[scroot]

As an elder millennial, I just don't know what to say. That a once in a generation allocation of capital should go towards...whatever this all will be, is certainly tragic given current state of the world and its problems. Can't help but see it as the latest in a lifelong series of baffling high stakes decisions of dubious social benefit that have necessarily global consequences.

[ayaros]

I'm a younger millennial. I'm always seeing homeless people in my city and it's an issue that I think about on a daily basis. Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things? So many people are in poverty, they can't afford basic necessities. The world is shitty.

Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.

Yeah, the world is shitty, and resources aren't allocated ideally. Must it be so?

[ericmcer]

The last 10 years has seen CA spend more on homelessness than ever before, and more than any other state by a huge margin. The result of that giant expenditure is the problem is worse than ever.

I don't want to get deep in the philosophical weeds around human behavior, techno-optimism, etc., but it is a bit reductive to say "why don't we just give homeless people money".

[estearum]

What else happened in the last 10 years in CA?

Hint: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CASTHPI

[trenbologna]

In CA this issue has to do with Gavin giving that money to his friends who produce very little. Textbook cronyism

[mike50]

Spending money is not the solution. Spending money in a way that doesn't go to subcontractors is part of the solution. Building shelters beyond cots in a stadium is part of the solution. Building housing is a large part of actually solving the problem. People have tried just giving the money but without a way to convert cash to housing the money doesn't help. Also studies by people smarter then me suggest that without sufficient supply the money ends up going to landlords and pushing up housing costs anyway.

[emodendroket]

Well I mean, they didn't "just give homeless people money" or just give them homes or any of those things though. I think the issue might be the method and not the very concept of devoting resources to the problem.

[Izikiel43]

WA, specially Seattle, has done the same as CA with the same results.

They shouldn't just enable them, as a lot of homeless are happy in their situation as long as they get food and drugs, they should force them to get clean and become a responsible adult if they want benefits.

[SequoiaHope]

The Sikhs in India run multiple facilities across the country that each can serve 50,000-100,000 free meals a day. It doesn’t even take much in the form of resources, and we could do this in every major city in the US yet we still don’t do it. It’s quite disheartening.

https://youtu.be/5FWWe2U41N8

[selimthegrim]

They didn’t invent it but yes, they have refined it to a high degree.

[amluto]

From what I’ve read, addressing homelessness effectively requires competence more than it requires vast sums of money. Here’s one article:

https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-t...

Note that Houston’s approach seems to be largely working. It’s not exactly cheap, but the costs are not even in the same ballpark as AI capital expenses. Also, upzoning doesn’t require public funding at all.

[mrguyorama]

Wasn't houston's "approach" to buy bus tickets to California from a company that just resold commodity bus tickets and was owned by the governors friend and charged 10x market price?

The governor of Texas bragged about sending 100k homeless people to california (spending about $150 million in the process).

>in the Golden State, 439 people are homeless for every 100,000 residents – compared to 81 in the Lone Star State.

If I'm doing my math right, 81 per 100k in a state of 30 million people means 24k homeless people. So the state brags about bussing 100k homeless people to California, and then brags about only having 24k homeless people, and you think it's because they build an extra 100k houses a year?

The same math for California means that their homeless population is 175k. In other words, Texas is claiming to have more than doubled California's homeless population.

Maybe the reason Texas can build twice as many homes a year is because it literally has half the population density?

[gowld]

Houston has less homelessness than California because people at the edge of homelessness prefer to live in California than Houston.

[amluto]

I’m not a person on the edge of homelessness, but I did an extremely quick comparison. California cities near the coast have dramatically better weather, but Houston has rents that are so much lower than big California cities that it’s kind of absurd.

If I had to live outdoors in one of these places, all other thing being equal, I would pick CA for the weather. But if I had trouble affording housing, I think Houston wins by a huge margin.

[IAmGraydon]

The older I get, the more I realize that our choices in life come down to two options: benefit me or benefit others. The first one leads to nearly every trouble we have in the world. The second nearly always leads to happiness, whether directly or indirectly. Our bias as humans has always been toward the first, but our evolution is and will continue to slowly bring us toward the second option. Beyond simple reproduction, this realization is our purpose, in my opinion.

