocorrect?
In other words: the lack of long term planning is US’s well-known strategic weakness.
"Decoupling" was started in the US by the Obama administration.
It’s the only way the US will learn.
Politics and propaganda tend to dominate national "learning", and those forces tend to escalate to prevent awareness. So not a lot of learning happens, historically ("history tends to repeat itself"; "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes", etc)
If facts don’t work, intelligent, rational discourse and compromise don’t work, and economic pain don’t work, well, you’re out of options (at least options that can be discussed here).
By denying all other avenues of learning, the USA has chosen to revert to the oldest, which can't be disabled: natural selection.
> China has been methodically preparing for trade war
Mostly because it was prompted by decoupling from the last three administrations before going full-bore in this latest Trump admin.
It's not even about China. Asia as a whole has seen massive economic growth in the last 40 years. Countries like Indonesia and Vietnam are self confident enough to no longer kow tow to America.
>The US once had a solid base to spin up heavy industry factories, but this withered away as cheaper overseas manufacturing cut US producers out and the American economy shifted toward leading edge technology and services.
The Americans in charge of the "economy" settled for "leading edge" technology and services.
We can eventually automate our economy by buying software and hardware from China. By electing Trump, we basically missed the chance to lead on anything, and instead decided to engage full time in trade and culture wars that aren't really going to yield anything. But as long as the work gets done, even if in China, we should be able to enjoy it.
The Romans used to think that way. Their subjects thought otherwise.
It's funny you invoke some trad/conservative appeal to tradition, and meanwhile China's imperial history of bureaucratic machinery is never pointed to as an example of "look, technocratic meritocracy works".
I think it's well documented that modern bureaucracy is at least inspired by China's bureaucratic machinery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Service_(United_Kingdom)
> Under Charles Grant, the East India Company established the East India Company College at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the imperial examination system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.[10]
> William Ewart Gladstone, in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for Stafford Northcote, private Secretary to Gladstone who, with Charles Trevelyan, drafted the key report in 1854.[11]
And western countries accepted it as part of the base assumption how government should work, then nobody points to its origin since now it's so obvious (from modern perspective).
Although it is worth recognizing that although the Imperial Chinese did have an examination-based civil service, it wasn't examinations on anything actually relevant to their jobs as in modern merit-based civil services. Instead, people wanting to enter the Imperial Chinese Civil Service were tested on their ability to recall trivia from classic Chinese literature. Great if the job was Jeopardy! contestant, less so for anything practical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Books_and_Five_Classics
Given how many obscure characters are there in Chinese, this exam would easily filter out lazy and dumb people.
Parkinson's Law contains a nice (tongue in cheek) summary of the influence of the Chinese system on the British Civil Service:
> The Chinese system was studied by Europeans between 1815 and i830 and adopted by the English East India Company in 1832. The effectiveness of this method was investigated by a committee in 1854, with Macaulay as chairman. The result was that the system of competitive examination was introduced into the British Civil Service in 1855. An essential feature of the Chinese examinations had been their literary character. The test was in a knowledge of the classics, in an ability to write elegantly (both prose and verse) and in the stamina necessary to complete the course. All these features were faithfully incorporated in the Trevelyan-Northcote Report, and thereafter in the system it did so much to create. It was assumed that classical learning and literary ability would fit any candidate for any administrative post. It was assumed (no doubt rightly) that a scientific education would fit a candidate for nothing - except, possibly, science. It was known, finally, that it is virtually impossible to find an order of merit among people who have been examined in different subjects. Since it is impracticable to decide whether one man is better in geology than another man in physics, it is at least convenient to be able to rule them both out as useless. When all candidates alike have to write Greek or Latin verse, it is relatively easy to decide which verse is the best. Men thus selected on their classical performance were then sent forth to govern India. Those with lower marks were retained to govern England. Those with still lower marks were rejected altogether or sent to the colonies. While it would be totally wrong to describe this system as a failure, no one could claim for it the success that had attended the systems hitherto in use. There was no guarantee, to begin with, that the man with the highest marks might not tum out to be off his head; as was sometimes found to be the case. Then again the writing of Greek verse might prove to be the sole accomplishment that some candidates had or would ever have. On occasion, a successful applicant may even have been impersonated at the examination by some- one else, subsequently proving unable to write Greek verse when the occasion arose. Selection by competitive examination was never therefore more than a moderate success.
I didn't know this and have always wondered why in the UK we didn't have something like the Chinese system for civil service.
Ironically the civil service is full of intelligent people and it's a competitive grad programme, but it's also wholly undesirable as a career path for many.
I know plenty of smart driven people who want to make a difference who won't go anywhere near the civil service for fear or bureaucracy or salary sacrifice or both. I also know plenty of people who left the civil service jaded by the whole experience.
I don't know what the solution is but I'm always a bit saddened that people end up moving money around or optimising clicks because there's no alternative if you don't want to get left behind
In ancient China, power and social status were gained through official positions, and merchants were considered the lowest of respectable occupations. This led to the exams attracting many of the "best and brightest" to government service. In modern western countries, being wealthy is the best way to get respect and adulation. The "best and brightest" spend their education learning how to extract value from the rest.
China isn't really that different these days. Everyone is thinking about being wealthy, but especially the Chinese. Hopefully the official class evolves to something like what Singapore has, or its going to be a constant brain drain on the government as smart kids continue to prefer the private sector.
Indeed, no one sane will invest in building factory systems on US soil under a Kakistocracy.
Robot platforms are already a difficult business model in the private sector. With the exception of robot vacuums the market just isn't viable in the US yet. Best of luck =3
It seems Honda just decided to produce the next Civic in Indiana. See [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/honda-...
"Just decided" =/= decided today. They decided months if not years ago, after months of negotiations with local authorities. Don't look at plants opening now to judge the current administration. Look at it 2 years from now.
Its not a new plant. I drove by it several months ago on I-74. Its been there awhile.
I don't know - the article specifically said Honda will produce the cars "to avoid potential tariffs". I don't think the Trump tariffs were in place "years ago"...
Of course, a marketing line to fit the current situation (and curry favor with the current vindictive administration) is easily added/updated at press time.
This does not mean the making of the deals and building the factory had anything to do with it at the time, but stating that those past decisions also have benefit in today's situation is not surprising.
It also does not mean that this has anything to do with the actual reason the deals and investments were made years ago. As you point out, those deals & investments years ago couldn't have anything to do with this week's tariffs.
Quick peek on Wikipedia tells me that they've been producing Civic there since 2008.
Yeah I didn't understand how this was news. Civics and Accords for the US market have been produced in the US for decades. This isn't anything new to my eyes, maybe I missed something though.
>how this was news I'll explain. It's a 'news' article from an arm of a multinational conglomerate trying to massage the economic harm the isolationist fascists currently in charge of the us govt are doing for (hopefully) obvious material reasons. see also: literally any of wapo's recent journalistic history, the nyt on gaza, social media like twitter's political shift, the tech ceo's in the front row of trump's inauguration, or if you prefer books, manufacturing consent, technofuedalism (yanis), surveillance capitalism, etc, etc, etc. capitalists stick together.
You're pointing out one plant making one model in one city. Chinese EV manufacturers are rolling out new models every week.
Does the number of new models mean a good thing?
It I had a watch company and I rolled out new models of watches every week;
1. Either there would be so little variation that people would have choice paralysis. 2. People would wonder why I couldn't keep a consistent product line with concerns of product quality. 3. People would have major concerns about repairs and service parts availability since the next new things was not a couple years ago but quite literally, last week.
Indeed, products for domestic markets may have some incentives to avoid international supply chains.
The policies likely will just lead to multiple heavily coupled regional factories producing identical products at higher COGS. Controlling supply and demand in theory also makes communism more efficient, but in practice eventually has unintended economic consequences.
We shall see how this evolves... May our popcorn be plentiful =3
Consumer robotics, maybe - but commercial robotics has been a critical component of (for instance) Amazon’s fulfillment infrastructure.
Amazon acquired that facet of its business, and should not be considered a B2B product.
Most general purpose robot firms just don't do well domestically, and rarely make it past a business cycle. I would partner with Festo Germany before touching US markets. =3
Most general purpose robot firms don't do well at all, because until very recently, general purpose robotics have fallen short of being useful in general purpose scenarios. Amazon acquired Kiva 13 years ago. Kiva was itself founded and headquartered in the U.S.
My point was robotics startups don't typically survive with generic products very long. They are acquired or go under even after they reach TRL launch stage.
Best of luck =3
Acquisition is a common result for sucsessful deep tech startups. It's because scaling in these markets is hard and better done at large companies.
Perhaps, but a few competitors were left with EOL hardware after the Amazon acquisition... pushed out of that automated inventory transfer system.
Things scaled up at Amazon for sure, and no place else...
Best of luck =3
What exactly are China's expansionist ambitions beyond obvious Taiwan and beef with India over the border in Tibet?
