The Western mind will think it is "unnatural" and playing God with nature on a completely unprecedented scale but large-scale geo engineering like this is probably the few options we have left.
western companies won't do it unless money is gained from it. Nothing god related keeping them from taking action, just the lack of money related incentives.
Maybe apps that take less than 3 minutes for a 17-year-old to install, register account, and learn how to use, are not really defensible "monopolies" and maybe these apps shouldn't be the target of antitrust laws that were intended for early 20th century robber barons.
The network effects, economies of scale, and associated ability to plough huge profits into buying up and out-promoting competitors absolutely make them monopolies.
This anti-big-tech hysteria in the US is dangerous. Applying early 20th antitrust thinking to modern tech companies is short sighted and doesn't show the whole picture. These American big tech companies that people like Steve Bannon and Lina Khan want to split up have been responsible for not only the impressive US GDP and wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 financial crisis but also for much of the rest of the world's wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 crisis.
Danish pension funds have 25% allocation on US stocks but ~70% of the total returns in 2022-2024 came from US stocks with big tech companies leading the charge.
Inequality is growing massively, it is also not necessarily the best use of capital, whilst this growth may be big, if it were not so concentrated it would likely be even larger. Concentration of capital leads to inefficiency, a small but relevant example, large mansions and super yachts. The marginal propensity to consume also needs to be considered, we live in a demand driven world.
Indeed. I'd argue that failing to apply robust antitrust enforcement (as the US hasn't in the last 20 years) is short-sighted.
It creates monolithic companies that are enormously profitable at the cost of innovation.
Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.
Seen another way, the current Big Tech landscape creates artificial barriers that limit startups' access to customers compared to what the internet and mobile previously enabled.
> Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.
It's not clear that this is true. Facebook produces a load of stuff out of its R&D budget that wouldn't be possible in 100 smaller companies.
This doesn't change the fact that they cause societal problems operating at this scale. Should we be building their vision of the future or societies consensus vision of it?
The advantages of monolithic R&D driven by a profit engine are (1) funding scale & (2) longer-term planning.
The disadvantages are (3) leadership tunnel-vision (e.g. $$$$ to build the shittiest metaverse) & (4) political inertia (e.g. greenfield R&D being subject to high-level BigCo political jockeying, like Microsoft's killing anything internal that threatened Windows/Office revenue).
It's far from all-positive, and debatably less effective than making a larger number of more diverse bets and then letting customers decide which is best.
E.g. Facebook never would have created something as alien as TikTok
In that regard the Danish pension funds are actually playing it safer than our neighbors. The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the largest of its kind in the world, is 40% US equities (read: US tech stocks) and 10% US private equity (read: more US tech).
Some Norwegians are starting to be concerned but only because they think Trump will seize their assets.
No it still works, because "but make a lot of money!" is _never_ an acceptable argument for anything. It may be a supplemental argument, but you need something else to be the foundation. Making a lot of money doesn't explain why something is good or why we should do it over other things.
I mean, we can make a lot of money through theft, or selling tobacco, maybe legalizing heroin. But those things are bad.
The reason many prefer Cursor over VSCode + GitHub Copilot is because of how much faster Cursor is for tab completion. They use some smaller models that are latency optimized specifically to make the tab completion feel as fast as possible.
GPGPUs ended up becoming the AI/cloud accelerators that FPGAs promised to be back when Intel bought Altera.
FPGAs are not ideal for raw parallel number crunching like in AI/LLMs. They are more appropriate for predictable real-time/ultra-low-latency parallel things like the the modulation and demodulation of signals in 5G base state stations.
FPGAs might not be ideal, but AMD's NPU IP originated with Xilinx.
Intel was an early player to so many massive industries (e.g. XScale, GPGPU, hybrid FPGA SoCs). Intel abandoned all of them prematurely and has been left playing catch-up every time. We might be having a very different discussion if literally any of them had succeeded.
XScale was forced on Intel as a penalty for anticompetitive activities against Digital. It’s no surprise then that they weren’t interested in doing anything with it.
