For less than this same price tag, we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home and/or feeling more comfortable starting a family. It would stimulate the economy in predictable ways.
Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
> we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home
I'd give the money to folks starting in the trades before bailling out the college-educated class.
Also, wiping out numbers on a spreadsheet doesn't erect new homes. If we wiped out student debt, the portion of that value that went into new homeownership would principally flow to existing homeowners.
Finally, you're comparing a government hand-out to private investment into a capital asset. That's like comparing eating out at a nice restaurant to buying a bond. Different prerogatives.
A) this is a pledge by companies they may or may not even have the cash required to back it up. Certainly they aren’t spending it all at once, but to be completely honest it’s nothing more than a PR stunt right now that seems to be an exercise in courting favor
B) that so called private capital is going to get incentives from subsidies, like tax breaks, grants etc. It’s inevitable if this proceeds to an actual investment stage. What’s that about it being pure private capital again?
C) do to the aforementioned circumstances in A it seems whatever government support systems are stood up to support this - and if this isn’t ending in hot air, there will be - it still means it’s not pure private capital and worse yet, they’ll likely end up bilking tax payers and the initiative falls apart with companies spending far less then the pledge but keeping all the upside.
I’ll bet a years salary it plays out like this.
If this ends up being 100% private capital with no government subsidies of any kind, I’ll be shocked and elated. Look at anything like this in the last 40 years and you’ll find scant few examples that actually hold up under scrutiny that they didn’t play out this way.
Which brings me to my second part. So we are going to - in some form - end up handing out subsidies to these companies, either at the local state or federal level, but by the logic of not paying off student debt, why are we going to do this? It’s only propping up an unhealthy economic policy no?
Why is it so bad for us to cancel student debt but it’s fine to have the same cost equivalent as subsidies for businesses? Is it under the “creates jobs” smoke screen? Despite the fact the overwhelming majority of money made will not go to the workers but back to the wealthy and ultra wealthy.
There's no sense of equity here. If the government is truly unequivocally hands off - no subsidies, no incentives etc - than fine, the profits go where they go, and thats the end of it.
However, it won't be, and that opens up a perfectly legitimate ask about how this money is going to get used and who it benefits
I really really don't get it. You (US) all saw it coming. Everybody knew voting for the dark side would funnel money away from poor and middle class towards the rich. Is it a dementia outbreak? Can someone shed a spark of light on the mechanics of all this crazyness?
Americans are fine voting against their interests as long as someone else is hurt worse by it. These policies will hurt most Americans, but as long as trans folks and racial minorities get hurt worse it's fine. Nothing new about the southern strategy.
We have a saying here. "It's the economy, stupid." The orange one appealed straight to the people's economic situation. Our elections hinge on who turns out to vote. Anyone of modest means saw their cash bleed away and their life gets harder. The sitting president always gets punished for this. It's not complicated.
Also, there was lip service to relaxing regulations on building power plants (just for the data centers) and data centers, but it remains to be seen how much of this can be accomplished with just the federal government.
I think the idea of a "college-educated class" speaks to another fundamental problem with the American project - that a college education is now seen as some upper-class bauble. It is only seen as such a luxury because it is such a slog and expense. Y'all should fix that problem too!
Student loans are the only loan type which you cannot bankrupt out of. I'm sure that many students would accept bankruptcy rather than bailouts if that is preferable. It doesn't make sense to saddle 20 year olds with insurmountable debt.
That was a recent change in bankruptcy law. You could literally just revert it. It should reintroduce some caution into some of these institutions of "higher education."
I'd rather fix the law then try to decide who to hand out tax surpluses to.
This sort of folksy take always ignores that the same issue happens with the trades as does with the professional classes. No one class is immune to a crash due to unnatural promotion. You've let your moral view overcome that reality
It's a fair comparison. Stargate is fundamentally about two things - America's industry needs a cash injection, and we're choosing a completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into.
Problem is, the parent comment is right. Even if you think student loan mitigation has washy economics behind it, the outcome is predictable and even desirable if you're playing the long-game in politics. If not that, spend $500,000,000,000 towards onshoring Apple and Microsoft's manufacturing jobs. Spend it re-invigorating America's mothballed motor industry and let Elon spec it out like a kid in a candy shop. Relative to AI, even student loan forgiveness and dumping money into trades looks attractive (not that Trump would consider either).
Nobody on HN should be confused by this. We know Sam Altman is a scammer (Worldcoin, anyone?) and we know OpenAI is a terrible business. This money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on and preserve the Weekend At Bernie's-esque corpse that is America's "lead" in software technology. That's it. It's blatantly simple.
> completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into
One, you’re not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off student debt.
Two, if they do what they say they want to, they’ll be building new power generation, transmission infrastructures and data centres. Even if AI is a hype, that’s far from useless capital.
> money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on
>One, you’re not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off student debt.
I don't think that was the actual literal expectation, rather that the cost to the tax payer - and there will be a cost to the tax payer - should be best spent elsewhere.
>Two, if they do what they say they want to, they’ll be building new power generation, transmission infrastructures and data centres. Even if AI is a hype, that’s far from useless capital.
Nothing has proven this to be true yet
>OpenAI is spending their own money on this.
Not a single entity has spent any real money on this. So far, its a PR stunt. The general lack of roll out corresponding with the announcement is telling. When real money is spent than I'll believe they might go through with it all the way.
Whats more likely to happen is that these companies will spend at most a token amount of money, then lobby congress and the executive branch for subsidies in order to proceed more 'earnestly' and since this is a pledge, there's nothing in writing that binds a contractual commitment of these funds and their purpose, so they could just as well pocket what they can to offset the costs, use what infrastructure gets built as a result, but shut down the initiative. Bad press won't matter, if its reported on at all.
This has played out for decades like this. Big announcements, so called private money commitments, then come the asks from the government to offset the costs they supposedly pledged to pay anyway, and eventually if you're lucky 1 widget gets built in some economic development area and the companies pocket what they can manage to bilk before its all shut down.
> fun part is when OpenAI asks for more regulation on AI, congress will be receptive
OpenAI is the Jeb Bush of D.C. They’re spending a lot of money, but it ain’t going far. Last time Altman asked for regulation he had to “jk” backwards when Europe and California proposed actual rules.
The problem with allowing student debt to rack up to these levels and then cancelling it is that it would embolden universities to ask even higher tuition. A second problem is that not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it. It would be unfair to them.
> not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it.
I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of debt and probably don't need this assistance. However, this argument is so offensive. People were encouraged to take out debt for a number of reasons, and by a number of institutions, without first being educated about the implications of that. This argument states that we shouldn't help people because other people didn't have help. Following this logic, we shouldn't seek to help anyone ever, unless everyone else has also received the exact same help.
- slaves shouldn't be freed because other slaves weren't freed
- we shouldn't give food to the starving, because those not starving aren't getting free food
- we shouldn't care about others because they don't care about me
These arguments are all the greedy option in game theory, and all contribute to the worst outcomes across the board, except for those who can scam others in this system.
The right way to think about programs that help others is to consider cooperating - some people don't get the maximum possible, but they do get some! And when the game is played over and over, all parties get the maximum benefit possible.
In the case of student debt, paying it off and fixing the broken system, by allowing bankruptcy or some other fix, would benefit far more people than it would hurt; it would also benefit some people who paid their loans off completely: parents of children who can't pay off their loans now.
In the end the argument that some already paid off their debts is inherently a selfish argument in the style of "I don't want them to get help because I didn't get help." Society would be better if we didn't think in such greedy terms.
All that said - there are real concerns about debt repayment. The point about emboldening universities to ask for higher tuition highlights the underlying issue with the student loan system. Why bring up the most selfish possible argument when there are valid, useful arguments for your position?
