I think this discounts the nature of the threat. American science has been systematically gutted and will be rebuilding for a generation even after it stops, and we’re seeing a lot of effort to put anti-competitive measures in place: from blocking deployment of green energy and removal of EV chargers to forcing fossil fuel infrastructure choices which lock in fossil fuel-based industrial processes for a decade. Japan’s phones were both very unusual, not repeated much elsewhere (due to language support) and they had a world-class electronics industry backing that, whereas ours was moved to China to save on labor costs.
We’re not developing cool tech if we don’t have the industrial capacity to make it or a domestic market. We’ll just get poorer and further behind.
Here in DC is pretty similar - I just checked the Silver Spring Regal and it’d be $82 plus tax for an 8pm showing tonight. I think part of this is the push to promo/membership programs — if you’re price sensitive, you’re not paying $9.54 for a medium soda (not making that up) so they make their margin on the people who just pay and everyone else gets some kind of discount program which gives the company data mining / ad revenue opportunity.
It’s super expensive and it takes forever to build—so much so that fossil fuel companies fund “libertarian” voices to use it as an attack on environmentalists because nuclear means decades of unabated fossil fuel sales. If you commit to solar or wind, you start cutting into their business within as little as months.
I think it’s because it’s ignoring the impact of concentration and the range of affected jobs. When, say, people switched from animals as the primary source of motive power for shipping, relatively few people immediately lost their livelihood because the things now using engines still employed tons of people (a delivery guy had to learn to drive but the rest of the job was similar) and a bunch of new jobs were created.
Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.
Perhaps white collar employees have felt jobs not conducted in an office are beneath them. Because a wide range of physical jobs pay a lot more than office work already
Not many pay “a lot more”—your plumber is not taking home what she charges you—and that often comes with unpleasant working conditions, overtime, or extended time away from home. That’s like talking about tech salaries as if most people are L7 staff engineers at big tech companies.
Most people are not making that much in blue collar work, but even if they were, it’s also not like freshly-laid off people can just switch overnight. Lots of that work isn’t great for middle aged people, etc. and anyone retraining is going to need support for training, certifications, etc. but that’s happening when they have the financial obligations of a successful mid-career person.
For example, say Google actually developed AGI and canned everyone. What happens to the market in Mountain View when everyone is trying to enter construction work or become auto mechanics at the same time that those industries are hammered by a lack of customers, and the real-estate market suddenly has entire blocks for sale?
That last part might seem extreme but I saw it in San Diego in the 90s: the defense contractors laid tons of people off after the Cold War collapse, and that meant that entire neighborhoods went from having streets of engineers who worked at the same places all scrambling at the same time. Fortunately, that wasn’t permanent or every sector of the economy (and some of them were able to repurpose things like carbon fiber aerospace techniques into golf clubs and bicycle frames) but there were literally people with engineering Ph.Ds competing for $15/hour QA jobs just to have health insurance.
> the United States has emitted more CO2 than any other country to date: at around 400 billion tonnes since 1751, it is responsible for 25% of historical emissions; this is twice more than China – the world’s second-largest national contributor
It’s a common fossil fuel industry talking point, which hopes that the listener doesn’t realize that the climate changes in the past which weren’t deadly happened on much slower time scales. We have a much larger human population now so if you’re saying “nature will survive” you’re also saying that you’re okay with millions of people dying or becoming refugees.
Let China continue to cancel fossil fuel plants as they roll out renewables and electrify at rapid scale? It’s not 1980, China is leading a lot of key technologies and they’re looking like they value long-term planning a lot more than we do.
To the extent that they need a nudge, a carbon tax would be very effective for correcting export market incentives, too.
This isn’t a video game where you buy “clean factories IV” and everything stops polluting on the next turn, it takes time to change industrial plans which are years in the making and involve non-trivial supply chains.
China is far, far from perfect but their emissions are going down at a time when the President of the United States is lying about fake emergencies and forcing utilities to run at a loss just to keep emissions up, so China is not the nation most deserving of pressure.
We’re not developing cool tech if we don’t have the industrial capacity to make it or a domestic market. We’ll just get poorer and further behind.
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