This type of bundling is just what conglomerates do. Is it a good thing? Not really. Many investors also hate this kind of stuff and avoid investing in these types of companies.

I think one possible route is that cloud capacity just becomes totally commoditized and none of the hyperscalers will be able to extract the kinds of profit margins that would allow them to make a good return on their investment (model makers will fall victim to this too). Ultimately, what may happen is that market competition for everything explodes since AI and robots can do all the work, prices for everything (goods, services, assets) collapses, and no one is really any richer than anyone else.

Points: 3

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The America First doctrine, in practice, has meant using power to do things that nominally appear in our interest, but don’t account for the second and third order effects. ie bully allied nations into accepting high tariffs without reciprocating, which doesn’t account for our own industries being hurt by higher input prices, a new reluctance to enter the US market, less competition, etc.

Protecting US workers from competition nominally helps those select workers, but it also makes them uncompetitive, steers businesses from setting up shop here at all, makes things more expensive for US consumers, and reduces innovation and upskilling.

Why should American voters pay more for everything so that SWEs can be paid exorbitantly?

I shouldn’t need to explain to you why protectionism is bad. There’s 200 years of economic research on this and it shows that protectionism always backfires.

Allowing US companies to find talent abroad means those companies can deliver better products and makes competition more viable (ie lowers prices for consumers). If we only care about “jobs” and the size of paychecks, then protectionism is the way to go. But if we actually want to provide broad based prosperity (especially for our own citizenry), then you should not protect a small subset of high paid workers.

It’s been creeping up for sure, but still historically low. And I’d attest that the headline rate is still the “real” rate.

I’m very bullish on humanoid robots, but this seems absolutely batshit insane to me. These things are no where near ready for full scale production.

My prediction is that this will keep going all the way to the AGI stage. Someone will release (or leak) an AGI capable model that’s able to design AI chips, as well as the Fabs needed to build them, as well as robots to build and operate the Fabs and robot factories and raw material mines and refineries.

>Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market,

“Tech companies are monopolies”, proceeds to describe how tech companies compete with each other.