> I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of debt and probably don't need this assistance. However, this argument is so offensive.
Please spend my tax dollars on curing disease, fixing homelessness, free addiction treatment, better mental health care, improving our justice system, or even cold fusion. All of these have better outcomes than does paying off student debt.
> These arguments are all the greedy option
You left out the best argument against: there are much better things to spend money on.
I could get behind fixing Bush's biggest mistake - his bankruptcy change that moved the pendulum to lifetime debt. I'd love to see people be able to discharge student loans that are impossible to pay off or where the debtor was put in debt by a fraudulent or failed education institution.
I don't like it, but how would you prevent everyone from getting expensive schooling and then immediately declaring bankruptcy?
Just better redistribution and georgism/UBI type stuff but also keeping the need based stuff (medicaid, social security disability etc.) I think would be more fair and not punish people who paid off their debt or worked a job during school. Expanding free public education to K-16 and maybe ?more heavily taxing elite universities that get most of their value from the prestige of their own high ranking students who then have to pay more for it and other things like prestigious journals and even startup funds like YC, top law firms, etc. that work largely as prestige money redirectors where the value comes from those capturing the prestige but is redirected almost entireoy to just whoever kicked off the prestige flywheel early..
> I don't like it, but how would you prevent everyone from getting expensive schooling and then immediately declaring bankruptcy?
You don't! If the government is backing the loan, as is true in almost all cases, you eagerly take the write-off on the public purse in the knowledge that you've just gained an enthusiastic taxpayer who can open a new business or take a flyer on a new career, instead of a debt slave that is terrified to do anything but brownnose their way up the ladder at their dead-end callcenter job that will disappear the minute someone figures out it can be done in Bangladesh or by AI for cents on the dollar.
Sure, it would be better and more efficient to do this directly by nationalizing the state schools and offering free tuition or something, but we have to work with what we have.
> how would you prevent everyone from getting expensive schooling and then immediately declaring bankruptcy
If the expensive schooling works, then the person should be able to get a nice, well paying job and pay off the loan over the next 20 years. Many of the differal programs (i.e. "putting the loan on hold") programs and policies would prevent this. It's when the clock runs out, and the student can't get the high-paying job that we have issues...
Bankruptcies are not a cure all. They are a way to force creditors to work with debtors to either get the debt to where it can be paid back, or git rid of debts the debtor will ever be able to pay. The idea is to prevent usury or debt servitude. It also has the effect of introducing a risk to a loan where the lender can lose their money, and has to consider if it is a good idea to write the loan. Student loans are risky, so the government guarantees them, but even so the default rate is high. Perhaps our focus should be on figuring out why so many loans default and working on bringing expenses and outcomes to an alignment where people don't default.
In America so many banks are hungry to loan money. You can build up your credit and save. I recovered from bankruptcy before the ink was dry. I was driving a new car and living in a new house in short order. It is now long gone from my credit file. Don't ever talk someone out of bankruptcy if they qualify for it.
If you own a home you can exclude it from the bankruptcy. You can also include it and continue to pay the payments and the contract must be honored!
Isn't most debt incurred by graduate students, especially those in med or law schools? Surely 4 years of higher education should be enough for someone to figure out basic maths?
Maybe, maybe not? This is hard to find via search, possibly due to graduate being inside the search term undergraduate. :)
This shows the average total owed by graduate students is much higher than undergraduates, about 3x.
https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/student-loans/avera...
So just spitballing here, if there are more than 3x undergraduates than graduate students, and the same number have loans, the undergraduate debt is higher overall.
The long rise of for profit undergraduate institutions until quite recently says it was extremely profitable to get students into debt for questionable education value, it's almost like payday loan shops, just preying on different segment of population.
I don't think traditional public or private four year universities are blameless, either, raising tuition to match this endlessly rising loans guaranteed by Federal government with spiraling administrative system costs.
Even though the cost is high I thought in the USA the number of med school students is restricted to a very small number.
>People were encouraged to take out debt for a number of reasons, and by a number of institutions, without first being educated about the implications of that
18 year olds don't understand what a loan is? Zero accountability?
In the United States? For huge swaths of the population that answer is obviously no. Financial education and literacy in this country is a complete fucking joke. Very few people expected that they would be on a payment schedule that amounted to $200/mo for 30 years, and for a significant portion of them, there was really strong messaging implying that getting a college education was the only pathway to financial success, such that student loans were worth it. Two generations and counting have been massively duped.
Basically all college-bound 18-year olds understand what debt is — you’re infantilizing them to a ridiculous degree if you think otherwise. A lot of them choose to proceed with college due to career optimism and following the herd, not because “debt” is some magical concept that they don’t understand.
Basically all college-bound 18-year olds understand what debt is
not to sound snarky but seldom do I read here something more wrong... if they did they would NEVER take on the kind of debt they are taking on in droves to get that paper. "debt" is one thing, you probably understand "debt" when you are a kid... understanding loans however - is an entirely different thing from general concept of "debt"
I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree. I know lots of liberal arts majors who still have a lot of student loan debt in their late 20s and 30s. They knew what they were doing when they enrolled in college and chose their major, it wasn’t like cost of tuition or what an “interest rate” is was somehow obscured from them or too difficult for them to comprehend. In some cases they regret the choices they made earlier but that’s a different matter, those choices were not made in ignorance of the basic situation they were entering into.
We definitely agree to disagree… I am trying to understand your point of view but failing - if they understood the loan and still took on it does that mean that they are just being irrational? or stupid (I don’t mean to sound mean here but lacking a more PC word here…)?
They absolutely understood the terms of the loan. I think they do it anyway because: (1) everyone else is doing it and they don’t have a good alternative (2) career optimism. If you end up becoming a lawyer/consultant/accountant or otherwise have a good corporate job, in the medium-term your student loan debt doesn’t really have a significant impact on your life.
It’s really only a problem if you (1) choose a private college and don’t stay in-state, (2) get a degree which doesn’t have a lot of practical value, and (3) then want to pursue a low-paying field or get a not-useful graduate degree. For example, a friend of mine did her undergrad in art history, master’s in museum studies, and works for a non-profit. She’s not rich but she’s able to survive reasonably comfortably. She’s not dumb or financially illiterate, and she knew what she was getting in for.
I'm just gonna mention that during the 2010s, Donald Trump had $287 million in loans forgiven after refusing to pay and suing the lender for "predatory lending practices."[1]
But yeah, let's make sure we squeeze every drop out of those college students, they should have understood their loan terms.
Consider that his position might be more profound than you considered it to be.
Mine is. It's about incentives.
Now you can take it from there, and at least in my interpretation the rest of your rebuttal falls apart.
There is absolutely no equivalency to slavery. That is simply dishonest. Slaves didn't choose to be slaves.
Do students who take on debt have no agency whatsoever to you?
Did the people who paid such debts had no agency when paying?
If you don't like the equivalence to slavery, pick a different example, there are three I posted and more you can probably think of on your own.
We know that the idea of a rational agent in economics is a myth, and as you mentioned, it is about incentives, as well as motives.
Students who take on debt that limits them in later life don't have all the information they need at the time they make the decision. Saying the information is available is not reasonable. These students are told they _most_ go to college to make a living.
They are not told they need to get an engineering, medical, or finance degree to make going to college worth it, economically.
They are shown all the loans they can get without an equivalent amount of effort put into educating them about the consequences those loans represent. For example, how much the loans will cost in the long run, along with estimated pay for various fields of study.
Furthermore, the loans are given for any degree program without restriction.
