[pyrale]

> If "essential" means whatever bdauvergne on Hacker News decides humans deserve to have in their lives, and nothing else, then sure, GPUs are non-essential.

You sure have a weird definition of it.

To make a quantitative claim, I'm not sure anyone would die immediately if Nvidia disappeared overnight, except maybe for a few traders. The potential long term casualties would likely be related to it possibly triggering a stock market crash, rather than first-order consequences of the company no longer delivering products.

Obviously, the disappearance of a company intimately related to logistics would be harder to mitigate.

> You don't get to pick and choose what other humans deserve

The crux of your confusion seems to be that you don't make a distinction between "deserve" and "need". Food and entertainment are both things everyone deserves, but only food is required for everyone to make it to the end of the month.

[feoren]

The category of "food" in economics is vast and absolutely includes things that humans don't need to live. Nobody dies if they can't buy clothing, except in very extreme cases, yet clothing is generally considered "essential". Meanwhile, people do die because they can't get jobs and become homeless, and you need an internet connection to get a job, but internet access is very rarely considered "essential" (although I suspect this is changing).

Besides, the usual definition of "essential" in economics is more about price elasticity, how consistent demand is, how spending on the category changes as income changes, etc. But whatever your parameters for that definition are, if you actually measure these things you'll see things that surprise you, and most of your results are going to be artifacts of how you categorize things. Lots of entertainment shows low price elasticity. Should dried beans and rice be in the same "food" category as foie gras? Is a Disney+ subscription essential to a working single mother of young children? Is heroin essential to a heroin addict? Are opiates essential to someone in chronic pain? Is alcohol essential to an alcoholic? Some would literally die if it were suddenly unavailable!

The category is murky, nobody can agree on what is or is not essential, nor even what its definition is: low price elasticity? necessary for life? necessary for a fulfilling life? able to be temporarily deferred in a crisis? All of these result in different lists.

> You sure have a weird definition of it.

As I feel like I've made quite clear: I do not have any definition of it, and neither do any of you. So let's not make policy decisions and economic predictions based on what is or is not "essential", please. People want GPUs, and you'll find lots of people who are more willing to give up their clothing and restaurant food than their GPUs.

[pyrale]

> I do not have any definition of it

Fair enough.

> and neither do any of you

Is this a kind of linguistical scorched-earth policy? I would like to know, because if we're going to be dishonest, there's plenty of other words we could start claiming have no meaning, until no meaningful conversation can happen.

[feoren]

You're right that I have a general issue with how people use words versus how they think they use words. Yes, there are plenty of words that have this problem. People reach for definitions as some sort of argument-ender, without realizing how much those definitions rely on what are essentially arbitrary categorizations by an arbitrary authority. Those are two other peeves of mine: bad categorization and arbitrary authority.

There is actually a theory behind all this, based largely on the critically important fact that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. But yes, I recognize the futility of trying to fight this war in comment-sized battles in tangentially related Hacker News threads.

> until no meaningful conversation can happen

I believe accepting "all models are wrong, but some models are useful" is in fact a prerequisite for meaningful conversation, because otherwise people simply aren't even arguing about the same thing. What appears to you as a "linguistical scorched-earth policy" is something I can trace logically from that statement. Most arguments are actually arguments about definitions and categories, and therefore useless. I am trying to get people to abandon the category of "essential vs. non-essential" because it, like so many others, is arbitrary.

[ifyoubuildit]

> The category of "food" in economics is vast and absolutely includes things that humans don't need to live

Yeah, but if the whole category goes away, not many of us survive. Isn't that what makes it essential?

> Nobody dies if they can't buy clothing

Huh? How do you figure?

[username332211]

Imagine for a second that the year was 1880. You would say that telephones aren't essential, wouldn't you? In the previous 25 centuries of recorded history we have lived without them. Nobody's going to die if they were to stop working.

And thus that the valuation of the Bell System must be based on pure hype. Right?

[timeon]

If they have stopped working today it would be disaster. If it stopped at that time, life would go on. It is not about technology but how society adapted around it.

[username332211]

"Disaster" is a very subjective term. One man's disaster is another's normality.

How many people died between 1812 and 1815 because there were no Trans-Atlantic telephone lines? About 30 thousand soldiers, wasn't it? Probably quite a few civilians as well.

I'd call the preventable death of 30 thousand men a disaster, wouldn't you? But in 1812 it was business as usual.

Would you say penicillin isn't essential, just because it's 1928 and people are accustomed to deaths from bacterial infections?