[jodrellblank]

Curiously, that is what I heard moments ago on Tom Campbell's theory of everything:

https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=2629

https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=3000

He was a physics grad, did some experiments with out of body experiences, decided the Universe is a simulation for immortal consciousness to experience making choices and dealing with their consequences, and reasoned from there that the purpose of life is to get rid of ego and fear and learn to benefit others instead of ourselves.

Quite how he got from one to the other isn't clear to me, or why it's physics related; the message seems to be a familiar religious one, deal with whatever struggles happen to you and try to be egoless and kind.

[GaryBluto]

> Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.

It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned.

So many great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way.

[pnut]

Is that true, that it's money that belongs to people?

OpenAI isn't spending $1 trillion in hard earned cash on data centres, that is funny money from the ocean of financial liquid slushing around, seeing alpha.

It also certainly is not a cohort of accredited investors putting their grandchildren's inheritance on the line.

Misaligned incentives (regulations) both create and perpetuate that situation.

[saulpw]

> It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned.

"earned", that may be the case with millionaires, but it is not the case with billionaires. A person can't "earn" a billion dollars. They steal and cheat and destroy competition illegally.

I also take issue with the idea that someone can do whatever they want with their money. That is not true. They are not allowed to corner the market on silver, they aren't allowed to bribe politicians, and they aren't allowed to buy sex from underage girls. These are established laws that are obviously for the unalloyed benefit of society as a whole, but the extremely wealthy have been guilty of all of these things, and statements like yours promote the sentiment that allows them to get away with it.

Finally, "great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way". No. You might be able to argue that today's advanced computing technology wouldn't have happened without private capital allocation (and that is debatable), but the breakthroughs that saved millions of lives--vaccines, antibiotics, insulin, for example--were not the result of directed private investment.

[UtopiaPunk]

"It's capital that belongs to people and those people..."

That's not a fundamental law of physics. It's how we've decided to arrange our current society, more or less, but it's always up for negotiation. Land used to be understood as a publicly shared resource, but then kings and the nobles decided it belong to them, and they fenced in the commons. The landed gentry became a ruling class because the land "belonged" to them. Then society renegotiated that, and decided that things primarily belonged to the "capitalist" class instead of noblemen.

Even under capitalism, we understand that that ownership is a little squishy. We have taxes. The rich understandably do not like taxes because it reduces their wealth (and Ayn Rand-styled libertarians also do not like taxes of any kind, but they are beyond understanding except to their own kind).

As a counterpoint, I and many others believe that one person or one corporation cannot generate massive amounts of wealth all by themselves. What does it mean to "earn" 10 billion dollars? Does such a person work thousdands of time harder or smarter than, say, a plumber or a school teacher? Of course not. They make money because they have money: they hire workers to make things for them that lead to profit, and they pay the workers less than the profit that is earned. Or they rent something that they own. Or they invest that money in something that is expected to earn them a higher return. In any scenario, how is it possible to earn that profit? They do so because they participate in a larger society. Workers are educated in schools, which the employer probably does not pay for in full. Customers and employees travel on infrastructure, maintained by towns and state governments. People live in houses which are built and managed by other parties. The rich are only able to grow wealth because they exist in a larger society. I would argue that it is not only fair, but crucial, that they pay back into the community.

[klaff]

Well said. I would add that corporations exist because we choose to let them, to let investors pool capital and limit risk, and in exchange society should benefit, and if it doesn't we should rearrange that deal.

[paddleon]

You know, we created the US government as an expression of the fundamental rights of man, with the idea that the government would provide for the common welfare and preserve these rights.

In rebellion against a king who seemed to want to exploit us and felt that his being king made him the source of the rights we had.

Maybe we need to re-think the relationship with corporations the same way? Re-structure so that they serve the common good?

[UtopiaPunk]

Maybe!! :D

[mrguyorama]

Please tell me which of Penicillin, insulin, the transistor, the discovery and analysis of the electric field, discovery of DNA, invention of mRNA vaccines, discovery of pottery, basket weaving, discovery of radiation, the recognition that citrus fruit or vitamin C prevents and cures scurvy (which we discovered like ten times), the process for creating artificial fertilizers, the creation of steel, domestication of beasts of burden, etc were done through Wealthy Barons or other capital holders funding them.