All the comments I made about game theory still stand, and we don't need to get into the myriad problems with our education and student loan systems. I agree they aren't perfect; I just think the argument 'I didn't get my loans paid off neither should you' is an extremely selfish one. Just because someone suffers doesn't mean everyone should. Also - in my experience people who are ready to make that selfish argument are very offended when it gets flipped on them. So they can understand intuitively the issue with the selfish position.
> They are not told they need to get an engineering, medical, or finance degree to make going to college worth it, economically.
This is a very well known fact. When I was in high school in the 2000s, it was a well known joke about how the arts / english majors won't land you a job. And even if you never heard about it, the data for average salary for graduates in the college, its dropout rates, and salary by majors is highly publicized. This isn't advanced research to do and in the age of internet, someone considering college should be able to do. I think the problem is no one believes they are the average case and instead are the exception who'll make it work.
Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully fair.
And there could be a change in the law that allows people to forgive student debt in personal bankruptcy, and that could make sure higher tuition doesnt happen.
> Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully fair.
I don't think that holds for a policy of non-intervention. People usually don't like that solution, especially when considering welfare programs, but it is fair to give no one assistance in the sense that everyone was treated equally/fairly.
Now its a totally different question whether its fair that some people are in this position today. The answer is almost certainly no, but that doesn't have a direct impact on whether an intervention today is fair or not.
I am a bit apathetic towards giving generally wealthier people who made a bad financial choice a break, when weighed against all the different ways you could spend that money, yes.
> People usually don't like that solution, especially when considering welfare programs, but it is fair to give no one assistance in the sense that everyone was treated equally/fairly.
If you're saying all the different ways you could spend that money, then you're saying non-intervention for the wealthier people how made a bad financial choice, and yes-intervention for other ways in which the money could be spent, which again, is a decision on where to give limited resources.
I'm not saying I agree or don't agree with whether it would be more helpful to give it to those who have college debt or those in the US who are without a home or frankly those here in Kenya (where I am now) who if don't have money, might starve to death.
Moreover that each decision can be judged.
> Now its a totally different question whether its fair that some people are in this position today. The answer is almost certainly no, but that doesn't have a direct impact on whether an intervention today is fair or not.
If we approach it from this side, I agree. Non-intervention, or not giving any limited resources to anyone, is the most fair approach and then we can evaluate whether it's fair the position in which those people are. Yet I don't know how realistic this is, to withhold all resources from everyone.
Maybe? That probably starts a definitional debate that isn't usually helpful. Is it apathetic to let nature, evolution, or markets do what they do best?
What is "fair" requires context. I could argue that nonintervention is fair or that a top-down, Marxist approach is fair depending on how "success" is defined.
I personally don't like the word "fair" very much because of how context-dependent it is. It's often used in "that's unfair" by a person who feels attacked or aggrieved in some way. It seems to have such a subjective quality to it, and yet can be claimed to be objective.
It actually reminds me of an essay I wrote years ago called "The Subjective Adjective" [0] (wow, I wrote it 10 years ago!) The premise is that we take how we subjectively feel and then transform it into an objective statement on reality, overlooking how subjective it really is.
Anyways, I agree some of these conversations seem to devolve into definitional debates that may not get at the real point.
I think I also replied to a different comment thinking it was you—identity and conversational continuation, an aspect of context so often hidden/lacking on HN.
In general, I agree with you that a policy could be equal/fair as in giving everyone an equal amount of X, and that the unfair part is where people are in life. I actually liked the idea of charging a flat tax across the US and then having people voluntarily pay the tax for those who couldn't pay it, because I agree, I would see the tax as fair but the wealth inequality as unfair and one way to rectify that is for people to voluntarily rebalance the wealth. But yeah, I'm sure tons of people would see that as unfair.
If we're considering tax changed, I'd love to see a government run like a kickstarter. Government departments' role should be designing programs, estimate costs, and pitching the program to the public.
For taxes, the government provides estimates or recommendations on what a household would owe but its voluntary. You throe your money into programs that you want to see funded.
It could go horribly wrong, but so can centralized planning. At least this way the people are responsible for it either way.
Have you lived in a country where the citizens believe that the government is overall apathetic to their situations? It often doesn't create a utopia, but rather a lot of cynicism and reliance on family support networks. I'm an American currently in East Africa and I imagine many if not most people here would say the government doesn't care about them and does very little for them. So what ends up happening is that since there is little government/social welfare programs, people rely on family welfare. And well, if you don't have a rich family, your life can be really really really hard, if you even survive.
Your family doesn't have money? No food. No service at the emergency room. Heck, even no water.
I think there's a balance and that people who want more apathy and inaction may not realize what it's like when that's actually the case.
Government is just a collection of people, collection of unknown neighbors. Action can lead to unintended consequences, but so can inaction. Someone is bleeding on the street, do you help? If you help, you might get HIV, if they were attacked the attacker might come after you, the person might even attack you. If you don't help, they might bleed out on the street, they might have permanent damage, or something else.
Do you act or do you not act?
Both have unintended, often unpredictable consequences.
> Government is just a collection of people, collection of unknown neighbors.
I don't think that's an accurate comparison. None of the politicians in Washington are my neighbors, the closes one lives about 300 miles away but he is never actually home. Those politicians have an extreme amount of control over my life, well beyond what seems reasonable given how disconnected we are.
> Do you act or do you not act?
That varies a lot, but context is everything. If I see someone bleeding out, yes I would help. I generally have basic first aid on me including a tourniquet and chest seals. If I have open cuts on my hands and no gloves I'd have to consider the risk of infection, but if someone is likely to die I think I would take the risk (you never know until you're in the situation though).
If someone is attacked on the street, again yes I'd likely act. Context still matters, if I'm 30 feet away and the person has a gun I'd be of no use unless I'm also armed, and even then I'd have to draw before they saw me. If someone is getting beat up, mugged, even stabbed, sure I'd jump in. I think of have a really hard time living with the knowledge that I watched someone get attacked or murdered and did nothing.
It would do more good in K12 or pre-K than it would paying off private debts held by white collar highly educated not rich yet due only to their young age university-bros.
It truly is astonishing. We have kids who cannot afford school lunches, people working multiple blue-collar jobs and yet the problems of people who are statistically better off than average constantly jump to the front. People complain about Effective Altruism because of one dude messing up big but it would behoove everyone to read up on the basic philosophy of it before suggesting how we best spent billions to help reduce suffering.
The problem with EA is in judging what is effective. Perhaps ridding the unforgivable student loans of parents actually helps the kids more than school lunches.
And frankly, some of the most effective altruism may be just to directly give cash to people, yet I don't know how many people in the EA community would trust people so much with unconditional cash.
there are many many problems with the EA movement, but they do generally support unconditional cash transfers.
cash transfers are seen as the "default" baseline. the bar for charity is that it must be better than cash transfers. they do find some such charities that they claim are even better than cash transfers, but they are totally comfortable with giving people unconditional cash.
ah ok, i appreciate the clarification and am grateful to hear that. I think I've worried that the EA movement often has an obsession with optimization, which can lead to getting the absolute best perfect solution and become really dehumanized in the process.
But as I said, I'm glad to hear that unconditional cash is gaining traction with those folks, as I think it not only gives someone financial resources but also trust.
> And this trust — another resource it’s difficult to measure — is the aspect of gifts that many have said they value most.
The above is an excerpt from MacKenzie Scott's essay, "No Dollar Signs This Time." [0] I really appreciate the approach she is taking, which seems to be especially embracing the uncertainty of it all and trusting people to do what they believe is best.
I'd say many of these university bros are actually parents to K12 and Pre-K and having parents not terribly in debt could help them focus more on being there for their kids and encouraging education.
