[ButyTh0]

Because they own nothing but make believe stocks and life works great for them.

The mega-rich are 100% decoupled from physical reality. May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis.

Just parroting memes the likewise idiot politicians believe are the magic chants that keep gravity itself pulling together the Earth.

"Omg he said the thing! Cut his taxes! Give him welfare!"

Our generation of leaders were raised in a pre-science and information as world. They rely entirely in cult of personality as their meat suit never sees itself engage in the labor it relies on to live. It's well aware intuitively how fucked it is. Must continue to stand in the pulpit!

[vkou]

Nah. The first two thirds of the 20th century was the science and information world. Man gained mastery of the skies, the depths of the sea, the void of space, the atom. We were taming diseases and found a way to end hunger. We started building thinking machines. We were playing with the fire of the gods. Science was working miracles on the daily.

It still is, but nobody gives a shit anymore, we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now.

Now we are just playing with fire.

[andrekandre]

  > we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now

sometimes i wonder if this is what happens when organic growth stops/slows; when (for lack of a better word) desperate people just start looking for any alternative to keep the growth train running...

[vkou]

It's just what happens when you give the rich all the political power in your society.

All of them come from the 'make money from other people's labour' background, and they will, of course, use that political power to optimize that wealth extraction.

[ericd]

Why is it that new accounts these days always seem to come out swinging about politics, class warfare, etc?

[donmcronald]

It might just be frustrated young people. They're getting squeezed real hard by a system that was set up to put them on an impossible trajectory before they were even born.

You can see the divide everywhere. People with lots of money think supply and demand, congestion pricing, etc. are great tools because it doesn't impact them at all compared to people on the bottom. Those are only good solutions if you're not the one falling off the bottom rung of the ladder.

Is it really shocking that people are upset to see the supply of resources being cornered and hoarded by the ultra rich with the most likely outcome being the only way to get access to those goods will be to pay forever?

The possibility of AI becoming a must-have knowledge repository or memory assistant is scary if you couple it with the idea of never being able to own it. How much is your memory worth? What if you can't compete in terms of productivity without having access to AI? What about the people that can't afford the "first month of rent"?

People come in and make angry posts like the GP because they know they're getting disenfranchised and don't have the power to do anything to change it.

[ericd]

I think it’s probably mostly what your sibling comment said, it’s very cheap to sow division and discord now.

I get what you’re saying, and there definitely are people who are angry about the US slipping, and standards of living reverting to the mean a bit, and looking to blame someone. The True Believer came out in the aftermath of WW2 and tried to analyze why it happened, and laid out that the most dangerous group of people aren’t the ones who’ve been poor for a long time, but those who were recently poor, who remembered a more prosperous time. Those people get tremendously angry about it, and represent fertile ground for politicians and motivated groups to plant the seeds of hate.

People need to have some perspective. You’re not permanently locked out of useful AI models, it’s within reach of most who can save a bit to go get a pair of used 3090s on eBay and run some pretty useful models.

[donmcronald]

> The True Believer came out in the aftermath of WW2 and tried to analyze why it happened, and laid out that the most dangerous group of people aren’t the ones who’ve been poor for a long time, but those who were recently poor, who remembered a more prosperous time.

Is it just people trying to sow division when you're potentially describing an entire upcoming generation?

> People need to have some perspective. You’re not permanently locked out of useful AI models, it’s within reach of most who can save a bit to go get a pair of used 3090s on eBay and run some pretty useful models.

I don’t agree. The current generation of young people can’t afford housing and education without taking on decades of debt. Buying a pair of 3090s for local AI isn’t even on the radar. Even if they could, it’s unlikely they’d be able to make productive use of them. The big AI companies haven’t even scraped the surface when it comes to memory, specialized knowledge, etc..

I see people downvoted my comment and I’m not sure why. I’m not trying to pile on to create drama. I’m trying to explain there’s a growing cohort of people that have a right to be angry because they’re watching global productivity increase as their standard of living is decreasing. Who wouldn’t be upset?

The dangerous part is that people angry about it are easy to sway with propaganda. It’s not the billionaire families colluding to fix food prices, which happened with bread in Canada, it’s the “insert another marginalized group here” that’s causing the problem.

[ericd]

I think the commenters with new accounts and comment on only political topics and not technical ones on Hacker News are a bit suspect. Not saying that there aren't a lot of disaffected youths out there, there totally are, and I'm agreeing with you with that bit about The True Believer, I just have a suspicion that a lot of these new politics-focused accounts aren't real. But maybe there are real young people who come to HN just to discuss politics, I guess tech has become more political over the last few decades.

I didn't mean that most people are going to go out and drop $1,000 and run their own models locally, I meant that it's pretty good evidence that they're not permanently locked out of owning access to AI, if that's a priority to them.

I agree with most of the rest, I'm a strong proponent of all sorts of safety nets, and higher top tax rates/cap gains tax rates. But it's also important to maintain perspective. A lot of what's happened is that citizens of very rich countries are maybe seeing their standards of living decrease somewhat while many more people globally are seeing their standards of living skyrocket. Visiting family in China every 5 years, the difference is astounding every time.

Upvoted that comment, fwiw, you answered in good faith, not sure why it's downvoted.

[t-3]

AI-fueled agitprop campaigns.

[GolfPopper]

>May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis.

Why associate them with roles that have a degree of positive association and human connection?

Treating them as faeries, vampires, or demons seems more accurate.

[fzeroracer]

I think treating them as the fae, vampire or demons is sort of insulting. Those creatures are at least bound by supernatural laws and can be negotiated with in some way.