How times have changed when a neoliberal institution (not quite as bad as The Economist) openly says this:
> Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.
This is absolutely correct and it's wild we now live in a time when mainstream media just comes out and says it.
I agree with two general themes of this article:
1. This administration has done more to destroy American's global power than any other in history and it's not even closer. We live in a time when Europe is questioning its position of being America's dog. The Gulf states are questioning what they get out of America's security guarantee if America can't or won't protected them; and
2. Russia and China are huge winners here. China simply has to do nothing and not interrupt the US while they're making a historic and unprecedented mistake. And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf.
This is going to end very badly for the US and it will (IMHO) go down as the biggest own-goal in American history.
I think in the US we already have that; it's just that our current leadership is in love with oil and gas and thinks renewables are "woke" or something. The number of renewable energy projects that have been cancelled or stalled here in the past year+ is gross.
It is nice that some Trump supporters are seeing prices at the pump and are having second thoughts about their Dear Leader. But a) it's disappointing that that's what it takes, and b) he still has a rabid base of people who love him despite his policies being the exact opposite of what they need to prosper (not to mention many of his policies being the exact opposite of what he campaigned on).
So we can only assume that renewables will continue to be kneecapped in the US at least for the next ~3 years. Hopefully European countries are fast-tracking renewable projects, but those things take time to build and bring online. (Hopefully they've been doing so since the Ukraine war started, really. The current Iran-related energy crisis is bad, but it's not like Europe had been sitting pretty with energy resources a month ago.)
> And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf.
MAGA is investing hard in trying to kill the EU from within by exporting conservative dipshit organisations, blue-printed from the USA. I see al kinds of recruitment going on here. If they succeed there is a small chance Europe will betray Ukraine, but right now the momentum is going into the other direction. What events have shown is that criminal games are incompatible with civil society, and European leaders are finally learning to understand that you can't play with autocrats like Trump, Putin and Orban, because for the latter, their only modus is to exploit, to loiter, to steal, to create conflict, to escalate, to play the victim, to up their game. End game: everything ends in ruin. Crime knows only one game: zero sum. People are starting to understand it.
It's not just the EU, you can see these organizations in Canada and in Japan. For example, I watch youtube channels ostensibly created to discuss Japanese Real Estate (I'm thinking about Rakumachi) which suddenly pivot to posting American right wing talking points in Japanese on their shorts channel. (Their long form RE content is usually interesting)
1. your conclusion is based on a remark by one hardly representative american journalist. you said yourself this has been going on since the 40s. it's cycles of "oh no, crazy republican goes to war", then reasonable democrat continues the war. we know the drill.
China has played much much better chess so it's not surprise they're benefiting. However, I don't really see how China will benefit from Iran being in ruins. Can you elaborate on how China benefits ?
From what I can tell, The USA is either going for force a regime change or it's going to ruin Iran. Where will China get oil from then? You might say Russia but that's a precarious situation for them to be in.
The Belt and Road initiative gets a shot in the arm. No tarrifs, free trade, lower cost finance with fewer encumbrances. Efforts to establish the Renminbi as a second reserve currency have been quiet, but these trade alliances and alternate banking arrangements are already making it a possible reality. US perception is that belt and road was unpopular and a failure, but its little different from US economic imperialism. The amount of money flowing through BRICS and the rise of China as the world's largest creditor is testament to this.
Cheaper weapons have shown to be effe tive in holding off a technologically superior force, and China is both great at producing them and happy to sell them to spec.
The US not being able to produce weapons at a fast enough cadence to refill the stockpile is an indicator that US weapons manufacturing is currently unsustainable, and prohibitively expensive. Both are weakness.
The US has shown that it cannot maintain moderate effort on two fronts. Not only is it financially almost unable to do so, only by the good graces of being the reserve currency, it would significantly struggle to maintain distributed engagements - this is military intelligence if an adversary wanted to engineer multiple conflicts requiring US attention globally to spread the US thin.
> China has played much much better chess so it's not surprise they're benefiting.
