In reality, things have value because people believe they have value. That doesn't mean every company that doesn't pay dividends is a speculative tulip bubble.

Should S&P really adjust the rules for such a small portion of the index?

Bladerunner and HBO's Chernobyl are two of my favorites that fit this.

I think humans will eventually fall out of practice of driving when they use SDVs for most travel. And then every once in a while they'll take their ol' 2026 classic car from highschool out for a spin and find they have forgotten how to drive!

Great. So we agree it is cherry picked.

> Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area.

I don't follow the logic here. Why would 2015 be the tipping point? What's so special about that year? The US has been increasingly urbanizing since WW2.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

> You might have cause and effect confused here.

Just to be clear, you're suggesting that people are having fewer kids (fertility had a recent peak in 2007) because new builds (which are just a small percentage of total housing stock!) have lost a few square feet? I find that to be laughable.

> Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless.

1. There are more than just offices in CBDs. There are also retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, residential, etc.

2. This ignores the benefit to the worker. And employer/employee relationship goes two-ways. You assign all the benefits to the employers (who gain access to a larger talent pool), while ignoring the fact that this benefits workers too by increasing the pool of jobs they can reliably and comfortably commute to.

3. Economic gains for employers are not purely extractive. A thriving and dynamic centeral business district helps provide income for residents, drive increased investment, and foster innovation.

> And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household.

Sports venues. Concerts. Festivals. Parades. Any large gathering of people. Not to mention that it's still a good thing to have for general use to go anywhere, even at non-max-capacity times.

https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/sound-transit-3-34-5-bi...

Not seeing that $150k per household number anywhere in that article. Looks like $10k per person is the number they come up with. Expensive to be sure, but not quite the number you somehow arrived at.

It is clearly cherry picked because the graph begins in 2015, which (as you can see in the one I linked) is the exact peak of the new build house sizes. A more honest article would show a larger date range.

Additionally, I feel it makes sense that new builds are getting smaller. People are generally having fewer children these days, so there shouldn't be as much need for huge houses.

> Except that the increased salary does NOT compensate for the increased cost of living. And firms absolutely don't pay for their impact on infrastructure.

It may not entirely make up for the cost of living, but in most cases I would say it certainly makes a big dent. And the rest of the difference can just be explained by the fact that people want to live in cities. So shouldn't it make sense that the cost of living is higher in these areas given that there is more demand for them?

> My favorite example: Seattle. Each household will end up paying around $150k in additional taxes for the new transit that will benefit primarily dense office holders in the downtown.

I think it's strange to frame public transit as primarily benefiting dense office-holders. There are tons of other entities in cities besides just companies in offices. It's a public good, and transit generally benefits everyone. Citizens, companies, government, educational institutions, etc.

Also please link to where I can read more about the $150k number.

Regardless, I don't understand what your proposed solution to this supposed "jobs crisis" is.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPSFLAM1FQ

Also, firm in a dense city can get better talent, but those negative externalities (and I would argue these externalities are not clearly caused by the mployer) are made up for through increased salaries the firm must pay compared to areas with lower living costs.

This is where you're losing me. You seem to be suggesting that de-dollarization will cause a US financial pain large enough that it will cause significant pain to other countries, AND that it will happen so fast that the de-dollarization itself (which was the impetus for this pain!) will not be sufficient to shield them from it.

>The US is where people put their money because putting it elsewhere was riskier. But now the US might be more risky. So you diversify... to the places that were risky before. So you can only move to risky places. That risk eventually leads to some loss. It's a "least-worst option" situation, but the end result isn't going to be great.

Lots of assumptions here: 1. That the US is in fact becoming a much riskier place to invest (mostly only true for countries at risk of sanctions). 2. Other countries have stayed as risky as they always have been (do we know this isn't the case?). 3. That despite the inherent risk advantages of diversification to a wide range of countries/currencies is not significant enough to overcome the level of risk that the US has increased recently.

>That's now how capitalism works, that's how rich people work. The echo chamber of HN is full of upper-middle-class people with disposable incomes that are happy to waste money to feel emotionally better about their choices. But businesses aren't emotional, they're competitive. They want lower costs and higher profits. That means spending less. If a business can use a model that's 1/6th the price to get approximately the same results, they're going to do that, in order to gain a competitive edge. China is the place you go when you want to cut costs.

It is how capitalism works sometimes. If the cost of using the new technology is very cheap AND top-of-the-line options result in significant productivity increases, most companies will be willing to pay higher multiples of cost for even marginal increases in performance.

If I'm so-and-so software company spending millions on various business costs, I dont care if I'm spending .5% of my costs on claude code when I could be spending .1% on deepseek. I want the best one (even if it's just slightly better) because the costs are marginal anyway.

>That diversification helps everyone else, but will hurt the US, which hurts financial markets, and thus everyone else.

These are huge jumps in logic, I'm not even sure where to begin. I guess the most glaring question is: If other countries are actively diversifying from US assets as you claim, why would they still be so hurt by a US financial market downturn?

>And once they're all divested, the diversification will add risk and losses.

Since when does diversification ADD risk, and how would losses be incurred?

>which of course China is leading the world in, as nobody cares about "better", they care about "cheaper"

Also a huge claim to make. You'll find plenty of people who want the best models and are pretty price-insensitive, especially among those who get the most economic value out of AI.

Yes, we would need to build more refining capacity to use it all effectively, but in a cataclysmic event (i.e. a world war or something) the US would be much much better off than most other countries.