[HN Gopher] Imagine 130M Washing Machines
___________________________________________________________________
Imagine 130M Washing Machines
Author : RickJWagner
Score : 68 points
Date : 2026-01-05 13:46 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scottsumner.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scottsumner.substack.com)
| rvz wrote:
| There are billions of computers, but only a few computers can run
| very large local LLMs.
|
| So instead, imagine billions of laptops (or phones) available in
| store that have local LLMs installed which allows you to have
| intelligence-like chatbot features available with the equivalent
| performance of Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT-5 if not better and they
| are far smaller.
|
| Thank you for telling us that efficient + performant multi-modal
| local AI models is the endgame; a bonus if they are smaller to
| fit in phones.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Centralized vs distributed feels like a largely orthogonal
| matter. E.g. phones are great at being clients, even for things
| which they could technically be the server for today, but they
| make pretty bad servers in terms of resource tradeoffs. Because
| of this, I think the endgame cares little about where the LLM
| runs as much as how much it costs for those devices to use one
| (which can be more than just money too - e.g. on phones it's
| battery, bandwidth, latency, privacy, or whatever else could be
| valued/scarce). That it's specifically on device is just one
| method of how to meet some of these attributes, not the
| exclusive method to use it.
|
| Even as a techie tinkerer my dream is not that every device I
| have run its own LLM - it's that I can point them to where to
| find the LLM (and swap that at will). The dumber I can make my
| edges the more they can end up doing overall.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| I'm skeptical of this. Users are not going to want to sacrifice
| on the quality or performance of the model for a warm fuzzy
| feeling about it running locally on their phone. Outside of
| hobbyists I can't imagine this really taking off for the same
| reason secure scuttlebutt never had a chance of beating
| Facebook.
|
| The only exception I can imagine is very sensitive topics, AI
| girlfriends or maybe image processing
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > A few billionaires might have additional vacation homes, but
| they are not going to consume a million homes, much less 10
| million.
|
| Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or
| vacant property investment.
|
| > progressive consumption taxes
|
| When someone proposes one, let me know.
| thenanyu wrote:
| Presumably, the percentage of taxation is a function of the
| price of the item? You can have a different curve or base rate
| for different harmonization codes.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| >> A few billionaires might have additional vacation homes, but
| they are not going to consume a million homes, much less 10
| million.
|
| > Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord
| or vacant property investment.
|
| I'm sure he is not unfamiliar with either...
|
| Not sure what landlords have to do with anything since washing
| machines are often included as part of a rental (or the
| apartment doesn't have a washing machine, but what does that
| have to do with landlords?).
|
| And vacant property investment is a small fraction of total
| property ownership in the US. It's more common that people have
| a vacation home and rent it out part of the year.
|
| >> progressive consumption taxes
|
| > When someone proposes one, let me know.
|
| They have been proposed...many times. In fact, the US's system
| has elements of a progressive consumption tax already since
| people can put retirement savings in IRAs/401ks. What would
| make it a more complete progressive consumption tax would be to
| either raise the limits on contributions to these retirement
| accounts (and remove income limits), and also introduce
| accounts like these that are meant as more universal savings
| vehicles. This is preferred (in my view at least) to just
| cutting dividend and capital gains rates to 0% since that would
| benefit existing rich people.
| strken wrote:
| The word "consume" is important. Billionaires might _own_ a
| million average family homes, but that 's not the same thing as
| actually using the home. A normal family will eventually lease
| the house and use it, unless it's left vacant.
|
| I'm not sure vacant property investment holds up in a world
| with radically higher numbers of houses getting built. The
| billionaires either stop investing and let house prices drop,
| or they keep investing until they run out of money, at which
| point they have no choice but to stop. This only holds up for
| houses themselves and not for land, but hey, you can solve that
| with a land tax.
| bluGill wrote:
| Landlords provide a useful service for anyone who doesn't want
| to live in a house for a long time. There are pros and cons to
| renting vs buying. If you are against landlords you are also
| against anyone who buying a house is a bad decision.
|
| Vacant property investment exists, but it is a small factor in
| all markets.
| tokai wrote:
| >On many distributional issues, I'm to the left of the Democrats.
|
| Which could still land you squarely on the economic right.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The easiest surefire way to lift the bottom of the economy right
| now is to go on a mass home building spree.
|
| If people had their rents cut in half, it would solve most other
| money problems they complain about (shy of those who will just
| inflate their lives into being money constrained again).
|
| Of course this will come mostly at the expense of regular middle-
| class homeowners, who will see the enormous paper gains of their
| properties in the last 5-10 years be decimated. Red or Blue, I
| don't care who, _hates losing money and will emphatically vote
| against this happening._
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Indeed. If you destroy housing costs [1], medical costs with
| single payer [2], and energy costs with renewables [3], that
| gets you to Abundance everyone so desperately opines about. But
| too much of the country is driven by the inefficiency (rent
| seeking, broadly speaking), that is the US system and the
| economy. That is all the country builds anymore. We
| collectively know what the foundational problems are, there is
| simply no political will to course correct. Increased supply
| will disempower the extraction system. AI replaces jobs people
| need to survive, but does not fix anything I've enumerated; in
| some cases, it even makes the problem worse (algorithmic price
| fixing [RealPage] and price discrimination [Instacart], for
| example).