They didn't play chess at all, but unlike the USA, they didn't poop on the board and didn't smudge the other players with their drool. We are forgetting now that the belt and road initiative, as well as the wolf warrior diplomacy, had put China on the lowest rankings in global perception. China had to do literally nothing to "play better", and they were smart enough to do so. The USA committing suicide--yeah, what can you do about it?
> The USA is either going for force a regime change or it's going to ruin Iran. Where will China get oil from then?
A positive story for China might be: a.) building port complexes and other industrial facilities is something China export as construction, engineering and financial services; b.) oil is a global commodity and a rising price everywhere doesn't create a relative disadvantage.
The US cannot ruin Iran short of the widespread use of nuclear weapons.
Air power has never resulted in regime change. Never. It takes boots on the ground and one just needs to look at a map. Iran is surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and the Gulf on the fourth.
Iran's drones and ballistic missiles are incredibly cheap, well-defended and impossible to meaningfully disrupt. The interceptors used to stop them are running out and increasingly ineffective. I think I read that the ballistic missile strike rate on Israel is now over 50%. What does it take to launch drones or even a ballistic missile? A cheap modification to any truck, basically.
The US cannot forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz because that would put them in close range to Iranian drone and missile strikes that the US doesn't have the weapon systems, interceptors and munitions to defeat. It's suicide.
Any escalation will end up much worse for Iran's neighbors than Iran because Iran is already built for economic isolation and self-reliance, thanks to years of criminal economic sanctions. You want to hit Iranian desalination plants? Well, that'll invite a hit on desalination plants in other Gulf states and that's going to end up much worse for them. Why? Remember those mountains I mentioned? They're covered in snow. Iran has ski resorts. Many people don't realize that. What does that mean? Just like California, they get significant freshwater from snow melt.
A ground invasion of the Iranian mainland has no staging ground. For Kuwait, we used Saudi Arabia. You can't stage across the mountains so you need an amphibious landing, much like D-Day. And it would need to be probably as complex and large. We simply don't have the ships, the soldiers or the logistics for that.
Basically, we have no options. This was unwinnable before we even started. This is why every president since Reagan refused Israel's attempts to start a war with Iran. Until Trump.
I honestly think he'd been fooled into thinking he could do a decapitation strike on Iran like Venezuela and get a friendly regime. That was never going to work. Iran has almost 50 years of hardening and maintaining a regime to resist US interference.
The one thing this administration seeems to care about is gas prices. This is why Iranian exports haven't been blocked. China is still getting oil from Iran. In fact last week the US lifted sanctions on Iranian oil, which was previously being sold below market. In January, Iran was selling oil for $48/barrel. Now they're selling it for >$100.
China has a massive reserve (~1.4 billion barrels) and has suspended exports of refined oil products. Countries friendly to us in the region are in for a world of hurt, most notably the Phillipines and Vietnam (Japan seems to have significant reserves like China, at least for now).
This war of choice on Israel's behalf has alienated and weakened Europe, the Gulf states and Asia. Iran is being smart about all this and allowing non-US oil to traverse the Strait, further putting a wedge between those countries and the US.
The US started it, has no path to victory and doesn't even know what victory is. It's up to Iran when this ends now and they're going to exact a price that will put them significantly ahead of where they were before this started. Ending of sanctions, tolls on ships traversing the Strait and/or reparations.
IMHO it's the biggest geopolitical mistake in US history and it's not even close.
I quite enjoyed the depth of that comment. Good write up.
Regarding countries friendly to the US - watching just how many foreign leaders have been diplomatically blunt or even hostile with the US has been interesting. Even the Australian prime minister, a famously boot-heeled position, has been publicly critical of the US.
Right now in Australia we are paying $3.30 AUD for a litre of diesel. That's over $8.50 USD per gallon.
You're basically critiquing a chart showing how purchasing power is decayed due to inflation because it isn't adjusted for "baseline" inflation. That doesn't make sense.
And yes, earlier variations are more impactful because compounding.
I will say that a better representation would be a logarithm of the inverse. The problem with doing it this way is that later changes look very small. $1.00 to $.99 is the same y-axis delta as $0.05 to $0.04 but the latter is very different.