Have you heard of the South China Sea?
Is it a rhetorical question? In my opinion this dispute is closely tied with Taiwan claim. When China gets Taiwan - it gets most of the critical area containing shipping lines and oil/gas fields.
Damn, thanks for plainly stating why we need manufacturing back to the states.
Not gonna happen. On the 1% chance we have a fair election next time around and Dems get elected, they will be too busy cleaning up the Republican mess, and nobody will notice. Just like what happened under Biden.
China ironically can end US by simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
> simply providing easy immigration for qualified tech workers.
I dont believe those tech workers would wish to move, unless the political system in china changes to one that is more amenable to democracy; not to mention that having high salaries in the US, it will be impossible to achieve similar levels in china after migration (even if the PPP remains the same!).
Move to a democracy-amenable country that isn’t engaging in a trade with with China.
Err, a trade war. That typo really bungled my comment, haha.
Because our so-called "democracy" is working so very well in contrast?
democracy was what decided the trump presidency. It is working. The problem is the voters are pretty dumb, or fell for propaganda.
Democracy isn't meant to give you the best outcome. It gives you, the voter, a way to push the gov't.
I mean, you are going to see an exodus of tech workers regardless as US economy withers up and other countries (probably in EU) pick up the slack.
China won't even have to have high salaries, all they would need to do is basically set up immigrant neighborhoods that have all the familiar things that US people like, and through the nature of just being around people of similar status, whatever the salary everyone gets paid gets normalized - there isn't anything you would be able to buy to "flex" on your peers, and everyone would be in the same boat.
China isn't interested in immigration. In a relatively liberal and democratic country like the US, immigration is a boon because we don't care all that much about political or economic stability and are used to not having it. In an authoritarian oligarchy like China it's poison because an unstable environment will see the government in trouble quickly when people lose confidence in the party and leadership.
But if China starts importing immigrants, it will be just another shithole. Their quality and success come from their own population. Importing foreigners is just poisoning yourself your culture and future.
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Yes, and I think this is the core motivation behind the Trump messaging - bring it back to the US if possible. In fact, he wants to bring back commercial and maritime ship building back[1]. Pretty cool! Hopefully this will employ lots of people.
[1] https://news.usni.org/2025/03/05/trumps-make-shipbuilding-gr...
“Back” is in the mid 1800’s, you mean?
Or “back” as in when we built astonishingly expensive liberty ships for a large fraction of our GDP in WW2?
Because since the move to steel ships, there’s never been a time the US has been good at building ships.
Brian Potter goes into great detail on this [0], it’s a great read.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-cant-the-us-build...
see also: his attacks on the "horrible" CHIPS act [0]. If anyone think he's doing anything good for anyone but billionaires, contact me. I've got some trump coin to sell you.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/trump-wants-kill-527-bill...
Talk is cheap, as they say. It's one thing to want something to happen, it's entirely another to actually make it so.
Generally disassembling the machinery of state and starting trade wars is not an effective way to achieve your policy objectives unless your policy objective is economic and social chaos.
Shame it's being bungled with flip flops for nothing in return. Nor any achievable commitments which business can plan for or count on.
"Back" as in undermining EV manufacturing? And non-fossil power generation?
"Back" as in massively increasing input costs?
"Back" as in alienating close allies who are a large part of our customer base?
"Back" as in repeatedly disrupting the supply chain by flip-flopping on tariffs without a clear plan?
"Back" as in undermining research across the board?
The current policy will not employ lots of people. It will have lots of people out of work fairly soon, if we continue on the current path. It will diminish our industrial base further, and reset our manufacturing skills to the 80s or earlier. But hey, at least toy manufacturers are hiring, that's a really important industry.
Setting aside any questions about intentions, the effects of the current policies are hugely deleterious.
He is gonna import raw materials from where ? Currently he started trade war with all of his allies ?
Well, no matter what he wants, there's a reason China has 5-10 year plans and not 2 week ones.
This is Chinas greatest strength and their greatest weakness. They can actually commit to policy positions when they're effective, but they also commit to policy positions when they're not effective.
The US makes 5 commercial ships per year. China makes 1,700.
https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/containers/us-wakes-up-to-...
And is the effort to deport as many Mexican skilled tradesmen and manual laborers as possible the part of this grand plan?
At the same time, he's ripping up the CHIPS act. It's the duality of Trump: he wants to bring manufacturing back, except when he doesn't.
Words and desires are easy. Crafting, marketing and enacting policy to achieve the goals set by your words and desires is difficult. The world is complex and reacts in complex ways, but try to say that to a Trump voter and get called a disconnected elitist.
Ship building is non existent in this country because of the protectionist jones act. Protectionism backfires every time.
Gonna build boats with steel and aluminium tariffs at 50% or more? Good luck with that.
This isn't something you turn around in a few years by adding tariffs, it's a long term strategy that requires high investments and tariffs. Like the chip act, but Biden did that so that cant happen either.
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You could also ... try not to make war. Just an idea. Pretty offputting actually to see someone supporting expansion being upvoted.
I might be misreading it, but I don't think the comment you're replying to supports China's expansionist ambitions.
No one is trying to make war, but naturally China is looking at changing the order of things, at least regionally. To make that happen it needs USA to move out, and create its own coalition of countries around the area.
America seems to be trying to make war, unexpectedly with Canada. Also, the only coalition America seems to be interested in is the one with Russia.
Also, multiple foreign countries like Russia are trying to make war right now.
America is nowhere close to going to war with Canada. Tariffs are import taxes, not weapons of war. Good lord.
Telling a sovereign nation, and the US’s closest ally, it should become the 51st US state isn’t making war, but it’s way more than imposing tariffs in contravention of treaties this president signed in his last term.
It's just a joke. A bad joke, but just a joke. Republicans are afraid to add Puerto Rico as a state for fear of it voting Democrat, they would never allow Canada to become a state even if you wanted to (or rather, 10 states), because they would never win an election again.
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Canada isn't bound to the monarchy or to the UK. The king is just a figurehead, and the king's representative (the Governor General) is a powerless rubber stamp.
Now, to be clear, the (conceptual) figurehead is taken seriously. When the queen died, a great renaming happened, changing each province's court of queen's bench to the court of king's bench, Queen's Counsel are now called King's Counsel, and of course new currency is being minted with images of the king. But, none of that means the actual King Charles the person has any power at all.
What definition of treaty are you using that the USMCA is not a treaty?
The difference is negligible in international use, but in the US it means “agreement that was ratified by the Senate”.
Are you claiming the USMCA was not, in fact, ratified by the Senate?
Disputing under the terms of a treaty is quite different than unilaterally breaking a treaty.
In the U.S. a treaty requires a 2/3 Senate confirmation. The USMCA is an executive trade agreement.
Dairy quotas are part of USMCA.[1]
The issue under Biden was protectionist/preferential policies which were challenged and got changed through the dispute mechanism[2]. The changed policy was then disputed again but the US lost the dispute[3].
The US has never gotten close to surpassing the tariff-rate quotas so the tariffs haven't applied.[4] Though the American dairy industry claims that's because of further protectionist policies.[5]
I'm not an expert on this so if you have more specific information please share sources.
[1] https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/files/agreements/FTA/US...
[2] https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...
[3] https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...
[4] https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-trump-doesn-t-12005222...
[5] https://www.idfa.org/news/idfa-statement-on-potential-u-s-ta...
What's all this annexation talk then?
That sounds pretty disrespectfully inflammatory.
It's not annexation to invite a country to join the Union. It's quite the honor, to be honest.
Upvote for my literal laugh out loud.
If it is such an honor, why has the response of 90% of Canadians been "Go fuck yourself"?
Up here, we consider it a betrayal, certainly nothing honorable.
America repeatedly threatened annexation and wanted water. It demands registration of goverment citizens. They call premier governor. Tariffs seem ti be preparatory steps meant to weaken Canada as a preparation for further attacks.
In general, conservatives are nowhere near to do the awful thing they say loudly they will do - and then, each time, they do that exact thing. Again again and again. These are plans and ignoring them is a self delution.
Warren Buffet said it's a declaration of war.
USA needs to move out and stop trying to start a war with China. Taiwan is China. Historically, legally, even according to the US's own policy. The KMT lost. This fantasy the US has of toppling or splitting up the PRC in a proxy war is extremely deranged.
China has exercised incredible restraint over the actions of a belligerent warmonger US.
I don't agree with most of what you've written, however, if the US has only mineral-profits interest in defending Ukraine from Russia, then there's only slightly above zero chance that the US will be rushing to defend Taiwan from China. What seems more likely is that the US will agree to let China take Taiwan in return for allowing the trade of TSMC chips to continue.
TSMC is the majoity (only?) value proposition the US has in Taiwan, and, from memory and a cursory Wikipeding, it seems that TSMC has been 'de-centralising' into Japan, the US, and Europe of late.
