At some point they'll need to do austerity.

Every story where a company sold for an amount that wiped out employee equity (for example every Bending Spoons acquisition) is because they raised too much and it never materialized into (sufficient) growth.

Second, the technology is very open. It's not as if the ONLY way to access an LLM is to pay a toll to Sam Altman. Models that are very good can run on my Macbook for the price of electricity and they're only getting better.

I think the former group almost certainly outweighs the latter group at least in the Western hemisphere, but I know the Western hemisphere has been steeped in a deep malaise of anti-optimism for several decades preceding AI to begin with. That it's almost a game to identify all the ways anything new might be bad, rather than celebrating the obvious ways they are good. And this penchant invariably biases their developing opinions of all new technology, be it AI or anything else.

For example in the year 2000, people aged over 65 were 12.4% of the U.S. population. Today, that demographic has grown dramatically to 19% of the population. That's fewer people working and paying taxes while also simultaneously drawing more from medicare and social security.

This doesn't mean it's "impossible". But to balance the budget today without major spending cuts would require raising taxes 39%. It's just so different than it was then to make the math work out.

I don't think that dating apps are showing users profiles that have already swiped left, and if they do, it's not an attempt to get users to convert to a paid subscription. Consumer psychology doesn't work that way. People are far more willing to pay to upgrade a good experience than they are to pay to try to improve a bad one. Further, an unappealing profile that gets zero likes will continue to get zero likes after they upgrade to a paid subscription. This means that user will churn almost immediately after 1-2 months of paying for something that doesn't work. They typically don't stick around paying for years while getting zero matches all the while.

Dating apps DO derank unappealing profiles, but rather than doing it to try to get them to convert, it's instead done to try to prevent high bounce rates. Imagine a user downloads a dating app and is shown profiles in completely randomized order. This user is far more likely to get frustrated and uninstall after a few minutes than if they were to download the app and be shown profiles that are appealing. This rigged ranking may sound like its reducing relationship formation, but they never would have swiped on the unappealing profiles anyway; the counterfactual is they simply uninstall the app in frustration.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54994

So that's about $52B per year in taxation added back on that extra GDP growth, so the net effect of the cuts are around $380B reduced federal revenue per year, or 18% of the deficit.

18% of the deficit is a lot but if you could snap your fingers and undo it, you now have a $1.7T problem instead of a $2.1T problem. Eventually you have to look at entitlements. There's just no way around it.

Also an underdiscussed issue with such a policy is that while it increases social security fund revenue, it decreases the amount of federal revenue collected. The CBO estimates that about 15% of revenues gained by an uncapped SSA tax are offset (lost) by a reduction in federal revenues. Worsening the deficit problem.

https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options/60955

Given that ~20% of that group have net income margins below 5%, how much of such a tax policy would simply be an inflationary tax on consumers? I.e., we know Walmart cannot simply pay a 5% revenue tax, that would instantly make them deeply unprofitable. So they would have to raise prices to afford the tax. And if they know Target, Kroger, Costco, and Amazon also need to pay the same 5% tax, there is less competitive pressure to eat into margin. Even with zero collusion, there is perfect information symmetry regarding the tax.

At their present 3.1% net margin, if Walmart passed a 5% gross-revenue tax entirely to consumers while all else stayed equal, prices would have to rise MORE than 5% -- about 5.44% just to preserve its existing margin. Of course, some of the tax burden likely gets shared between Walmart, its customers, supply chain, vendors etc... In a world where the Fortune 500 (Walmart) has to pay the 5% revenue tax but a supplier of some SKU (not a Fortune 500) does not pay it, I imagine Walmart would lean extra hard on them to eat some of the tax. It all seems like a very messy and inefficient tax.

On the VAT, the CBO has actually studied a 5% VAT tax and modeled that it would raise $330B. That's 16% of the current $2.1T deficit.

https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options/58637

That's before the military, foreign aid, and everything that starts with "Department of"

I'm not claiming I'm an expert, but just sharing personal insight. It doesn't take many users before statistical observations of behavior make themselves apparent. Start producing 5-10k matches per day on your platform and you will see what people want and don't want really quickly.

Yes, the FOMOism in dating app user psychology is extremely real, but this isn't a product problem, it's a human psychology problem. In theory, you could make an app with, say, a lifetime number of swipes to prevent infinite FOMOism, but it would fail to be a viable product model because the #1 thing that I found users wanted -- more than everything else -- was optionality. And if you don't offer it, they'll go to someone who does.

Hinge actually already uses Gale-Shapley and it doesn't seem to be producing meaningfully improved outcomes.

https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/30/hinge-and-its-...