I read recently that companies are getting almost resentful that they have to go through yuo to get your money. I keep thinking about that because I think it's true.
I read some of comments here and on other threads about PE and I keep seeing some variation of "this particular PE crime is an outlier, we can fix it". No, no you can't. PE isn't an aberration. It's just the natural extension to capitalism. It's inevitable.
This can be understood easily in Marxist terms, as unpopular as that is. What we're talking about is the workers relationship to the means of production.
You have a nusing home. The people who work there should own it. There's no reason not to. Instead there's this intermediary, some capital owner, who demands to extract profits from that. We've simply replaced the feudal lords of old with investment bankers. It's the ultimate in rent-seeking behavior.
Years ago I remember hearing about PE firms buying up trailer parks. For many this is their last refuge from being homeless. When they are homeless, it's not only devastating to them but it's expensive for everyone. Health issues, going to the ER more often, violence, law enforcement making sure homeowners don't have to see homless encampments, people can't hold down drugs, self-medication with drugs and so on.
We absolutely shouldn't drive up the price of mobile home pricing so rent-seekers can extract profits but we as a society choose that over housing security for people. That's not just wrong. It's state-sanctioned violence.
This nursing home PE squeeze is also state-sanctioned violence. Make no mistake. Arguably, it's even social murder [1].
And once again, it's super easy to understand in terms of the workers relationship to the means of production. Yet everybody thinks they'll be Jeff Bezos one day so it's super-important now to vote in the interests of the billionaire class. Yo uwon't be. And even if you are, do you really want to become rich this way? Is that what you want your legacy to be? That you made the last years of elderly people who needed care miserable?
Why do people think this is good? Or fixable by the politicians who are bought and paid for by the people profiting off of this?
There's a guy on Tiktok who is singlehandedly showing just how bad AI still is and how much it lies and hallucinates eg [1]. Watch a bunch of his videos.
So these tools can be useful when you know the subject matter. I've done queries and gotten objectively false answers. You really need to verify the information you get back. It's like these LLMs have no concept of true or false. They just say something that statistically looks right after ingesting Reddit. We've already seen cases of where ChatGPT legal briefs filed by actual lawyers include precedents that are completely made up eg [2].
There's a really interesting incentive in all this. People like to be told they're right and generally be gassed up, even when they're completely wrong. So if you just optimize for engagement and continued queries and subscriptions, you're just going to get a bunch of "yes men" AIs.
I still think this technology has so far to go. I'm somewhat reminded of Uber actually. Uber was burning VC cash at a horrific rate and was basically betting the company (initially) on self-driving. Full self-driving is still far away even though there are useful things cars can automate like lane-following on the highway and parking.
I simply can't see how the trillions spent on AI data centers can possibly be recouped.
After randomly breaking the AM4 CPU and motherboard in my 4 year old PC last year and seeing that at the time I'd spent almost a new PC to get new parts and rebuild it. Less if I wanted to do a complete rebuild myself but I'm over building PCs. I've done that for years.
It was an expensive mistake as I bought a few options to experiment including a NUC and an M4 Mac Mini but eventually bought a 9800X3D 5070Ti PC for <$2 and for no reason in particular I bought a 64GB DDR5-6000 kit for $200 in August or so. I checked recently and that kit is pushing $1000. I also bought a 4080 laptop and bought a 64GB kit and an extra SSD for it too last year.
That's pretty lucky given what's happened since. I don't claim any kind of foresight about what would happen.
I do kind of want to take the parts I have and build another AM4 PC. The 5900XT is not a bad option with 16 cores for ~$300 but my DDR4 RAM is almost useless because the best deals now are for combos of CPU + motherboard + RAM at steep discounts.
You can get some good deals on prebuilts still. Not as good as 6+ months ago but still not bad. Costco has a 5080 PC for $2300. There's no way I'm going overboard and building a 128GB+ PC right now.
I've seen multiple RAM spikes. We had one at the height of the crypto hysteria IIRC but this is significantly worse and is also impacting SSDs. I kinda wish I'd bought 1-2 4TB+ SSDs last year but oh well.