Many of the above were discovered by people explicitly rejecting profit as an outcome. Most of the above predate modern capitalism. Several were explicitly government funded.

Do you have a single example of a scientific breakthrough that saved tens of millions of lives that was done by capital owners?

[mike50]

The transistor was funded by Bell Labs.

[AstroBen]

> Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things

I suspect this is a much more complicated issue than just giving them food and shelter. Can money even solve it?

How would you allocate money to end obesity, for instance? It's primarily a behavioral issue, a cultural issue

[brokenmachine]

I guess it's food and exercise.

Healthy food is expensive, do things to make that relatively cheaper and thus more appealing.

Exercise is expensive, do things to make that relatively cheaper and thus more appealing.

Walkable cities are another issue. People shouldn't have to get in their car to go anywhere.

[dkural]

[ This comment I'm making is USA centric. ]. I agree with the idea of making our society better and more equitable - reducing homelessness, hunger, poverty, especially for our children. However, I think redirecting this to AI datacenter spending is a red-herring, here's why I think this: As a society we give a significant portion of our surplus to government. We then vote on what the government should spend this on. AI datacenter spending is massive, but if you add it all up, it doesn't cover half of a years worth of government spending. We need to change our politics to redirect taxation and spending to achieve a better society. Having a private healthcare system that spends twice the amount for the poorest results in the developed world is a policy choice. Spending more than the rest of the world combined on the military is a policy choice. Not increasing minimum wage so at least everyone with a full time job can afford a home is a policy job (google "working homelessness). VC is a teeny tiny part of the economy. All of tech is only about 6% of the global economy.

[limagnolia]

You can increase min wage all you want, if there aren't enough homes in an area for everyone who works full time in that area to have one, you will still have folks who work full time who don't have one. In fact, increasing min wage too much will exacerbate the problem by making it more expensive to build more (and maintain those that exist). Though at some point, it will fix the problem too, because everyone will move and then there will be plenty of homes for anyone who wants one.

[dkural]

I agree with you 100%! Any additional surplus will be extracted as rents, when housing is restricted. I am for passing laws that make it much easier for people to obtain permits to build housing where there is demand. Too much of residential zoning is single-family housing. Texas does a better job at not restricting housing than California, for example. Many towns vote blue, talk to talk, but do not walk the walk.

[jkubicek]

> AI datacenter spending is massive, but if you add it all up, it doesn't cover half of a years worth of government spending.

I didn't check your math here, but if that's true, AI datacenter spending is a few orders of magnitude larger than I assumed. "massive" doesn't even begin to describe it

[atmavatar]

The US federal budget in 2024 had outlays of 6.8 trillion dollars [1].

nVidia's current market cap (nearly all AI investment) is currently 4.4 trillion dollars [2][3].

While that's hardly an exact or exhaustive accounting of AI spending, I believe it does demonstrate that AI investment is clearly in the same order of magnitude as government spending, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually surpassed government spending for a full year, let alone half of one.

1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181

2. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ

3. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/nvidias-market-cap-tops-4poi...

[diziet]

> NVIDIA's total annual revenue for its fiscal year 2025 (ended January 26, 2025) was $130.5 billion

It is clearly not in the same order of magnitude

[randomNumber7]

You need to look at turnover also.

[dkural]

Global datacenter spending across all categories (ML + everything else) is roughly 0.9 - 1.2 trillion dollars for the last three years combined, I was initially going to go for "quarter of the federal budget", but picked something I thought was more conservative to account for announced spending and 2025 etc. I pick 2022 onward for the LLM wave. In reality, solely ML driven, actual realized-to-date spending is probably about 5% of the federal budget. The big announcements will spread out over the next several years in build-out. Nonetheless, it's large enough to drive GDP growth a meaningful amount. Not large enough that redirecting it elsewhere will solve our societal problems.

[kipchak]

>We need to change our politics to redirect taxation and spending to achieve a better society.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much on the pie chart to redirect percentage wise. About 60% goes to non-discretionary programs like Social Security and Medicaid, and 13% is interest expense. While "non-discretionary" programs can potentially be cut, doing so is politically toxic and arguably counter to the goal of a better society.

Of the remaining discretionary portion half is programs like veterans benefits, transportation, education, income security and health (in order of size), and half military.