Taiwan is a sovereign nation, and West Taiwan needs to accept that.
The Taiwan obsessed PRC loonies online always seem to think that the west spends way more time thinking about Taiwan then they actually do.
>That country has expansionist ambitions and a superior manufacturing base, which is typically what wins wars.
What country are you referring to. US with Greenland, and Canada?
CHINA!
By the time MAGA is finished, it’ll be Greenland.
Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.
UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want.
And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people.
Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons.
We will see.
Edit
The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
This becomes less of a difficult pill to swallow if a) we're involved in a trade war, b) the economy has crashed and we must work our way out of it "for the country", c) the right people get enough money.
They're too smart for mass murder because that would actually spark a resistance, not to mention get other nations involved. I don't think a sweatshop labor economy will spark a resistance because we can't even resist our current labor abuses (and neither can that segment of China's population).
> They're too smart for mass murder because that would actually spark a resistance
I don't think they're too smart for that. They're too lazy. They prefer to just gut public health and let disease take care of the culling.
> What I think will happen is the US tries to mimic China by creating an even lower class of our workers that form a new industrial/manufacturing base to compete with.
Still too optimistic on how long-term the American approach will be. There won't be a UBI, the oligarchy will be paid directly from government coffers. The deficit, bonds and other government instruments will paper over the collapse of tax-revenue and population for a while, before the whole house of cards collapses[1]. I think the billionaires hope to be in space habitats or dead by then, if not, there's always their bunkers in New Zealand - their cache of gold bars should still work there after they ravage the USD. Capital knows no borders.
1. See late 1990s Russia. Only simple, extractive industries will chug along.
like what?
> The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor.
I fear this is going to be achieved with a World War in the not-too-distant future.
Get rid of a lot of dissatisfied poor people and seize some more resources for the wealthy at the same time.
If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power.
They don't really need those lower end resources anyway. I think they are OK to give them away just in case.
> If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power.
Only in a democracy.
China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway.
America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
(I don't know how accurate the book title is, does the average American really commit 3 per day? https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocen...)
The trouble is those populist politicians, in the US at least, are the very same billionaires at the top of the system who have somehow convinced the working class people they are on their side.
>The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
I agree that people will still want/need meaning, and some may lose it, along with their jobs, but having the money for basic needs by default gives you the ability to explore your interests with less risk. You can spend 6 months learning to paint or program or write stories without worrying about food and bills if UBI is properly implemented. If you miss your tech support job, you can go idle in 30 channels on Libera and help people that wander in asking questions about whatever software.
What am I missing here? People giving up without trying to find something to do? People who feel useless if they aren't the family breadwinner? I personally look forward to a day when most people don't need to work, and instead can "work" on what they choose.
Also I think a large chunk of people will be happy to just consume media all day.
Or, less pessimistic, a lot of people are happy to consume human relationships all day.
That’s what life has always been about for a large segment of people, going back thousands of years. Media is more or less a bandaid. People are busy, people are anxious, people don’t want to bother to spend money - media can give the sensation of human interaction without the hard bits.
But ultimately, if I could never work but I was surrounded by my loved ones forever, I would be pretty happy with that. We can find stuff to do, or just do nothing at all. With them, it’s always a blast.
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
It's not like most jobs in this economy provide purpose and meaning now as it is. People on UBI can find meaning in hobbies, art, hiking, friendships, and other things that they currently don't have time for. Volunteering is another route. Remember how everyone started baking sourdough bread and making home cooked meals when the pandemic started? We'll find other ways to have purpose and meaning. UBI will be a lot like retirement is now only it will last for a much longer portion of the lifetime.
UBI won't fix much for a far more trivial and mechanistic reason: adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income merely gives landlords the ability to charge ($1,000*n bedrooms)/mo more in rent.
Landlords have pricing power because people have to live close to their jobs. If UBI lets people move freely, landlords lose their pricing power.
I always disagree with this moving freely argument. Certainly some live where they do specifically for work, but some are also there to be close to family. They will not be interested in relocating to save a buck.
In other words, the real estate market is sticky. There are large costs to moving, so consumers put up with price increases more readily than they do in other markets.
But there's a big gulf between "sticky" and "laws of supply and demand don't apply".
People on UBI will be much more price sensitive than those supplementing with wage income since the UBI dependent will be time rich and money poor. Landlords will have less power over them. They'll still have some power because of the stickiness.
There's a big gulf between "eventually all marginal productivity increases are eaten by rising land rent" and "laws of supply and demand don't apply."
You have no reason to believe people with new marginal income from UBI would move to lower COL areas. We have strong reason to believe they'd spend that money to move toward high COL areas. Evidence for this is the fact that people, when they have money, choose to live in high COL areas.
People living solely on UBI will be the poorest people in the country. It's absurd to believe that UBI will be generous enough to cover more than basic living expenses. They're not going to behave like "people with money".
I didn't say anything about "people living solely on UBI"
Your claim is, I guess, that people supplementing wages with UBI will move to poorer locations, because they are less tied to their jobs, and then the poorest of the poor (those who already live in bottom-percentile COL locations) will... move to even poorer locations?
Seems like a wacky argument relative to: "people will do what they literally always do with new marginal income, which is move to nicer areas, and since everyone is doing it simultaneously without new supply, prices will go up and nobody will improve their lifestyle."
Landlords can't simply arbitrarily raise rents like that. If they could, they would already charge every individual tenant 100% of their income. Renting is a market like any other, and markets have limits and competition. The renters that do try to increase rent by $1000 will simply not have tenants anymore, and those that didn't, would, because UBI means people can basically move anywhere, any time they like.
It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
That can happen because of a new subway station, a hot new employer nearby, or simply because money appeared in their pockets.
If money were no object, more people would live in high COL areas, not fewer. You know this is true because you see it in the prices.
To prevent rent increases you’d need people all to have $n appeared in their pockets and to have a pact not to then spend $n to upgrade their living arrangements. The cruel irony of course being if everyone attempts to upgrade, then no one achieves an upgrade but they do achieve spending their new money!
Additional income is not additional willingness to pay 100% of that income forthe currently-purchased quality and quantity of one particular good or service, and even if it was that's a demand shift which without a supply change, will still result in a smaller increase in rent.
UBI, which any realistic method of implementing makes a shift in income from somewhere higher on the income spectrum to somewhere lower (the exact shift being defined by the UBI level and financing mechanism), most likely (if it replaces existing means tested welfare programs) most favoring a level somewhere above where current welfare programs start tapering off, does have some predictable price effects, but they aren't “all rents go up by an amount equal to the UBI amount times the number of recipients typically living in similar units”.
First order, they are some price increases across goods and services disproportionately demanded by the group benefitting in net, with some price decreases across those disproportionately demanded by the group paying in net. These will vary by elasticity, but in total should effect some (but less than total) compression of the time money shift, reducing somewhat the real cost to those paying and the real benefit to those receiving, but with less effect on those paying because of lower marginal propensity to spend with higher income.
Beyond first order is more complicated because you have to work through demand changes,and supply chnages caused by labor market changes from reduced economic coercion, increased labor market mobility and ability to retrain for more-preferred jobs, which are going to decreased supply for some jobs, increase supply for others (though on different schedules), etc.
> It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
The only landlords who can afford to operate this way own many, many units. A long term tenant who pays in a predictable manner and isn't actively damaging property is worth their weight in gold, and you can't afford to roll the dice on the next tenant unless you're able to spread the risk and cost of the churn around.
All rents are set by the market's willingness and ability to pay.
No matter whether you're the 40th percentile (a vacancy-sensitive landlord) on price or the 90th (a vacancy-insensitive landlord), the dollar value of the underlying distribution is defined by the market's willingness and ability to pay. If that goes up, the entire distribution moves to the right.
Does your rent go up by the precise amount of your increase in income every year? Mine doesn't. My landlord isn't checking my W2 or tax statements for extra rent money, that isn't how it works.
The assumption that all rents, everywhere, would go up by the amount of UBI is the definition of "arbitrary."
Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount?
When minimum wage rises, yes rents rise.
When high paying employers come to an area, yes rents rise.
These are a lot more random/diffuse in the market than UBI is, but they still cause the same effect.
Can you please explain why rents go up at all?
>Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount?
What does it matter?
You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
Rents can rise based on minimum wage, but all renters do not raise their rents precisely by the increase in minimum wage.
And when high paying employers come to an area, not all renters raise rents accordingly.
You're ignoring that market forces exist affecting rent other than the simple greed of landlords. Not every landlord would increase rent by the amount of UBI because there is an obvious market opportunity in not doing so, and because not every property could justify that, even with UBI.
> You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
I'm a landlord. My agent figures out the rent to charge on my behalf. They do this by making an informed guess as to what the market can bear — sometimes they've been wrong, and had to reduce the asking rate.
That is, mechanistically, how they discover what the market can bear.