We're really waiting for the AI bubble to pop. Part of me think sthat'll be in the next year but it could stay irrational substantially longer than that.
The C30 64GB kits are nearly impossible to buy now, so, well done. Got one in September '23 for ~$380 AUD, on the rare occasions it's available today it's been over $1600 AUD.
I upgraded my UPS to a sine interactive unit to minimise the risk of it dying to bad power while the market is so crazy...
I believe there's a Chicxulub level meteor headed for social media and it's not addiction. It's liability. We, as a society, don't really care about addiction. That's reflected in our government. Gambling, nicotine, alcohol, drugs, etc. Remember with tobacco it was the harm not the addiction that was their undoing.
Core to all of this is what's colloquially become known as The Algorithm. Google in particular has sucessfully propagandized this idea that The Algorithm is a neutral black box over which we have no influence (for search). But every feature and behavior of any kind of recommendation or ranking or news feed algorithm is the result of a human intentionally or negligently creating that behavior.
So one thing most of us here should be aware of is to get more distribution for a post or a video or whatever is through engagement. That is likes, comments, shares, reposts, quotes and so on. All these companies measure those and optimize for engagement.
That sounds neutral and possibly harmless but it's not and I think it's foreseeably not harmless and no doubt there's evidence along the way to demonstrate that harm.
We've seen this with some very harmful ideas that get a lot of traction online. Conspiracy theories, antivaxxer nonsense, doxxing queer people, swatting, the manosphere and of course eating disorders. ED content has a long history on the Internet and you'll find pro-ana or "thinspiration" sites and forums going back to the 1990s.
So I think social media sites are going to have three huge problems going forward:
1. That they knowingly had minors (and children under 13, which matters for COPPA) on their platforms and they profited from that by knowingly or negligently selling those audiences to advertisers;
2. They knew they had harmful content on their platforms but hid Section 230 in particular as simply being the host for third-party content. I believe that shield is going to fail; and
3. They knowingly or negligently pushed that content to children to increase overall engagement.
One clue to all this is you see Mark Zuckerberg who wants to push age verification into the OS. Isn't that weird? The one company that doesn't have an OS thinks the OS should handle that or, more specifically, should be liable for age verification? That's so strange.
In an era where we have LLMs (and the systems that came before) that can analyze posted content (including video) and derive features about that content you don't get to plead ignorance or even user preference. These companies will be held liable for the harm caused by content they distribute.
Most people just don't understand what a monumental rewrite of global politics this is and (IMHO) it will go down as the worst foreign policy mistake in US history and it's not even close. Some might say "what about Vietnam?" No, this is worse, geopolitically. WhY/ Because there was never any possibility of success. The US simply doesn't have the military capability to depose the regime or open the Strait and Pentagon military planners all knew this beforehand.
The big winners are:
- China. They're already going renewable at a rapid pace. They have a massive stockpile of oil (~1.4B barrels) and they're still receiving oil from Iran. This diminishes US influence in the the world and increases China's influence;
- Russia: this crisis will probably force the West to make peace with Russia and they'll retain any current Ukrainian territory just to secure Russian energy exports, particularly natural gas;
- Iran: the sanctions are over. Prior to all this Iran was selling oil to China for below market rate, less than $50/barrel. Now? They're legally able to sell it and get market rates, which are more like ~$120/barrel. Iran may well still get a regime of charging ships to traverse the Strait after the war is over;
Who are the losers?
- Europe: this is going to massively increase energy costs for years;
- Ukraine: see above (Russia);
- The US: massively decreased influence, particularly in the Middle East;
- Israel: there will be no regime change in Iran, Iran will come out in a better position and this may well be the first crack in the US-Israel relationship because Israel dog-walked the US into this war. The Iron Dome has shown to be not as impenetrable as once thought;
- The Gulf states: they face a tough choice between remaining US client states or breaking free. Breaking free probably means their monarchies and despotic regimes will fall. The myth of the US security guarantee has been broken. These regimes will probably stick with the US for their own survival and we may see some of them fall anyway (eg Bahrain).