|
| I would like to imagine a world with enough housing for every
| human, affordable, accessible medical care for all, and cheap
| clean energy deployed at scale. When is AI going to deliver
| that?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119657 (housing cost
| citations)
|
| [2] _Health Care Costs and Affordability_ -
| https://www.kff.org/health-costs/health-policy-101-health-ca...
| - October 8th, 2025
|
| [3] _U.S. electricity prices continue steady increase_ -
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65284 - May
| 14th, 2025
| card_zero wrote:
| I don't understand POSIWID at all. "Purpose" is inherently
| good intention and moral judgement.
| cameron_b wrote:
| The main token in POSWID seems to apply to reasonably
| mature instances of S for which several passes have been
| taken through the build loop. Once someone has edited the
| thing, it is reasonable to assume that the outputs are the
| fruits of the intentions.
| card_zero wrote:
| Oh, so it's more like "the purpose of a system emerges".
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yes.
| bluGill wrote:
| What would people spend that excess on if they had it? Adam
| Smith observed that most people spent it in nicer houses.
| While I think there is a limit I think for most we would turn
| around an spend that extra on a nicer house and return to
| living paycheck to paycheck hoping we have enough to make the
| end of the month after paying for it. Nicer cars would likely
| take a good portion of the difference as well.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > What would people spend that excess on if they had it?
|
| Humans do not exist to be extracted from for their basic
| needs imho, which is how the current system is configured,
| so this is not an excuse to keep extraction systems in
| place. Give humans a 4 day work week if the argument is
| "what else would you spend this money on?" with the excess.
| Humans do not exist for the profits of others, again, imho.
| I understand others have different opinions on this topic.
|
| https://4dayweek.com/ | https://workfour.org/ | https://hn.
| algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| It might even help with the cratering fertility rate across
| the developed world.
|
| https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
|
| https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-roundup-5-causation
|
| "What if we put all of this effort in and all that happens
| is people live better lives!?" sounds...silly, no?
| bluGill wrote:
| What you think others should do it not relevant. The
| question is what will they do.
|
| If someone wants a 5 day work week and a larger house
| instead of a 4 day work week who are you to force them to
| do otherwise? It is perfectly possible to get a 2 or 3
| day work week if you want - most jobs won't offer it, but
| the possibility exists if you are willing for the
| sacrifices - most are not (though it isn't clear if they
| even realize the option exist)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If most jobs won't offer it, that is a problem to fix.
| These are just arbitrary rules, after all (in the US, the
| official per week work hours codified in federal
| statute). They can be changed. It is not an option if
| most cannot obtain it, or it is not easy to obtain it. We
| have different mental models on the topic, that's all.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >Humans do not exist for the profits of others
|
| They don't, but they voluntarily take the risk trade-off.
| If you are the profit of someone else, it also means you
| are the liability of someone else.
|
| Working for someone else has become so prevalent and so
| much the norm, that people have _completely_ lost sight
| of the downsides of working for yourself.
|
| It's not at all surprising that people opt for steady
| paycheck over erractic income and full liability for
| their mistakes/short-comings (despite the allure of fully
| reaping the upside). I've seen dudes making $40k/yr
| destroy $500k of product and still get their paycheck the
| following week.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| If we had reasonable safety nets for healthcare, retirement,
| and housing I wouldn't give a flying fart about my home
| value... but right now it's the only safety net I have.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| Wait, then who will the Boomers unload their overpriced real
| estate to?
| vablings wrote:
| I think the sad thing is its already massively overvalued and
| the only thing propping up the market is the ability to get
| more mortgages for longer creating servitude and debt bondage
| like you have never seen.
| jayd16 wrote:
| If we did, what's to stop the rich from buying it all anyway?
| seanalltogether wrote:
| Property taxes that need to be paid regardless of occupancy.
| They become more of a liability if you can't keep it rented
| 12 months of the year.
| jayd16 wrote:
| If the idea is they're needed then why wouldn't they get
| rented?
|
| Unless something gets done about economic equality, the
| rich are in a position to benefit the most.
| delaminator wrote:
| Giving millions of non-citizens loans to buy houses is sure
| fire way to sink the bottom and middle of the economy.
|
| Maybe undo that injustice first.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| You are missing the bigger problem, healthcare spending. We as
| a society now spend more on that than our housing, and the gulf
| between the two widens every year.
|
| We should do what you say, but we should also focus on pumping
| out more doctors, etc.
| lif wrote:
| Have you looked around? We actually have plenty of "housing",
| however most do not meet the qualities/criteria that make them
| desirable enough to be "homes".
|
| Lower density, family and pet friendly. You know, the kinds of
| places that landlords live in. Not the places they are trying
| to force on others as "inevitable".
