I recently found my ipad mini 2 (released in 2013) that had been boxed up when I moved a few years ago. After charging up the battery and booting it up, I checked for system updates. The latest system available for it was ios 12.5.7, released in 2023. It loaded fine, and I’ve been using the mini as an ereader ever since – the screen is fine, and wifi works.
Many years ago, I was the fourth student in a four-student class. The three other students have Erdős numbers of 2, 3, and 3. The professor, like me, has no Erdős number.
even if thats the case, they have eaten multiple times that amount of other companies lunch. Companies that currently use ads, whereas cgpt does not.(but will).
As a reminder, even Apple didn't hit 1T market cap until late 2018. We didn't get a second in the 4 comma club until mid 2019 with MSFT. Google and Facebook in 2021.
And now we have 4 companies above 3T and 11 in the 4 comma club. Back when the iPhone was released oil companies were at the top and they were barely hitting 500B.
So yeah, I don't think anyone has really been displaced. Nvidia at up, Broadcom at 7, and TSMC at 9 indicate that displacement might occur, but that's also not the displacement people are talking about.
I don't entirely know what to make of a very-small number of companies' valuations going sky-high that fast (and a few completely without any apparent connection to the fundamentals or even the best-plausible-case mid-term future of those fundamentals, like Tesla) but I can't help but think it means something is extremely broken in the economy, and it's not going to end well.
Maybe we all should have been a little more pro-actively freaked out when dividends went from standard to all-but extinct, and nobody in the investor class seemed to mind... like, it seems that the balance between "owning things that directly make money through productive activity" and "owning things that I expect to go up in value" has gotten completely out-of-wack in favor of the latter.
My guess? Hype. All the companies at the top have a lot of hype. I don't think that explains everything, but I believe it is an important factor. I also think with tech we've really entered a Lemon Market. It is very difficult to tell the quality of products prior to purchase. This is even more true with the loss of physical retail. I actually really miss stores like Sharper Image. Not because I want to buy the over priced stuff, but because you would go into those stores and try things.
I definitely think the economy has shifted and we can see it in our sector. The old deal used to be that we could make good products and good profits. But now "the customer" is not the person that buys the product, it is the shareholder. Shareholder profits should reflect what the market value of the product being sold to customers, but it doesn't have to. So if we're just trying to maximize profits then I think there is no surprise when these things start to diverge.
Why not guaranteed employment, not UBI. Subsidize minimum wage jobs that produce social good without being soul-crushing. (Raise the minimum wage while you’re at it).
How do you provide minimum wage jobs that are not soul-crushing, without destroying the private sector soul-crushing minimum wage jobs?
How do you even find productive jobs people would want to do (or at least find tolerable) that no-one in the private sector was willing to pay minimum wage to get done?
How do you provide jobs to a wide range of contextual needs, from ages 16 to 65, office workers to labourers, physical and mental impairment, neurodivergence, ability to travel, etc? How do you fund the administrative burden of matching jobs to people?
What do you do for the people who still cannot work for various reasons - total disability, caring for another, etc. You still need provide a wide gamut of social welfare programs for different needs and circumstances, with its concomitant bureaucratic cost and inefficiency - or let people starve, or give them "jobs" that have no productive output, just performative burdens.
What's the actual upside of guaranteed employment programs over a UBI?
