Unions are not the primary mechanism between employers and workers for establishing fairer wages in many European countries. Unions are designed to level a power imbalance between an employer (typically a legal vehicle which aggregates the material self interest of various actors) and the employees who would otherwise have to act alone.
Myopically focusing on wages while ignoring the many other concerns about the distribution of power and legal rights is a common misunderstanding.
Real wages (adjusted for inflation) were relatively flat from 2001 to the mid-2010s, especially for the bottom half of the wage distribution. Since then, there have been periods where real wages grew, but inflation often outpaced wage growth, particularly from April 2021 to early 2026. As of May 2026, real wages were still down 1.4% compared to January 2021, meaning that, after accounting for price increases, American workers are making less than they did five years ago.
Not every American citizen is having incomes like SWE in SV.
> A wide range of pro-employment policy incentives can help to slow or reduce job displacement, including: wage insurance policies that compensate people when they have to take a lower-paying job, retention tax incentives to encourage employers not to make layoffs, workforce training grants, or infrastructure to facilitate matching of employers to employees to speed the rate of labor market adaptation. While the particulars of which interventions are best will depend on what kind of labor displacement AI brings, we should readily accept the costs and market inefficiencies that these policies could entail, particularly as they are likely to be offset by AI-driven productivity gains.
People get income from one of three places: capital income, labor income, or the welfare state. If this technology truly unlocks a holy panacea of productivity with a commensurate drop in employment then capital’s share of the national income can and should provide for a wider and deeper welfare state. Nothing new need be invented here. Dario’s long and only somewhat organized list of policy interventions makes appropriate preparedness sound like a manic pulling of any and all levers when a simple theory of distribution will suffice.
This and we already did a dry run of ad-hoc distributions with COVID relief. They had to use the data from tax filings but it did work in terms of getting the money out there.
> If this technology truly unlocks a holy panacea of productivity with a commensurate drop in employment then capital’s share of the national income can and should provide for a wider and deeper welfare state.
This isn't guaranteed in the tax system as it exists today, because reinvestments into further growth are often treated as expenses which cancel out the income for tax purposes.
No I'm not? Current American tax policy does not guarantee that any fixed percentage of the national income will be received by the government as revenue. If the advent of powerful AI pushes corporations away from dividends and buybacks towards expansion and research, then tax revenues may flatten or even decrease even as the national income spikes. (Sales taxes are more likely to track aggregate economic activity, but US sales taxes are both not very high and don't flow to the federal government.)
Public sector unions, like all unions, are designed to level the power imbalance between worker and employer. Nothing about public/private employers changes this dynamic.
It’s always a crowd pleaser to be skeptical of ai development. Not sure what people feel like they are achieving for continually announcing they aren’t buying it when someone claims they’ve made effective use of these tools.
Nvidia is giving OpenAi money (through investment) to buy Nvidia chips. The bubble is that Nvidia got that money from its crazy high stock price, the extra investment raises OpenAi’s evaluation and the increased sells raises Nvidia’s evaluation. If the valuations see a correction then spending like this will decrease, further decreasing valuations.
Bubble collapsing looks like enshittification of OpenAI tools as they try to raise revenues. It’ll ripple all throughout tech as everyone is tied into LLMs, and capital will be harder to come by.
> The bubble is that Nvidia got that money from its crazy high stock price,
This is totally False, NVDA has not done any stock offerings. The money is coming from the ungodly amount of GPUs they are selling. In fact they are doing the opposite, they are buying back their stock because they have more money that they know what to do with.
A company buys back its stock if it thinks the stock is underpriced. Otherwise when “you have more money than you know what to with” you give it to your shareholders via a dividend. A concept mostly forgotten by tech companies.
NVDA outstanding shares are down ~1.2% year over year; the company has been buying back its own shares with —>> profits <<— to the tune of tens of billions.
Meanwhile NVDA stock is mildly up on this news, so the current owners of NVDA seem to like this investment. Or at least not hate it.
Agreed that we’ll see ad-enabled ChatGPT in about five minutes. What’s not clear is how easily we’ll be able to identify the ads.
Valuations won’t see a correction for the core players, I have no idea why people think that. Both of these companies are already money factories.
Then consider we are about to lower interest rates and kick off the growth cycle again. The only way these valuations are going is way up for the foreseeable future
And it's worth reiterating that a bubble does not mean the technology is worthless. The dot com bubble collapsed despite the internet being a revolutionary technology that has shaped every decade since. Similarly LLMs are a great and revolutionary technology, but expectations, perception and valuations have grown much faster than what the technology can justify
These hype cycles aren't even bad per se. There is lots of capital to test out lots of useful ideas. But only a fraction of those will turn out to be both useful and currently viable, and the readjustment will be painful
I think ultimately the conclusion that we're in a bubble is bad analysis. It jumps over a chasm and assumes that analogy to past historical situations allows us to draw conclusions.
This isn't a bubble. This is the collapse of 300 years of modern capitalism into corporate techno feudalism.
This won't crash and lead to a recession or depression. We are at the end game. Look around you. Capital is going scorched earth on labor. They are winning. Cost of living in metropolitan areas is exploding, and most of us will end up begging for scraps in peripheral areas.
This is the result of everything the elites have been working towards for the past few decades. Climate catastrophe is the cherry on the cake: they will shock therapy us into the last few bits. There will be corporate citizenship that enables one to live as a demi-god at the behest of the owners, and survival in the wastelands for the rest of us.
I think everyone is underestimating the advancements in wafer tech and server compute over the last decade. Easy to miss when it’s out of sight out of mind but this isn’t going anywhere but up.
The current SOTA is going to pale in comparison to what we have 10 years from now.
> I think everyone is underestimating the advancements in wafer tech and server compute over the last decade.
What advancements?
We have done a fabulous job at lowering power consumption while exponentially increasing density of cores and to a lesser extent transistors.
Delivering power to data centers was becoming a problem 20 ish years ago. Today Power density and heat generation are off the charts. Most data center owners are lowering per rack system density to deal with the "problem".
There are literal projects pushing not only water cooling but refrigerant in the rack systems, in an attempt to get cooling to keep up with everything else.
The dot com boom and then Web 2.0 were fueled by Mores law, by Clock doubling and then the initial wave of core density. We have run out of all of those tricks. The new steps that were putting out have increased core densities but not lowered costs (because yields have been abysmal). Look at Nvidia's latests cores, They simply are not that much better in terms of real performance when compared to previous generations. If the 60 series shows the same slack gains then hardware isnt going to come along to bail out AI --- that continues to demand MORE compute cycles (tokens on thinking anyone) rather than less with each generation.
child care policy frees labor capacity for work that is more likely to earn a slice of the national income. It’s almost certainly going to result in greater economic activity for the state. In the immediate it is funded from two existing funds.
State + local tax burden in NM is 10.2%[1]. Revenue neutral would mean those taking the child care would instead take a job with average salary $120,000. But as another comment points out this policy attracts new jobs to the state, which complicates the math