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| Blackrock will just buy all the new homes you build and charge
| exorbitant rent.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If they charge "exorbitant" rent no one's going to rent from
| them. They're constrained by broader market conditions.
| m000 wrote:
| > If they charge "exorbitant" rent no one's going to rent
| from them.
|
| We will. There are just not enough bridges for everyone to
| live under. /s
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > regular middle-class homeowners, who will see the enormous
| paper gains of their properties
|
| As one of those homeowners, I keep hoping that housing values
| go down because I'm taxed on the value of my home every year,
| and that tax burden is crushing me. My property taxes are 2% of
| the (appraised) value of my house. The fact that its worth
| twice what I paid for it is meaningless to me when the tax bill
| comes - I can't really sell it and cash out the 'investment'
| because I need somewhere to live.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Why "can't"? You can always move out to somewhere cheaper and
| pocket the difference. Besides, when property tax rates are
| lower, housing prices are higher to begin with. It's a wash
| for anyone except those property owners who were lucky to get
| grandfathered into cheaper ownership when the tax rate fell.
| haizhung wrote:
| No. Mass building (while not touching inequality) will NOT
| solve the issue.
|
| It's easy to see why: there already IS enough housing around
| for everybody. If there wasn't, you would see a massive amount
| of homeless people. And even in the US where that might be the
| case - the amount of empty real estate is larger than the
| amount of homeless people. You could easily house them if you
| wanted. It's a question of distribution.
|
| The other reason to see why this doesn't work is: there is no
| country that managed to do it. Miraculously, the housing crisis
| has hit all (western) countries on the planet. All of them try
| to build their way out of it, no one succeeds. Why?
|
| If you just mass build, the new units will be bought
| immediately by the rich, and the working people will have no
| housing still.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > It's easy to see why: there already IS enough housing
| around for everybody.
|
| Maybe in Detroit this statement is true, or a ghost town in
| the middle of nowhere. The fact that housing costs money
| mostly anywhere else is trivially evidence that there isn't
| enough of it to go around.
|
| > Miraculously, the housing crisis has hit all (western)
| countries on the planet. All of them try to build their way
| out of it, no one succeeds. Why?
|
| Very few western countries are trying to "build their way
| out" in a meaningful sense. Folks aren't buying that housing
| en masse for no reason; they just expect it to become even
| scarcer and more expensive in the future. If you fail to
| build any more, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
| siavosh wrote:
| Productivity will go up, competition will go up, profits will go
| down, unemployment will go up, wages will go down, a crisis will
| occur, consolidations and monopolies will emerge, hyper
| inequality will then break a system incapable of compromise. But
| sure, there will be a lot of washing machines.
| fny wrote:
| A tangential thought: say AI makes a huge dent into labor. Wages
| will collapse across the board. Who is left to profit from?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Who is left to profit from?
|
| That's already the case where most of the economy is AI-related
| stock market speculation rather than being based on actual
| investment fundamentals.
| soared wrote:
| There is a more feasible future IMO that paints AI as the
| washing machine, calculator, computer, spreadsheet, automation,
| etc. Jobs AI can complete don't lead to people getting let go,
| but rather those people sit on top of the AI who can do their
| job much better (sometimes at larger scale, sometimes not).
| Better outputs for the same cost (well wage+AI costs) -> more
| purchasing power, more efficient business, etc.
|
| I don't know if this is how AI will go, but this exact thing
| happened to me with deep learning. I did stupid math to
| optimize algos in 2012, but in 2022 deep learning was 100x
| better than me. I just babysat the AI, as it (and llms) still
| can't talk to clients, understand business/culturual nuances,
| navigate an org, politic, innovate, etc
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I think a few people will live like kings while the rest of
| us live in Terrafoam.
| foobarian wrote:
| Money is just a proxy for value add. When automation replaces
| the labor, the only remaining value add may be withholding
| violence. I hope we don't get there
| petermcneeley wrote:
| in-vogue trite. The question for these thought-writers at this
| stage is simply incompetence or malic.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the
| rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality.
|
| This is a weird one. I don't think the problem with rich people
| is that they consume luxury goods. That's actually a good thing
| overall. Let them have their megayachts, megacars, golden
| toilets, etc. Someone has to build those.
|
| I think the problem is when they use their unlimited funds to
| purchase stuff they shouldn't own. Newspapers, TV stations,
| social media, etc. That kind of power, often flaunted openly (see
| the bezos scandal when they literally wrote something along the
| lines of "if you screw with us we have wapo at our disposal") is
| not something that should be in the hands of one person. Or a
| family. That's way way way more dangerous to society than them
| snorting caviar off of models' bodies, or eat gold leaf you won't
| believe they're not burgers with truffles on top.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| Do we think news outlets owned by the government or the "warm
| collective" would be any better at unbiased reporting or not
| disseminating fake news or unjust influence? Is there any
| organization or entity structure today that is trustworthy
| enough to even handle those sorts of organizations. It appears
| fraud is rampant in our government, so why trust them any more
| than some random dude? Frankly it seems the odds might be
| better with one random guy not being on the take.
