So, $22.50 per day, or $113 per week. How much does one of your people cost, all-in, including benefits? It's unlikely that it's less than $100k per year, and very likely at least double or triple that, if not five times or more. At $200k/year for 50 weeks, that's $4k/week. At the current token price, the AI makes a $200k engineer 3% more productive, the company is breaking even. If it makes them 1.5X or 2X as productive it's a clear and unquestionable win, even with higher token prices.

As for me, think AI makes me about 5X more productive than I would be without it, and that's just considering volume of work. Honestly, I think the quality is a little higher than I'd do myself -- not because the AI writes better code than I do (it definitely does not), but because I'm able to be pickier and do more and larger refactors than I would if I had to do the grunt work myself. Also because I have Claude write documentation that, frankly, I just wouldn't get around to if it were me. The documentation is not nearly as good as if you gave me a dedicated technical writer... but the $2500 I spend per month in tokens would come nowhere close to paying a writer, even if we ignored the coding productivity.

Windows search used to be kind of OK. Never as good as Everything, but Everything didn't exist for most of history. But they really fucked it up somewhere along the line, which I didn't notice because I was using Everything, and now it's very challenging to construct a complex search without learning a whole new language of keywords.

If they keep the facilities small enough then you might be right, but then they miss out on economies of scale. They will still need some nurses in order to put up the semblance of providing health care in the process, not in the facilities perhaps, but around them.

Somewhat, yes (and this most definitely includes the federal government!). On the other hand, small organizations don't have the same opportunities for economies of scale. This is what drives consolidation in most markets; the bigger players can outcompete the small ones because they have efficiency opportunities the small ones just don't, and greater consolidation increases that... up until it gets balanced and then exceeded by bloat, which lets smaller players back in.

That's what happens in competitive markets, anyway. The healthcare market is so heavily regulated that it may not work the same way.

I'm sure the shareholders will be lining up in droves to accept your offer of 1/25000 of a cent per share.

American cults have significant indirect impacts on the world and we produce the most and house the most of them. Some get exported even. Some do a little good like helping Tom Cruze make some entertaining movies.

But right now, the worst cult is driving up global oil prices.

1. Blockbuster films help fund other films and a lot of people like them enough to have them make money or crash and burn a ton of cash... They shouldn't succeed simply because they have a 30% marketing budget which is ridiculous because of the film's pile of money.

Yes, it makes bland stuff to appeal to the lowest common denominator and they don't have to run their business on massive bets; perhaps if people were not such gullible consumers?? FX doesn't draw people in as much...
Also, those expensive films pay a lot of people to make them although a ton of money is not going to the FX people. The bankable movie stars get too much for their brand. That is on the public... The big unspoken cost is the business managers who take massive profits while probably encouraging the hate on the stars they resent having to pay high wages to. They are also trying to replace every writer, artist, and actor with AI so they can keep all the money for themselves. Think it's bad now? Wait until they have zero push back from their interference which is the biggest reason films suck today. The formula committee and exec producer created shit that ruined everything is going to have a suck up AI following orders... not sneaking around the system to add memorable scenes to Forest Gump disobeying the bean counter's "artistic" vision.

2. Cable TV is not great and they make you buy channels you don't watch (or hate or are actively destroying the USA.) but the cable model with ads funded tons of TV shows that were good and had niche markets. Now the whole business model is shot, TV shows of the past are not possible; just some on broadcast TV or the HBO model (also might die.) Youtube shows make no money and have to beg for donations just to fund a tiny staff without stability or capacity to produce much. So now you have tons of choice and is it really cheaper?? I know people who pay as much or more now than before and they don't rave about quality improvement - plus they admit to watching a lot of old content from before "modernization."

The real problem: People are overly entertained. We are amusing ourselves to death. You shouldn't see so many videos that everything is a rehash. That said, if you pick the best of every plot or genre, we don't need any more new content if you consumed it in moderation. One thing I've noticed in decades in education is that we have far fewer people with actual hobbies. Pure consumption is not a hobby. Get a hobby and you won't have time to see all this content slop... and it was slop before AI started learning the patterns that was turning it into slop already.

Well, we didn't have childcare provisions or maternity leave laws forty years ago when things were booming, so those aren't likely to have any causal bearing. It's also the same healthcare system; the difference is that there have been 30 years of legislative attempts to make it "more affordable". Interestingly, the only sector of the economy where costs have increased at a similar rate to healthcare is higher education, which has seen over forty years of "affordability" action. And please note the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.

Wish I had mod points....spot on everything.

You can only move workers by paying more, either moving them from one job to another or from being unemployed to being employed. But if you're already very close to full employment (which we are; prime-age employment is 83.3%), then in order to get more workers you have to get more people.

Executives, maybe, but "top shareholders" don't make any more than "bottom shareholders", not on a percentage basis. And for all of the shareholders the fact is that they'd be better off selling their shares and buying into a more profitable industry. I'd guess that investors buy health insurance stocks because it's a pretty reliable industry -- it doesn't make much money, but it keeps making money even when the rest of the economy tanks.

You're right, of course, that the ACA establishes a perverse incentive for insurers (similar to the cost-plus funding model NASA used to use), but this doesn't seem to have affected overall costs much. It's most problematic with vertically-integrated companies (like UHC). There is data that shows that they pay more for services that their own subsidiaries deliver -- UHC pays more to doctors in its own groups than to doctors outside of its groups, for example. But overall, the evidence that the ACA had any effect on the trajectory of healthcare prices is weak at best. Which makes sense, because the ACA tinkered with the insurance side of the problem, and that's not where the high costs come from. M4A wouldn't do any better, not unless it used its increased bargaining power to force pay cuts on the provider side.

In a closed system, yes, it means that the current price is too low, so demand is higher than can be filled, which means that the price should be raised, both for labor and for the product of that labor, until the excess demand is destroyed (i.e. buyers can't afford it). However, the system isn't closed. So what it actually means is that the suppliers will move to where the labor is, so they can continue meeting the demand at the current price.

What this means for the US is that US business will at least not be able to grow, and will likely have to shrink.

Which, I have to grant, will fix the labor shortage. Businesses will shrink or close, fewer jobs will be available and labor will no longer be in short supply.

You mean they shouldn't be made here.

The top shareholders and the executives are. Hence Luigi.

The insurers are motivated to drive health care costs up by the so-called affordable care act, which caps their profits at a percentage of those costs. Since they're not the ones paying the bills, the insured are (and via APTC, the government is, which means the taxpayers are) they want those costs to go up because they get to collect more profit. You need to not ignore reality if you want it to make sense.

Your questions only address one side of the equation, which makes them meaningless overall.

If there is huge excess profit in the system you can expect to see labor shortages causing wages to shoot up astronomically. If there isn't, then what happens instead is the shortage is addressed by businesses scaling back, simply making less and selling less. Ideally, this just results in hobbled growth, but more often it results in businesses trying to do more with less, and failing. That, of course, results in layoffs, which addresses the labor shortage a different way.

And keep in mind that this happens in a sector-by-sector and business-by-business way. So you can't look at Jeff Bezos's wealth and assume that means there is excess profit in lots of industries, just because Amazon is doing well. (And definitely don't look at Elon Musk's wealth and use that to assume there's lots of excess profit; Musk is insanely wealthy because people think his companies will generate incredible profits in the future, not because they're doing it now).