Load up on verification cans because the companies who got away with flaunting EU advertising/tracking laws will get away with obnoxious ad-driven AI too.
(The cookie consent banners that you see everywhere were anticipated and forbidden in the laws themselves, companies just gambled that the EU wouldn't be able to enforce the law, and they were correct. I expect something similar to happen with for-profit AI steering.)
Need? A committee of the dumbest software on your pc/phone will get together to tell you what you need, and they have decided you need tin-can audio quality so that the microphone can be active so that AT&T spyware embedded in the Taco Bell app can listen for off-hand comments about refreshing your phone to opportunistically target you with the spam-cannon.
These are ~1000-word stories (prompts at [1]), squarely in the sweet spot where planning logistics are minimal, context windows comfortably fit everything, and the appropriate level of abstraction omits any details which could glaringly reveal weak world-model knowledge.
SOTA LLMs from 2 years ago would saturate this study, and while modern LLMs are amazing and I suspect they would do quite well on a similar but more challenging study that forces them out of said comfort zone, this isn't that.
> our government works for corporations instead of the public
Yes, but we cheat ourselves out of change with learned helplessness. Did you see how much hatred the business community directed at Lina Khan when she started dusting off the old antitrust machinery? That happened recently. It can happen again. It was on the ballot, and it will be again.
Yes, I saw that too, it was quite remarkable. Still, learned helplessness would have us believe that such an appointment was impossible and yet it happened, and it happened in a Democratic party that leaned "more lib than left" to an even greater degree than it does today, or will in 2028.
So when the billionaires twirl their moustaches and say "Silly kids! You can't possibly defeat me, why do you even try?" (or, more realistically, sponsor a lackey to promote that message) one should try to have at least as much gumption as a child facing down a cartoon villain who recognizes this as smack talk rather than deep philosophical truth. The progressives of 100 years ago faced down the first round of Robber Barons and won. We've done this before and we can do it again.
You'll notice that this was not a popular discussion.
HN users don't like it when billionaires are dissed, as many want to achieve that, for themselves. Very much a reflection on the demographics of this site. Maybe not a bad thing, but kind of amusing.
A current account deficit is a capital account surplus.
We can pay for imports with things we make or things we own. To a first approximation, making things employs people and owning things does not. If we pay with things we make, our economy employs people. If we pay with things we own, the jobs disappear while stocks/bonds/real estate soar.
If you want the whole story from an actual economist, read "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
You're missing the third thing we pay with: T-bills. We literally print money. That's it. We didn't give up anything we own. We didn't give up anything we made. We printed money, because there needs to be enough currency to represent the ever growing wealth of the world and the world has chosen the US dollar as the reserve currency, to the great benefit of the US.
You're missing that the T-bills are replacing exports (including services) that would otherwise have had to happen to support the imports, and that the latter employs people while the former doesn't.
The benefit is to the US in aggregate but is a detriment to most US citizens, since most US citizens get their money primarily from working rather than from owning assets. But for the minority of people who mostly get their money from owning assets, this is brilliant, I agree.
> people have a baseline of goods they must consume for survival (housing, food etc.), and once that baseline is reached spending does not fall further
Oh boy, do I have news for you. It is in fact possible to run out of money, and in a deflating economy with no jobs you can't just go out and earn more. It puts peoples' collective backs against the wall -- at which point they decide to fight like cornered animals rather than die in a corner, and things get nasty.
Inflation crises are awful, but when you run out of money there are jobs and you can get more and this generally prevents them from turning into bloodbaths. This is why we collectively decided to err in this direction.
Weimar Germany is the perfect example. Did it suck? Yeah. Savings were incinerated, everyday activities became market speculation, the memes are all true -- but it happened under nearly full employment and once the root causes were addressed everything largely simmered down. This is in stark contrast to the deflationary shock of the Great Depression later that decade which propelled the Nazis into power and led directly to WWII.
99% deflation doesn't happen because people start killing each other long before then.
Ricardo's comparative advantage result is contingent on the assumption that capital is not mobile across borders. This was a good assumption in 1817. Is it a good assumption today?
Furthermore, he's very up front about this in On the Principles, and from this information you can calculate the exact number of people who read the damn thing between the person repeating the talking point and the person originating the talking point.
It doesn’t really matter what Ricardo said in 1817: every US academic economist surveyed in 2018 by the Kent Clark Center disagreed that US aluminum and steel tariffs would increase the welfare of the American people ([0]), and this is with the benefit of >200 years in advances in economic scholarship and analysis since Ricardo.
Good industrial policy is made from positive economic actions. State investment, interest free loans for factory expansion, strong antitrust law, subsidies and tax reforms that promote industry growth instead of shielding it from competition.
Tariffs can be a good way to pay for this but they are always negative for consumers, and most of the time also net negative for domestic industry. Hard quotas and trade bans put up a wall that completely removes buyer choice and turns everything into a corrupt seller's market.
The American tradition is using negative tools because of their anti competitive effects. Car makers really don't want people buying cheaper cars from overseas so they lobbied for the chicken tax. In a country where funding from corporate super PACs is the most reliable way to win elections no president will change policy if it means losing a big sponsor.
The fact that he has two and a half years left in office, along with Congress not willing to do anything, means industrial policy cannot be done. We can certainly try again when something changes, whether that’s the required turnover in Congressional representation (maybe midterms, maybe two more years from now) or federal administration regime change (January 2029). “We are at an impasse.” Until then, the country keeps burning down, as voted for by the electorate.
I do not see another path, but perhaps I am mistaken. I am always open to being corrected when wrong.
If only all those academic economists were as loud about how to keep tech and industrial capacity from withering and moving to China, as they are with their criticism of attempts to prevent that. They don't even complain when China engages in protectionism, dumping, and general "market distorting" subsidies. Listening to them, you'd never learn that none of the advanced economies got that way by following their laissez-faire trade prescriptions [1].
And of course they limit their analysis to "welfare of the people", first-order, ignoring how loss of industry will (and is already) come back to bite us. As if our only interests were those of passive consumers.
[1] " ... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticis...
Many academic economists are loud about those. It is the politicians who pick and chose the ones they prefer and want to promote. Just see how Laffer and his "Laffer curve" have been embraced by the right to cut taxes despite having no evidence at all about the shape of the curve. An idea literally born during a cosy dinner between Laffer, Rumsfeld, Cheney and a WSJ journalist.
Economist here. Yes! Politicians choose to promote certain economists. I’m tired of answering questions about Modern Monetary Theory, which Bernie Sanders chose to promote. The creator is from an economics department ranked 259th. It’s a duuuumb theory.
I don't know it makes much difference. People could walk from country to country in Europe back then and still can, likewise you could move money and equipment and still can.
The limiting factor on deploying capital abroad was never the ability to move gold or even equipment, it was the ability to have faith that over many years the remote authorities would continue to enforce your remotely held claims on the operation.
But that's been true for your locally held claims as well, and even more so in modern times with tax rates hovering around 50% in many European countries. It's just that they take their cut every single month, instead of doing so at will.
(The cookie consent banners that you see everywhere were anticipated and forbidden in the laws themselves, companies just gambled that the EU wouldn't be able to enforce the law, and they were correct. I expect something similar to happen with for-profit AI steering.)
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