FY2025 spending in total was 3% over FY2024, with interest expense, social security and medicare having made up most of the increase ($249 billion)[1], and likely will for the foreseeable future[2] in part due to how many baby boomers are entering retirement years.

Assuming you cut military spending in half you'd free up only about 6% of federal spending. Moving the needle more than this requires either cutting programs and benefits, improving efficiency of existing spend (like for healthcare) or raising more revenue via taxes or inflation. All of this is potentially possible, but the path of least resistance is probably inflation.

[1] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/deficit-tracker/

[2] https://www.crfb.org/blogs/interest-social-security-and-heal...

[dkural]

I agree with all of what you're saying.

I think the biggest lever is completely overhauling healthcare. The USA is very inefficient, and for subpar outcomes. In practice, the federal government already pays for the neediest of patients - the elderly, the at-risk children, the poor, and veterans. Whereas insurance rakes in profits from the healthiest working age people. Given aging, and the impossibility of growing faster than the GDP forever, we'll have to deal with this sooner or later. Drug spending, often the boogeyman, is less than 7% of the overall healthcare budget.

There is massive waste in our military spending due to the pork-barrel nature of many contracts. That'd be second big bucket I'd reform.

I think you're also right that inflation will ultimately take care of the budget deficit. The trick is to avoid hyperinflation and punitive interest rates that usually come along for the ride.

I would also encourage migration of highly skilled workers to help pay for an aging population of boomers. Let's increase our taxpayer base!

I am for higher rates of taxation on capital gains over $1.5M or so, that'll also help avoid a stock market bubble to some extent. One can close various loopholes while at it.

I am mostly arguing for policy changes to redistribute more equitably. I would make the "charity" status of college commensurate with the amount of financial aid given to students and the absolute cost of tuition for example., for example. I am against student loan forgiveness for various reasons - it's out of topic for this thread but happy to expand if interested.

[GolfPopper]

The current pattern of resource allocation is a necessary requirement for the existence of the billionaire-class, who put significant effort into making sure it continues.

[nine_zeros]

> but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.

What you have just described is people wanting investment in common society - you see the return on this investment but ultra-capitalistic individuals don't see any returns on this investment because it doesn't benefit them.

In other words, you just asked for higher taxes on the rich that your elected officials could use for your desired investment. And the rich don't want that which is why they spend on lobbying.

[UtopiaPunk]

I don't think it is a coincidence that the areas with the wealhiest people/corporations are the same areas with the most extreme poverty. The details are, of course, complicated, but zooming way way out, the rich literally drain wealth from those around them.

[venturecruelty]

Thanks for pointing this out. Sorry you're getting downvoted. I visited San Francisco about ten years ago, and seeing a homeless person sheltering themselves under a flag or some sort of merch from a tech company really drove home just how bereft of humanity corporate power centers really are.

[newfriend]

Technological advancement is what has pulled billions of people out of poverty.

Giving handouts to layabouts isn't an ideal allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization.

[QuercusMax]

Lots of people lose their housing when they lose employment, and then they're stuck and can't get back into housing. A very large percentage of unhoused people are working jobs; they're not all "layabouts".

We know that just straight up giving money to the poorest of the poor results in positive outcomes.

[limagnolia]

"A very large percentage"

Exactly how large are we talking here?

I have known quite a few 'unhoused' folk, and not many that had jobs. Those that do tend to find housing pretty quickly (Granted, my part of the country is probably different from your part, but I am interested in stats from any region).

[nativeit]

The proportion of people you write off as “layabouts” is always conveniently ambiguous…of the number of unemployed/underemployed, how many are you suggesting are simply too lazy to work for a living?

[estearum]

Technological advancements and cultural advancements that spread the benefits more broadly than naturally occurs in an industrialized economy. That is what pulled people out of poverty.

If you want to see what unfettered technological advancement does, you can read stories from the Gilded Age.

The cotton gin dramatically increased human enslavement.

The sewing machine decreased quality of life for seamstresses.

> During the shirtmakers' strike, one of the shirtmakers testified that she worked eleven hours in the shop and four at home, and had never in the best of times made over six dollars a week. Another stated that she worked from 4 o’clock in the morning to 11 at night. These girls had to find their own thread and pay for their own machines out of their wages.

These were children, by the way. Living perpetually at the brink of starvation from the day they were born until the day they died, but working like dogs all the while.