If everyone gets £1000 UBI money each month, everyone can afford to pay £1000 more rent than before. Some agents will guess this means everyone can afford £500 more rent, some will guess higher, some will guess lower. They'll discover through this process of guessing and seeing what happens, how much people can actually pay.
This is complicated by all the other concurrent changes, including:
(1) the scenario of no-more-work-needed suggests that some of the tenants will move to wherever the rent is lowest rather than where their previous commute was shortest
(2) no-more-work-possible meaning money supply goes down rather than up
(3) people won't need to spend a huge amount of money commuting, not just time, which may increase personal money supply (just not by as much as the loss of income from not working)
(4) if they actually like the homes enough to want to spend all day in them, rather 5 hours awake and inside because the other 19 hours of the day are 8 asleep, 2 commuting, 8 working, and 1 lunch break; UBI being claimed by 500 people who all officially live in the same 1 bed flat in a Norfolk village, but they're all actually spending their money on living in relatively cheap safari cabins in Botswana or whatever, is a very different dynamic than everyone staying put to keep close to friends and family.
(On the plus side, if we have robot workers so cheap there's no point hiring humans any more, then we may also get a lot more high-quality housing for a price of next-to-nothing).
No landlord is looking at a particular tenant's income under the microscope and adjusting their rent. But, of course they do it in aggregate based on averages. UBI shifts the overall demand curve, and every supplier of goods will adjust their prices proportionally.
A broad UBI plan would likely not have every single person's income going up by a known amount, either.
Most of the plans I've seen taper off and then become a tax at certain income levels.
Taking the U and the B out of UBI? They should pick a different name.
this isnt descriptive of the past while.
the prices are going up because the landlords have entered a web2.0 mediated cartel.
Increasing the rent price makes it much easier for new rentals to come online, as long as the government isn't effectively stopping new competitors. Much the reason why grocery stores, car mechanics, etc. aren't going to raise their prices by an average of $1k/mo.
I think this can be fixed with social housing. Not a fundamental issue but yes I agree this is an issue.
The UBI in my mind is not $$$ but merchandises and services coupons.
Applying it to rent is arbitrary. The general point is that it is inflationary for all goods and services.
That is assuming UBI is funded through government borrowing as we saw with COVID stimulus. If funded through new taxes the inflationary impact should be much less.
(I don’t have enough economic training to determine how much less.)
Rent suffers more from supply and demand because of artificial supply problems.
Wages have increased far more than the price of food over the last 200 years, wage rises aren’t inflationary on their own.
Well it's not quite arbitrary because it will induce supply in other goods and services. Rent in high COL areas is driven primarily by land rent (i.e. cost of land, regardless of whether that land is actually rented to the building on top of it or not), which has zero supply elasticity.
And then the other portion of rent (the building itself) is also pretty darn supply-inelastic as well, though not entirely.
i live in a high COL area and rent is not high because of land costs. there are several empty lots that people want to build on but the discretionary review process for entitlements make it too easy to wreck the permit process (everybody knows this in the entire world; this is the YIMBY line which has truth to it). another factor is the cost per bedroom to build is very high, due to the cost of building in the market (labor, cost of goods, etc). so it's actually everything to do with the building/entitlements and nothing to do with land cost. at least where i live right now. proof: the college cancelled a massive housing project because it was gonna be too expensive per bedroom. this wasn't because of land costs but building costs.
aside, while i'm at it, let's take another swipe at free market and housing: the YIMBY line has truth about regulations preventing building, but if you look at build starts for like the 10 years after the 2008 crisis, you'll see a lack of buildings that happened during that time. they had record housing starts leading up to the crisis, and you know what also existed then? the same regulatory regime that we are now tearing down to help us build what we need. but after the crisis, the builders stopped building because they were fearful about the market. this suggests to me that "regulations prevent building, just let the free market take care of it," is too simplistic and ignores very real data. the market took care of it by not building.
What location is this?
burlington, vt. a place that has deep regulatory issues, but that is only part of it.
https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2024-05-23/uvm-halt...
So 1) yes construction costs are a huge, huge factor (especially right now), but 2) land is about $1.5MM/ac in Burlington VT. A few miles outside of it, land is about $150,000/ac.
Consider a 2 acre project:
$3MM in land costs inside Burlington
$300,000 in land costs right outside Burlington
What projects would could you do on the $300,000 lot that you can't possible do on the $3MM? Basically all of them!
Regarding the UVM project: they should sell that parking lot to bring the $1.5MM/ac costs closer to $300k/ac so people can build stuff instead of a place to store asphalt :)
are you googling your cherry picked facts? nice debate win! (might help to have local context)
regardless, why do you think land in burlington is expensive?
No, those are real numbers spot-checked from Zillow. I was on my phone and, ya know, it's an Internet argument, so they're definitely ballparked, but they are from real actual land sales inside Burlington and then a few miles outside of Burlington.
I suppose the delta is surprising to you?
It's expensive because it's productive. The marginal productivity of living/working in Burlington means the market can sustain higher costs, ergo the costs go up.
This is more problematic than every other good because 1) they cannot add more land inside Burlington and 2) the land doesn’t actually have higher carrying costs by virtue of being more expensive (unlike roughly every other asset).
i look at zillow multiple times per day so i'm well aware of the local market, so no it's not surprising me. zillow doesn't give the full picture of what is happening locally. zillow list price for vacant land doesn't consider all the vacant lots held by people who aren't building for various reasons nor does it consider the surrounding suburbs etc. or the land uvm holds but doesn't develop (who they gonna sell to? they have more money than anybody). there are a lot more variables than just zillow!
> Zillow list price for vacant land doesn't consider all the vacant lots held by people who aren't building for various reasons nor does it consider the surrounding suburbs etc. or the land uvm holds but doesn't develop (who they gonna sell to? they have more money than anybody). there are a lot more variables than just zillow!
What? Yes it does. That's how prices work. If UVM sold all of their land, prices would go down, but they aren't selling all of their land, so the prices are higher.
I never said "all land is being used productively." I said "land prices are the primary source of cost in high COL areas." One contributor to high land prices are all the things you mention: people withholding their unused land from the market.
No, there are not more variables than just the sale price. The price of land is the price of land, and it factors in all the variables you mentioned.
of course land price contributes to housing cost but "land price" isn't the full picture. i wish it were that simple.
> That's how prices work. If UVM sold all of their land, prices would go down, but they aren't selling all of their land, so the prices are higher.
yes exactly how prices work in a textbook but a textbook is not a local market with all sort of dynamics. imagine the political process of UVM choosing to sell all their land, that is just absurd to be like "they can do that and the price problem is solved!" they probably got the land for very cheap and clearly want to develop but they can't because they can't afford construction costs, for a number of reasons (price of land being only one).
I didn’t say it’s the full picture.
UVM’s internal politics are, in fact, accounted for in the price of land.
Yes, for that particular plot of land, which they already owned, the land price is not what prevented construction. That particular project’s failure is not a major driving force of the price of living in Burlington.
The fact that 2 acres costs $3MM is a major driving force.
thank you for sharing your opinion about why burlington's housing prices are high.
Meh, I just shared the fact that for the same scale of project outside of Burlington, anyone can literally 10x their budget for construction costs based solely on land price differences.
Of course the counterpoint is: a single stalled project with extremely unique economics (built for students and on land that was already owned)
So who knows!
you continually show your lack of information about burlington's real estate situation with each comment. very entertaining to me. thank you for the entertainment as well.
Excellent counterpoint!
This is why UBI isn't a good solution to the massive glut of problems we're facing.
Which is why universal basic services[1] provide a much better solution, because they make it the government's problem to handle the logistics of creating or procuring the resources people will need.
But after decades of red scare, I don't have much faith the U.S. government will move in this direction, and even the working class may protest it due to how conditioned they are to reject anything they might associate with communism.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_services
No, it doesn't, and the proof of that is that landlords don't already charge 100% of income.
You seem to be assuming housing rental is an perfectly monopolistic market, which it isn't, and any place where it even loosely approximates that needs to correct that whether or not UBI is adopted.
I had to move out of an apartment a few years ago and into a spare half-story at a friend's house. The apartment was attempting to raise my rent, while not to 100% of my income (yet), a significant amount. Their excuse was "that's the market rate now," and when I told them to F off and went to check other nearby apartments, they were correct, that was the "market rate."
I have absolutely zero doubt that if the government had paid me the difference they were trying to charge (as UBI or any other stipend), they would've raised the rate again by the same amount very quickly. In fact, going by the idea that supply & demand are what caused that (rather than simple landlord greed that I generally see it as), UBI definitely can't fix it, since UBI will not increase supply or decrease demand-- they'll still need to charge just enough that some people can't afford it in order for there to be "enough."
You're somewhat correct in that the solution (building more housing, I guess) is not really related to UBI.
This argument applies equally to never increasing anyone’s wages. If income goes up for anyone, rent will instantly rise to match the increase.
(It’s not clear why this only applies to rent and not other things people spend money on.)
