I feel this in my own life. From well before my working years I had a message ingrained into me: “Do not count on social security to be around when you retire.”
It’s probably not all so drastic as that, but for me (and many other American millennials) my financial ethos has been squarely centered on saving and making hay while the sun shines. Compound that over 300M people and multiple generations and you do get overly deep and inflated capital markets.
As genX this was my experience too. The numbers have been clear for decades, SS is unlikely to be a great option by the time anyone working today gets it. (including people who retire in a month). Generally I think there will be SS when I'm old - but it will barely be enough to live on. I'm trying to save money so I can not only eat but also do other things I enjoy [that cost money] when I retire.
Unfortunately, many of our urban areas have already been planned (for better or worse) for cars and not the density that makes public transit viable. Autonomous cars will solve a host of problems for the old, young, mobility limited, and just about everyone else.
It will prove disruptive to the driving industry, but I think we’ve been through worse disruptions and fared the better for it.
I'm not sure what the answer is for housing, but there are tons of factors that go in to the growth of cost there. For one, the people making the buying decision aren't comparing DR Horton to Lennar. Usually, they're thinking along two lines: monthly mortgage cost and location.
Still, that doesn't rule out other types of consolidation (that are not necessarily corporate in nature.) There are no new "cities" being built, and even if you want to live in a small suburban community, chances are that you want or need to live near a city for economic reasons. I bet a lot of people on this forum wouldn't even consider living outside of 15-mile radius of SFO or NYC.
For individual families, the choices are often even more constrained. Assuming a dual income household, it's unlikely both earners will be able to geographically relocate at the same time. So you end up with situations where new housing outside of economic centers is pointless to build, and new housing in economic centers is expensive or impossible to build due to regulations and existing suburban street layouts.
Bringing it back to Baumol, we can think of an invisible "land value tax" as rising much like a wage rises without an increase in productivity. Since we're not making new economically productive regions, the cost of living near one of the existing ones has to rise (and we're not doing anything to counteract those trends.)
Housing is all messed up because land is a limited resource and regulation artificially limits it even further.
I live in a high demand area. A perfectly cromulent house on a particularly good lot will sell for $1.5 million as a teardown. The new house will be 6,000+ sqft and be inhabited by a family of four. Builders won’t build smaller because the land price sets a hard floor. The most profitable and economically productive thing would be to split the lot and build several smaller houses, or build a small apartment building, housing several times more people for the same cost. But this isn’t legal. Construction costs don’t make a difference. If construction costs doubled, the new houses would just get smaller. Some of these teardowns would stop being torn down. The cost of living in the area would stay about the same.
I suspect it’s a byproduct of Google’s internal launch process which may require more work or longer processes for launching something in different jurisdictions. So it’s probably not an active decision that they couldn’t legally do this in the EU, but a result of being extra careful around what they can “launch” in a jurisdiction with potentially high penalties.
(I am a Googler, but not on this team, or familiar with their launch policies)
Fellow Googler here. I'm the exception that proves the rule. After 7 years of Macbook and Linux devices, I needed Windows for a special project, so I got a "gWindows" device and found it very well supported.
Aside from the specific Windows-only software I needed, I would still just ssh into a Linux workstation, but gWindows can do basically everything my Mac can. I was pleasantly surprised.
It's just easier to iterate and improve on a coding specialist AI when that is also the skill required to iterate on said AI.
Products that build on general LLM tech are already being used in other fields. For example, my lawyer friend has started using one by LexisNexis[0] and is duly impressed by how it works. It's only a matter of time before models like that get increasingly specialized for that kind of work, it's just harder for lawyers to drive that kind of change alone. Plus, there's a lot more resistance in 'legacy' professions to any kind of change, much less one that is perceived to threaten the livelihoods of established professionals.
Current LLMs are already not bad at a lot of things, but lawyer bots, accountant bots and more are likely coming.
Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.
It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.
These are cool, it would be nice if there were also waving flag versions to match the styles of the leading emoji sets (eg Apple and Google). Most of them use some form of wavy flag:
I'd love the flag of Aboriginal Australia to be included too! I always think it's really disappointing that it isn't included anywhere, particularly if Star Trek is going to be represented. Any help?
It’s probably not all so drastic as that, but for me (and many other American millennials) my financial ethos has been squarely centered on saving and making hay while the sun shines. Compound that over 300M people and multiple generations and you do get overly deep and inflated capital markets.