81 karma · joined September 11, 2024
a) The article is published by a company who's caters to rich individuals who want to gain citizenship in other countries by paying their way in. Morally dubious to begin with.
b) The 54B capital flight figure is unsubstantiated. They cite no sources, only a single hyperlink that redirects to their own completely unrelated webpage??
c) The lost tax revenue estimates also seem to be completely made up. In fact, they make no mention of the figures past the title and introductory paragraph. A complete joke of an article.
If you're interested to know the real numbers, the official national statistical institute of Norway (link below) tracks wealth tax revenues per year. From 2022 to 2023, revenues moderately increased from around NOK 26 billion to NOK 29 billion. 2024 statistics are only due to come out this year.
The simple answer is that our current way of life (in the west at least) does not accommodate kids. We USED to have kids because they were an economic benefit to agrerian cultures, but have since become a burden since our society does not make time or resources for them, least of which is physical space when you consider urban life.
IF we want to increase the birth rate again, we need to shift our lifestyles away from being as career centric as they are today. We could for instance, remove the stigma of working part time or having a stay at home parent. We could encourage people not to grind long hours to climb the corporate ladder. Actually fix the housing problem without bending to NIMBYists and investors and provide affordable/accessible childcare.
Since children are the future tax-base and labor force of a nation, pay parents for raising kids, like its a job. It is kind of gross to view children in this perspective, but if we are talking about economics, well-adjusted children are just as much an input just as much as energy is.
Technologically speaking, we as a species are basically magic at this point, so I reject the notion that strategically recovering the birth rate is impossible, rather there is no will to.
But why? We use virtual address spaces for a reason.
The first is the quality mass produced products like laptops, cereals, frozen pizzas, etc which have enough revenue that they can hire human marketing to come up with unique content, packaging and ads. The other category, is _high_ quality locally produced goods, like cheese, meats, and some clothing (for example) which do not have enough revenue to hire dedicated marketing staff, but instead use informal marketing. Marketing beyond simple ads in the later case barely matters since there is a lot of trust that the product is quality.
Now there are a lot of garbage products out there, mostly from dollar/discount shops, drop shippers, online shops, and sometimes supermarkets. Margins on these cheap products is usually thin, so if they can save a few bucks with Pomelli they will probably use it.
I'd argue that most people today have become very sensitive and well trained to sniff out poor quality products, its easy to get ripped off. Cues of poor quality could be the design of the packaging including language and fonts, the weight and feel of the product or the brand name when it comes to amazon products sold by Mosptnspg, DSPEAE , Sdarming or whatever lol.
Is the cue to poor quality not going to become Pomelli-style designs? People are already sensitizing themselves to genAI content, and Pomelli is unlikely to produce designs time after time again which are unique enough to bypass a good eye.
It is not the builders fault, they did not know, but the manufacturers of ACM did for decades! and they were penalized. Most were forced to set up trusts to cover certain expenses in the US, but I am not sure what their scope is.
Yes, that is why when you test positive for asbestos you add a little "a" sticker to the material to notify anyone in the future.
I think you are missing the point. Many people like myself want to take care of it, and would hire a proper crew to take care of it, but we are not wealthy enough to just call in a crew without some financial planning. This is not just an annoying expense, quite a bit more than that.
Nope, same attitude here.
My own house probably contains some Asbestos, but getting an asbestos survey is very expensive, prohibitively so for people earning the average salary. Not to mention if asbestos is found, it is a further expense to get it removed and cleaned up. The best I can do is send a sample in for testing if I find something risky while renovating myself. Most contractors up here do no care at all if something looks like it may be ACM.
The best thing we can do for people is to provide balanced guidance on where asbestos may be and how much risk does it pose. AIB like Asbestolux is way more dangerous than Eternit is and depending on the location Eternit can remain in place.
Unfortunately if we were to take a zero tolerance approach it would cause more harm than good. How do people pay for remediation? do we all abandon our homes? what happens to the farmers who cannot move? I have no perfect answer here. Asbestos is a hazard no question, but what can we do other than common sense and balance?
Not any more, their quality has increased recently. Not that I care, wife and I did without them during our engagement.
> Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn't, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom
> Criticizing "hedonism" is its own kind of hedonism
false dichotomy. Of course capitalism and our indulgence in material goods has gone too far. That does not mean we have to be totally pious in life.
We are consistently sold ideas that do not meet expectation, the catch is expected.
"Hey everyone we discovered X breakthrough!" It only has Y constrains or consequences which make it not so useful, or at worst, harmful later.
Well 2008 happened too and people weren't too concerned with risk either.
Ad hominem.
> ignores lagging enterprise procurement cycles
Time is long gone for that, even for most bureaucratic orgs.
> rapid glide path of unit economics as models, inference, and hardware efficiency improve
Conjecture. We don't know if we can scale up effectively. We are hitting limits of technology and energy already
> Habit formation is the moat
Yes and no. GenAI tools are useful if done right, but they have not been what they were made out to be, and they do not seem to be getting better as quickly as I like. The most useful tool so far is copilot auto-complete, but its value is limited for experienced devs. If its price increased 10x tomorow, I would cancel our subscription.
> We’re not watching a bubble pop; we’re watching infrastructure being laid for the next decade of products.
How much money are you risking right now? Or is it different this time?
Unfortunately, while I want to see the technology succeed in the mainstream, it's never going to get there. Period. The AR use-case presented by tech giants to consumers fails to solve any real world problem that a cheaper and more accessible cellphone couldn't. Sure there are niche-use cases and cool demos for consumers, but until the hardware reaches the form factor and durability of traditional prescription glasses consumers will never adopt the technology in a meaningful way.
If we actually want to drive sales of AR devices, we will replicate usecases where AR currently drives value, such as HUDs for aircraft. The same concept can be applied to other high workload environments such as EMS, truck drivers, ATC, law enforcement and handful of military applications. However sales in these domains will be somewhat limited except for military applications which is bad PR for the most of the leaders of AR tech.
So for now its all essentially vaporware to generate hype for the stock market.
What is the point in a discussion if no one reads the actual article?
Yes pretty much, and hello form Norway.
We already have that running in UA right now, loitering drones are very hard to shoot down, fast and carry anti-personnel munitions.
The article is wordy, but is ultimately correct. Wars are inherently complex and there is no one size fits all solution for supplychain and combat. Drones will be a feature in a modern military, but not the game changer the venture capitalists want you to believe.