With half a trillion dollars you can also open a lot of universities. Increased supply would lower prices for everyone. One could even open public universities and offer education at very reduced or no tuition.
There are very many universities with zero or no tax, most of them in socialist countries. Why don't you go there? Maybe because none of those matter when serious education is considered.
If we block on the basis that previous people didn't have something and that it would be unfair to them we would literally never make any progress in this world.
Instead of starting a new better world, we'll just stick with the old one that sucks because we don't want to be unfair. What an awful, awful way to look at the world.
When the bailout is for business the money always comes, but suggest even a fraction of that amount of money go towards regular people and all of a sudden there's hand wringing and talk of moral hazards.
> it would embolden universities to ask even higher tuition.
Then cap the amount you give out loans. Many of them are back by one level of the government or another.
> A second problem is that not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it. It would be unfair to them.
This is a very flimsy argument. Shall we get rid of the polio vaccine since it's unfair to those who already contracted it that our efforts with the vaccine don't benefit them?
> Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
AFAICT from this article and others on the same subject, the 500 billion number does not appear to be public money. It sounds like it's 100 billion of private investment (probably mostly from Son), and FTA,
> could reach five times that sum
(5x 100 billion === 500 billion, the # everyone seems to be quoting)
we are vastly overspending and will either need to monetize the debt (disastrous) or massively cut spending and raise taxes in the future. already now, we need to massively raise taxes on the wealthy but even that will be insufficient with our current spend.
free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal situation.
> free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal situation.
How is free college a giveaway to the wealthier third of society? For starters, I can assure you the wealthy care a lot about the name of the institution issuing the diploma, and they can afford it. They'll happily front extra cash so their kids can network with people of similar economic status.
I didn't say "the wealthy", I said the wealthier third of our society. Only ~39% of people age 18-24 are in college, those are generally the wealthier people in our society, and free college (I'm assuming from your reply it's free public college) would mostly be a giveaway to those people.
Have you considered that perhaps you have causality mixed up here? Perhaps it's not that only the wealthier ~39% of people want to go to college, but rather that the bottom 61% don't want that economic burden.
I certainly agree that more people would be going to college if it were free. 80% of people? I'm skeptical, but the existing people sending their kids to college (who can afford foregoing that income) would certainly appreciate the giveaway
Good point. Then next best is limit the lending. If a uni wants to charge 50k a year then they need to find rich students who can pay cash. If they want the smartest students they need to find ways to be affordable. Only lend money for affordable universities basically. That will force efficiency, reduce admin etc.
The pretending to not understand how public services work shtick is so tiring.
Everyone understands that public services are free to use because they are funded by taxes. It's not the gotcha you think it is. People say that roads, K-12 education, etc are "free" when they mean there is not a direct fee to use them because they are paid for by the government using tax dollars. You don't have to pretend to not understand this
Who says roads or public education are free? Every gallon of fuel is taxed and, at least in any jurisdiction I've lived in, property taxes fund schools.
I'm not pretending to not understand here. Someone said it would be free and I'm asking how. The fact that "free" doesn't mean free is the problem, not an issue of me misunderstanding.
Your mind works in a very different way than mine.
Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance system might tick up inflation.
Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
Where is the humanity? Of course some extreme of inflation is bad, and of course we want people to be employable. But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
(And I don't think we have a surplus of engineers in the country, judging by what I perceive to be the gap in talent between china and US, and the moaning by tech about the need for H1B).
> Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance system might tick up inflation.
Well yes, I can talk to two different points when the context is different. A good conversation isn't just people shouting their personal opinions, its people playing off of the discussion at hand and considering different angles.
> Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
That's actually not what I was saying, I may have phrased it poorly. I did not mean that I worry about anyone getting educated. I was simply trying to point out that a degree has much less value when anyone can get it, like that's because it is free as is the topic here.
In the other thread I wasn't actually concerned about inflation personally, only pointing out that inflation will go up if a large amount of student debt is made to just disappear. I was raising that as a prediction with high likelihood, personally I have opinions on the underlying approach but I don't really have dog in the fight either.
>And I don't think we have a surplus of engineers in the country, judging by what I perceive to be the gap in talent between china and US, and the moaning by tech about the need for H1B
Why take that at face value? Its generally used for wage suppression[0][1] by big companies (not only in tech) and due to how its structured, creates an unhealthy power balance between employers and H1B employees
The MAGA ideals (this is not snark just applying logic) needs more skilled Americans so this would also be aligned with MAGA albeit one of those things that takes more than 4 years to come to fruition so politically harder to do.
> But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
What artificial scarcity are you talking about here?
I'm not trying to say we need artificial scarcity, university should be a market like any other product or service.
Personally I tend to go even further away from most when it comes to scarcity in the job market too - I'd rather have open borders than immigration systems that limit how many people can come here and compete for jobs.
Totally agree, we haven't really had capitalism for most of my life. It is possible though, and most of US history included at least mostly free markets.
I was a software consultant for many years. I'd put that on the list of truly competitive marketplaces. People were either willing to pay me to do a job or they weren't, and I would have to adjust my prices and terms to try to increase or decrease my workload.
For sure, I'd argue that's mainly because any industry that centralizes or grows big enough to really matter finds itself the subject of new government oversight and regulation. As soon as the government becomes involved, for better or worse, its no longer a free market.
I don't know the ins and outs of the UK education system, but I have to assume the facilities and employees are still paid for.
> Does food and water? Shelter?
If everyone had access to it for free? Absolutely! I wouldn't work as a farmer or build houses if no one had to pay for those products. Value, or price in this context, is only really feasible for scarce assets. If something is seemingly unlimited and freely available it will have no (financial) value.
Sure, but then the answer to my original question of who pays for it is the taxpayer. It isn't free, the cost is just subsidized by the public rather than paid by the student.
I'm not even saying that's a bad thing, if most people want it that way I don't see the problem. But it isn't free.
I'm not sure how, it seems really important to distinguish between free and not free. To me it seems disingenuous to call something free when its publicly funded.
But everyone knows that "free" in this context means publicly funded. Free as in beer never meant that the entire production of the beer somehow was accomplished without financial or material input.
That doesn't hold up even just in this comment thread. Higher up when I asked who pays for it the reply I got was "Not anyone". The person really didn't seem to get that " free" == publicly funded == taxpayers pay for it.
Right, but if our answer is taxes then someone pays for it and it is not free. There's nothing wrong with that, we just can't call it free.
> You can say who's gonna pay for it for everything. Defense and meddling in world affairs is a big cost too.
For sure, no disagreement here. My personal opinion is that defense is only necessary in times of war and meddling in world affairs is never necessary.
You think defense is only necessary in times of war? I think you should re-think that position. If you mean that, it is just a fundamental misunderstanding of ... everything.
Educated people get better paying jobs. More pay means more payed taxes as well. If you have a smart tax system with progressive tax, that's a real lever.
It sounds counter intuitive, but more taxes is more fair and better as a whole. To prove, it takes no more than to look up correlation of amounts of taxes with percentages of homelessness (and other such indicators) between western countries.
May be an unpopular opinion here, but education should be a market just like anything else and the government should put its thumb on the scales as infrequently as possible.
Health insurance is an entirely different animal. It has its own flaws and issues, as well as its own benefits. You can't easily compare a service product and an insurance product, they're just too different.
Though yes, financially health insurance also has no monetary value when anyone can get it for free. You can't assign a price to it and anyone in the health insurance business is entirely at the whims of what the government is willing to pay them to provide a service deemed essential enough to subsidize the entire cost of the product.
Free does not mean limitless. Where I live in EU its not uncommon to wait for over a year to see a doctor on „free” insurance and less than 24h when you pay out of your pocket.