| servercobra wrote:
| I think the odds are better if it's not a random guy who also
| already has a bunch of power (e.g. Bezos with his
| considerable influence buying up and weaponizing WaPo). I
| personally think that consolidation of power is a reasonable
| thing to prevent. I'm not sure how you could block someone
| like Zuckerberg who started his own new media, other than the
| government, which as you pointed out has its own issues.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| I'll be honest, I'm not an expert on this, and I don't have a
| perfect solution. I just think we should try to do something,
| even if it's not perfect.
|
| There are some professions with codes of conduct. Some are
| internal, some ar legislated (i.e. fiduciary duty for
| lawyers, financial advisors, etc). We also have some concepts
| like public utility and public interest. Maybe we should look
| there (again, ask the experts I'm sure there are people who
| study this for a living). Maybe slowly bring in duties for
| "public interest" related fields. Maybe at the management
| level. Maybe come up with ownership structures that decouple
| power from financial incentives (a la voting shares vs.
| normal shares) and impose them for such businesses.
|
| I fully agree with you that gov ownership of media would be a
| disaster. I'm not proposing that in any way. Just ... better
| ways to do it than we do today.
| fcantournet wrote:
| Historically news outlet run as public service (with
| sufficient guardrails for autonomy) such as the BBC, PBS,
| France Television, Arte (naming only those I know well) have
| produce much better news coverage than the privately owned
| ones.
|
| OTOH the concept of independent public institution and
| general checks and balances seems to have been entirely
| forgotten, so maybe that's not a solution for 21st century.
|
| An alternative would be communally owned media (50/50 by
| readership and journalists), with simple direct tax incentive
| to fund them (equal amounts of $ per person)
| CaptainJack wrote:
| Having first hand experience of all of the named public
| services, I beg to differ heavily. These corporations tend
| to be heavily left-leaning, with no real guardrails
| preventing this. The consequence is pretty biased coverage,
| under the guise of a "trust-us, we are here for the greater
| good".
|
| Look at the handling of Middle-East by BBC, the Zucman tax
| at France Television, or the current allegations of fraud
| in some communities in the US.
|
| My current take is that it is really hard to get a fair
| unbiased coverage, unless you actually state that you will
| strive to hire and promote both sides. If these
| corporations had to publish the composition/promotion/pay
| of their newsroom across the political spectrum (as they do
| for example by gender), you may start to have fair unbiased
| coverage. But many journalists working there see it as
| their job to describe "not the reality as it happens, but
| rather as it ought to be" (to quote the CEO of France
| Television). We should acknowledge that people are biased,
| and measure the balance of biases rather than assert there
| is no bias because they serve the greater good.
| tehjoker wrote:
| This is a very funny take since all of these stations are
| anti-communist. This is inter-right wing sectarianism.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| So everyone to the right of tankies gets lumped together
| as "right wing" in your view of the political spectrum?
| That's not very helpful.
| tehjoker wrote:
| That's objectively true. They're center-left or center-
| right. They're certainly not democratic socialists (who
| are the barest left of the left). The parent is
| complaining that there is some objectivity at all in
| liberal/center-right media, that it isn't calling for
| pure repression by force of middle eastern people and
| recognizes they sometimes suffer from aggression in ways
| that are understandable to human beings.
|
| None of these outlets object to this repression being
| meted out, they only care that it is done in a way that
| is respectable. A left wing take would criticize the
| imperialist nature of these wars of aggression and
| genocide and examine the economic, class, and other
| social dimensions that cause these events to occur and
| call for a social revolution via means that are electoral
| or otherwise. A left-leaning liberal take would say
| something like "man it's crazy they don't respect the UN
| charter or even US laws". This should give some objective
| sense for how rightward our discourse has been drawn.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I'm not sure megayachts have no economic downside. They create
| some jobs, certainly, but if the golden goose is catering to
| the whims of eccentric billionaires, then collectively we're
| losing smart and talented people who could be building things
| like better public transportation, or more reliable and
| sustainable infrastructure.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I don't think the lack of talent is preventing us from having
| good public transportation. Diverting smart folks from yacht
| building will not eliminate the problems with unions, zoning,
| or crime to name a few of the issues. These are difficult
| problems because people and their different desires are
| involved.
| netrus wrote:
| One city has a millionaire who builds a yacht for 100M
| dollars in a local shipyard and uses it for holidays. The
| neighbor city has a millionaire who spends 100M dollars to
| build 10 ferries he gifts to the city. The general
| population is clearly better off in the second case, even
| if it does not matter for the workers in the shipyard.
| gertlex wrote:
| That seems very lucky of the second city. Let's hope we
| get lucky with some generous billionaires soon!
|
| I don't claim that regulations are simple, and incentives
| couldn't be created to result in infrastructure
| investment by the wealthy... but I won't hold my breath.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Cute gambit to talk about ferries, the one mode of
| transport that doesn't have insane land-use debates.
