IIUC, the only issue with the jones act requiring US-built vessels is that previous the US Navy used to buy US-built vessels and lease them out below-cost and don't do that anymore. It was never economically to use US-built vessels but we've stoped subsidizing it anymore.
The US navy did not. The US Treasury used to provide "differential subsidies" to allow US flagged vessels the ability to win cargos in international trade versus non-us flagged vessels with lower operating costs.
This is a reason I also like the web is that after the page loads I can just do stuff instead of getting kicked out to have to update the app ... Or even having to re-log in ...
> He told the BBC that the company owns what he called a “full stack” of technologies, from chips to YouTube data to models and frontier science research. This integrated approach, he suggested, would help the company weather any market turbulence better than competitors.
I guess but is it better for an investor to own 2 shares of Google or 1 share of OpenAI and 1 share of TSMC?
Like I have no doubt that being vertically integrated as a single company has lot of benefits but one can also create a trust that invests vertically as well.
There may be firm specific risk etc., but there is also a concept of double marginalization, where monopolies that exist across the vertical layers of a production chain will be less efficient than a single monopoly, because you only get a single layer of dead weight loss rather than multiple.
In more traditional industries investors seem to prefer less integration. One example being Siemens, who divested their Healthineers and Energy divisions and all their share values increased by a lot.
Maybe this is because these industries are better understood and there is less risk involved, but I wonder if the current big software companies will take similar paths in the future.
Investors often prefer stocks that are not themselves a portfolio (like AWS and Amazon retail being bundled; or your Siemens example). Lots of people would like to buy into AWS's margins without also buying Amazon retail's margins. But this is different from vertical integration that creates competitive advantage.
Well if AI goes poof - the equity markets take a really big bad hit. So I would probably move out of equity and into something more concrete and reinvest if you can time the market bottom.
Nvidia earnings tomorrow will be the litmus test if things are going to topple over.
it might bring in the schedules, but since it probably wouldn't cause there to be an actual hole, its really more about long term fab build plans than anything else
> The last piece of this economic riddle, which we haven’t mentioned thus far, is that elected governments (who appoint and direct employment regulators) often believe they have a mandate to protect people’s employment and livelihoods. And the straightforward way that mandate gets applied, in the face of technological changes, is to protect human jobs by saying, “This safety function must be performed or signed off by a human.”
I mean the role of you to go jail if something goes wrong is pretty important.... It unfortunately often doesn't work but the lengths at which well paid people go to avoid and then shorten prison sentences really should demonstrate this is the only punishment that works.
We cannot have computers solely in charge of stuff because the computer cannot have responsibility. If you take the radiologist out of the loop then you should take the responsibility.
> The arguments always feel to me too similar "it is good Carnegie called in the Pinkerton's to suppress labor
Is that an actual EA argument?
The value is all at the margins. Like Carnegie had legitimate functional businesses that would be profitable without Pinkerton's. So without Pinkerton's he'd still be able to afford probably every philanthropic thing he did so it doesn't justify it.
I don't really follow the EA space but the actual arguments I've heard are largely about working in FANG to make 3x the money outside of fang to allow them to donate 1x ~1.5x the money. Which to me is very justifiable.
But to stick with the article. I don't think taking in billions via fraud to donate some of it to charity is a net positive on society.
> I don't think taking in billions via fraud to donate some of it to charity is a net positive on society.
it could be though, if by first centralizing those billions, you could donate more effectively than the previous holders of that money could. the fraud victims may have never donated in the first place, or have donated to the wrong thing, or not enough to make the right difference.
When you work for something that directly contradicts peaceful civil society you are basically saying the mass murder of today is ok because it allows you to assuage your guilt by giving to your local charity - its only effective if altruism is not your goal.
A janitor at the CIA in the 1960s is certainly working at an organization that is disrupting the peaceful Iranian society and turning it into a "death to America" one. But I would not agree that they're doing a net-negative for society because the janitor's marginal contribution towards that objective is 0.
It might not be the best thing the janitor could do to society (as compared to running a soup kitchen).
you missed this part: "The arguments always feel to me too similar"
> The value is all at the margins. Like Carnegie had legitimate functional businesses that would be profitable without Pinkerton's. So without Pinkerton's he'd still be able to afford probably every philanthropic thing he did so it doesn't justify it.
That isn't what OP was engaging with though, they aren't asking for you to answer the question 'what could Carnegie have done better' they are saying 'the philosophy seems to be arguing this particular thing'.
I disagree, it's woeful ignorance (and sometimes even willful).
When Amazon and all first came out they didn't charge sales taxes and states were pretty unhappy because largely nobody was paying the sales taxes they were supposed to on their tax returns.
Maybe I just have low standards like "never click the link from the Nigerian prince who needs assistance moving funds", but this again seems like a "they never encounter it so why would they know it" situation, judged harshly because of fundamental attribution error. [0]
* Most Americans have no other encounters with "use taxes" in their day-to-day lives.
* It's natural to assume the vendor (or new Internet Computer Thing) is continuing to handle it, especially when that's how all their regular purchases work.
* The tax functionally didn't exist for many decades, at least when the retailer had no in-state presence.
> states [...] tax returns
22.7% of Americans in states without income tax: "The what?" :p
> I'd rather take a financial hit than act so weak and passive.
What's passive about what Europeans are doing?
They marked products as USA-origin and sales of those products are way down (or they just pulled the USA products from the shelf). It's basically an infinite tariff.
It's not like every single Chinese consumer decided they didn't want American soybeans. More authoritarian countries have strong import controls; helps with both having high (inefficient) employment but also your citizens aren't going to wonder why all these cool stuff (fridges, etc) are always imported and the local stuff sucks.
Yeah, there's an economist comment on "We can afford everything that we produced".
Like when the Apple is produced it's not because a dollar bill was sowen into the ground. The actual inputs of production are not money but money is the lubricant that allows the goods and services to flow around in the economy. We always run into the situation where goods and services are produced and not demanded and that causes them to no longer be produced but the lack of money didn't cause their existence no more than money produced them in the first place.
Without it, societies had to have informal debts where you knew you helped your neighbor harvest crops so they would later do something for you (or perhaps you helped them harvest their crops because they provided shelter). That whole barter shit is made up.
reply