This is correct, it does apply to all forms of wage increases. I wouldn't say "instantly," but yes that's why cities are perpetually expensive despite constantly increasing productivity. They are highly productive ergo they have high wages ergo they can sustain high rents ergo they have high rents ergo they "are expensive" compared to adjacent markets.
Mentioned above but I'll put it here too for other readers: the reason rent is unique is that in high COL areas, it's driven primarily by the price of land which is has zero supply elasticity. Higher prices induce supply in all other forms of goods and services.
High cost of housing and rent is driven just as much by regulations preventing new housing from being built.
Regulations are causing the fact that housing prices follow purchasing power of potential buyers: it causes a shortage in supply, which means supply side can dictate prices. Prices will be what buyers can afford. Just wait for the next recession, housing prices will fall, even with the same regulations.
Rent isn’t optional, most things are. For things that are optional, which is really a sliding scale, we do see consumers just stop consuming.
I can’t not consume rent, that’s never an option.
> UBI will not increase supply or decrease demand
Actually, I contend that it can increase supply of "housing sufficiently near sufficient income" by improving some marginal (existing or potential) housing.
Many devils in the details, of course.
Most participants in mature markets know approximately what percentage of the public's wallet they can grab. Obviously it's not 100% for any of them, but they all know what they can get away with.
My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income, landlords would respond by raising rent by about $400-$500 or so, grocery stores would raise their prices by a percentage of that new income, and so on for all businesses, until all $1,000 was soaked up and the public is no better off than they were before.
> My guess is that if UBI added $1,000/mo to everyone's income
Aside from whether the prediction is realistic under this assumption, UBI under any realistic financing scheme doesn't do that. It replaces (and potentially increases the net benefit of) means-tested welfare at the bottom end of the income distribution and spreads the clawback from a set of relatively sharp cliffs that occur between working poor and middle income levels to a much more gradual effective trail-off over nearly the whole income distribution as part of progressive income taxation.
Has anyone considered something like UBI but instead of income make it UBG--Universal Basic Goods.
The idea would be that when automation advances to the point that something can be made with very little labor the government would build automated factories to produce that thing and make the output available for free.
There would still be room for private companies to make those things too. They could make fancier or higher end models for those people who want something more than the free models from the government.
And who would purchase those, and with what?
The only scenario where UBI/UGI would make sense is one where AI can replace most/all humans at any job they could have. At that point it makes no sense for there to be a economic hierarchy at all.
No, UBI makes sense right now (the exact level that makes sense changes over time), it is a lower-bureaucracy, lower perverse-incentives alternative to means-tested welfare (and, possibly, also minimum wages) as a means of providing a support floor (its not really a flat addition because any means of financing it will provide some form of clawback, and if done through the progressive income tax, it becomes redistributiion that compresses the pre-benefit-and-supporting-tax income distribution.
UBG is a completely different story, though.
The way it does all these things is by adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income. That is what UBI is. Whether you choose to cut means-tested welfare or increase progressive taxation alongside it is up to you.
- Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI? Or only UBI? The premise upthread seemed to be UBI in response to mass unemployment caused by automation. Are you sure renters will still have more money in their pockets, even with UBI?
- If they don't have employment, and incomes are $0, then in the absence of UBI, would rent also drop to $0? If not, then I think we're better off with UBI.
- These higher prices for rent and groceries seem like strong incentives for competition. Maybe we can't expect that in NIMBY San Francisco, but without a jobs market, the only attraction to live there is the weather. Why not move somewhere cheaper?
> Are you assuming that all these people also have employment income on top of their UBI
Any system with UBI requires other sources of income to exist (thr absence of such sources means that nothing of value is being produced for exchange, in which case any money printed is basically monopoly money and how you distribute it doesn't matter because it isn't doing anything), and a major premise of UBI has always been that it enables those transitionally deprived of income more freedom to reconfigure their lives and ramp up these sources of income (and does so with less redundant—with the progressive tax system—bureaucratic overhead) than do means- and behavior-tested welfare programs.
The particular mix of available other forms of income between wage labor, independent business, or capital don’t really change the basic arguments.
Well, my question implies that being a landlord would be a remaining source of income, for starters. But if that landlord also owns the automated farms and factories producing consumer goods without labor, then the people they're renting to really might not have any other income. At any rate, where a UBI is substituting for employment income that someone used to earn, but is no longer able to, then I don't think the renter gains purchasing power to pay more for rent. (They do gain free time though).
Yes, if you have a single capital owner that owns all productive assets, that's a serious problem that UBI won't solve.
The idea of adopting a downward-redistributive policy like UBI is to do it before that occurs.
One market where we see this effect, I think, is university education.
Access to cheap loans has lead to an explosion in costs.
I'm not so sure about that. A few years ago I looked for historical university cost data. I didn't find much, but when I graphed what I did find I did not see any noticeable change in the rate costs grew between before the availability of cheap loans and after their availability.
Beat me to it and you're absolutely right. There's no need to guess what's going to happen here, we've already seen what happens elsewhere when the government injects a lot of money.
This seems reductive. Not all goods have inelastic demand and no substitutes or alternatives. Not every industry is supply limited. Said differently, not everything is immune to competition.
If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison. Instead of saving 500/mo by commuting, now you might save $1000 by relocating.
Rate limit edit: I said commuting, not going going to live in some random place.
> If cost of housing goes up, building and moving become more attractive by comparison.
Do you think "just move away from the city centers (where all the jobs that you used to need are) to random middle-of-nowhere wherever-we-have-space" will hold forever, and won't trail off once the initial phenomenon of everyone dispersing is finished?
Very obviously correct^
Okay then you tell me: why do rents go up at all?
Because the landlords use price-fixing software.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
And before that software rent never went up?
If "meaning" was a good argument against UBI, then nobody would want pensions, because UBI is exactly the same as setting the state pension age to zero.
Leaving aside that older people aren't as enthused about FT work they've known for 30 years, many of them keep jobs or get bored and lonely without them. Not everyone wants to sit around crafting useless projects, or consuming. Creating value for others and connecting (and status signaling) can provide meaning, and granted in retirement there are other vectors for that made available such as volunteering.
It's not a good argument against UBI, but there are better arguments against UBI.
You don't have to make a binary choice between work and useless craft projects. Community projects and helping other people in their more meaningful projects can be useful and be fulfilling and make someone feel accomplished. Part of the problem with working as much as possible until retirement age is you never build any community presence or report and don't often make friends doing their own projects that would need your help.
I think volunteering could actually solve part of that. Butarge scale of volunteering work, thinking about the scale of unemployment in the future, might need governments to step in to create them.
I too worry about a future where the rich no longer have any need for the poor. I think the scenario where the rich end up just giving the poor a bit of money each month is an extremely optimistic one. Much more realistic is a slow genocide, where the poor simply die en masse in the streets due to having no homes, food, and healthcare, while such homelessness becomes both increasingly more unavoidable and more illegal.
And before talk about violent uprisings and guillotines: surveillance and law enforcement are also becoming increasingly more powerful and automated. The French Revolution might have turned out differently if the Bourgeoisie had cameras on every street corner and AI-powered murder drones.
Aren't you too pessimistic? 1 kg of rice costs somewhere around $2 here and you won't eat it in a day. So with $20-30 you can have a month worth amount of rice. You don't need thousands of dollars to survive.
And giving everyone $30 every month won't break even developing country economy.
How are you cooking that rice? With rainwater collected from gutters over a trash can fire? Both of which are illegal, by the way.
How are you preventing others from stealing your rice? Where are you eating it? Where are you sleeping at night?
Yes, of course you need thousands of dollars to survive. The problem is rent, not food.
1 kg of rice has 1300 calories. Not enough for most adults. And not very appetizing if that’s all you eat
> The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
Employment is the only - or even best - way of finding meaning in one's life?
UBI cannot work in a free-ish market. Suppliers of basic needs (housing, water, energy, food) will crank their prices to include UBI.
i'm very far left ideologically and i think UBI in the current political economy is a bad idea because it's just gonna go to rent etc. all the capitalists will raise their prices.
by "UBI" i think you just mean everyone, except for a few, will be on food stamps.
Do you have data to back up this claim or is this just bar talk ?
The elites leaving common folk relatively alone would be a best case scenario. If people are free to build and supply for themselves with UBI then life wouldn’t be bad.
Problem is elites usually want control. Oh you’re running small scale manufacturing with open source AI and robots? That’ll be a fine for “safety” reasons. Look at California requiring permits for everything.
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes?
Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries.
We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
If I was running a busniess, all tings being equal, I would rather sell 1,000 units at $100 than 10 units at $10,000.
The more customers I have, the less risk there is if I lose a customer. The less I have to bow to my customers whims.
If one of the 10 people ask me to hire their cousin, I might have to do that. If one of the 1,000 people ask me to do so, probably not.