[LightBug1]

It's not unthinkable that one of those "layabouts" could have been the next Steve Jobs under different circumstances ...

People are our first, best resource. Closely followed by technology. You've lost sight of that.

[johnrob]

Invest in making food/shelter cheaper?

[dotancohen]

Food and shelter are cheaper than at almost any time in human history. Additionally, people have more variety of healthy foods all year long.

No matter how cheap food and shelter are, there will always be people who can not acquire them. Halting all human progress until the last human is fed and sheltered is a recipe for stagnation. Other cultures handle this with strong family bonds - those few who can not acquire food or shelter for whatever reason are generally provided for by their families.

[estearum]

The US has built its physical infrastructure to make familial interdependence extremely difficult and often impossible.

Too monotonous housing mixes over too large of areas.

[dotancohen]

Large houses make familial interdependence extremely difficult? That doesn't make sense. Or did I misunderstood? I don't live in the US.

[johnrob]

Cheap depends on how we define the cost. In relative terms, food is more expensive than ever:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

[bryanlarsen]

Food is not Baumol, productivity increases is how we went from 80% of the population working in primary food production to 1%. These increases have not stopped.

[droopyEyelids]

What if some of the homeless people are children or people who could lead normal lives but found themselves in dire circumstances?

Some of us believe that keeping children out of poverty may be an investment in the human capital of a country.

[dkural]

Anthropologists measure how civilized a tribe or society was by looking if they took care of the elderly, and what the child survival rates were. USA leads to developed world in child poverty, child homelessness, and highest rate of child death due to violence. Conservatives often bring up the statistic by race. It turns out bringing people over as slaves, and after freedom, refusing to provide land, education, fair access to voting rights, or to housing (by redlining etc.) - all policies advocated by conservatives of time past, was not the smartest thing to do. Our failure as a civilized society began and is in large part a consequence of the original sin of the USA.

[estearum]

Yep

> purposely create underclass

> wait

> act surprised that underclass exists

[newfriend]

The US already provides significant aid to those in poverty, especially children. We don't need to stifle innovation to reach some level of aid that bleeding hearts deem sufficient.

[QuercusMax]

Do you really think that building giant datacenters full of accelerators that will never be used is "innovation"?

[_DeadFred_]

We need excess capacity for when the next 'rip off anime artist XYZ' fad hits. If we didn't do that, we would be failing capitalism and all the people of history who contributed to our technological progress.

[sfink]

> Technological advancement is what has pulled billions of people out of poverty.

I agree with this. Perhaps that's what is driving the current billionaire class to say "never again!" and making sure that they capture all the value instead of letting any of it slip away and make it into the unwashed undeserving hands of lesser beings.

Chatbots actually can bring a lot of benefit to society at large. As in, they have the raw capability to. (I can't speak to whether it's worth the cost.) But that's not going to improve poverty this time around, because it's magnifying the disparities in wealth distribution and the haves aren't showing any brand new willingness to give anything up in order to even things out.

> Giving handouts to layabouts isn't an ideal allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization.

I agree with this too. Neither is giving handouts to billionaires (or the not quite as eye-wateringly wealthy class). However, giving handouts to struggling people who will improve their circumstances is a very good allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization. We haven't figured out any foolproof way of ensuring such money doesn't fall into the hands of layabouts or billionaires, but that's not an adequate reason to not do it at all. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

Some of those "layabouts" physically cannot do anything with it other than spending it on drugs, and that's an example of a set of people who we should endeavor to not give handouts to. (At least, not ones that can be easily exchanged for drugs.) Some of those billionaires similarly have no mental ability of ever using that money in a way that benefits anyone. (Including themselves; they're past the point that the numbers in their bank accounts have any effect on their lives.) That hasn't seemed to stop us from allowing things to continue in a way that funnels massive quantities of money to them.

It is a choice. If people en masse were really and truly bothered by this, we have more than enough mechanisms to change things. Those mechanisms are being rapidly dismantled, but we are nowhere near the point where figurative pitchforks and torches are ineffective.

[_DeadFred_]

In the USA cowboys were homeless guys. You know that right? Like they had no home, slept outside. Many were pretty big layabouts. Yet they are pretty big part of our foundation myth and we don't say 'man they just should have died'.