I agree with your main point: "just go renewable" is both naive and utterly useless advice. That's a decades-long project. Also, who makes all the solar panels (and probably windmills)? China.
It is a little different because the US is a net energy exporter now and definitely wasn't in the 1970s. Still, there will be higher prices for everything and the US can't realistically block exports to keep prices low because other countries will stop sending us stuff.
Were the president anyone else, they would be impeached and removed from office. That's how bad this is. But we live in a post-truth world the the president is the leader of a cult.
> Russia: this crisis will probably force the West to make peace with Russia and they'll retain any current Ukrainian territory just to secure Russian energy exports, particularly natural gas;
The West is not the only party in this war and Ukraine has shown many times that it can do its own thing. Ukraine was supposed to roll over and die in 3 days and it has just managed to liberate about 500sqkm of territory, 4 years after the start of the war. Plus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22xoretdhbm
Ukraine is completely dependent on arms from the US and Europe to sustain the war effort. Ukraine is running out of men to serve in the Army. Ukraine has no path to reclaim the territory it's lost.
I'm not making a judgment about whether or not this is right. This is just a sober analysis of the situation. And that is that the war is stalemated and the only way this gets resolved is to declare peace at the current borders. This grand misadventure by the US and Israel in Iran just made that more likely.
Your sober analysis of the situation overlooks what many respectable analysts are saying.
Ukraine has become probably the de facto #1 drone based military in the world right now.
It's made the first production use drone type that uses practically 0 Chinese manufactured components. It's making more types that use off the shelf components but are otherwise 100% Ukrainian made. Its drone types are getting more and more sophisticated and larger, with the biggest having a 3000km, 1 ton payload. That's besides the ground or sea drones.
Watch the video I linked (and several more from the same channel if you have time).
Also Russia's army is being attrited faster than reconstituted, at the moment. That's a long way to say that the Russian army in Ukraine is shrinking.
Ukraine is dependent on European finances. And the EU has guaranteed funding for at least 2 more years. The US isn't helping with any equipment, weapons. Every US weapons Ukraine uses is paid for, by Ukraine and its allies.
The real danger is if Europe flinches, which would be a monumentally bad decision as Ukraine is finally winning the war of attrition.
> Ukraine has become probably the de facto #1 drone based military in the world right now.
I think Iran may well have that crown. Ukraine certainly was a testbed for drone use, first starting with cheaper but still military grades drones like the Bayraktar [1] but now with more homegrown versions. But Russia has followed suite and adapted.
> Also Russia's army is being attrited faster than reconstituted,
Russia has a larger army and a larger population. It also has several knobs it can adjust with the biiannual draft [2]. Russia has oil, raw materials, can produce its own food, a history of conscription and what is basically a war economy [3]. And thanks to an unlucky spate of oligarchs falling out of windows and dying in car accidents, Putin is still in control of the country.
Zellensky on the other hand doesn't have most of those things and is subject to the changes in political winds in Europe and the US. He also has the added pressure of Europe's energy crisis.
I also believe that it was Ukraine who on their own decided to blow up Nordstream to prevent Europe settling with Russia to turn back on the gas supply.
> The real danger is if Europe flinches, which would be a monumentally bad decision as Ukraine is finally winning the war of attrition.
The West gets bored amd impatient. I remember thinking this in 2023: Putin is just going to hold on until the West gives up or mores onto some new crisis. There's a quote misattributed to Kissinger that goes "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
I also don't agree Ukraine is winning any war, let alone one of attrition. Weirdly, this has become a WW1 trench war basically but with drones. And look at how the Western Front changed from 1914 to 1917.
You are so far behind the news that it's funny. Bayraktar stopped being good in this war - or cutting edge - about 3 years ago, which is an eternity.
Do yourself a favor and ask your favorite chatbot about the Ukraine drone industry and their military use. Ask about FP-1, FP-2, FP-5 Flamingo, Ukraine's ballistic missiles, their ground drones, their naval drones, their Shahed interceptor drones (which the Gulf States want to buy!), fiber optic FPV drones, etc.