The Uberfication of the workforce is incredible to see: you work when the algorithms tell you there's work, you'll get paid what it wants to pay you.
Cheap transport, cheap postage, cheap delivery of foods...
Wealthy people would buy hundreds of millions of different phones? I strongly doubt it. Luxurious electronics for very rich people is usually something like iphone with diamonds covered back. This solves nothing and creates zero innovations.
Maybe they’ll subsidise them so they can monitor us 24/7/365
Wealth =/= spending, and definitely doesn't equal consumption.
Elon Musk might have more wealth than 1,000,000 US households, but he doesnt eat 3 million meals a day, drive a million cars, or sleep in a million houses.
I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown of consumption instead of wealth, as competition for goods and services produced is where disparity has tangible impact.
However, the productivity of workers in relation to capital is a valid concern for their ability claim the goods produced.
Have you ever read _Atlas Shrugged_? When I read comments like yours, my head goes there.
I have read Atlas Shrugged, but I'm not sure how to interpret your comment.
I was referring to this part:
> A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
As it stands right now, the common people having phones is what justifies investment in the cellular infrastructure. Without that investment, wealthy people can have plenty of phones but no service.
Is it realistic to think that the poors will start their own economy servicing each other? I'm sure there would be chaos and violence for a period but eventually it seems like the path upward would be a whole new economic system for that 98%. This system could even make use of the automation offered by AI.
But the wealthy don't spend their money.
A billionaire doesn't spend more money than a million people on...anything probably.
Why are manufacturing jobs special? People will upgrade their tastes to consume more. Middle class houses with artistic stone work and well-manicured gardens. Skin treatments, massages, and health scans galore. More entertainment and more niche too. Banking apps that could win design awards. We are nowhere near the end of useful work.
> Why are manufacturing jobs special?
Because you need manufacturing to win wars, or to be seen by outside great powers that you're in a position of winning wars. You're not winning wars based on git commit messages, but based on the steel any one country is able to produce at a certain moment in time (and to transform it into tanks/armoured vehicles and artillery shells).
That is manufacturing capacity, not jobs. A factory of ten people and a few hundred robots is fine. Other types of manufacturing like chips, aerospace and medical equipment are high value and low workforce.
Tariffs and industrial policy may increase the US' manufacturing capacity, but don't expect to see many manufacturing jobs from it.
> A factory of ten people and a few hundred robots is fine
Don't think that that is true when it comes to the steel industry when you include all the verticals, i.e. mineral extraction + transportation of said minerals + energy production + transportation of said energy. You need qualified people for that, lots of them. And I've yet to see the steel factory that can be run with only 10, 25 or even 100 people.
Yes, 10 people is a gross exaggeration, but manufacturing output has remained the same while manufacturing employment has fallen over the last few decades. Advanced robotics will continue the trend even if policy pushes manufacturing output up. There is no realistic way to drastically increase manufacturing employment.
aerospace in the US is very much NOT low workforce. It's quite the opposite. One of the highest employers of "traditional" manufacturing in some ways. I think you also underestimate how many employees are required for medical equipment manufacturing as well.
I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufacturing things cheaply abroad and having US workers move up the value chain.
Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with the us right? Specializing only works when line goes up forever. Heck sometimes line not going up as fast as yesterday is a "crisis".
> Is there not opportunity cost in both directions?
Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US.
> At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right?
We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism.
> Specializing only works when line goes up forever.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.
How does )3 work in the age of nukes? A shooting war between US-PRC is not something anyone should want.
Your comment perfectly illustrates why communism doesn't work. The one-sentence summary of communism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" and clearly people's needs grow. I don't know how much longer CCP can still keep communism in its name; how will CCP leaders reconcile that the fact that only by abandoning communism did the country rise?
What happens when every single physical and mental job that could be done by humans is done by AI/robots? Sure, you'll always have people imagining and creating new things, but it doesn't seem wise to tie that to economic compensation when technology reaches a state where every single human being gets to experience an upper-middle class American lifestyle, unconditionally, from birth to death.
Communism, as you described, is an ideal. An horizon, a direction to walk. Therefore, it never was achieved, and it is not expected to be achieved in any short term. So, it does not make sense saying that only after abandoning communism China rose. What they abandonned was a soviet flavour of socialism. Communism never existed (at least not the flavor that you described), but it is still an inspiration and source of values. Perhaps in a far future, with more technology, and without existing an upper class above a lower class this could be possible.
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes
The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people.
This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc).
Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists.
1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
You cannot do everything with robotics, no matter what those selling you robots will claim.
There will always be demand for those supporting the machines that make things. Tech will still require humans.
The goal should be to make as many things as China and EU with a USA population.
Everything, sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to have them do the things they can.
Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly.
Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
And yet the revolutions he inspired end up (in many ways) more dystopian than the capitalism they seek to replace..
Since then there's been a realization that you can simply regulate the worst aspects of capitalism while still reaping most of its rewards.
Now, that has been realized - but hasn't happened - in the United States, but it can certainly be done.
It'll probably be too late though.
So what? People have been misinterpreting and misusing knowledge, realizations, and stories since basically forever. That doesn't make the original works worthless or any less insightful. You would be hard pressed to link most of the policies of communist nations to things Marx said or advocated for. The vast majority of Marx's works is pointing out flaws in capitalism, not prescribing policies to use instead.
I agree with your points but they do not lead to the conclusion that the GP was implying (that Marx contains the solution to what ails us)
That was a fear the first time automation came around. (I have a vague memory of machines used for weaving textiles.) Turns out people bought more cheap clothes, and thus people were needed to run the machines.
I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
Money ≠ Wealth. Currency ≠ Money.
As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen.
If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections. Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.
When all the labor (physical or mental) is automated, you've basically solved a huge problem for humanity. Doesn't matter who owns the robots. They either share the products of the labor for close to nothing, or they are producing for themselves only. Someone will produce for the population.
Why is this difficult to imagine? The capitalists need human labor commodity as long as, well, human labor commodity is the only labor commodity that can do the job. Once it (if ever) isn’t? And they own all the robots that can do the work? And they own all the robot soldiers that can protect their ill-gotten wealth? (Just in short total automation) Well, no need for consumer capitalism any more. Then you just have totalitarian capitalism where everyone else will have to live out their lives at the total mercy of those overlords.
(It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
In past times this question was solved by the ruling class commissioning monumental buildings and fine art, as well consuming enormous amounts of luxuries. This gave at least some form of employment back to the people.
Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all.
The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
Read the Plutonomy paper from CitiGroup circa 2005: https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
The plight of the poor is not an economic problem it is purely a political one. Progress in technology isn't really a root cause of poverty, rather a proximate cause with the root cause being "because the fruits of technology are not adequately shared by government policy", a policy issue.
Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
Economics is inherently political. The original (and more descriptive) term for the subject is "political economy".
> Economics is inherently political.
Yes? The political policies will have an impact on the economy.
Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up.
Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity.
Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do?
Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
> The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
I always wonder when people say things like that. What's the first thing a humanoid robot with human like intelligence do when you tell it to make a copy of itself?
Does it set up a backyard forge and start to cast new arms and legs out of discarded cans? Does it finish the parts on a manual Bridgeport or does it carve them out manually with a hand file?
When it needs silicon chips, does it make them itself or try to order more from the company that made it? Will it become a right to repair activist when it finds out the company won't sell components to individuals?
Maybe it has to pay for all this with a part time job at the local fast food joint.
All of the above, and more.
Assuming a humanoid robot with human like intelligence it may also be able to enlist humans to accomplish it's task, either by paying them directly, or through intermediaries, or deceiving them into helping it.
If it is capable to human like intelligence and creativity it may be able to pioneer new manufacturing processes -- perhaps it will learn to grow parts for itself by using existing biological processes in ways that we haven't yet figured out.
The point isn't so much the how with a self replicator, the point is the exponential growth rate. You're right that the first machine will take a long time to build the second, but those two will certainly be able to build twice as many in at least the same amount of time -- probably less because they can use the infrastructure that the first set up to build the second.
Once humans make machines that are capable of self replication regardless of where it is on the spectrum from base matter and energy assembly to just off the shelf parts assembly you're going to see exponential growth.
And once certain kinds of creative people get their hands on these machines they will inevitably jailbreak them and make them work for them instead of the companies that will try and lock this kind of stuff down like they always try to do.
The war on general purpose computing will transition into a war on general purpose manufacturing and the same kind of people who want ot sell you devices that you can't compile software for without a license will try to do the same with self replicating hardware but they will fail.
I think you've described the second thing a young hacker may get it to do...
>Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes?
Robots that can build things already exist and can be purchased second hand, but I haven't see this level of hacking them to self replicate. The logistics of getting enough parts, and having the general purpose ability to diagnose a very wide range of issues with used components, and similar seem to prevent this from being some sort of self replicating singularity.
If such a robot did already have the power to do such self replication, why would it wait for a second hand hacker instead of the builder of the robots using them to produce copies at reduce cost?