Can I go be a cowboy? Can I just go sleep outside? maybe work a few minimal paying cattle run jobs a year? No? If society won't allow me to just exist outside, then society has an obligation to make sure I have a place to lay my head.

[randomNumber7]

If you are not willing to fight for your rights you will lose them.

[reactordev]

I threw in the towel in April.

It's clear we are Wile E. Coyote running in the air already past the cliff and we haven't fallen yet.

[saulpw]

What does it mean to throw in the towel, in your case? Divesting from the stock market? Moving to a hobby farm? Giving up on humanity?

[reactordev]

Any dream of owning a home, having retirement, even a career after a couple years when it’s clear I’m over the hump. I’m trying to squeeze as much as I can before that happens and squirrel it away so at least I can have a van down by a river.

[ohhnoodont]

What does squirreling it away mean though? A pile of cash instead of investments? The reality is that you don’t get to throw in the towel.

[reactordev]

SPY/VOO/land with a river for the van. Probably working at the local Shell or 7-11

[jstummbillig]

I don't know what to do with this take.

We need an order of magnitude more clean productivity in the world so that everyone can live a life that is at least as good as what fairly normal people in the west currently enjoy.

Anyone who think this can be fixed with current Musk money is simply not getting it: If we liquidated all of that, that would buy a dinner for everyone in the world (and then, of course, that would be it, because the companies that he owns would stop functioning).

We are simply, obviously, not good enough at producing stuff in a sustainable way (or: at all) and we owe it to every human being alive to take every chance to make this happen QUICKLY, because we are paying with extremely shitty humans years, and they are not ours.

Bring on the AI, and let's make it work for everyone – and, believe me, if this is not to be to the benefit of roughly everyone, I am ready to fuck shit up. But if the past is any indication, we are okay at improving the lives of everyone when productivity increases. I don't know why this time would be any different.

If the way to make good lives for all 8 billions of us must lead to more Musks because, apparently, we are too dumb to do collectivization in any sensible way, I really don't care.

[randomNumber7]

> I don't know why this time would be any different.

This time there is the potential to replace human workers. In the past it only made them more productive.

[AlexandrB]

I think that's a distinction without difference. If one person can do the job of 10 thanks to automation, what happens to the other 9 who were doing that job before?

[randomNumber7]

You can also produce 10x the goods with the same amount of workers or let the other 9 work in other jobs.

The difference is that previously there still had been plenty of (low skill) jobs where automation didn't work. Pizza delivery, taxi driver, lots of office jobs with repetitive tasks etc.

Soon there will be nothing for the average joe as the machine will be better in all tasks he could perform.

[PrairieFire]

agree the capital could be put to better use, however I believe the alternative is this capital wouldn't have otherwise been put to work in ways that allow it to leak to the populace at large. for some of the big investors in AI infrastructure, this is cash that was previously and likely would have otherwise been put toward stock buybacks. for many of the big investors pumping cash in, these are funds deploying the wealth of the mega rich, that again, otherwise would have been deployed in other ways that wouldn't leach down to the many that are yielding it via this AI infrastructure boom (datacenter materials, land acquisition, energy infrastructure, building trades, etc, etc)

[amanaplanacanal]

It could have, though. Higher taxes on the rich, spend it on social programs.

[ayaros]

Why is this so horrible. Put more resources in the hands of the average person. They will get pumped right back into the economy. If people have money to spend, they can buy more things, including goods and services from gigantic tax-dodging mega-corporations.

Gigantic mega-corporations do enjoy increased growth and higher sales, don't they? Or am I mistaken?

[542354234235]

The shift in the US to the idea of “job creators” being business owners is part of it. It was just a way to direct money to the already rich, as if they would hire more people with that money. When it is plainly obvious that consumers are job creators, in that if they buy more goods and services, businesses will hire more people to make or provide more of those things.

Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.

[panick21_]

The framing of X or Y are job creators is idiotic. Its literally the most basic fact of economics that you need producers and consumers, otherwise you don't have an economy.

The more economically correct way to express this would be that entrepreneurs and companies who innovated increase productivity and that makes the overall economy more efficient allowing your country to grow.

> Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.

This just sounds like quarter baked economics ideas you have made up yourself. Neither 'trickle down' nor 'trickle up' are concepts economist use. And that you confidently assert anything about the social outcomes of these 'concepts' is ridiculous.

