charliea0

I assume it's to make it harder for competitors to train on Claude's Chain-of-Thought.

That's a very fair point. :)

Given all of that, the unemployment rate is still only 4.5%.

The largest contributor to the shrinking middle class has been more and more people are moving into the upper class.

You can look at Pew's survey here: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/1-the-h....

The upper-income tier grew from 14% -> 21% as the middle-income tier shrank from 61% to 50%. To be perfectly fair, the lower-income tier class did also increase from 25% to 29%. The story is complicated.

We should just set a number of H1Bs and auction them off.

The unemployment rate in the information-technology job market is 4.5%?

To make this concrete, suppose that Elon Musk never immigrated to the US. SpaceX and Tesla are never founded, or are founded in some other country.

The American electric car market is never kickstarted, none of the American employees of SpaceX or Tesla are hired, there is no space renaissance.

Keeping out Elon Musk is somewhat good for United Launch Alliance and for Ford, but it's worse for all the Americans who have to buy worse cars and pay more for satellite internet.

I hire a programmer to code my app, SuperConnect++. I charge $0.99 to download the app. People buy the app if it's worth more than $0.99 to them.

If 150,000 people buy the app, then I have ~$150,000 of revenue. I can pay a programmer $100,000 a year and have $50,000 left over. 150,000 people benefited from the app.

Now say I have to pay an additional $100,000 visa fee for my programmer. My cost of $200,000 is less than my revenue of $150,000. I don't build the app. I don't get $50,000. 150,000 people who would have bought the app don't benefit from it. The biggest loss is to the Americans who don't get to buy the app.

There are other possibilities, maybe I increase the price to $1.99 or I hire an American. We can see that those are both bad. The former extracts $150,000 extra dollars from American consumers. Since unemployment is low for Americans and an American programmer can't have two jobs at once, the later just means that some other project that the American programmer would have worked on is not completed.

A better perspective is that the median H1B holder created $100k+ worth of value for some US company. Salaries are lower than the value you create, or else your employer would stop paying you.

There could be some rare edge case where you are undercut by a direct competitor, but overall America is much richer with H1Bs that without them.

I'd only really be worried about barriers to entry and composition.

One limit on wages is $ of value / hour. If AI makes existing programmers more efficient, then you would expect total wages to go up.

If AI makes it easier for folks to become programmers, then the value produced could be split over more people. Alternatively, if you need fewer programmers then more value could be captured by a few superstar winners.

We can definitely offer subsidies for manufacturing in the US - we've already gotten TSMC to open several fabs.

I think punishing interest rates are better than an equity stake. As Intel's rally shows, having the government as your equity holder is actually amazing for investors.

The government should avoid bailing out big, uncompetitive corporations. If the government is acting as lender-of-last-resort in some crisis, then it should demand senior debt to that it gets paid back before any shareholder.

If a lawful order is enjoined by a district court, you can appeal to higher judges. If the higher judges agree with the district court, then you can appeal to the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the district court, then the order probably isn't lawful.

Is there any justification for this beyond increasing Google's ad revenue?

You can remove carbon from the atmosphere for $1000 per ton. That would be a reasonable emission tax.

I think the point is that human demand isn't the limiting factor. Americans having trouble making rent, paying for groceries, and healthcare indicates that they need more - not that neoliberalism is a solution to anything.

Home health and personal care aide is the largest employment category in the US. As other sectors become more efficient, you can direct more people into healthcare, entertainment, etc.

The US still has a big manufacturing sector and it has an unemployment rate of 3.5%. It could definitely absorb a small number of displaced workers.

I think the bigger problem is that folks often take wage cuts whenever they change sectors - you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills.

Slavery is horrifically evil. Ending it freed 4 million people from daily robbery, abuse, and a life of subsistence poverty.

Banning slavery eliminated massive dead weight loss. Slavery used violence to force labor from people below the clearing price - it compelled them to work for free.

All liberals should oppose slavery. We should want free people, free markets, and a generous social safety net for all.

I think the ports will just pass along the cost. Whatever bargain the union strikes will be uniform across all of the ports and so they won't be able to undercut one another.

This whole discussion is kind of silly. 7T is 8% of global gdp. If your thing needs 7T of investment to happen, then it’s not going to happen.

I drink a lot of acidic sodas, but I've never had a cavity as an adult.

So that American consumers can benefit from possibly better or cheaper foreign software?

Seems difficult to ban TikTok alone without violating the First Amendment. If you more generally banned exploitative data practices then you’d interfere with other social media companies as well.

Really, the issue is the people who vote for the politicians? If voters supported radical climate policy then elected officials would implement it.

I’d go read Andy Grove instead. High Output Management is eye-opening for leadership in any kind of organization.

There’s something very depressing when your credential for teaching people how to be a successful entrepreneur is that you created a popular course on “how to be a successful entrepreneur.”

If you hire someone for 100k per year and it turns out they only contribute 50k per year, then you lose a minimum of 25k over those six months.

As a business you're more risk-averse in offering high salaries since it costs more when you make a mistake.