I've seen this plot in various movies, TV shows, and books. It definitely is a possibility. In the Dune universe the AI's are banned after a war against them.
https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap
I don't think the costs go to zero though for that.
There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce.
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
I still haven't seen an example of technical workers being replaced by AI
Perhaps we have differing definitions of "technical workers" ? Here in the Bay Area at least there are a number of companies which are replacing "senior staff" with an LLM and a junior engineer. The argument is that this combination is "cheaper" than the salary paid to the senior engineer. For me that is exactly analogous to replacing a factor worker with a robotic work station and a technician to maintain the robot. There is a ceiling on that junior engineer's career which occurs when they are themselves replaced by another junior engineer to reset the salary cost.
We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search.
What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.
The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.
This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model.
Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
1. there are limits to natural resources.
2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
> 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind?
I thought it was giving people money.
I mean, depending on the amount, yes it could be deciding all of the things you said. You would be limited in your choices depending on how much the ubi actually is.
Right now I get zero ubi so I guess I am even more limited on all of those, and am even more a pet.
Right now you can live without it.
As a pet. More of a pet than someone on UBI. I'm someone already experiencing the bad thing we worry might happen to someone on UBI—withdrawal of it.
Not the worst, unclear to me why this was a concern in the first place. Be cool to have UBI though.
This isn't a rebuttal, the only solution you're allowing space for is "kill everyone". The universe is finite and all things end.
1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility.
2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too.
3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
> 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work.
I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities.
But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
>Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity.
Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives.
UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
I think that there are definitely people who have been on welfare and used it to better themselves and there are people who thrive in the face of adversity, overcoming the worst situations.
I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
People are weird and different.
Fully agree. But I do believe that cultural norms and societal expectations and what people push you to do with your life play a big role, so these are all levers to be pulled if you want to make a more self-driven population.
> I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose.
People on welfare? I can imagine a lot of these people "accept" that the goal is to get themselves out of welfare, ASAP (especially if there's a deadline), but they can't see a way to that goal - e.g. applying for jobs but getting rejected left and right, and feeling dejected.
With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
No, there a lot of people who have no idea what to do when they have free time.
There are lots of older people who go back to work, not because they need the money but because the need the structure. In fact, there is an increased risk of death due to retirement.
>Available evidence suggests it is unlikely that changes in health insurance and income can account for the increase in mortality at age 62. So, to further examine the plausibility of retirement leading to higher mortality, Moore examines which causes of death increase when men turn 62, and considers the connection between those and decreased labor force participation.
https://business.purdue.edu/news/features/2022/retirement.ph...
>With utopian UBI, one would be free to do what they want.. even if it's just jagging off the whole day.
People have need to feel like they are doing something. Usually something positive but they will settle for something negative, generally that ends poorly for society.
Also UBI would only, as my understanding is, take care of the basics. Food, shelter, medical care. So you would end up with a population that has enough to survive, hungry for more and no way to achieve it.....
You can achieve the need to do something by forming human connections. Mutual necessity between people, a form of fulfillment that long predates any economy.
We have the unfortunate combination of being uniquely individualistic and with too much time. Community-based societies, which we will have to transition to in a post-scarcity world, don’t have that problem.
I don't think anyone would choose to work in any way like today, especially if work is focused on generating wealth with a large portion of it being redistributed. Work would have to change to something more like volunteerism.
Well, many people would choose to work for the extra income that would bring them. Or some other status symbol that working could bring, welfare won't bring you that Rolex! Or some cultural shift that makes certain work "cool" (1). Or just fostering a sense of community and mission for doing certain work. People do many many many things motivated by other things than money. I agree that it's only a subset of the population, but if you decrease the work input needs to less than that percent of the population, that's doable. Still, as I said, we're not there yet and I believe we won't be there yet for a long long time.
1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
> 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table
It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?
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How I hate articles like this, painting everything as "existential" threat. Feeding the paranoia that has grubbed the US. Everything is viewed as a threat.
The US has squandered its advanced manufacturing capabilities, warning bells have been sounding for decades, and yes, those chickens will eventually come home to roost. Not yet but soon.
trying to spread democracy to China through its economy was the biggest mistake the US has made in 50 years.
It seems eager to make even bigger mistakes. The current administration started playing with levers it does not understand.
I never believed that the "spreading of democracy" was any more than a flimsy pretext for exploiting China's cheap labour.
Or China will come around one way or another. It is not like US did all the hard work.
Let me put it another way, even if China is a democracy, it will still compete with US in world economy. So many people there need work, the price will be low to produce things there.
Blame US's manufacturing woe fully on China isn't logical, Japan/South Korea are of the same breed, just lesser on China's scale.
Another arguably more important factor is the over regulation and bloated governance here, to a degree of being comical, just look at the California government.
Is this drawn out, lengthy democratic process really for anything of substance or just performative virtual signaling that essentially benefits no one in the name of benefiting everyone?
Anti manufacturing is a choice, made the government, thus by the populace themselves. And please, do not bring Trump, California has been in a Dem super majority since 2012.
When there's no social safety net and you live in a society which insists on "he who does not work, does not eat", anything which sidelines labor is not "perceived as" an existential threat, it is an existential threat. And recognizing it as such is not paranoia, but straightforward realism.
If you don't want the paranoia, then fix the system which causes people to (correctly) see automation as pure downside.
Ironic, since the rage/fear-baiting and hijacking of dopamine is an existential threat!
Once upon a time, a US president said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". His unconventional administration brought USA from deep economic depression into a golden age.
Meanwhile, the current ruling elite smears him as one of the worst presidents of all time, and has spent decades undoing that legacy and racing towards a repeat of 1929.
he also ran for reelection four times and made private ownership of gold illegal, and vastly expanded the power of the executive branch.
Reminds me a lot of the current guy and his obsession with another term, and whether or not the gold (that FDR largely stole from the people in the first place) is in Ft Knox.
I guess the biggest difference is DOGE but it's all too much centralized power for me
The difference between DOGE and FDR banning gold hoarding over $100 ($2K+ today) is that the latter targets the wealthy, while the former is focused on looting public goods to enrich the privately wealthy.
It could be seen as naked class warfare either way, but they are opposites. Increasing wealth inequality is fantastic path to social unrest and weakened institutions.
FDR was the leader of a republic, Musk is a classic robber baron.
IMO his expansion of the government was a best case scenario. The US was quickly barreling towards a socialist revolution. Any other president, particularly a greedy ultra-capitalist, would’ve stoked that flame.
The American people were angry about their exploitation at a level that hasn’t been seen since the creation of the US. He successfully bread crumbed the poor away from taking heads, literally. We so often forget that the most powerful people in this nation is Us, the People. We vote and we revolt. A nation-wide catastrophe is the perfect opportunity for mass organization.
Make no mistake, FDR was a staunch free market capitalist. He just wasn’t stupid.
Paranoia is the USA's way of life, when life always seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff: losing your job at a moment's time, losing your life savings for a healthcare emergency, losing your kid to a school shooting, losing your stuff to burglars. Any of these have a very low chance of happening but they can be so life-changing that Americans seem to always be in some state of paranoia, a low-trust society with few safety nets and a highly-competitive mindset is primed for that.
American media just capitalises on the sentiment, it's a vicious cycle of abusing paranoia. The government does it too, just look at the red-scare from the Cold War that feeds into American public discourse to this day, anything remotely socially progressive is "communist".
It's amusing and sad to watch from a distance.
I've observed this as well, I do wonder though if that doesn't strongly encourage competitivity(is this word right? autocorrect highlights it, huh) and make people work... well, more. More effective, more time, more angry. It's certainly one possible explanation for why they dominate in many areas. But it does sound like such an exhausting thing.
I don't think it makes us work more, but I think it makes us less satisfied with our lives. Which ultimately fuels the consumerism and pleasure-seeking.
Well, that solves the consumption part of the things, but not the production side.
The production side of things comes from exploitation - the US is the strongest imperialist force in the world. We don’t just exploit the periphery, we also exploit our own citizens to the maximum they can bear.
> competitivity "competitiveness" might be the word you want.
competition?
Well if it's worked so well thus far, why change it up? I suspect that if a country is not at least a little paranoid about the competition that it doesn't stay #1 for long.
To me it's a problem of causality, does it actually made the USA be "#1" for long? Is it helping society to be this paranoid about everything and everyone?
I'm no sociologist to answer that but I question if it's a causal link or if it's more a case of "despite the", what if the USA could be doing better without the paranoia, maybe it's a drag and not a push... It surely seems to be dragging society down into a dark path.
The sub-title of the article is completely unhinged:
> China's Dominance Playbook, General Purpose Robotics Is The Holy Grail, Robotic Systems Breakdown, Supply Chain Hardships, The West Is Positioned Backward And Covering Their Eyes, China's Clear Path to Full Scale Automation, Call For Action
I closed the page quickly despite the subject matter is something I am interested in. Also the AI generated images that have no raison d'etre of being there.
