Importing might be banned until the US loses access to its main source of GPU manufacturing. And what are the US going to do about it? Defend Taiwan? With missiles made with components and materials processed where, pray tell?
The US does need to start protecting its manufacturing again, but it’d be lucky to start at a level as high as high end semiconductors. That’d be like a stroke victim trying to run before they re-learn to walk.
As others have pointed out, this means less services, more manufacturing, less consumption, a probably a lower standard of living. But with the business as usual alternative looking a lot like business as usual in the western Roman Empire circa 450 CE, taking a hit to your standard of living while investing in a future which you still have the slightest control over, maybe feels like a decent trade.
Nuclear wasn’t completely replaced. The graphs you link to show that Germany’s electricity generation have dropped to the level it was at in the year 2000, and that’s before the last of the nuclear plants were turned off.
As a result, Germany’s industrial production is falling. Which will be great for the environment if countries who previously imported goods produced by Germany’s clean nuclear power don’t just switch to goods produced by China and South East Asia’s far dirtier electricity.
Of course, China is steadily increasing its own nuclear energy production, so it’ll end up being clean eventually, and likely sooner than us given how efficient they are.
But it’s not like we’re reducing dependency on nuclear power. It’s more like we’re trading the risk of nuclear accident in our own backyards for something else. I tend to think that the something else is the risk that the eastern world’s factories stop accepting the western world’s increasingly worthless paper money, which they’ll be in a much stronger position to do once we’re no longer able to manufacture what we need due to environmental concerns.
It's true that energy intensive industry has been hit hard in Germany. But is also true that the sector has been heavily subsidized for decades. As the carbon mining sector. That was effectively paying the energy cost of those industries with taxes.
In Spain, where we didn's shut down nuclear energy nor have oil or coal, energy intensive industry is also threatening or shutting down (https://www.miningweekly.com/article/alcoa-threatens-to-shut...). The threats are barely hidden "subsidize our costs or else...".
Indeed: if cheap (for the consumer, not for the taxpayer...) nuclear electricity was sufficient France industry would thrive. Reality: it (sadly) is dying.
That assumes that once a golden goose dies, there’s an infinite supply of replacements. There’s a reason we’re comparing these companies to a mythical creature after all: if sustainable businesses producing valuable things were easy to create, this website wouldn’t exist.
The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
You seem to be making a bunch of somewhat odd assumptions? Eg that investors are idiots, and that it's easy to beat the market?
I was answering the hypothetical example of one company having this magic button. With the rest of the world operating as normal.
If you want to figure out the optimal approach to many companies having such magic buttons, that's a slightly different question.
You are right that creating companies isn't easy nor trivial. That's why the market so richly rewards creating successful companies from scratch. But that's nothing that a well-diversified investor needs to worry about for this particular decision. You just look at market prices.
> The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
> Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
You seem to assume zero competition? And also that the stock market is really bad at evaluating business decisions (at least worse than you)? If the latter is the case, you should become an investor and make a killing!
Especially if you are living in a world where everyone else is stupidly slaughtering their golden geese, you should be able to pick up some disgruntled ex-employees for cheap and just run a steady ship!
Another important consideration: at some level of abstraction a company is just a legal shell. 'Killing' a company might just mean that the old equity (another legal abstraction) is deleted, and the former creditors turn into equity holders. The operations don't even need to be affected by this at all. Of course, you can also 'kill' a company by shutting it down. But again, that doesn't necessarily remove any of the demand for its (type of) products, nor does it remove the experience of the people working there, nor does it break any of the machinery and hardware.
So if Adobe goes belly up, there are already plenty of other companies willing to fill their former niche.
That's what the post-WW2 world looked like: the developed countries had booming economies, but the poor countries fell further and further behind. Some even in absolute terms.
Yet, that time is frequently cited as the golden age that people harken back to.