[thmsths]

Because the entire western culture has shifted to instant gratification. Yes, what you suggest would most likely lead to increased business eventually. But they want better number this quarter, so they resort to the cheap tricks like financial engineering/layoffs to get an immediate boost.

[panick21_]

I'm not saying you are wrong that some redistribution can be good, but your analysis is simplistic and ignores many factors. You can just redistribute and then say 'well people will spend the money'. That's literally the 'Broken Window' fallacy from economics. You are ignoring that if you don't redistribute it, money also gets spend, just differently. Also, the central bank is targeting AD, so you're not actually increasing nominal income by redistributing.

[542354234235]

Take a million dollars, give 1,000 poor people $1,000 and every dollar will be spent on goods and services. The companies running those services and making those goods will need to have their employees work more hours, putting more money back in poor people’s pockets in addition to the money the companies make. Those employees have a few extra dollars to spend on goods and services, etc.

Give a rich person a million dollars, and they will put it in an offshore tax shelter. That’s not exactly driving economic activity.

[panick21_]

You are simply disagreeing with 99% of economists.

Money in tax shelter doesn't go threw a portal in another universe. Its either invested or saved as some kind of asset and in that form is in circulation. And again, even if you assume it increases monetary demand (decreases velocity) the central bank targets AD and balances that out.

Based on your logic, a country that taxes 100% of all income and redistrubtes it would become infinity rich. Your logic is basically 'if nobody saves and everybody spends all income' everybody will be better off.

This is not how the economy works even if it feels good to think that. Its a fallacy.

Where you could have a point is that potentially the tax impact is slightly different, but that's hard to prove.

[AlexandrB]

> Take a million dollars, give 1,000 poor people $1,000 and every dollar will be spent on goods and services.

If we're being realistic a bunch of this will go to paying off existing debt. Still good, but not the economic stimulus you're imagining. There are also "services" like gambling apps that act as a sponge to soak up money from those foolish enough to use them and transfer that money back to the wealthy shareholders. I'm sure there is research on what percentage of that $1000 can be expected to stimulate the economy, but it's not 100%.

[coliveira]

There are many ways of spending money in the population that don't include just "distribution of money", as it's portrayed nowadays. Child care, free and high quality schools, free transportation, free or subsidized healthcare, investment is labor-intensive industries, these are all examples of expenditures that translate in better quality of life and also improve competitiveness for the country.

[panick21_]

That has literally nothing to do with the point I have argued.

[QuercusMax]

Stock buybacks don't build anything. They're just a way to take money from inside a company and give it to the shareholders.

[panick21_]

I don't know what that has to do with the point discussed.

Do you think shareholder don't spend money, but employees do or something?

[coliveira]

Because government is always a fight about resources. More resources in the hands of common people and to make their lives better is less money in the hands of powerful corporations and individuals, be it in the form of higher taxes for the rich or less direct money going to their enterprises.

[QuercusMax]

One of the big issues is money in politics. Our congresspeople make a killing off of legal insider trading, they take huge donations from companies, and the supreme court has even said that it's cool to give "gratuities" in exchange for legislation or court rulings you like.

Corruption is killing this country.

[phkahler]

Let's pay down the debt before increasing social programs. You know, save the country first. If a penny saved is a penny earned then everyone -rich or poor- is looking for a handout.

[amanaplanacanal]

The only person who has come close to balancing the federal budget was Clinton. But Republicans still try to position themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility.

If the voters can't even figure out why the debt keeps going up, I think you are fighting a losing battle.

[Atheros]

> likely would have otherwise been put toward stock buybacks

Stock buybacks from who? When stock gets bought the money doesn't disappear into thin air; the same cash is now in someone else's hands. Those people would then want to invest it in something and then we're back to square one.

You assert that if not for AI, wealth wouldn't have been spent on materials, land, trades, ect. But I don't think you have any reason to think this. Money is just an abstraction. People would have necessarily done something with their land, labor, and skills. It isn't like there isn't unmet demand for things like houses or train tunnels or new-fangled types of aircraft or countless other things. Instead it's being spent on GPUs.