| (Although they do need waterfront property on both ends.)
| I'll give you a point for that one.
|
| But let's be serious. Ferries have a very limited use in
| only a few cities. Even then, the appeal is limited
| because they're relatively slow.
|
| I submit that the most common result of replacing one
| yacht with $100m of public transit spending is that the
| unions and the bureaucracy will eat up the $100m in a few
| minutes.
|
| The theory here is that diverting more smart people into
| "good" careers like urban planning will be great. But if
| we look at the last 100 years in the United States, the
| rise of careers like urban planning have been correlated
| with an explosion in construction costs.
|
| Yet back in the bad old days when there weren't urban
| planning degrees and only a few effete twits went to
| college, private capitalism was able to build two big
| urban transit systems in NYC. No book smart people. Just
| sandhogs and profit motive. How much did it cost to add
| just a few stops to the NYC subway over the last two
| decades?
| vablings wrote:
| I disagree with this. Some of the more extravagant
| engineering prowess has divested from insane eccentric
| billionaires
|
| Like the other commenter said the larger issue is the
| monopolization (see groq x nvidia for a glaring example) and
| other forms of rent seeking that clamp down on market
| fairness and efficiency
| mike50 wrote:
| Mega yachts are not airplanes, computers, software or some
| other cutting edge or basic research technology. It's a
| boat that other then adding starlink hasn't meaningfully
| changed for decades.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You're imagining a nonexistent problem.
|
| Luxury yachts and public transit make approximately 0 talent
| impact on the world.
|
| Building each is an extremely tiny industry.
|
| These are also very average talent required jobs.
| numpad0 wrote:
| And I would wonder if overpriced luxury items in general are
| detrimental to the economy. It feels to simple me that
| transacting items with subjective added values above costs
| shrinks economy a bit.
|
| To me it feels that overpriced items cause less trickle downs
| if they cost less to make: the delta would go into an
| oblivion. Trickle downs don't appear to be real, but less
| than already immeasurable sounds bad.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| That isn't what he is saying. He is saying that tax reform
| needs to be progressive, meaning it hits rich people more, and
| it hits them when they spend not when they earn.
|
| A progressive tax will tax them more when they buy luxury items
| and thus make them buy fewer luxury items.
| pydry wrote:
| >tax reform needs to be progressive, meaning it hits rich
| people more, and it hits them when they spend not when they
| earn.
|
| This misses the point. It needs to hit them when they own not
| when they spend.
|
| >A progressive tax will tax them more when they buy luxury
| items
|
| Which still wont be progressive it's the yield bearing assets
| Jeff Bezos buys which are the main problem not the fancy
| candlesticks he decorates his house with.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > meaning it hits rich people more, and it hits them when
| they spend not when they earn.
|
| The parent of your comment made a pretty good case precisely
| against this. And it didn't talk about all spending, only
| about luxury one as exemplified by the following, rather
| misleading, quote from the OP:
|
| >> Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by
| the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality.
|
| This is wrong and pointing it out is good.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's not a good argument at all. "Earning" is a socially
| productive activity, far more so than directing resources
| towards the making of a huge luxury yacht for private
| consumption (or similar kinds of luxury spending). There
| really isn't any good argument for taxing earnings or
| saved/invested assets per se, as opposed to consumption.
| _ZeD_ wrote:
| The whole idea is to make the rich people poorer, even if just
| a little.
|
| The money taken from 1000 or 2000 rich people may be used for
| the rest of the 130000 ones
| Lendal wrote:
| Bingo. The guy has a lot of things right, but I was floored
| when I read "progressive consumption tax" coming from an
| otherwise well written essay. Consumption taxes are regressive,
| and no amount of progressive lip stick will make them
| redistribute sufficiently to achieve the effect he wants.
|
| I would say that any tax reform that fails to reduce asset
| concentration will completely fail to reduce economic
| inequality. Let Bezos have his newspaper, if that's all he
| owns. Let him game the system to evade income tax. Fine. The
| problem is when a very small group of people own all the
| newspapers plus their original business empires plus their
| privately owned social media companies, plus their funded PACs,
| their psyops, etc.
|
| All assets must be taxed directly to such an extent that
| concentrated assets are redistributed naturally through market
| forces. Tax wealth, not work.
| sharts wrote:
| Why even make a distinction of category spend.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > Someone has to build those.
|
| Well, yes? That means those "someones" are not building
| something else instead.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yes, sometimes that's indeed an opportunity cost. But it's
| also a catalyst for making things possible or affordable that
| otherwise wouldn't be.
|
| Many technological progress are first explored in niche and
| luxury segments and only later fully developed for the masses
| with mass utility. Space exploration, motor racing sports,
| military, .... they all can seem like wasteful enterprises
| and yet a lot of new technologies come from these areas
| smileysteve wrote:
| A post about mis-generalization seems to make a huge mis-
| generalization, seemingly from a lack of diversity.
|
| The author recognizes that laundromats exist, but doesn't believe
| that washing machines are a luxury good (his yacht example of 60%
| owned by the top 1% likely applies somewhere around 60% to the
| top 30%). This indicates the author generalizes that high density
| living with shared appliances don't exist or apply to a large
| part of the population (that density doesn't shift statistics).
|
| A few thoughts, instead of taking 340m people, you need to
| account for 2% homelessness, another 8% as housing insecure, 30%+
| as high density possibly sharing at the apartment/condo building
| or laundromat level. A small upper 1% that outsource to services.
|
| The infamous Mitt Romney, 47% of Americans don't pay income tax
| quote can be really shocking when you start thinking about the
| average American, and the wages that they earn compared to a
| higher income segment you might be in.
| bluGill wrote:
| Laundromats exist, but there are 100 million according to my
| web search which puts his estimate in the right area even if he
| is off by 30 million.
|
| Most Americans would not call a washing machine a luxury good.
| Even in much poorer Mexico there are a lot of families living
| on $100/week that have a washing machine - they are an
| affordably luxury to many poor people.
| smileysteve wrote:
| If the statistical "right area" is within 30%, then 60m is
| similarly in the correct area.
|
| But the context is most important, are AI's worst strategies
| worse than 30% off because of gross generalizations?
| bluGill wrote:
| Depends on the context. Sometimes I need to be correct to
| withing 0.0000001%. Sometimes I can be off by 500% and
| still be close enough.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > _2% homelessness, another 8% as housing insecure_
|
| Per a quick search, that's 0.2%, not 2%. Not sure about what
| "housing insecure" means, so that's harder to check. Also, that
| is just a one-night snapshot, and many of those won't be
| homeless if you check back later.
| chris_va wrote:
| The high level question of wealth concentration from new
| technology is an interesting question (and probably could have
| been just 3 sentences, since it is unanswered).
|
| The rest of the article has some easy to read anecdotes, but it's
| hard to know if they are at relevant/accurate. E.g. common
| mistake (arguably) that I see a lot:
|
| > In 1990, America enacted a tax on luxury consumption of goods
| such as expensive cars, yachts, furs and jewelry. A few years
| later, the tax was repealed by a coalition that included
| Democratic politicians worried about job loss in the yacht
| building industry. It's hard to think of a more perfect example
| of muddled thinking about distribution. Any tax reform that fails
| to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to
| reduce economic inequality.
|
| Mega-yachts are money pits. A rich person purchasing a mega-yacht
| is probably the fastest way to redistribute a monetary supply.
| Taxing it has some benefit, but reduces the incentive to buy
| mega-yacht... Now, monetary supply and productivity/wealth are
| not exactly the same thing, but this seems like a basic error.
| strken wrote:
| I think the whole point was that mega-yachts are money (or,
| from the perspective of the employee, effort) pits. Those
| employed shipbuilders and wait staff aren't building cruise
| ships and they aren't serving meals on them. The time and
| effort that went into those tasks will never reappear.
|
| The median person is better off if the rich either invest that
| money, lose it to tax, or give it to charity. The money/effort
| gets redirected away from mega-yachts and other consumption and
| it has to go somewhere.
| bluGill wrote:
| That money often doesn't go to someplace the common person
| would fine more useful. A yacht made and stored outside the
| US is easy to hide from US taxes if you want one, if it is a
| status symbol you can find plenty of others, some of which
| are easy to make elsewhere thus moving money out of the US.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > Matt Yglesias keeps telling us that America is richer than
| Europe because we have many more dryers
|
| Or perhaps America is poorer because they lack an outside space
| to hang clothes?
| bluGill wrote:
| Most Americans have space to hang clothes. They don't use it,
| but the space exist. Sometimes it is illegal to use that space
| to hang clothes, but they wouldn't even if the laws changed.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > Sometimes it is illegal to use that space to hang clothes
|
| Ahh, land of the free
|
| Based on my knowlege of New York apartment buildings, there
| are shared laundry rooms, thus New York City has fewer dryers
| per capita than Alabama.
|
| Clearly South Dakota is richer than New York City?
| bluGill wrote:
| I don't know New York. I know where I live most apartments
| are shared laundry rooms, but a few list washer/dryer in
| the apartment as a feature.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wouldn't relish doing that in the winter, having to work
| around weather, or having the day star's UV light destroy my
| clothes.
| jrm4 wrote:
| So, this whole analysis strikes me as the worst of "economic
| thought?" The first bit of failure here is "equating well-offness
| to output," e.g. something that can be measured by GDP.
|
| Then it misses the other big deal, which is the utter weirdness
| caused by extreme on-paper wealth inequality, where the e.g. Elon
| Musk numbers reach levels of literal absurdity.
|
| Money, in a sense, doesn't matter. It's "goods and services." The
| big question should be, does the way we do "money" effectively
| help everyone trade goods and services in a reasonable way.
| That's the only real path to "happiness."