People get free insurance but hospitals get fixed amounts of cash allowing them to admit fixed amount of patients
In this scenario the answer is yes, it loses some value. Still much better system than private care in US
There is a queuing theory thing here! People die in the queue.
However the US system. seems to create a lot if inefficiency. There is no free lunch. But a lunch where you don't throw out as much bread as you eat is more efficient.
Maybe so, but also then everyone has a Harvard degree, which is MUCH MUCH better for society than a Harvard degree losing value is bad.
Of course if you're an ignorant right wing anti-intellectual climate change and evolution denying religious fanatic, the idea of everyone having a Harvard degree is existentially terrifying for other reasons that it losing a little bit of value.
> Maybe so, but also then everyone has a Harvard degree, which is MUCH MUCH better for society than a Harvard degree losing value is bad.
Is it your opinion that Harvard could provide the same quality of education to an unlimited number of students?
This isn't a right/left scenario, its logistics and market dynamics. Expanding access to a scarce resource means value of that resource goes down. A supply glut doesn't mean the product is any less useful, just that there's more for it so people will get to pay less for it.
Allowing student debts to be included in bankruptcy takes care of most of the issue. Those that were unable to find decent, paying jobs will have a path to relieve the stress of high student loan payments, while those that found high paying jobs will continue paying on the loans from which they received a benefit.
"we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. "
Don't throw more money at schools. They will happily take the money and jack up tuition even more. There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.
> There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.
There is and it's explained by Baumol's cost disease. Basically you can't sustain paying professors the same wage while productivity increases in other parts of the economy. Even if the actual labor of "professing" hasn't gotten more productive. You have to retain them by keeping up with the broader wage increases. And that cost increase gets passed down to students.
You are forgetting the fact that this is a private investment, whereas the student loans problem should be solved by the government. No private institutions will have any interests in paying off student loans.
Eliminating debt has a lot of unintended consequences. Price inflation would almost certainly be a problem, for example.
It's also not clear to me what happens to all of the derivatives based on student debt, though there may very well be an answer there that I just haven't understood yet.
History says almost all society was corrputed and previous 50 to 80 years are slight exception. People with power prefer to give power to selected people selected by their personal preference.
Repaying student loans makes a lot of people a little richer. The current initiative makes a few people a lot richer. If you ask some people, the former is a very communist/socialist way of thinking (bad), while the latter is pure, unadulterated capitalism (good).
That and a lot of people do not have the means to convince current power centers ( unless they were to organize, which they either don't, can't or are dissuaded from ) to do their bidding, while few rich ones do. And so the old saying 'rich become richer' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That was the implication indeed. Money is like gravity, the more you have the more you can pull in. This will give a person the power to do anything to make more money (change the laws as desired, or break them if needed) but also the perfect shield from any repercussions.
One of the more destructive situations in capitalism is the fact that (financially) helping the many will increase inflation and lead to more problems.
When a few people get really rich it kind of slips through the gaps, the broader system isn't impacted too much. When most people get a little rich they spend that money and prices go up. Said differently, wealth is all relative so when most people get a little more rich their comparative wealth didn't really change.
you can redistribute real resources - every person spending their life working on a rich persons yacht rather than helping educate the next generation due to the price system, for instance, is a real distribution of resources. this is why consumption taxes are modern and valuable
If we have to have taxes, I'm very much in favor of a consumption tax. It doesn't work for our current system though, capitalism kind of hits a wall when spending money is disincentivized (compared to saving money or simply not trying to earn more).
Redistribution of wealth is tricky and almost certainly runs into the same wall I mentioned in my last comment. When everyone competing with each other (financially) see a similar bump in income they didn't really change anything. Redistribution is more helpful when targeting the wealth gap and not very useful when considering how wealtht the majority of people "feel".
That said, I 100% agree people shouldn't be working their entire life on a rich person's boat. That's a much bigger, and more fundamental, problem though. That gets to the core of a debt-based society and the need for self reliance. The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
100% this but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn't happen at scale. even here on HN if you post something along these lines but in real terms you will get downvoted like crazy and get even crazier comments.
the system is setup to make sure there are workers, w2 workers. this is why there is student loans and this is why schools do not teach you to be an entrepreneur, to be a salesman, to hustle for yourself and not for someone else. I see so many people here talking about leetcode and faang and I think to myself that is just modern day slavery. if you are LXXX at say Meta making say $750k/year, I think the same - you are a modern-day slave. if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more. no company is going to pay you more than you are worth to them and they won't even break even with you so-to-speak so you can bank on this fact whoever you work for and whatever you bank. though there is a big difference between working on someone's yacht and making $750k the principles are the same but system is working hard and succeeding in making sure it stays as it is...
I am very sympathetic to your point about barriers. I feel like California has been waging war on 1099 contractors and small businesses for decades. Hell, they have a $600 minimum business tax on unprofitable businesses. They want stable W-2 union workers with state regulated compensation, not free wheeling contractors and businesses succeeding or failing on their own merits.
However, I think it is worth clarifying your following point.
>if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more.
This is far from slavery. You are worth that to Meta. You might be worth significantly less without Meta. If you can make 1.5 mil/year alone and quit, meta wont send the slave patrol to bring you back in shackles. Instead, it is the golden shackles of greed that keep people making $750,000 instead of opting out.
> but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn't happen at scale
This has been getting less and less true since the Industrial Revolution. We’re not quite at the point where we don’t need menial labour. But we can sure see the through line to it. The alternate future to the despairingly unemployed is every person being something of an owner.
> if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more
Whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Also, if you’re being paid $750k/year, you’d better be worth more than $1.5mm to your employer, because taxes and regulatory costs are typically estimated around 100% of base up to the low millions.
This has been getting less and less true since the Industrial Revolution.
how so? what do you think is the breakdown between say working people in the USA (excluding gig-jobs cause you know…) who are W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners? 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
Automation. Consider the number of jobs today that one can do singly today that didn't even exist then.
> W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners? 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
There are about 165 million workers in the American labour force [1]. There are 33 million small businesses [2]. Given 14% have no employees [3], we have a lower bound of 5 million business owners in America, or 3% of the labour force.
Add to that America's 65 million freelancers and you have 2 out of 5 Americans not working for a boss. (Keep in mind, we're ignoring every building, plumber or design shop that has even a single employee in these figures.)
there are lots of redistributions that are net beneficial even when you account for the incentive hit. marginal increases in the estate tax, for instance, almost certainly fall under this umbrella
Totally fair, by no means is that a settled issue. Debt is just my opinion of a likely root cause.
> there are lots of redistributions that are net beneficial even when you account for the incentive hit. marginal increases in the estate tax, for instance, almost certainly fall under this umbrella
That requires a lot more context to answer. The costs and benefits considered are important to lay out. Without that context I really can't say if it's a net benefit or not, I would assume that two average people would have a different list of factors they'd consider when saying whether its a net benefit or not.
Personally I don't see estate taxes as net beneficial. I don't agree with the principle that death is a taxable event, and I don't prefer the government to have in incentives to see people die (i.e. when someone with an estate dies the government makes money). Financially, to stick with just the numbers, I don't consider $66B in annual revenue worth the bureaucracy or legal complexity required to manage the estate tax program.
Transfers are taxable, either as gifts or income. Not sure why we would exempt inheritance flows. $66B seems like a pretty good haul, that could easily be much larger given the massive portion of wealth that is inherited, and is 5x the budget of the IRS.
And the disincentive effects are much smaller than taxing the equivalent in directly earned income.
I get that today's laws do allow for taxing estate transfers as a taxable event. The personal concern I was raising is that I don't thing it should be taxable, not whether today's laws allow for taxing it.
