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Comment by fnoef | Hacker News Reader

$40B. Insane. Imagine what could be done with this money to improve humanity. Instead, it’s spent on a fancy text generator that promises to eliminate most of the non mundane and physical jobs, as well as create autonomous killing machines, on top of burning the entire worlds electricity. Crazy.

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you can say the same about every recent US war, and add one 0 to the sum.

Or, more controversially, say EU green deal which decimated EU car industry and lost/will lose us few millions of jobs. Losses up to a trillion and nothing to show for that

I know it may be a radical view, but less cars is always a good thing. Not too happy about the job losses, though.

The job losses don't have to happen and it's a failure of the government in allowing it happen. There is always a job to be done if people are willing to work, there are always people willing to do certain types of work.

Nah they are just replaced by chinese cars, people won't drive less or buy less cars just because EU became noncompetitive. We just lost big part of economy to somebody else.

Technology and productivity have reduced more death than any redistribution

What a hilariously moronic comment. In what way is this true? When the cotton gin was invented, slavery absolutely exploded and productivity rose like several 100,000%.

Was this meaningful for humanity? Keeping 20% of the population in bondage because we didn't want to upset the productivity gains of slavers in the south? All progress IS progress after all right?

Government welfare programs have done more to decrease poverty than anything else in the history of human existence. Also one doesn't have to go back in time 200+ years either to see the massive failures of neoliberal economics. Who thinks their lives are better because they have slightly faster phone while they continue to not afford healthcare, can't educate themselves, provide for children, or own homes.

You think 50% of the population seeing their lives materially decrease is meaningful? Good grief, do you honestly care more about trinkets than children? Actually don't answer that for the sake of your soul.

i'm a bit worried for politics in the next 10-20 years because the upper class believe in conspiracy theories like this.

all your welfare and distribution were only possible because technology created the wealth that could be redistributed later. i would suggest researching this with a calm mind.

> Was this meaningful for humanity? Keeping 20% of the population in bondage because we didn't want to upset the productivity gains of slavers in the south? All progress IS progress after all right?

Slavery was actually leading to less overall productivity, abolishing it was crucial to make everyone richer and not just the slaves.

Apart from that, technology (and not redistribution) mostly resulted in much higher life expectancy and much lower poverty levels especially in developing countries like India and China.

You can ask your favourite LLM agent the primary reason the world achieved emancipation from poverty (hint it was because of economic activity and technology)

Literally nobody is talking about slavery here, dude. Did you post in the wrong thread?

Neoliberal? I bet you can't even define that what means other than "some thing I don't like and I have to signal my virtue by saying it".

Who said redistribution?

This money could be invested in universal healthcare, or into AI research for medicine. But hey, I guess replacing developers and generating slop is more beneficial to our society.

yes, replacing developers is better for sustained growth and reduced poverty and not your pet projects.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

Well, historically this has been more effective than any other system known to man.

Effective at what?

Increasing shareholder value

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