>This is a Call for Action for the United States of America and the West. We are in the early precipice of a nonlinear transformation in industrial society, but the bedrock the US is standing on is shaky. Automation and robotics is currently undergoing a revolution that will enable full-scale automation of all manufacturing and mission-critical industries. These intelligent robotics systems will be the first ever additional industrial piece that is not supplemental but fully additive– 24/7 labor with higher throughput than any human—, allowing for massive expansion in production capacities past adding another human unit of work. The only country that is positioned to capture this level of automation is currently China, and should China achieve it without the US following suit, the production expansion will be granted only to China, posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities.
This is not an "existential threat". It's an existential threat to the US being the top production economy. But the US can still thrive as an economy. I don't mind the US benefiting off of Chinas super productivity. Also there's really no hope, China will surpass the US in this area so it's a bit pointless to try.
Opens with AI art and a banner about how this is an AI site, I am just gonna assume the body of the text is AI spam as well and close it.
Yes, China is winning, but at what cost?
Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside, the West has put itself all by itself in this position, for too long it had thought that it could still rule the world based on the services industries and on the financialization of the world economy. It seems like they bet wrong.
> Leaving the stupid The Economist-list memes aside
What are you referring to?
Something like this [1].
I've singled out The Economist because I used to read them until not that long ago so that I can confirm first-hand that they also use that rhetoric (but can't be bothered to look for an online source right now).
Later edit: A X [2] post pointing to an Economist article [3] that does just that, but, as I said, the examples are too numerous, just purchase a Economist issue and go through their China section, you'll see it right there
[1] https://x.com/slipknothooh/status/1433496026795630598
[2] https://x.com/Liberation_Blk/status/1690911685312126976
[3] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/08/08/what-does-xi-j...
Long article. Mostly interesting!
Surprising that they skip over autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in their survey of types, but perhaps that's because it's a weird interstitial with high interaction with Humans for less-general usecases (material movement, but no material handling/auto-interfacing with other automation besides e.g. an attached conveyor). Also, less clear success in the market. I think Locus robotics probably qualifies as the most widely used AMRs (vs Kiva/Amazon being posterchild for AGVs)
This article, like many conversations I've had, covers "making competitive hardware", but skips a lot of the "how to do things with the robots" successfully /for multiple uses/, which is also a hard problem.
> posing an existential threat to the US as it is outcompeted in all capacities
Is US ever gonna grow out of sore loser mentality or do we really need WWIII?
I assume that future AGI which is smart enough to control "general purpose robotics" is probably smart enough to design robotic forms that make all the current stuff obsolete anyway.
Like the article says, physical world data is too scarce to jump straight to powerful robotics first.
The problem is that, at some point, the west decided to stop rewarding excellence in tech and started rewarding people for their social networking abilities. Now we have a lot of people who are good at talking and few people who are good at tech who have money to invest in robotics. Had I been even moderately rich, I'm certain I would have been investing in robotics right now. But instead, I'm working on document management software for government... While extroverts who got rich from Facebook IPO get to build Instagram for dogs...
I think the decline coincided with the crackdown against cryptocurrency. Had it been allowed to develop normally instead of being suppressed and corrupted (by governments), things might have looked very different.
Now I don't believe the system has any integrity so it makes no sense for me be productive. I actively look for the highest paid, most unproductive jobs I can find... Fortunately, there are MANY of those available in our system.
I've made it my life's mission to exploit the system's flaws, while simultaneously complaining about them. Helping the bad guys self-destruct while earning a living is about as rewarding as it can be for me.
A lot of other people my age are in the same boat, some knowingly, most unknowingly. I hope situation will change soon. There are some signs but it's going to take some big changes.
I would like to see a robot hand try and plug in a MCIO or OcuLink connector to its MB port because even my fat fingers have trouble seating them in correctly.
you know that pick and place robots are used to put and solder the components onto the board that you're trying to plug the OcuLink connector to, right?
Do you not have enough supports/standoffs on your mobo? Just because your case comes with 6 doesn't mean you only need 6.
Ai and robotics will push us into a golden area for x years until they become so good that we better have an answer to the implications of full automation of everything.
Also the laber shortage is pushing this transition even faster in potential traditional/ slow areas.
Where can one go and keep up with the latest in special purpose robotics? E.g., if I wanted to know about every new robot in the construction industry and similar labor intensive trades, is there a place that covers that?
We didn't want a new labor economy.
We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders. If that meant parting out our industrial base to our main geopolitical rival, that's what that meant.
In the US, capitalism has mostly replaced nationalism and patriotism. In China, it augments those things.
In China, Capitalism exists to benefit the state.
In the USA, the state exists to benefit Capitalism.
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Gonna die with this hammer in my hand.
Pick up a sickle while you're at it.
I believe a lot of this is where China's current deflationary pressure is coming from. China has driven the cost to produce energy and goods right down to the floor through tremendous scale and efficiency. There doesn't seem to be any sign prices have reached the bottom yet. A lot of parallels to "The Great Deflation" [1] of the late 1800s.
Quoting Wikipedia,
"The prices of most basic commodities and mass-produced goods fell almost continuously; however, nominal wages remained steady, resulting in a pronounced and prolonged rise in real wages, disposable income and savings – essentially giving birth to the middle class. Goods produced by craftsmen, as opposed to in factories, did not decrease in price"
China's system really prioritizes worker and middle class prosperity. Over here in the west we're too busy sliding into a rent seeking oligarchy that we haven't noticed yet.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation
A Latin American perspective (from the B in BRICS):
There are 3 economic blocks dreaming on global dominance: Europe, US and China. The difference among them is how they pursue these dreams.
The Europeans talk, discuss, gather and don't do anything.
The Americans shout, yell, go alone and do everything wrong.
The Chinese just do it, mostly right.
> Comparing a robotic system to a human, the current labor force is lower skilled, lower ability, and a much higher attrition rate. ... The US must take part in the robotics revolution before all labor is handed over to China to own in perpetuity.
The US capitalists must monopolize all upcoming labor commodities (all-robot) before China does it. Definitely some projection here.
so, the narrative from semianalysis is shifting from "agi is imminent" to "robotics will take over" - what does that mean for semi sales ?
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China is known to scale out in the low end market without having a strategy to go upmarket.
Reading this article I honestly got the opposite impression. China is hopelessly behind Japan in both high end machine tools and robotics.
I take it you haven't seen any Chinese cars lately. Particularly in the EV space they're demolishing the competition in price and quality, and a huge part of that is thanks to automation with the robots described here.
Check out eg the Xpeng G6, which delivers an Audi ride but undercuts the Tesla Model Y on price:
https://www.xpeng.com/g6
And the 2025 xpeng g6 is so much better than previous model, 5C charging battery, better ride, even better energy efficiency, better looks, better interior design, 30% of car parts are updated. And they delivered this update 2 years after the first model, when normally it takes other companies 5 years for an upgrade of this size. They have positive margins on a 17-20k RMB, 270 miles+, 350KW charging, FSD like autonomous driving EV, even though they have to price it this low due to ultra-competitive market. They can't do this without Chinese supply chain. Speed of iterations, innovations, fast time to market, efficiency is this all about.
China creates the most high end drones and 3d printers, and my Hisense TV is better and cheaper any of my Samsung's. This is from personal experience of things I have purchased.
China is definitely growing quickly. At the trade shows I go to where some of the robots in the article are presented, Chinese companies have become quite prominent in the last few years when they were completely non-existent 10 years ago.
It "was known" in the 60s that Japanese electronics and cars were inferior in design and quality. Chinese products are going through the same trajectory.
This "is known" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. "Is known" 15 years ago, perhaps. Things are changing rapidly.
China has multiple 100% indigenous fifth-gen fighters man. They have domestically designed and built nuclear reactors. They have a 100% indigenous space station.
I wish there was an app for renting humanoid (android) robots. Maybe from Unitree or TeslaBot or something, or a US-based robot if there is one that is actually being manufactured and similar.. maybe combined with a built-in AI system.
America definitely seems to be a little bit behind in terms of android manufacturing. They have some pretty competitive robots but they seem more expensive and to be being built inefficiently.
Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup that can build a stack and integrate it into one or more off-the-shelf robots to provide the intelligence part. Because a lot of the demos of android are teleoperated since the AI is still quite difficult.
Combining the AI and a rental service would be so powerful.
We might be one or two years away from that being practical.
The sheer quantity of completely ridiculous, absurd economic and political beliefs, and predictions on this comment thread is amusing, all the more so when you consider that so many on HN who deride the wealthy are themselves part of the global 1% of elites in terms of income and access to resources, and have made their way to this position in the very same market economies that are supposedly bringing us all to slavery and misery of nearly feudal proportions.
For a site whose readers like to tout the general trend here as being of people with above average intelligence, ignorance and blindness to the obvious is rife.