I'm actually following this war daily and have followed since it started.
Use your chatbot and if you want more look for Paul Warburg, Lines on Maps (both YouTube), UnderstandingWar.org, etc - also follow their sources.
Regular people have NO idea what kind of military Ukraine has built.
If Ukraine's economy is supported for 2 more years, their odds of bringing down the Russian military are probably 80%.
Yes, but is it a mistake or deliberate? The Iran war has been planned since GW Bush.
Now we have a president who hates the EU and Ukraine more than he hates Russia and China and he has Greenland ambitions.
He is currently dragging out the war and Rubio was in the EU to string people along yet again.
If he drags out the war long enough, the EU might need to make concessions on certain issues.
What the EU should do but is too stupid to do: It should immediately negotiate with China and Russia to create jealousy (that is what Trump does, he understands that) and say: While you are doing your extended Iran adventure, we'll drop sanctions on Russian gas and import LNG.
That is literally the only language Trump understands and then the deep state will put him on a leash. Trump would hate nothing more than EU overtures to Putin while he is left out of the negotiations.
Sometimes you have to use all options to get things done.
> I agree with your main point: "just go renewable" is both naive and utterly useless advice. That's a decades-long project. Also, who makes all the solar panels (and probably windmills)? China.
This is the key point a lot of people miss, the vast majority of equipment needed to actually use renewables requires Chinese products. If you go 100% renewables, you're only replacing one form of dependence (oil) for another,
Once you get NREs set up you don't need a constant uninterrupted supply of replacements as fossil fuels do (we burn them after all).
We'd need replacements as old infrastructure ages out but it seems much easier to wait out a supply disruption compared to oil since this just means using old equipment while the supply is cut; sure some might break after a while but electricity production wouldn't fall immediately.
I can't believe they made an account for that comment. Like each action carries the same weight. Renewables, esp solar are super low maintenance. When you buy panels, barring some manufacturing defect, you buy them for the life of the project, not the panel.
Once you have a sane people in charge of policy the building out of renewables quickly using Chinese panels and turbines can be accompanied by incentives do build up domestic manufacturing for them.
Solar and wind equipment lasts a long time so it is OK if it takes a decade or two to ramp up domestic production to the point that it can handle all our needs.
Speaking from experience, I had Netflix for years without thinking about it, starting at $8/month. At that price I didn't care if I watched it or not. Then it went to $10, $12, etc. Once it got to $15-16 (I forget), I cancelled it.
I now sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on shows I like and just rotate which streaming services I have. Yes, this is anecdotal.
It's hard to find data on how common rotating streaming services is. I would guess not common. I found this from 2021 showing the number of streaming services the average US household has [1]. It's worth noting that this was based on lockdown-era data.
The number if still quite high. I still have 3-4 mainly because my ISP gives me 1 and Amazon Prime bundles it. Were it not for those, I'd probably stick with 2. This is imperfect data because is it the same 4 or are some or all of these rotated? We just don't know.
Most of the data around this is how streaming is cannibalizing satellite and cable. But at this rate Netflix will cost $30+ in 10-15 years. Will it still have growing revenue and the same subscriber numbers? There is price elasticity here.
This makes sense to me as a strategy for most users.
I cancelled a year or two ago, but not for the price changes alone. I didn't like the new interface much, and I found myself endlessly scrolling through the same things looking for stuff to watch.
I'm not sure if Netflix vastly removed most of its content, or they just made discoverability a nightmare, but it felt often like I 'ran out of stuff to watch.'
It's hard to justify 20 something a month for what is essentially a few 6 episode shows that will last one season, and maybe 4 or 5 passable movies in a year. It seems rather silly to me to pay for that all year.
I think this is a lot more common and I suspect people decide to do monthly and that they'll cancel after catching up on shows ... and then they don't cancel. So I'm sure the streaming services don't care that people do this because they might come out ahead anyways.
This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here. It's a relatively new term (~50 years old) but it has a lot of history behind it, specifically with enclosures. The Enclosure Acts [1] were a series of laws that took what was common property open to all and made them private property. This was embryonic capitalism [2].