When my parents die, assuming they go before me, I don't see why the government should be involved. To be clear, my parents are well below estate tax thresholds, but the underlying premise is the same. Someone's relative dying and leaving them an estate shouldn't by a taxable event as far as um concerned.
$66B should be a lot of money, but our federal government doesn't know what it means to balance a budget. We could easily cut $66B in current spending if we cared.
i’m sorry but student debt payoffs are probably one of the lowest socially valuable uses of this money, rather than basic things like snap or housing vouchers. sorta shows how myopic HN is, student debt is a relatable concern so it gets prioritized
also just: “why invest it when we could spend it on consumption now” is a good argument against letting private wealth usage be socially determined if most people just always vote for consumption now
I know!! Also we could have given an IPhone to 500 million of people for the amount!! It’s such a waste to think they’re investing it in the future instead
This is the problem with capitalists / the billionaires currently hoarding the money and the US' policy, it's all for short term gain. But the conservatives that look back to the 50's or 80's or whatever decade their rose-tinted glasses are tuned to should also realise that the good parts of that came from families not being neck-deep in debt.
go to the uk. they have all the free abortions, genders, and education you could possibly want. apply for asylum since you're clearly afraid for your life.
I am surprised at the negativity from HN. Their clear goal is to build superintelligence. Listen to any of the interviews with Altman, Demis Hassabis, or Dario Amodei (Anthropic) on the purpose of this. They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more.
Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
All of those things would put them out of business if realized and are just a PR smokescreen.
Have we not seen enough of these people to know their character? They're predators who, from all accounts, sacrifice every potentially meaningful personal relationship for money, long after they have more than most people could ever dream of. If we legalized gladiatorial blood sport and it became a billion-dollar business, they'd be doing that. If monkey torture porn was a billion dollar business they'd be doing that.
Whatever the promise of actual AI (and not just performative LLM garbage), if created they will lock the IP down so hard that most of the population will not be able to afford it. Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.
That's the crazy thing about this "super AI" business is that at some point no one would buy it because no one could afford because no one has a job (spare me the UBI magic money fantasy). I love the body positivity line. But if such a thing came to pass, I think something different would probably happen to the rich.
I continue to be amazed at how motivated some of us are to make such cruel, far-reaching and empty claims with regards to people of some popularity/notoriety.
Oh yes, Larry Ellison and Sam Altman are the real victims here!
I continue to be amazed at how desperate some of us are to live in Disney's Tomorrowland that we worship non-technical guys with lots of money who simply tell us that's what they're building, despite all actions to the contrary, sometimes baldfaced statements to the contrary (although always dressed up with faux-optimistic tones), and the negative anecdotes of pretty much anyone who gets close to them.
A lot of us became engineers because we were inspired by media, NASA, and the pretty pictures in Popular Science. And it sucks to realize that most if not all of that stuff isn't going to happen in our lifetimes, if at all. But you what guarantees it not to happen? Guys like Sam Altman and Larry Ellison at the helm, and blind faith that just because they have money and speak passionately that they somehow share your interests.
Or are you that guy who asks the car salesman for advice on which car he should buy? I could forgive that a little more, because the car salesman hasn't personally gone on the record about how he plans to use his business to fuck you.
Do you want a superintelligence ruling over all humanity until the stars burn out controlled by these people?
The lesson of everything that has happened in tech over the past 20 years is that what tech can do and what tech will do are miles apart. Yes, AGI could give everyone a free therapist to maximize their human well-being and guide us to the stars. Just like social media could have brought humanity closer together and been an unprecedented tool for communication, understanding, and democracy. How'd that work out?
At some point, optimism becomes willfully blinding yourself to the terrible danger humanity is in right now. Of course founders paint the rosy version of their product's future. That's how PR works. They're lying - maybe to themselves, and definitely to you.
Just my opinion/observation really but I believe its because people are implicitly entertaining the possibility that it is no longer about software or rather this announcement implicitly states that talent long term isn't the main advantage but instead hardware, compute, etc and most importantly the wealth and connections to gain access to large sums of capital. AI will enable capital/wealthy elite to have more of an advantage over human intelligence/ingenuity which I think is not typically what most hacker/tech forums are about.
For example it isn't what you can do tinkering in your home/garage anymore; or what algorithm you can crack with your intrinsic worth to create more use cases and possibilities - but capital, relationships, hardware and politics. A recent article that went around, and many others are believing capital and wealth will matter more and make "talent" obsolete in the world of AI - this large figure in this article just adds money to that hypothesis.
All this means the big get bigger. It isn't about startup's/grinding hard/working hard/being smarter/etc which means it isn't really meritocratic. This creates an uneven playing field that is quite different than previous software technology phases where the gains/access to the gains has been more distributed/democratized and mostly accessible to the talented/hard working (e.g. the risk taking startup entrepreneur with coding skills and a love of tech).
In some ways it is kind of the opposite of the indy hacker stereotype who ironically is probably one of the biggest losers in the new AI world. In the new world what matters is wealth/ownership of capital, relationships, politics, land, resources and other physical/social assets. In the new AI world scammers, PR people, salespeople, politicians, ultra wealthy with power etc thrive and nepotism/connections are the main advantage. You don't just see this in AI btw (e.g. recent meme coins seen as better path to wealth than working due to weak link to power figure), but AI like any tech amplifies the capability of people with power especially if by definition the powerful don't need to be smart/need other smart people to yield it unlike other tech in the past.
They needed smart people in the past; we may be approaching a world where the smart people make themselves as a whole redundant. I can understand why a place like this doesn't want that to succeed, even if the world's resources are being channeled to that end. Time will tell.
Exactly as you say. AI is imagined to be the wealthy nepotist's escape pod from an equal playing field and democratized access to information. Win at all cost soulless predators who find infinite sacrifice somehow righteous love games like the ones that macro-scale AI creates.
The average person's utility from AI is marginal. But to a psychopath like Elon Musk who is interested in deceiving the internet about Twitter engagement or juicing his crypto scam, it's a necessary tool to create seas of fake personas.
>> Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
I joined in 2012, and been reading since 2010 or so. The community definitely has changed since then, but the way I look at it is that it actually became more reasoned as the wide-eyed and naive teenagers/twenty-somethings of that era gained experience in life and work, learned how the world actually works, and perhaps even got burned a few times. As a result, today they approach these types of news with far more skepticism than their younger selves would. You might argue that the pendulum has swung too far towards the cynical end of the spectrum, but I think that's subjective.
I think (big assumption) most here are from that same period/time. Most are in their late 30s, 40s. Kids, busy life etc. Not the young hacker mindsets, but the responsible maybe a bit stressed person.
One time I bought a can of what I clearly thought was human food. Turns out it was just well dressed cat food.
> to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions,
Aw they missed their favorite hobby horse. "The children." Then again you might have to ask why even bother educating children if there is going to be "superintelligent" computers.
Anyways.. all this stuff will then be free.. right? Is someone going to "own" the superintelligent computer? That's an interesting proposition that gets entirely left out of our futurism fatansy.
I’m willing to believe. It’s probably the closest we’ve come to actually having a real life god. I’m going to get pushback on this but I’ve used o1 and it’s pretty mind blowing to me. I would say something 10x as intelligent with sensors to perceive the world and some sort of continuously running self optimization algorithm would essentially be a viable artificial intelligence.
> They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more.
Look at who is president, or who is in charge of the biggest companies today. It is extremely clear that intelligence is not a part of the reason why they are there. And with all their power and money, these people have essentially zero concern for any of the topics you listed.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that if artificial superintelligence is ever created, all of a sudden the capitalist structure of society will get thrown away. The AIs will be put to work enriching the megalomaniacs, just like many of the most intelligent humans are.