| toss1 wrote:
| >>recall that central LA currently lacks the large stock of high-
| rise apartments that you see in cities like New York and Chicago.
|
| The author _entirely_ overlooks that NYC and Chicago are not in
| earthquake-prone areas and LA is right next to a major geologic
| fault system. Yes, skyscrapers can be safely built to withstand
| earthquakes, but it tends to be at least expensive, which is
| counter to solving affordability issues.
|
| >>I favor a steeply progressive consumption tax.
|
| This is generally pointing in the right direction, but a
| progressive _transaction_ tax on every transaction, including
| finance and investments would be far better. Easier to track,
| harder to evade, far less intrusive into peoples ' lives required
| by income tax. and the rate and difference between rates would be
| so low that structuring deals to 'optimize' taxation brackets
| would be pointless.
|
| Just the volume of Equities + TRACE fixed income/structured +
| munis + real estate is over $200Trillion. A mere 3% tax on those
| would put the $6T US budget in large surplus. Add $1.7
| Quadrillion of ovrerall payments and a 0.3% tax on transactions
| (yes, $3 per $1000) would also put the US budget in surplus. Make
| it progressive by setting tax rate tables based on transaction
| size, e.g., transaction <$10=0.01, <$100=0.1%, <$10k=0.2%,
| <$100k=0.3%, <$1MM=0.4%, =>$1MM=0.5% (plus big penalties for
| 'structuring' transactions to lower brackets).
|
| Not impressed with the article
| bluGill wrote:
| Sky scrappers are expensive. A single story building is the
| cheapest thing you can build anywhere - only when land is
| expensive is it worth going up instead of out. There is value
| in density so we build skyscrapers anyway, but for nobody is it
| the most economical way to get square feet.
| SecondHandTofu wrote:
| Land IS somewhat expensive in LA though.
|
| Plus, you are looking at it purely from a construction cost
| of the building point of view. If you build more densely, you
| don't need as many roads and other services, which also cost
| money, and once you have enough density, agglomeration means
| that it's economical to have local businesses nearby, fewer
| people need cars etc.
| bluGill wrote:
| Roads are cheap. I know we spend billions on them, but they
| are still cheap compared to adding another floor.
|
| I'm not arguing with your other points. Density is often
| worth the monetary costs, but don't try to pretend it isn't
| more expensive. (Indeed I would value the time density can
| save high, but there is no objective way to value a large
| part of my time)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The author entirely overlooks that NYC and Chicago are not in
| earthquake-prone areas and LA is right next to a major geologic
| fault system.
|
| Maybe you should visit Japan sometime. Does downtown Tokyo look
| more like NYC/Chicago or LA?
| SecondHandTofu wrote:
| If we put a $10k tax on beards, that's $600 billion right
| there!
|
| What's that, people might change their behaviour in response to
| it, in possibly unintended and negative ways? Nah we can just
| hand wave that away, who needs liquidity or investment.
| tptacek wrote:
| A "high-rise" is anything over 6 stories; they aren't
| skyscrapers. The argument generally is for upzoning, not for
| setting height records, and that argument isn't impacted by
| seismology.
| bluGill wrote:
| > The whole point of being rich is to get away from every single
| human being that doesn't have to be nice to you.
|
| This is false. Most rich people don't want to get away from every
| single human. (if they did they can find plenty of places to
| backpack). They want to get away from a few crazy people who
| stalk them.
| AIorNot wrote:
| This comment is a total non-sequitor to the topic
| bluGill wrote:
| That is a direct quote from the article, and thus cannot be a
| non-sequitor. It is used in reasoning and means the whole is
| standing on something false. You may decide the analysis is
| correct anyway, but it is fare to stop everything right there
| since there is a logic flaw.
| cousinbryce wrote:
| Sounds like you've failed to "...get away from every single
| human being that doesn't have to be nice to you"
| bluGill wrote:
| Whatever - I don't think many rich care about getting away
| from people in general. Most of them don't really care, and
| many of them like other people in general.
|
| The point of being rich can be the luxuries you can buy, a
| point system, buying a better afterlife, or any of hundreds
| of motivations. I'm sure some care about getting away from
| other people, but to say that is the point is false.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| You're refuting a straw man. Re-read what you quoted.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| >P.S. Can you even imagine 130 million washing machines? >...more
| than three times around the Earth on the equator...
|
| Nah, that's the wrong way to go about it. The total length of
| your blood vessels would also circle the earth twice, but I'm
| sure you'd prefer them to stay safely inside your body.
|
| If each washer is 3 feet on a side, that's 6 square feet. You
| could easily stack them 4 high with an ordinary forklift. So
| that's around 7 square miles, or just 7 sections of a standard 36
| section survey township. Where I live, there's enough farmland to
| fit all of them within a 2 mile radius, without disrupting much
| (well, unless you're a farmer). You'd nearly be able to fit all
| the dryers too.