Anyway, I remember that Google demo of making restaurant reservations. I believe it was scripted and had a human fallback. Little did we know that Google would drop the bag on the whole transformer thing that came out soon after. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some of the same people involved.
What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se but a moat. The entire proposition of OpenAI is that they can build a moat and recoup the billions of investment. I'm not convinced that's true, which is part of the author's point, for some of the same reasons:
1. Cost of hardware and training and tokens keeps going down. We saw the same thing with Bitcoin mining. I wonder if we'll see ASICs enter the fray here too; and
2. China will make sure no one company owns this future. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. It is a national security issue for China.
Where I disagree is that this will be an end for the rent-seeking class. I think we're bouldering towards a dystopian future of even more wealth concentration where most people get displaced by automation and AI, which suppresses wages and ultimately leads to a situation where a handful of people have all the money and almost everyone else has no money.
> This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here.
It's being used in a more literal-meanings-of-the-words sense ("pursuing monopoly rents") rather than the narrow economic term-of-art sense of "pursuing monopoly rents through influence over public policy by means that do not create, or which inhibit the creation of, additional wealth" (the definition you seem to be complaining about it not adhering to without actually providing.)
But most of the usages would also be correct in the narrower sense, because virtually ever actor referred to as rent-seeking in the broader sense are also rent-seeking in the narrow sense as part of that. (E.g., actively lobbying for "safety" regulation which would disproportionately impair non-incumbent new competitors.)
> What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se
but a moat.
Pursuing a moat is just another term for seeking monopoly rents by any means, including rent-seeking in the narrow sense.
(There's also obviously an ideological angle in creating the term "rent seeking" as a term of criticism to those seeking monopoly rents through means that the creators of the term disapprove of, excluding seeking the same kind of rents by other means from "rent seeking".)
No, a moat is a competitive advantage/ OpenAI in particular is predicated on the belief that they will have a compeitive advantage. ASML is a compeitive advantage with EUV (for now). You can overcharge for if you have a compeititve advantage but that's not the same as rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is fundamentally intermediation like a health insurer putting themselves between a patient and a healthcare provider or privatizing grazing lands or controlling water supplies from snowmelt (like the Resnicks) or privatizing trains in the UK.
Microsoft has a compeitive advantage with Windows, Google with its search engine and the ad business that funds it, Amazon with AWS or NVidia with GPUs. There are alternatives to all of these things but these companies maintain dominance with a combination of scale, cost, technology and network effects. That's not rent-seeking in a broad or narrow sense.
Rent-seeking would be Microsoft lobbying lawmakers to require schools and governments to purchase Windows, for example.
No, a moat is a barrier to people closing the gap of an existing competitive advantage. The barrier is literally the point of the metaphor. If there is no barrier, there is no moat, just a transitory advantage; that's the whole basis of the famous "we have no moat and neither does OpenAI" memo at Google; its not that the big established players had (at that time, or now) no current competitive advantage over open source competition, its that there was no structual barrier preserving it.
> Rent-seeking is fundamentally intermediation
No, rent-seeking is using influence over public policy as a means to extracting monopoly rents. State policy favoring intermediation is one manner of rent seeking, yes.
> Rent-seeking would be Microsoft lobbying lawmakers to require schools and governments to purchase Windows, for example.
That is an example, but lobbying for specific mandates for purchases from the specific firm is a fairly extreme case of rent-seeking, not the general case; a more common for of rent-seeking is firms in a narrow group of leading incumbents lobbying for various standards (either for public market access or government contracts) to be set for the industry that are not a particular burden for existing large firms to meet but which create additional friction for new competitors. In the specific case of software, this can include lobbying for rules that specifically treat open source solutions as suspect and dangerous, as well.
> If there is no barrier, there is no moat, just a transitory advantage
A moat can very much be transitory and caused by natural (or at least, not specifically intended) factors. Perhaps we could then call it something different, like a river as opposed to a moat, but the strategic effect is the same either way so it makes sense to use the established term for it.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree.
Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college.
