PC, Web and Smartphone hype was based on "we can now do [thing] never done before".
This time out it feels more like "we can do existing [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing people"
It all feels much more like a wealth grab for the corporations than a promise of improving a standard of living for end customers. Much closer to a Cloud or Server (replacing Mainframes) cycle.
>> This time out it feels more like "we can do existing [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing people"
I was doing RPA (robotic process automation) 8 years ago. Nobody wanted it in their departments. Whenever we would do presentations, we were told to never, ever, ever talk about this technology replacing people - it only removes the mundane work so teams can focus more on the bigger scope stuff. In the end, we did dozens and dozens of presentations and only two teams asked us to do some automation work for them.
The other leaders had no desire to use this technology because they were not only fearful of it replacing people on their teams, they were fearful it would impact their budgets negatively so they just quietly turned us down.
Unfortunately, you're right because as soon as this stuff gets automated and you find out 1/3rd of your team is doing those mundane tasks, you learn very quickly you can indeed remove those people since there won't be enough "big" initiatives to keep everybody busy enough.
The caveat was even on some of the biggest automations we did, you still needed a subset of people on the team you were working with to make sure the automations were running correctly and not breaking down. And when they did crash, since a lot of these were moving time sensitive data, it was like someone just stole the crown jewels and suddenly you need two war rooms and now you're ordering in for lunch.
Yes and no. PC, Web, etc advancements were also about lowering cost. It’s not that no one could do some thing, it’s that it was too expensive for most people, e.g. having a mobile phone in the 80’s.
Or hiring a mathematician to calculate what is now done in a spreadsheet.
"You should be using AI in your day to day job or you won't get promoted" is the 2025 equivalent of being forced to train the team that your job is being outsourced to.
It's absolutely ridiculous and has almost everything to do with Disney trying to maintain their hold on Mickey Mouse. Every single time his expiration came up they managed to lobby for an extension and now we're left with this current mess of a system
Oh this again? Yeah, not efficient enough to beat out fans in non-vacuum based environments. Come back to me when there is a research paper outlining how doing so is better by any of our understandings of physics first, than some startup trying to raise.
So the replacement is the talent stays in their own country, making local wages there where their talents are leveraged via offshoring instead. They still work to their skillset, wages remain suppressed but their country of origin get their personal taxes instead. But at least the talented individual gets a lower quality of life, that will teach them to roll the dice wrong on the geography they were born into.
We can still use policy to disadvantage the economics of offshoring, we just haven’t gotten there yet. This took time, that will take time.
Does it suck that billions of people were born into lesser global economic circumstances? Absolutely. Does that mean we should allow corporations to exploit labor (both imported and citizens who have to compete against that imported labor) at the disadvantage of domestic citizens? No. This is workers vs capital, not immigrants vs citizens.
There's a logically fallacy in there. Throwing up border walls does not stop capital. Capital can still exist outside the borders and work with the supply chains of the other countries minus 1. And pick an inflow metric that capital cares, and the US does not control more than 50% of it. number of consumers, GDP, income growth, all of it. The capital will continue to service the bigger number that remains offshore through cutting the US out of that pie reciprocally.
The US as a feature of it geography and population (Japan, UK and the Philippines) can choose isolationism as a policy. But the rest don't have it as an option due to direct contact to neighbors or economics too small to sustain. Most of the world will not follow the on-shoring path, because they cannot.
There is nowhere else to invest. China, Russia, and Africa? No trust. Europe and Japan? Too old. That leaves India, which may or may not attract material capital inflows.
Who, funnily enough, will probably be the largest impacted by such things as locking down H1Bs.
Old and still accessible beats inaccessible. BTW the source of the USAs demographic resistance to aging has been the sheer fact it was that immigration melting pot of bringing in young talent to offset its local aging population. A few decades of this path and the US can be just as dismissed as Japan who have taken this path decades in advance.
All countries will end up like Japan, it’s just time (explained in the links I cited). Some countries are likely willing to eat some economic gains out of other preferences. That’s a choice. It’s not all “line goes up.”
India’s total fertility rate is already 1.9, below 2.1 replacement rate. Its demographic dividend (and any potential capital investment opportunities) is already on borrowed time. So capital would rotate and reallocate there, while there is still time, regardless.
Per slide 8 of your second link: Except Africa and half of Asia who will still be above replacement rate for the remainder of our natural lives.
Per exhibit 5 of your first link: The US still to be as bad as Europe and Japan you disparage as "old" and that is based on 2024 analyses. A few more years of these events if sustained will drop that further.
And per Exhibit 1 of that same link, sure India will be at 1.9. And the US was at 1.6 two years ago, which is worse.
Most of the world will be below fertility replacement rate by 2030. This is important, because the faster fertility rates decline, the faster the light cone of capital returns into the future shrinks (people = profits = returns).