Unlimited energy? No, I don't believe in this. I thought people on HN generally accepted science and not nonsense. A "superintelligence" that would ... what? Destroy the middle, destroy the economy, cause riots and civil wars? If its even possible. Sounds great.
I mean, I had some faith in these things 15 years ago, when I was young and naive, and my heroes were too. But I've seen nearly all those heroes turn to the dark side. There's only so much faith you can have.
Not envious of multi-billionaire's companies gathering capital, IP, knowledge and infrastructure for huge scale modern day private Stasi apparatuses. Just bitter.
Once AGI is many times smarter than humans, the 'guiding' evaporates as foolish irrational thinking. There is no way around the fact when AGI acquires 10 times, 100, 1000 times human intelligence, we are suddenly completely powerless to change anything anymore.
AGI can go wrong in innumerable ways, most of which we cannot even imagine now, because we are limited by our 1 times human intelligence.
The liftoff conditions literally have to be near perfect.
So the question is, can humanity trust the power hungry billionaire CEOs to understand the danger and choose a path for maximum safety? Looking at how it is going so far, I would say absolutely not.
> [...] 1000 times human intelligence, we are suddenly completely powerless [...] The liftoff conditions literally have to be near perfect.
I don't consider models suddenly lifting off and acquiring 1000 times human intelligence to be a realistic outcome. To my understanding, that belief is usually based around the idea that if you have a model that can refine its own architecture, say by 20%, then the next iteration can use that increased capacity to refine even further, say an additional 20%, leading to exponential growth. But that ignores diminishing returns; after obvious inefficiencies and low-hanging fruit are taken care of, squeezing out even an extra 10% is likely beyond what the slightly-better model is capable of.
I do think it's possible to fight against diminishing returns and chip away towards/past human-level intelligence, but it'll be through concerted effort (longer training runs of improved architectures with more data on larger clusters of better GPUs) and not an overnight explosion just from one researcher somewhere letting an LLM modify its own code.
> can humanity trust the power hungry billionaire CEOs to understand the danger and choose a path for maximum safety
Those power-hunger billionaire CEOs who shall remain nameless, such as Altman and Musk, are fear-mongering about such a doomsday. Goal seems to be regulatory capture and diverting attention away from the more realistic issues like use for employee surveillance[0].
That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.
It will be, or, it's slowly happening already. Climate change is triggering water and food shortages, both abroad and on your doorstep (California wildfires), which in turn trigger mass migrations. If a richer and/or more militarily equipped country decides they want another country's resources to survive, we'll see wars erupt everywhere.
Then again, it's more of a logistics challenge, and if e.g. California were to invade Canada for its water supply, how are they going to get it all the way down there?
I can see it happening in Africa though, a long string of countries rely on the Nile, but large hydropower dams built in Sudan and Ethiopia are reducing the water flow, which Egypt is really not happy about as it's costing them water supply and irrigated land. I wouldn't be surprised if Egypt and its allies declares war on those countries and aims to have the dams broken. Then again, that's been going on for some years now and nothing has happened yet as far as I'm aware.
(the above is armchair theorycrafting from thousands of miles away based on superficial information and a lively imagination at best)
I was in Egypt a while and there's no talk of them invading Sudan or Ethiopia. A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar.
The main military thing going on there - I was in Dahab where there are endless military checkpoints - is Hamas like guys trying to come over and overthrow the fairly moderate Egyptian government and replace it with a hardline Hamas type islamic dictatorship for the glorification of Allah etc. Again it's not about reducing scarcity - more about increasing scarcity in return for political control. Dahab and Cairo are both a few hours drive from Gaza.
> A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar.
The rest is fees from the Panama (EDIT: Suez) Canal and tourism. Getting into a war, particularly with a country on the Red Sea, is suicide. (Also, the main flash point between Egypt and Ethipia has receded since the GERD finished filling.)
and a bureaucratic one as well. in Germany, they want to trim bureaucratic necessities while (not) expecting multiple millions of climate refugees.
lot's of undocumented STUFF (undocumented have nowhere to go so they don't get vaccines, proper help when sick, injured, mentally unstable, threatened, abused) incoming which means more disease, crime, theft, money for security firms and insurance companies, which means more smuggle, more fear-mongering via media, more polarization, more hard-coding of subservience into the young, more financial fascism overall, less art, zero authenticity, and a spawn of VR worlds where the old rules apply forever.
plus more STDs and micro-pandemics due to viral mutations because people will be even more careless when partying under second-semester light-shows in metropolitan city clubs and festivals and when selling out for an "adventurous" quick potent buck and bug, which of course means more money pouring into pharma who won't be able to test their drugs thoroughly (and won't have to, not requiring platforms to fact check will transfer somewhat into the pharma industry) because the population will be more diverse in terms of their bio-chemical reactions towards ingredients in context of their "fluid" habitats chemical and psycho-social make-ups.
but it's cool, let's not solve the biggest problems before pseudo-transcending into the AGI era. will make for a really great impression, especially those who had the means, brains, skills, (past) careers, opportunity and peace of mind.
Your first link says "With a score under 5, Russian Federation has a level of hunger that is low."
The current situation with Russia and China seems caused by them becoming prosperous. In the 1960s in China and 1990s in Russia they were broke. Now they have money they can afford to put it into their militaries and try to attack the neighbours.
Russia is a massive grain producer and exporter. One of their biggest health issues right now is obesity (from those cheap grains) with 60% of the adult population overweight, and growing. Furthermore, obesity has actually been an issue for their recruiting effort (there's a lot of running in war).
I would wager that states such as Russia and others misallocate resources, which in turn reduces productivity. Worse yet, some of the policy prescriptions stated above would further misallocate scarce resources and reduce productivity. Scarcity doom becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. This outcome is used to rationalize further economic intervention and the cycle compounds upon itself.
To be explicitly clear, the US granting largess to tech companies for datacenters also counts as a misallocation in my view.
Have you tried opening the links? They show Russia at developed country level in terms of food insecurity (score <5, they don't differentiate at those levels; this is a level mostly shown for EU countries); and a percentage of population below the international poverty line of 0.0% (vs, as an example, 1.8 % in Romania). This isn't great — being in the poverty briefs at all is not indicative of prosperity — but your terrification should probably come from elsewhere.
- They export a lot of natural resources but don’t have a strong manufacturing base. They don’t have high tech, they don’t export many manufactured items to developed countries. It’s a mob run country, resources are easy to extract.
Russia has quite large tech companies (compared to EU, which is dominated by US tech). For software think Yandex, VK, Playrix, Kaspersky, etc in addition to lots of software talent. With hardware, don't nuclear reactors, rockets, aircraft still count as high tech?
And they are out manufacturing the combined west on pretty complex stuff like missiles, air defense systems, drones, artillery. Plus, due to sanctions, their civilian industrial sector has grown so much that's theres a shortage of facilities (not to mention labor).
When I looked through their major exports it was mostly centered around natural resources. You are right there are some spots like developing reactors in other countries but in net not much is going well for Russia economically. Yeah they had to start making more things internally due to their invasion but they are not exporting those goods.
But again, I don’t see them out manufacturing the west on military equipment when some of that equipment is getting overrun easily by 40 year old western equipment. It’s still a poor nation being run by the mob with some shining spots.
That doesn't mean much on its own. Their per capita GDP is still low.
Also arguably their GDP figures are worth even less than Ireland's. A huge proportion of Russia's economy is tied in military production (and huge proportion of that is funded through debt).
