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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

Undocumented beavers destroy $1M of GDP doing construction without permit.

Sort of like open source AI model destroys $600B in market cap

Don’t worry; the current wave is going to hit hope source hard. Likely with Facts.

I don't understand this take. If compute-restricted China develops algorithmic improvements to AI, they will just be integrated with the American AI data centres and will push the SOTA forward. It doesn't remove the value of American AI infrastructure investment nor the economic potential of future SOTA models able to do billions of dollars worth of work.

Market cap is just (no of shares) x (share price) and fluctuates all over in ways largely unrelated to fundamentals. Share price = whatever the idiots buying and selling that day happen to agree on and can depend as much on their mood as anything else.

It's a failure of GDP calculations not to include unpaid work.

The good was produced.

Italy, Spain and UK include some shadow economy

You have to include the beavers in your population in order to have proper per capita figures.

Including animals in economic estimates is famously difficult. After all, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

It would be tricky to calculate though. How much do you put down for unpaid work by trees producing oxygen for example?

What would be the cost to do it artificially?

If it was in the US, maybe Faux news would have framed it this way, "why are these illegal beavers being allowed to steal American jobs?" and maybe blame Mexico for that.

"Faux news", good one

Want to laugh, but this is classic bad economics take. SMBC-Comics could do this one.

The $1m can be spent fixing potholes. Massive waste of time, but if the next $1m is used to make potholes, a self-sustaining cycle of making and filling potholes can boost the local economy for just a small dribble of $1m per year input, to the alternating cycle.

And they create hundreds of jobs in the process!

AKA broken window fallacy

What animals can we use to fill potholes?

Actively or passively?

Moles, obviously. They make heaps, precisely filling the potholes, but they do this by tunnelling, weakening the ground and over time creating more potholes.

It’s a prime example of a circular economy and sustainability

Loch Ness Monster is a good one; see: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/24/pictures-pothole...

This gave me laugh, thanks for sharing it!

I mean that is how GDP works. Wasting billions on something stupid counts just as much as spending the same amount on sound investments.

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