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.
I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.
If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.
Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.
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.
Of the listed factors (lack of child care, early retirement, incarceration and substance addiction) the only one we can easily handle is the lack of child care.
Child care is ridiculously expensive, in part because of insurance and regulations. Many state regulations limit it to no more than 4 or 5 children per worker, which makes the labor expensive even though we underpay them ($12/hour is common). $12/4 kids = each parent paying $3/hour just for the labor, not including rent, supplies, and of course, insurance. Insurance is high because of the high value we place on the children.
So the solution is to have either local governments or large businesses supply the child care. In those cases, they can self-insure.
The flow chart is a most thoroughly oversold piece of program documentation. -- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