So, to tie this all together: for the reasons I’ve laid out in this subthread (with citations), I’m not too concerned about the need to cater to the demands of capital. It needs returns more than humans need it considering population growth is almost over, and it will continue to slowly exhaust investment opportunities as the global demographics transition continues.
Same, three actually, none of which the US. A closer representation for the US brain may be who is considering between different states? Here is the thing, other countries do not necessarily work exactly the same way as the US or individually have large enough local markets to contain all aspects of the overall tech industry, just locally.
Its interesting that they went with the Elastic License. Maybe this is a leaf in the wind that we're going to see more adoption of the license outside of Elastic. I get it's not a "standard" license, but standard licenses become standard through adoption. Someone has to be early to the party.
The better alternative? Dunno. An alternative is iPhone and just take some of the benefits that comes with it. It's been a much more closed ecosystem from the start, but it's owned it. Google had a competitive advantage over that but they seem intent on throwing those advantages away with no foreseeable other upsides.
In development, working on completely other problem spaces to mobile development at all. It's not 2012 anymore and there are other noteworthy growth areas to spend time on.
But one think in the short term was tonight I just spent some hours migrating registered accounts away using a Gmail account to Proton.
If removed in 3 years. So many societal norms are being broken, what's one more. It sounds hyperbolic to say out loud because it usually is, but we're dealing with any possible scenario here.
It sounded hyperbolic for the 50 last newsworthy things he has done. Americans seems to think the current order is a given when in reality it's much more precarious.
Trump will be gone in 3 years, dead or degraded into a bowl of racist jello.
It seems clear that the plan is to game the system as much as possible before then so Republicans never have to win an election again. If they can do that, they don't need Trump - the Trump administration will live on.
I agree with this though I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t manage without Trump.
Republicans aren’t some consistent viewpoint. It’s a big tent that’s (somehow) united by Trump. Even if Republicans came to completely dominate politics, they may have their own schism and we end up back in two party land.
Thought that may still be a more chaotic two party land than we have today. Who knows what the future brings.
It's not so much the republican party anymore, it's project 2025 people and the federalist society, Christian fascists funded by people like Thiel and built on the plans of Curtis Yarvin. They'll still be there after trump as they are his entire cabinet, Vance is in deep on it so succession is already secured, they'll rig or cheat elections to keep political power. Part of project 2025 was a CV database so they could insert sycophants in all levels of unelected government positions as well. They're entrenched and chipping away at election integrity every day.
There's a strong possibility. He's a cult of personality, and really doesn't believe in the values of either party. The Republican establishment loves him, because he gets people out to vote, and he'll push their agenda as long as he gets his cut of the action. This is one model of understanding Trump anyways.
(There are many models, and all models are wrong, yadda yadda)
Personality cults rarely survive the first leader, though it has happened (munster Rebellion). But at that point the plans of Christo fascist like thiel and the federalist society have progressed so far it's too late that it doesn't matter. Maybe a military coup is all we can hope for now.
>If removed in 3 years. So many societal norms are being broken, what's one more.
Are you American? I don't think you understand our culture if you go down this road. Trump operates in the gray -- gray enabled in part by two Democratic presidents doing things like keeping the minimum wage low while painting themselves as progressive as being "soft" on immigration. Is it a kindness to create instability in one's homeland, then look the other way if they flee as long as they don't insist on the same legal protections as others?
Anyways, the two term limit is a very basic rule, one that would provoke an overwhelming response the likes of which I do not think anyone who contemplates such a move fully grasps, and one that is difficult to put into words without sounding theatrical or shrill.
> by two Democratic presidents doing things like keeping the minimum wage low while painting themselves as progressive
Biden proposed and backed a boost of the federal minimum wage to $15/hr, it was defeated in Congress (he also unilaterally implemented a boost in the minimum wages under federal contracts, which did not require legislation, to create upward pressure on wages.)
Prior to that, President Obama also backed a federal minimum wage increase which, as well as boosting the wage would have indexed it to inflation going forward, this also was defeated in Congress (President Obama also unilaterally boosted the minimum wage under federal contracts.)
(OTOH, people pretending the President is a dictator and blaming him for failure to implement legislation when the President pushed for it but Congress refused to allow it to be passed is not entirely unrelated to the status quo where the President simply refuses to be bound by the law in his actions, though its not the main reason for that problem.)
> Anyways, the two term limit is a very basic rule, one that would provoke an overwhelming response the likes of which I do not think anyone who contemplates such a move fully grasps
The degree to which people are confident and complacent that other people will spontaneously rise up and do something if Trunp crosses on red line or another is, perhaps, one of the significant reasons why people do not, in fact, rise up in any way that is effective as Trump crosses every red line that exists.
