ByteDance’s Bytespider is scraping at much higher rates than other platforms

To clarify: the creators of the majority of online content haven't consented to their content being used to build AI models for any company or organization. For US-based "creators", that includes both domestic companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and foreign companies like ByteDance.

AI is in a hype cycle at the moment. Once tech companies realise that they're not going to be able to recoup the billions of dollars they've dumped into the money hole, they'll either raise prices or withdraw products (or a mixture of both).

Consumers, by and large, don't like generative AI. Or at least they don't like it enough to make it pay for itself.

we'll see what happens once the parasites have killed the host

I think there was a story a while ago, possibly apocryphal, about someone who ran a disposable email service with a bunch of random looking domains, and they noticed bot traffic repeatedly hitting the page that shows one of their domains but not clicking through to actually activate an address. Guessing that the scraper was trying to find and block all these domains from being used to sign up for their services, the admin of the disposable email site added a function where if it detected bot traffic it would occasionally return domains like "gmail.com" in the text field.

Google Intel subsidy

Agreed, especially when the textbook being referenced was written by a polarizing figure like Kruggman. I wonder, how much "textbook stuff" was removed from textbooks after 2008?

If that's your opinion it's pretty clear your engagement with the field of macroeconomics is several degrees removed from the actual research.

Assuming you're here in good faith, I would ask you to actually browse a dozen or so of any recent, randomly picked papers in the field you claimed is "not empirical", skim them and note if it's empirical work or theoretical work.

Then come back here and seriously argue that the field is "not empirical". I'll give you a jump start, here's two good sources for recent macro papers:

NBER Macro preprints: https://www.nber.org/topics/macroeconomics?page=1&perPage=50

AEJ Macro: https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/mac/forthcoming

Of course that won't be your current view of the field if your knowledge comes from the opinion section of newspapers and HN comments. But, again, I'm assuming you want to challenge your views in good faith here.

> Reminder that in the last 30 years economists have variously told us that there's a (high) natural rate of unemployment that we couldn't change (has recently been completely debunked).

Not sure where you get that opinion from, the NAIRU published by the CBO went from a high of 6.2% in the energy crisis of the 1970s to around 4.4% today:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NROU

30 years ago the NAIRU was 5.4% and today it's 4.4%, saying it was "completely debunked" makes no sense and I'm seriously wondering which source you got this claim from.

Moreover, the concept of a natural rate of unemployment that's somewhere above 0% is uncontroversial: there's naturally a time gap when looking for a new job, even in an economy at "full employment capacity".

> That raising the minimum wage costs jobs.

Unless your economics education stopped at the first week of microeconomics 101, or comes entirely from the political discourse or reddit, this isn't something that is the position of basically any economist.

Seriously, here's the first recent (2024) highly cited research review I could find from 4 seconds of googling:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32878/w328...

First, note the review is 123 pages long. There's clearly some subtility past "minimum wage bad, unemployment high!" But we can skim and jump to the conclusion. To quote:

""" While the evidence is not unanimous, a reasonable conclusion from the existing literature is that minimum wage policies have had limited direct employment effects while significantly increasing the earnings of low-wage workers—at least at certain levels and in particular economic contexts.

"""

Also, by the way, the minimum wage labor effect is studied in your labor economics class, which is micro, not macro. Which points again to the question of where you're sourcing your claims from.

An argument could be made that any increase in competition is a side-effect, rather than the main goal, of their antimonopoly changes. Until China explains the full Jack Ma story, anything alibaba-related will be seen as political driven, rather than economic.

The point remains that in general if a foreign country is over subsidizing an industry it's a good idea -- even if you don't like them -- to just buy a ton of the stuff.

2. It remains to be proven how good of an idea the silicon valley VC model has been in the zero-interest rate environment since it changed. Uber has had all of 5 profitable quarters in 15 years. Twitter had something like 4.

Many of those VC hypergrowth companies, except a dozen or so, are effectively a big game of hot potato The gap between investment and profit made is often still in the 9 or 10 figure range.

I'd wait another decade or so before proclaiming it's a good strategy. Predatory pricing doesn't even work in theory - there's was effectively a chapter in an industrial organization class I took, though I'd have to find the material again. It might work in practice if there's other effects not taken into account in the theoretical model, though.

3. I would agree with you there, and I think both banning tiktok and subsidizing intel (foundries only) are ideas I agree with even though controversial.

4. I wouldn't argue that the alibaba breakup was a good example - this sort of move creates a huge chilling effect on investors and entrepreneurs in China. The breakup was much more about Xi consolidating his grasp on power than anything else to be realpolitik about it.