[PrairieFire]

Totally agree that the money doesn’t vanish. My point isn’t “buybacks literally destroy capital,” it’s about how that capital tends to get redeployed and by whom.

Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders, which are already disproportionately wealthy and already heavily allocated to financial assets. A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled into more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc), not into large, lumpy, real world capex that employs a bunch of electricians, heavy equipment operators, lineworkers, land surveyors, etc. AI infra does that. Even if the ultimate economic owner is the same class of people, the path the money takes is different: it has to go through chip fabs, power projects, network buildouts, construction crews, land acquisition, permitting, and so on. That’s the “leakage” I was pointing at.

To be more precise: I’m not claiming “no one would ever build anything else”, I’m saying given the current incentive structure, the realistic counterfactual for a lot of this megacap tech cash is more financialization (buybacks, M&A, sitting on balance sheets) rather than “let’s go fund housing, transit tunnels, or new aircraft.”

[Atheros]

I really don't think any of that is true; it's just popular rhetoric.

For example: "Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders" is obviously false: the shareholders (via the company) did have cash and now they don't. The cash is distributed to the market. The quoted statement is precisely backwards.

> A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled

That doesn't mean anything.

> more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc)

And do they sit on it? No, of course not. They invest it in things. Real actual things.

> buybacks

Already discussed

> M&A

If they use cash to pay for a merger, then the former owners now have cash that they will reinvest.

> balance sheets

Money on a balance sheet is actually money sitting in J.P. Morgan or whoever. Via fractional reserve lending, J.P. Morgan lends that money to businesses and home owners and real actual houses (or whatever) get built with it.

The counterfactual for AI spending really is other real actual hard spending.

[slashdave]

Well, at least this doesn't involve death and suffering, like the old-fashioned way to jump-start an economy by starting a global war.

[7222aafdcf68cfe]

when the US sells out Europe to Russia, do you think the Russians will stop? That global war might be with us within a decade.

[brokenmachine]

...yet

[skippyboxedhero]

Can you imagine if the US wasn't so unbelievably far ahead of everyone else?

I am sure the goat herders in rural regions of Pakistan will think themselves lucky when they see the terrible sight of shareholder value being wantonly destroyed by speculative investments that enhance the long-term capital base of the US economy. What an uncivilized society.

[anthomtb]

As a fellow elder millennial I agree with your sentiment.

But I don't see the mechanics of how it would work. Rewind to October 2022. How, exactly, does the money* invested in AI since that time get redirected towards whatever issues you find more pressing?

*I have some doubts about the headline numbers

[arisAlexis]

Yes this capital allocation is a once in a lifetime opportunity to crate AGI that will solve diseases and poverty.

[edhelas]

</sarcasm>

[arisAlexis]

This is literally the view of demis hassabis, Sergey brin, Mario amodei and others. Are you seriously implying they are trolling us?

[pezezin]

Poverty is a social and political issue, not technological. We have more than enough resources on this planet to fix it, but we don't.

[arisAlexis]

This is a actually the fallacy of communism. It can never and will never be "fixed" like that.

[pezezin]

I won't be fixed by magical AI either.

[aeve890]

/s

[brokenmachine]

We have 8.3 billion examples of general intelligence alive on the planet right now.

Surely an artificial one in a data center, costing trillions and beholden to shareholders, will solve all society's issues!

[arisAlexis]

I suggest you read Amodei post called "machines of loving grace". It will change your worldview (probably).

[greenie_beans]

as a counterpoint, you should read this essay with the same title: https://www.clunyjournal.com/p/machines-of-loving-grace

[AlexandrB]

A lot of this stuff is in the realm of "lol" or even "lmao". There's a consistent failure to consider human nature and economic incentives woven through this essay. Probably the most objectionable stuff is in section 2 "Neuroscience and Mind" because the definition of "mental illness" itself is prone to all kind of historical and societal biases. Who gets to decide what a "normal" brain is? Is it the AI? Does the owner of the brain have any say here? Would a psychopath actually volunteer to be "treated"? Ultimately the danger is that "normal" will just mean "what's best for economic productivity". This is not a good or moral definition and is not founded in any kind of ethical reasoning.

[arisAlexis]

Just remember you "lol" at Nobel laureates and Turing award winners that all agree unanimously that we are going there. You just lol. Not much to say to convince you.

[pezezin]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority