and fix known bugs. Search can some later. The "Backroom" panel that interrupts Save operations is an example. I want to see File Explorer and only File Explorer, not your damned Spam Panel!
Even if the bubble bursts, AI will still be radically more powerful in a decade
The bottleneck may be training data, only so much can be wrung out of it even with hyper-training. Until bots actually understand shit, this may limit them for a good while.
and they are not yet charging for the "tokens" what they need to charge to become profitable
We recently got access to Claude Enterprise and found how expensive it is. We were given $45 a month of budget. Everyone in the team blew through that in 2 days. And considering this is still being "subsidized" I honestly don't see what's the future for "AI Coding".
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.
Now that most people have a fast internet connection
In the case of BitTorrent, even the fastest Internet connection won't get you a lot of successful peer connections if your ISP blocks all inbound TCP connections.
If youtube goes away, streaming video won't disappear, some new ecosystem will grow in its place.
Such a new ecosystem already has grown, as I understand it. It's called getting Netflix, HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+/Hulu, Peacock, Prime Video, or Apple TV to accept your pitch and fund it. These take the place of cable television channels in the pre-broadband economy. And there are still a lot more pilot screenplays than budget to produce all of them.
2. Talk to real people. Touch grass. Etc.
With the decline of third places, particularly since the pandemic and as online shopping has taken over the functions of malls, how do people usually meet people in 2026?
Yes, I am proposing the internet be used as designed.
If only I could get my home ISP to add IPv6...
Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean
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.
In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad.
This is why Medicare for all, by itself, wouldn't do anything to lower healthcare costs. It would probably reduce the cost and complexity of billing, which would cut overall cost by a few percentage points. To really reduce costs, it would have to force providers to lower costs.
Assuming M4A ends up being a single payer system, that would, in fact, make it very possible to force providers to lower costs.
Branded drugs cost 2-3X as much (though generics are often actually cheaper in the US) than elsewhere), which is an area that is obviously ripe for savings... but there's a risk there because those high prices fund a lot of research (pharma is also not terribly profitable; that revenue mostly gets sunk into new drugs).
Research should be funded directly, not by paying more for unrelated prescription drugs. That's the whole point of having grant programs from agencies like NIH.
The vast majority of hospitals in the US are non-profits, so that 50% figure is based on relatively thin data. However, those few for-profit hospitals compete directly with lots of non-profits, so their price and cost structures have to be comparable.
One of the biggest problems, IMO, is healthcare consolidation. When most of the hospitals in an area are owned by big chains, it really doesn't matter if they are nonprofit. Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean. Consolidation has generally resulted in higher prices and lower quality of care, from what I've seen.
Meanwhile, every other entry in the feed is an advert.
Every other entry? Try every entry. Something like 1% of my Facebook feed is actual organic content from friends. 14% or so is from groups. The other 85% is ads. And I'm being optimistic when I say that it is only 85%. When I see about the first or second ad, I close Facebook, because it's just going to be ads all the way down after that.
I'll make an offer right now to buy it for $1,000 with the intent to release the entire catalog into the public domain (CC0) 28 years after its creation.
That totally ignores the laws of supply and demand. You make more workers by paying more.
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.
FWIW, healthcare insurance shareholders aren't getting rich
The top shareholders and the executives are. Hence Luigi.
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.
The main driver of high cost in the US is the providers, not the insurers
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.
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.
Doesn't a labor shortage also mean there are too many businesses/openings?
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.
Maybe some widgets shouldn't be made.
You mean they shouldn't be made here.
Neutrinos have bad breadth.