If you make a rocket worth $1 million and then blow it up the next month that cost is obviously included in GDP but it's literally the equivalent of burning money/productivity.
Their debt to GDP ratio was 14.6% at the end of 2024, a decrease from 2023. US is 123.1% of GDP while Ireland is at 42.7%. And PPP is the number that matters - its one of the big factors which governs quality of life, at which price you can produce and sell widgets, bushels, etc. And btw, that guns/butter calculus also applies to the US, etc.
> Their debt to GDP ratio was 14.6% at the end of 2024, a decrease from 2023
Allegedly almost half of their defense budget since the war began was funded through private forced loans issues by banks directly to (effectively state owned?) military contractors. So that's not reflected in their military budget.
Also I doubt Russia could borrow a lot on the international markets even if they wanted to. Certainly not cheaply (like the US or especially Eurozone countries)
> And PPP is the number that matters - its one of the big factors which governs quality of life
Again... Russia's GDP per capita is still quite low (even if significantly higher than nominal).
Also if your nominal GDP is inflated by defence spending and energy exports and you multiply it with PPP (i.e. consumer price index) what exactly do you get?
Generally low prices indicate that the country is poor overall.
> its one of the big factors which governs quality of life,
PPP adjusted GDP per capita? Really? That's certainly not the best indicator of those things (even if there is strong correlation overall).
Do you think a median person in Ireland is 30% better off than the average Swiss or 2x better off than the average German?
Anyway, going back to Russia. If e.g. $100 comes in into the country through energy exports and is spent making bombs and other equipment what fraction do you think trickles down to the local economy?
No, no, just no. I don't care what the website says. People in Russia are quite economically depressed. You might want to visit and talk to real people instead of web pages. Visit the Far East.
Yes, and anyone saying Russia isn’t poor either has not done those things or is blind/deaf or unable to comprehend what those people are saying, or possibly not interested in the truth.
"Global warming may not have caused the Arab Spring, but it may have made it come earlier... In 2010, droughts in Russia, Ukraine, China and Argentina and torrential storms in Canada, Australia and Brazil considerably diminished global crops, driving commodity prices up. The region was already dealing with internal sociopolitical, economic and climatic tensions, and the 2010 global food crisis helped drive it over the edge."
Gaza seems mostly to be about who controls Israel/Palestine politically. Gaza was reasonably ok for food and housing and is now predictably trashed as a result of Hamas wanting to control Palestine from the river to the sea as they say.
South Sudan is some ridiculous thing where two rival generals are fighting for control. Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at the moment?
No, not really... the origin of Gaza conflict is in Zionists confiscating the most fertile land and water resources.
That's why Israelis gladly handed back the Sinai desert to Egypt, but have kept Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, Shaba Farms, and continuously confiscate Palestinian farmlands in the West Bank.
There is nothing arbitrary or religious about which lands Zionists are occupying and which they're leaving to arabs.
Completely false and simplifying a complicated history to present a very one sided view.
The most fertile lands are in the west bank. They were under Jordanian control and could have been turned into an independent Palestinian state, but weren't. Israel "accidentally" got them in the 6 days war, and were happy to give them to Jordan back to "take care" of the Palestinian problem, but they refused.
The places that Israel have the majority of the population in Petah Tiqwah, Tel Aviv and the region were swamp lands, filled with mosquitos, that were dried over many years and many deaths by Jewish farmers.
So you are saying Hamas would have same domestic support if Gaza was economically at the level of e.g. Slovenia? People who complained about "open air prison" caused by Israeli "occupation" even before Oct 7 would disagree with you I think.
Even in Europe extremists are propped up by promise of "cheap energies" from Russia.
I guess if you dont see the link this is not the place to explain it.
Also the "open air prison" effect was a result of trying to reduce attacks from Gaza. For example before the 2008 war there were more than 2000 rockets launched from Gaza into Israel.
Very zero-sum outlook on things which is factually untrue much of the time. When you invest money in something productive that value doesn't get automatically destroyed. The size of the pie isn't fixed.
More importantly, money, at global scale, doesn't solve scarcity issues. If there are 100 apples and 120 people making sure everyone has a lot of money doesn't magically create 20 more apples. It just raises the price of apples. Building an apple orchard creates apples. Stargate is people betting that they are building a phenomenal apple orchard. I'm not sure they will and an worried the apple orchard will poison us all but unlike me these people are putting their money where their mouth is and had thus larger inventive to figure out what they are doing.
On global scale if you have 100 people and 150 apples but apples are on the opposite side of the globe it is not like you can sustainably get those apples delivered all the time.
Getting 150 apples once is better than nothing but still doesn’t fix the problem.
1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion. Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x?
You can't just compare things to the Manhattan project. The Manhattan project was large for it's time, but the thing they were doing was ultimately, simple. You can build a nuclear bomb with simply a large enough sphere of enriched U-235 and it'll explode. Which is what the Hiroshima bomb was - a gun type assembly. This is not a complex device.
The relative complexity of projects only ever increases, because if they were simpler we would already have done them. The modern LHC is far more complicated then the Manhattan project. So is ITER. Hell, the US military's logistics chain is more complicated then the Manhattan project.
The fundamental attribution error here is going "look the power to destroy a city was so much cheaper!"
(contingent on the money actually being spent, which....) This is basically an AI-manhattan project. It would employ vast numbers of construction, tradesmen, manufacturing, etc.
This isn't a handout, it is an investment with an expected return. Which is good, because it is less likely to be applied to bad ideas like forcing solar roadways and solar farmers.
By "solve problems" you mean "temporarily mitigate problems by throwing money at them", right? Or do you actually have specific examples of problems that can be permanently solved and aren't already being tackled?
Fusion research has had less than than tenth of this investment, but a viable fusion reactor would have far more impact than a tenth of what Stargate will likely deliver.
Not to mention efforts for mitigating climate change and ecological collapse. But of course those issues reside outside our economic system, so why would anyone invest in them.
Five-hundred billion dollars is nothing when you consider there's a new government agency that it is said will shave two trillion from government inefficiency.
That’s like complaining about investments in automated looms at the start of the Industrial Revolution and claiming that the money would be better spent if handed out to the slum dwelling population.
We have the benefit of hindsight now and we understand that technological revolutions improve living standards for everyone and drag whole populations out of grinding labour and poverty.
And it would be foolish to allow China and Russia to out-invest the West in AI and make us mere clients (or worse, victims) of their superior technology.
Industrialists understand that the way to fix the world’s problems is to advance society, as opposed to resting on the laurels of past advancement, and dividing the diminishing spoils of those achievements.
I disagree with you. I think the impact of AI on society in the long term is going to be massive, and such investments are necessary. If we look at the past century, technology has had (in my opinion) and incredibly positive impact on society. You have to invest in the future.
Won't an intelligent agent available to everyone be able to solve problems in the world? Isn't that why they (OpenAI) and others are doing what they do? To bring abundance?
We already tried fixing problems with throwing tax money at them. It didn't work out. You can see the result of socialism in Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and where not. Wars do not start because of scarcities. Wars start because of disbalance of power. And it is very important for the Western world to be ahead in the AI, because otherwise China may cause a real war and then a lot of Western people would die. Do you not care about them?
Socialism is communism in progress. I have actually lived in socialist country, what about you? And lies and propaganda is what Leftists like you do, not me. Funny, you never want to live in the countries where you rule.
I'm sorry but unless this $500B was being invested in equipping soldiers and building navies, air capabilities, artillery, etc it could not stop even an urban gang turf war.
well, it also starts a fair share of wars, or lets say, "brings freedom and democracy in exchange for resources and power" and sometimes even decides to topple leaders in foreign countries to then put puppets into place.
maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.