While I agree that development has gotten more complex (often unnecessarily), compared to the 90s, the sheer number of potential consumers now available seems hard to justify complaining about.
When I looked into this the numbers suggested that energy-wise we'd be extracting a drop in the bucket. There are concerns for local effects though (e.g. earthquakes).
The thought experiment makes no sense. Once the basilisk is created it has no reason to create an incentive structure that applies to the past because the past is fixed. If the basilisk is actually superintelligence it's not going to fall for the sunk cost fallacy.
Madeleine Clare Elish described AI as providing “moral crumple zones” (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2757236) where it can serve as a buffer of plausible deniability to deflect blame when it behaves irresponsibly. For the corporation defects in the LLM are a feature.
Anyone who doesn't recognize that LLMs main usefulness to corporations is censorship at the base information level is very behind the times
"oh wow this is so easy, we can filter all our requests through this .gov model and not have to track all the pesky open source software that has been sanctioned ourselves"
I assume that some of the doomsaying perspective comes from operating under the assumption that Congress will be about as functional as it has been lately and not actually get around to explicitly delegating.
And that this court will continue to flagrantly misinterpret laws to reach their desired policy goals. For an example see Sackett v. EPA where the majority very carefully fails to understand the difference between adjacent and adjoining in order to cull environmental regulations they don't like. From Kavanaugh:
"In my view, the Court’s “continuous surface
connection” test departs from the statutory text, from 45
years of consistent agency practice, and from this Court’s
precedents. The Court’s test narrows the Clean Water Act’s
coverage of “adjacent” wetlands to mean only “adjoining”
wetlands. But “adjacent” and “adjoining” have distinct
meanings: Adjoining wetlands are contiguous to or
bordering a covered water, whereas adjacent wetlands
include both (i) those wetlands contiguous to or bordering a
covered water, and (ii) wetlands separated from a covered
water only by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river
berm, beach dune, or the like."
> You mean like every Court has done since Wickard v. Filburn?
Yes, its definitely not a new issue. Which is why I'm not a fan of the judiciary grabbing so much power for itself, the least representative and least accountable branch of government.
From what I understand, commercial real estate is also going through some devaluing so maybe those rents should be going in the other direction? This seems like a last ditch attempt to keep things together long enough until rates come down (I'm not sure they'll come down enough in the near term.). I'm hoping businesses choose to move - or maybe go storefront free for a while - to speed up the correction. (I've noticed several businesses operating (purely?) out of a nearby storage place for a while now.)
Intuitively, it seems rare for any rent-seeking business (such as a landlord) to decrease prices, especially for an active tenancy. But even for a vacancy, they will only do that when they are absolutely forced to, and they will delay it for as long as possible (better to wait two months to fill a $1k/month vacancy than to reduce it to $800/month).
On the other hand, they will happily increase prices without being forced to, especially since they can do that while they have an active tenant.
Why would a landlord ever decrease the price of an active tenancy? It would only happen if the tenant threatened to end the tenancy. That’s more likely for commercial tenants than residential, but it still requires a higher “activation energy” than its corollary, where the landlord increases the price on a whim.
The answer is when the market turns - from going up or steady, to down.
If they can.
The big issue with rents right now IMO, is that commercial real estate typically has short length adjustable rate (or even ballon) financing, which causes catastrophic problems when you have a combination of:
Which is common when we enter a recession due to increasing borrowing costs.
The landlord either has to burn their free cash hoping for a recovery, or default. If it’s a short period of time, the first can happen. If it’s a fake out, then they’re left with no cash and still go bankrupt - so then need to liquidate, but it’s often when a bunch of other folks are doing the same, so prices go through the floor and it’s a bloodbath for existing investors.
And since the low interest rate environment was going on so long (with QE even!) almost everyone was leveraged to the gills on cheap credit, often to the point they had little to no free cash flow even at that point. It wasn’t just commercial of course - residential properties stopped having positive cash flow in some cases nearly a decade ago, but still kept going up. Residential financing offers more opportunities to insulate oneself from this kind of crazy though.
It happens normally of course due to the business cycle, but this has been an exceptionally long time without real monetary tightening (since well before ‘08), so the overhang is bigger.
It’s why all those dead malls are still sitting there.
So, in the fashion of wil-e-coyote off the cliff, no one wants to look down. Because it’s a long way down.
Yep. Importantly, employment contracts. Employees are extremely resistant to wage decreases but they'll passively tolerate it in the form of inflation. Without inflation, they'd have to be fired and replaced with someone else just to get around that psychological obstacle.
Moving for most small businesses comes with a heavy cost. If you’re in a high regulation area like California, even moving down the block would first of all require a ton of permitting and time. Second, foot traffic is not equal everywhere. Even if you move buildings in the same neighborhood, availability or lack of something as simple as parking, can affect your business significantly. Lastly, even if you figure everything out, moving comes with the costs of making the new place up to date to align with your business. For some businesses these costs can run into millions (big restaurants). In most cases, businesses will either pay the higher rent or simply shut down.
I had a similar experience and was left wondering whether I could add progressively larger units of work to the alarm clock task to get things done while still "asleep". :)
Add whatever challenges you are currently working on at work or your side-hustle to your alarm. Soon, you will see your productivity skyrocket all while getting a few more minutes of much needed "sleep".
Related to preventing value getting shoveled into the void, I was reading an article about tax write offs for movies that were never released - even though they were basically done. The fun suggestion someone had was that the movies be released to the public domain, since in some sense, society was footing the bill. It seems like something along those lines would be interesting here.
I believe that some retailer special interest group put out some numbers that did not support any real increase in shoplifting/shrinkage. Initially they made a claim otherwise but they ended up backpedaling. Oddly, the numbers around shrinkage from self-checkout seems to be persistent though.
