maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
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.
Like which wars in this century?
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.
If you ignore Gaza and whole of Africa, maybe.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be explicitly clear, the US granting largess to tech companies for datacenters also counts as a misallocation in my view.
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.
I'm reminded of the KAL cartoon on Russia https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8... That was from 2014. Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle.
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.
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)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
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.
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.
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.
As long as you let universities act like for-profit businesses, their profits will be the only thing they optimize for.
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).
free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal situation.
Also if you are being $ focused then offer it where there is ROI: STEM, medicine (allow more doctors too).
Education doesn't lose its value if it is free. Does food and water? Shelter?
Unless people are just tuning out of their degree and it is just a social thing. In which deal with that specific problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Let them be discharged in bankruptcy. The system will fix itself around that.
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.)
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?
There are more low-income people in private universities (with private or private/public loans) than in public universities.
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.
Getting 150 apples once is better than nothing but still doesn’t fix the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/d5f32ef28464d01f195827b...
Furthermore, they became #4 GDP PPP last year and and were reclassified as a high income country.
https://www.intellinews.com/russia-s-economy-is-booming-3289...
The poorer regions are actually benefiting from high contract salaries. How sustainable that is, guess we'll see.
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.
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.
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.
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?
2) Put solar on top of all highways.
3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.
4) Build transmission.
And many more ...
The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
> 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.
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.
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!"
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
OpenAI is spending their own money on this.
Does health insurance also lose its value when anyone can get it for free?
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.
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?
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.
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.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force_in_the_United_Stat...
[2] https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/state-of-small-busi...
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/22/a-look-at...
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
18 year olds don't understand what a loan is? Zero accountability?
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.
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
At that point, it's not technology, that's religion (or even bordering on cult-like thinking)
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.
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.
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.
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.
But yeah, let's make sure we squeeze every drop out of those college students, they should have understood their loan terms.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/10/27/repo...
Whats a truly competitive market place where all competitors, broadly speaking, are playing on the same playing field and the best business wins?
There's been nothing but waves of consolidation across nearly all industries for the last 40 years. Competition is scarce, it seems.
I'd rather fix the law then try to decide who to hand out tax surpluses to.
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.
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..
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
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-024-05823-8
[1]: https://www.paularnesen.com/blog/the-h-1b-visa-corporate-ame...
i don't agree that debt is the problem
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.
Also part of this is making education better bang for buck.
You can say who's gonna pay for it for everything. Defense and meddling in world affairs is a big cost too.
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.
No.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the disincentive effects are much smaller than taxing the equivalent in directly earned income.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
If everyone has sanitised water it loses value.
Value is the overloaded word. We don't need to scarcity things so dollar number goes up for some elite group.
A good test is forget money and think of human collaboration. People doing things. Does it makes sense from that perspective.
Best way to scale Harvard is easy: make all the other places better (or if they are make people realise that)
Are you trying to estimate only those without employees?
> 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?
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 these are small niches that don’t make a whole sector, and arguably it’s on the fringes comparatively to everything else
Broadly speaking the so called free market is only in its name
Was using this as a proxy for business owners who probably don’t have a filing cabinet of SBA and Census small businesses.
We’re well into the pendulum swinging back. The vanguard were the dropout wunderkids. Now it’s salt-of-the-earth tradesmen and the like.
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.
This WAS a thing without the quotas, though.
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.
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.
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.
Do you act or do you not act?
Both have unintended, often unpredictable consequences.
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.
[0]: https://yieldgiving.com/essays/no-dollar-signs-this-time
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.
I really don't know lol.
Putin growing concerned by Russia’s economy, as Trump pushes for Ukraine deal https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-growing-concerned...
Also basically the whole western world are progressively sanctioning them eg. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-imposes-new-wave-of-sa... and https://kyivindependent.com/us-likely-to-sanction-russia-if-...
Plus the war is expensive. Plus Ukraine's main strategy at the moment seems to be to take out their oil and related industries using drones https://www.newsweek.com/russia-map-shows-critical-infrastru...
I'm not sure it's going to change unless there is some sort of deal or Putin goes.
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.
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.
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"
Also, who is the person that "screwed up big"? I'm guessing you mean SBF but my view is that MacAskill is an outright shuckster.
Those who are struggling to afford it are the ones who will appreciate the help
[1] https://www.stern.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/assets/documen...
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.
...on their roofs? Over all their crops? What's the play here?
- They are run by the mob
- 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.
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).
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.
But then there's this showing the median being closer to only 2x different https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/18/facts-abo...
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.
https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2022/01/how-universi...
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.
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.
Compared with who exactly? Certainly not EMEA. Korea is mainly hardware and China has run out of IP to copy.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This sounds ridiculous to anybody who pays attention to what Trump/MAGA and the modern Republican party say.
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.
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!
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].
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.
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?
> PPP is the number
Metrics adjusted by PPP might. What do you mean by PPP as such? The multiplier itself? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPPC.RF?most_rec...
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?
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...