The biggest mistake tech companies have done over the past 2 decades is not spending enough money lobbying. Every other industry manages to stay under the radar by continuing to pay both sides. Tech industry never got involved in politics so they were easy targets for politicians on minor issues.
I mean given that they are in tech, the biggest mistake was being located in a city or state. I can understand that they have to deal with the US government (any company anywhere in the world have to deal with it) but they don't have to deal with San Francisco/California. They choose that position and they don't deserve sympathy for being passive about it.
>the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better
You want the US government to provide more subsidies to US tech companies so they can stay competitive? Because that is what China is doing for its tech sector.
You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Subsidizing companies is not the problem not sharing the wealth with the workers is the problem. US not subsidizing it companies is bullshit fed to you. As Boeing, Tesla, SpaceX, Microsoft from the tel-cos to the power suppliers to banks and hedge fund all have been subsidized by American tax payers or are still being subsidized with and you get share buybacks. Americans are being bullshitted into loosing their social and healthcare subsidies in favor of giving it to corporations but the sharing back of the wealth in conveniently forgotten
>You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Do you have in mind any examples that make your case the strongest? In particular, examples caused by subsidy to the company, and not to the population[1].
The US already subsidizes these companies, sometimes more severely.
The problem is these companies are thieves, mostly. They just take the money and pocket most of it. Infrastructure be damned.
And when the house of cards inevitably tumbles down, they don’t pay the price. The gains are private, but the losses are public.
US companies always favor tomorrow, not next week. They look to enriching themselves NOW. But in doing so they take on a debt. They put everything on a metaphorical credit card. Eventually the competition is too hot and they have to pay their debt very quickly, and they shutter despite their subsidies and long-running success.
Google is the primary target for current US anti-big-tech sentiments that are getting political traction with Lina Khan and Steve Bannon teaming up at a recent conference against US Big Tech companies. J.D. Vance has also expressed that he agrees with Lina Khan and Steve Bannon and would like to see US Big Tech companies like Google be forcibly split up.
What will happen with Google's AI wing when Google inevitably gets split up in the next 4-8 years?
Are the administration really going to risk messing with one of their leading AI companies while they are also terrified of China catching up or overtaking them in leading edge AI?
I wouldn't put it past them but I don't think it's a given either.
In my opinion they should because the US doesn’t have any GPU restrictions and VCs are hungry for disruption. The US also has the tech talent pool to throw at the problem unlike in manufacturing.
After breaking up Google, there will be a lot more moats to be had vs being stifled by the Google behemoth.
The Pelosis' trades are public knowledge. Pelosi and her husband have outperformed the market by being tech-optimistic Californians. One of their most lucrative investments was investing in Nvidia after ChatGPT was released triggering the AI boom. Did that require any particular political "insider knowledge"? No.
That happens after they are disclosed and this delay benefits them. Not you.
How did the Pelosis' know that the DOJ was going to file a lawsuit against Visa and as soon as it was filed, that would cause the stock to drop? [0]
The DOJ could have filed it at any time before the trade was publicly disclosed.
> Pelosi and her husband have outperformed the market by being tech-optimistic Californians.
People who trade on the advantage of insider (political, economic, etc) knowledge can easily outperform the market.
> One of their most lucrative investments was investing in Nvidia after ChatGPT was released triggering the AI boom. Did that require any particular political "insider knowledge"? No.
So you do admit that for most of the Pelosis' trades, they did use political insider knowledge then?
The level of people here defending politicians and family members of them, benefiting from insider trading loopholes is amusing to see.
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
Wow, a classic example of Brandolini's Law! [1] Two words of bullshit required a paragraph to refute it. Perfect.
Just don't bother. They never argue in good faith. You'll just give yourself an aneurysm trying to keep up with their firehose of falsehoods.
They know and we know that even if their right wing fever dreams about Pelosi were true (which they aren't), it's obvious that the scale and criminality of what Trump did this week doesn't even begin to compare.
It doesn't matter to them. They only want to obfuscate, deflect and ideally enrage. That's what they do.
The Western mind will think it is "unnatural" and playing God with nature on a completely unprecedented scale but large-scale geo engineering like this is probably the few options we have left.