| timerol wrote:
| 3 feet times 3 feet is 9 square feet
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Well that was a dumb mistake. 10.5 square miles then.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > _The key to higher living standards for average people is to
| produce lots more output, which requires more automation._
|
| Building and deploying that automation requires capital. As a
| result, it's largely the people who control that capital who
| benefit from it, not the individual workers whose productivity is
| increased by it.
|
| There were people who added value to a manufacturing process by
| being highly skilled welders (earning $30/hr) who can push MIG
| wire at 30 inches per minute. On a good day, they actually
| average 20 inches per minute OEE because they also need to load
| and unload the fixture, take lunch breaks, and so on. Those
| welders become (or are replaced by) weld-jig-operators, who can
| load a buffer of incoming parts, unload a buffer of completed
| parts, and replace emptied spools of wire, clean up the work
| area, and so on, while the $400k weld cell with a trio of ArcMate
| robots pushes 80 inches of wire per minute.
|
| Yes, that's a 4x productivity gain, but does the welder now earn
| $120 hour? No, the new operator now gets a pay cut back to $20/hr
| because you can train a replacement in a week (unlike a welder,
| who needs years of practice to manipulate a torch that
| skillfully). Meanwhile, the owner of the company profits at
| ~$100/hr, recoups their big capital investment after a year, and
| rakes in the profits after that to buy another yacht, or maybe a
| newspaper.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > because you can train a replacement in a week
|
| Guess what, this is a huge gain for the unskilled worker who
| can get trained in a week for that formerly high-skilled job.
| And then the capital owners are hugely incented to expand
| production and hire all those unskilled workers, pushing the
| wage floor up in the process.
| mNovak wrote:
| I agree that the worker becoming more productive due to some
| capital equipment generally won't see any benefit from doing so
| (unless it requires special skills to operate). But I think the
| argument is that the end consumer will eventually benefit from
| the increased productivity.
|
| In your example, yes, the factory owner can take their $100/hr
| of profit. But among the various factories, some owner might
| take $25 of that profit and instead undercut their competition
| to grow their order book. Other factories respond in kind, and
| the consumer is getting cheaper products.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Why output is what matters
|
| Now imagine the amount of paperclips AI could make.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the
| rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality.
|
| While this is essentially tautological, I'm not sure you can
| practically tax the majority of luxury consumption. Think of all
| the small differences when a CEO shows up to work vs a temp
| worker (or even a middle-manager)[1]. All of those differences
| are luxuries, and many of them are informal and thus hard to tax.
| If we were to successfully tax all the formal luxuries (which in
| and of itself becomes legislative whack-a-mole), the wealthy will
| have a strong incentive to shift much of their luxury consumption
| to informal luxuries.
|
| Plus, I find all of the focusing on "wealth tax" and "luxury tax"
| and such rather mystifying when we have an extremely regressive
| income tax in the US. The low tax rate for long-term unearned
| income in the US, combined with the fact that borrowing against
| assets does not realize any of the gains, makes effective tax
| rates for the 99.9 percentile much lower than the 90th
| percentile.
|
| It is possible to eliminate dynastic wealth just by ensuring the
| losses due to inflation and taxes exceeds investment returns at
| the top tax bracket.
|
| 1: Or the difference in your kid applying to a college with your
| name on one of the buildings versus someone else's kid applying
| to that school
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Think of all the small differences when a CEO shows up to
| work vs a temp worker (or even a middle-manager). All of those
| differences are luxuries, and many of them are informal and
| thus hard to tax.
|
| But businesses are incented to remove the most expensive
| disparities, lest they impact the company's market performance.
| Or maybe they keep the different treatment but expect to pay
| the CEO less as compensation. Either way it's win-win.
|
| > It is possible to eliminate dynastic wealth ...
|
| Dynastic wealth is wealth that has provably sat unspent and
| unconsumed for generations. It's effectively frozen in place
| (except that every once in a while quite a bit of it gets
| donated to charity in exchange for a very, very expensive name
| placard on a building, or something). To the extent that this
| reflects a spreading of good social norms around the stewarding
| of those assets, there's not much of a reason to want to get
| rid of it in the first place.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Dynastic wealth is wealth that has provably sat unspent and
| unconsumed for generations. It's effectively frozen in place.
| To the extent that this reflects good social norms around the
| stewarding of those assets, there's not much of a reason to
| want to get rid of it in the first place.
|
| Wealth generates income that is used to grow more wealth and
| spend the balance on luxuries. Reduce the ability for it to
| do that and you reduce luxury consumption!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Why assume that luxury consumption is the only possible use
| of that income? That just doesn't seem to reflect the
| facts. It's not like many old-money folks have billion-
| dollar yachts or private aircraft, or the other kinds of
| luxury spending that seem to be the focus here. Many of
| them are used to leading incredibly modest lives.
|
| Also, it takes meaningful skill or an appetite for risky
| ventures (or a combination of both) to generate substantial
| income from that accumulated wealth - passive return rates
| are extremely low. That reflects socially productive
| endeavors we don't want to tax.
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