I personally don't use LLMs to code, besides a few snippets or when i'm out of ideas what/how do to. But models like Starcoder and Code Llama is what i see people often using for this purpose. There are benchmarks for various languages, you can find those on Hugging Face.
Yes, it does, but some of us actually consider this to be a feature.
The issue with reversibility is that it’s not just reversibility - it’s also the power for the authorities to take your assets from you.
The question isn’t “do you want to be able to get your money back after it was stolen”, it’s really, “do you want the powers that be to be able to decide whose money it is.” We’ve been lucky to live in a world where “yes” is a reasonable answer. But there’s no guarantee that it’ll stay that way. And crypto is insurance against that possible change.
In what way is crypto an insurance there? Typically, ruthless regimes are good at separating you from your assets. I don't see any of the typical methods not working with crypto.
It's really only an insurance against marginally bad situations and there lots of other things work equally well.
To be clear, "crypto" is just a book that says these individuals own however many tokens. It doesn't guarantee that anyone will abide by what the books says. It doesn't guarantee that nobody will take your real wealth from you by force.
Thank you so much for this post, and Hello from Tokyo!
I'm currently working on an old fashioned website editing app, with a UI styled after today's note taking apps. I'm hoping that being able to work on my blog across devices without an internet connection - and without a like button or analytics script - will help me focus on what I want to write, instead of focusing on what will "sell". I'm thinking of putting an old fashioned "address book" page where I can list who I'm following, and manually publishing interesting emails I receive in response to my posts. It probably won't become big or earn me any money, but at least I'm having fun building it.
Thanks for reading, and wishing you all a great day too!
This is an issue with more than just the tech industry. It’s an issue with modern society itself.
Take the GDP, the number that when it’s first derivative goes negative, we shout “recession” and use it as an excuse for all manner of harmful (and sometimes beneficial) behaviors. What is GDP? It’s not a measure of wealth; it’s a measure of production.
Take the boots paradox, for example. A society making $50 boots that need replacing after a few months, will have a higher GDP than a society making $100 boots that last for years. And the shitty boots society, despite spending more on boots - to paraphrase Terry Pratchett - will still have soggy feat.
It’s a hard problem, and I can’t see any obvious way to solve it. Both in social networks, and in economics. For whatever reason, consumption seems to be much easier to measure than wealth.
There’s nothing that makes it inherently impossible to put bills this way in cash, though.
For example, in Japan, you can pay bills by taking them to the local konbini - which is probably no more than a couple minutes walk away - then handing them the bills. They scan barcodes, take your cash, stamp the bills, give you your change. Done. No need for ID or a bank account.
The reason that people can’t easily pay bills in cash in the US is not because it can’t be done.
To add to this point, it’s quite likely that the vast majority of JavaScript developers are using generators and symbols, whether they realize it or not. The reason is that your build system of choice will typically have been compiling async/await into a combination of generators and iterators for years now.
It’s probably getting to the point where it’s no longer necessary in a lot of cases, but these constructs that “nobody uses” were able to implement the newer and more widely features long before they were available in browsers.
I’m in the same boat here. I had a list of ~15,000 blog readers at some point, but gave up sending emails when most services wanted to charge me $1000~$2000/year, even when I only wanted to send 1-2 emails a year.
If there are any services that allow me to import my previous list and email them (very) occasionally for a reasonable price, I’d love to know about them.
If the source of the email signups was a blog, I feel like you can very reasonably use substack. I feel a little dicey doing so for my startup, but I may end up doing it and sending out hybrid email updates/blog posts.
The US does need to start protecting its manufacturing again, but it’d be lucky to start at a level as high as high end semiconductors. That’d be like a stroke victim trying to run before they re-learn to walk.
As others have pointed out, this means less services, more manufacturing, less consumption, a probably a lower standard of living. But with the business as usual alternative looking a lot like business as usual in the western Roman Empire circa 450 CE, taking a hit to your standard of living while investing in a future which you still have the slightest control over, maybe feels like a decent trade.