>Biden proposed and backed a boost of the federal minimum wage to $15/hr... Prior to that, President Obama also backed a federal minimum wage increase
I don't have time to get into the specifics with you, but to put it in poker terms, the democrats play a "tight-passive" strategy - they make piddling bets then fold when called, when faced with an opponent who will C bet them to the river.
Combined with the documented kneecapping of candidates further left than neoliberalism, it's the height of entitlement to fail to govern well, repeatedly, and demand votes because the "other guy" is worse.
>The degree to which people are confident and complacent that other people will spontaneously rise up and do something if Trunp crosses on red line
Maybe spellcheck your own post before assuming I speak for anyone but myself?
>Trump crosses every red line that exists.
You have not spoken to the victims of totalitarianism, and your histrionics will make it sound less dire when folks like me announce with deadly seriousness it's time to go into your condo, lock the door, and get in the bathtub.
The USA already came within a hair of testing that boundary, outside of natural causes I think Trump will make a play for it. He's had zero respect for any rule, I don't see why that one would be different, especially not given what has already happened.
Nope, but have spent my time in the Bay and Massachusetts. Born European and currently in Canada. But, guess what, every country looking at their trade deals in the world are not American either. If you need to be American to have confidence in it as a trading partner, there are no such American trading partners on the international stage. Welcome to what the majority of the world is actively thinking about the state of the US right now. The borders can remain the same while the paperwork governing those borders can be changed, just ask the Fifth French Republic.
Very basic rule indeed, and who upholds those rules? The army and police? ICE? The paper is only worth the systems that support them, and there are years to go in tinkering with the make up of those systems. A ruling or two by the Supreme Court, and it's a whole new ball game.
Let me be crystal. TL;DR Only babbling fools think America isn't capable of crossing any line right now on the international stage. The trust, is gone.
>Let me be crystal. TL;DR Only babbling fools think America isn't capable of crossing any line right now
I think the babbling fools are the ones with multiple passports, ignorant of their privilege, who demand that the same untrained civilians they turned their noses up at when they tried to leave this place take risks for a type of global elite who's happy to float in wherever they can enrich themselves, then flee.
There are plenty of great unis in the EU and Canada. Why come here, if we're so terrible?
> The tax strategies these companies use are known
Links to an article from 2017 about a tax loophole that was closed in 2020 [0]. As an Economist that by his Wikipedia article [1] dedicates so much of his time talking about the Irish tax regime, he should be well aware of this fact.
You are talking about the "Double Irish", which was scotched (sorry) in 2020 by Ireland.
The link under your quoted line in the TFA seems to be talking about Apple (and others) preparing for the end of the Double Irish by finding other tax havens.
"Elite tax advisers help Apple Inc. and other corporate giants skirt impacts of crackdown on 'Double Irish' maneuvers."
So, I don't see what's invalid about the TFA's point, which is about tax avoidance in general
As someone close to pharmaceutical manufacturing, the reason why the manufacturing is done in Ireland is for tax benefits for sales in Europe.
So why not have a US factory for US sales? Because it's much more expensive and complex to have two separate factories making the same drug. It's far easier to just scale the Irish factory to serve all global sales.
Even the same companies with Irish factories have US factories as well. It's not like any tax benefit moved that out of the US as well.
The manufacturing is in one place. The IP in another place. Both places chosen mostly for tax reasons in this case. Paying zero taxes in the US is a lucky side-effect.
It is also kind of an odd article because his assertion "After the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), imports from Ireland soared." is not at all borne out by graph that immediately follows.
Switzerland is a whole different matter, but such carelessness doesn't improve trust
Right, the graph shows a continuous increase since 2017, which tracks the growth of the worldwide pharmaceutical industry in general ($800b in 2016 [0] to $1.4t in 2024 [1].) So actually, the proportion of pharmaceutical imports that were from Ireland remained constant until a spike in late 2024.
And then there's this:
> The top seven pharmaceutical companies are paying $10 billion or so in tax on their $70 billion in offshore profit. They are just paying all that tax abroad.
So these companies already pay 14% in corporate tax. In the US, they'd pay 21% headline rate, but with room for deductions (I can't find a good source for what they actually pay, but here's [2] a bad source putting the R&D deduction alone at $15b/year across the top 8 companies). This 21% changed from 35% in the 2017 act the article criticises, though some deductions were also reduced. So corporate tax can't be the main differentiator here.
It's nice, for balance, to see an article that says the problem with Trump is that he just isn't protectionist enough. But the arguments here don't hold up.
PC, Web and Smartphone hype was based on "we can now do [thing] never done before".
This time out it feels more like "we can do existing [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing people"
It all feels much more like a wealth grab for the corporations than a promise of improving a standard of living for end customers. Much closer to a Cloud or Server (replacing Mainframes) cycle.