By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
And the last 10+ years has taken this further where we now have "side gigs" or "side hustles" or people who are desperate to be "influencers" or "Youtubers" or whatever. Any hobby you have needs to be monetized to get by. You have to sell something, even if it's advice on how to do the thing.
That's what's meant by "hobbies are a luxury". It means you're earning enough not to need to monetize some portion of your life. And the number of people who can do that is continually decreasing.
The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Every aspect of our lives is getting financialized so somebody else can get wealthier. Every second of your time and thing you do needs to be monetized and exploited.
Gambling isn't a net negative for society. It's just a negative. There are no positive aspects to it. Gambling addicts are incredibly likely to commit suicide. It's incredibly destructive.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
True, but somewhat misleading. This includes parents that work part-time. If we only include full-time work then it's never been over 50%. Largely this reflects the second wave of feminism and women being able to get jobs they want!
> Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
Employers tend to prefer full-time employees because they are more efficient. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee and you'd rather get the max number of hours out of them. It's actually quite hard to get a part-time job in many fields. It's true that part-time employment has gone up but again I think this is largely good! And in any case the ratio of part-time employees has barely changed since the 1960s: ~17% today vs ~13% back then. So it's hardly the typical case.
> The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Silly Marxist voodoo economics. Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
> Employers tend to prefer full-time employees ...
They don't [1][2].
> Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
Small businesses absolutely fit the model, specifically "petite bourgeoisie" [3]. The problem with small business owners is they think they're capital owners (or will be someday) so they vote for the interests of capital owners but most small businesses are just jobs you have to buy with typically less pay and less security.
This is a trite response that doesn't engage with what was originally stated.
The double edged brilliance/danger of capitalism is that it constantly opens up and moves into new markets. This is good, it means once the market determines a need, capital investment can accelerate production of the good that meets that need.
But the flip side is it is coming for everything. Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient. And there are genuine problems with that.
Regulation has been the historical response, but we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
This is a contradiction that needs to be resolved. One can be pro-capitalism or anti-capitalism and come to the same conclusion.
> we've seen concentrated wealth chip away at regulations for decades or even rip them apart overnight.
There are more and more regulations every day. Oil refineries are being abandoned in California due to regulations so heavy there's no way for them to operate anymore. A friend of mine pulled his business out of California due to stifling regulations.
> Everything will be marketized and monetized and accelerated and made efficient.
I give my unwanted items to the thrift store rather than the landfill. Others sell it on eBay. This is monetizing/making things more efficient. And it's good.
but not universally. oil refineries were causing asthma and environmental degradation.
them moving to another state is a regulatory failure (they shouldn't have another jurisdiction to move to, they should just operate without imposing negative externalities on others, spelling of the refineries).
what value is clean air? what is the value of a human life? how much is your attention worth?
these are questions that capitalism should not answer, but will nevertheless try to.
Socialist economies are much more environmentally destructive, because they are so inefficient they cannot afford the luxury of being environmentally cleaner.
The problem isn't capitalism. That's just poor thinking from someone who has spent too much time thinking about political ideology. The problem is how we finance campaigns combined with gerrymandering. And if you want proof, look at corruption in communist and formerly communist countries. It makes the US look like a bunch of choir boys by contrast. Thinking that it is about capitalism is just an attempt to wedge in some political ideology into a practical problem of governance and a sign someone has never actually had to lead real humans before.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
This is caused by the government sucking up ever larger portions of the economy, while also constricting it with ever more onerous regulations. It has to be paid for somehow.
> Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.
This is absolutely correct and it's wild we now live in a time when mainstream media just comes out and says it.
I agree with two general themes of this article:
1. This administration has done more to destroy American's global power than any other in history and it's not even closer. We live in a time when Europe is questioning its position of being America's dog. The Gulf states are questioning what they get out of America's security guarantee if America can't or won't protected them; and
2. Russia and China are huge winners here. China simply has to do nothing and not interrupt the US while they're making a historic and unprecedented mistake. And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf.
This is going to end very badly for the US and it will (IMHO) go down as the biggest own-goal in American history.
reply