Alex Karp, in particular, has some of the most absolutely horrifying clips of his TV appearances circulating all over video social media. But Musk has broader reach, and is even more oblivious and has tied himself to someone who he himself accused of pedophilia.
Andreesen, Thiel, Sam Altman, and the above are great at raising valuations for investors but they are doing it incredibly stupidly in a way that leads to massive backlash. California is voting for a billionaire tax this year, and I think that these tech CEOs only have themselves to blame for the backlash they are causing.
The problem isn't that these people are simply inarticulate and incapable of expressing their views in ways that appeal to people. It's that their views are unappealing (if not downright objectionable) to most people.
It's a sign of how disempowered the populace is that these selfish ghouls don't even feel the need to pretend to be decent functioning adults anymore. Because, why bother? What is anyone gonna do about it?
I bet you there are people equally repulsive and influential but face little public backlash because they never show up in front of a camera.
You feed pigeons randomly, and if they happened to be standing on one foot when they got fed, they will associate that behavior with what happened. So they will stand on one foot while feeding.
In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.
Right... but clearly the government has been making some decisions lately that have, in real ways, directly impacted negatively the economy. There's not superstition about that.
But the real villains here are the same as ever, the most dangerous non-human persons: corporate persons.
So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.
The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.
This seems like the polar opposite of what the "AI safety" people are worried about and it seems unlikely that they could both be true at once.
> As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes
These are both two independent things and two independent sets of people.
The main group of people opposing housing construction is landlords and existing homeowners. The ones doing AI have almost no overlap with that. Moreover, "you get paid less" and "housing costs more due to artificial scarcity" are only tied together in the sense that money going to landlords and banks isn't going to workers, which again isn't the AI thing.
Or to put it a different way, you could mitigate a lot of the "AI problems" by building more housing and the AI people would be pretty fine with that.
Hopefully non-logged in users can at lease see the income-by-age graph: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=480,quality=10...
https://prospect.org/2024/05/14/2024-05-14-trendy-nonsense-g...
> The Economist piece and kindred articles are good examples of how to lie with statistics. You can show that the typical 25-year-old’s income outpaces boomers’ income when they were 25 only by failing to adjust for inflation and the rising costs of life’s necessities, or using averages rather than medians.
But the Economist did use inflation-adjusted median earnings in its analysis of incomes by age among different generations. The Economist cited the median after-tax income, adjusted for inflation. (https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...) I'm not sure why this author seems to think that the Economist is failing to adjust for inflation or not using medians, when it says so quite clearly in their graphs.
The Prospect article also says that home ownership among under-35s has gone down, and links to data on the home ownership rates grouped by age (https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/a-02132020-ar...) but the data ends in 2017. The oldest of Gen-Z would only be 20 years old at the time this data ends. When we look at the Economist's wrote:
> Bolstered by high incomes, American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).
A chart of home ownership rates that end in 2017 could not possibly refute this claim given that Gen-Z would be too young to buy homes around the time that the data's source ends. The home ownership rate among under-35s increased from 34% in 2017 to 39% in 2023 (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-house...), so when Gen-Z started to enter their earliest feasible home-buying years the ownership rate was in a period of recovery. The Economist's claims seem to bear out.
The rest of the piece goes off on tangents largely unrelated to the financial outcomes related to Gen-Z relative to previous generations. For instance, it cites a pew survey on the percentage of young adults that support their parents. But it does not compare that against earlier decades, so there's no evidence in any change in rate over time. In fact the bulk of the piece shares data that aren't relevant. E.g. how does the racial breakdown of the subprime mortgages relate to incomes by age and birth year?
The economy, real wages, etc are basically higher than ever (despite idiot Trump's best efforts).
People are mad because being mad is fun and we're all on being mad machines 24/7.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Yes, "sex in exchange for money or drugs" - improving.
Give a shit.
I'd say the most important metrics are those that matter to people, not those that other people say should matter to them. Births are going down, suicide is going up, but they're just drama queens, we ran the numbers... that is what turns mere criticism into hatred.
Less and less people own a bigger and bigger share of wealth, and they're too often not decent people who respect democracy and the fact that they're still just one person, not a particularly special one, and still only have one vote. No, many of them are not content with that, and have assaulted the people ever since they successfully fought for the few worker's rights they have now. That is bad enough, and not even close to the full picture. That "it used to be worse" in some metrics isn't relevant, what matters is now, how it is because of robber barons, and how it would be without them.
If someone steals most of your shit but leave you with more than "people used to have, on average, in historic times", you wouldn't be placated by that. Because, weirdly enough, you don't view yourself as a mere abstraction to be talked about that way, and billions of other people don't view themselves that way either.
And are you saying you would not in fact not mind being treated worse than other people today, as long as you're getting treated better than someone in the stone age? You completely sidestepped that part of my comment, only to frame me as somehow upset and irrational, such as
> "Pretending information is imaginary or offensively abstract because you’re upset about income inequality (which is even more of an abstraction)"
Fairness and justice matter. Sure they're abstract, so is happiness, so is hate. Come to think of it, none of the important stuff, none of the in-between stuff that makes any of the measurable stuff real and meaningful, can be easily measured. And how people feel about their lives and where society is going matters because they feel it, not because it filters down to some numbers you happen to accept.
And even IF everything was getting better all the time, it would still matter that people don't feel it. They're not "tempted" by being unhappy, nobody wants to be. Pretending that's the case for the majority of people, just because you're upset human reality is messy and wet is not good or helpful.
... okay, fine, whatever. It's extremely well studied and so well understood, and people are happier than ever, across the board. So what do "People are mad because being mad is fun" and "as seductive as "everything is terrible" even refer to? What's the problem?
Notice that all these countries are English speaking countries? Aside from speaking English they also have lots in common when it comes to the way the economy and society is run. I can only speak for the United States, but I’ve noticed unfordable not luxury apartments going up everywhere and starter homes are not.
It looks more like you only read English-language news which is concerned about the happenings in English-speaking countries.
https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...
These are current average houseprice-to-income ratios per country. The first English-speaking country on that list is in 87th rank.
I suppose the message is that although housing (and health care and higher education) costs in the US (and elsewhere) have outpaced wage growth for the last half century or so, it could still be worse living in a country with much lower wages to begin with.
The issue is, why does it cost several times as much to add a housing unit in the US as it does in Mexico? That can't be explained by the cost of lumber or copper since they're tradable commodities and if it was labor then prefabricated components should be driving down the price unless it's some kind of a racket. Which implies that it's mainly rackets and zoning restrictions.