Or just don't have IP at all. It's entirely a waste of resources. What, you won't work on a cure for cancer because you can't rent-seek discovery? No, of course not. The marginal profit is sufficient. The entire system is unnecessary and serves no public utility. It just facilitates a new form of rent on knowledge. It's as bad as the idea of privatizing land rents.
Patents were invented for a good reason. They prevent important inventions from dying as trade secrets, and being lost to the society.
A patent requires a clear explanation of an invention, in exchange for a limited time of monopoly on its use. After that, the invention enters public domain.
Before patents. important inventions would stay tightly guarded secrets, because once the invention leaks, there's no recourse, every competitor can freely use it, and put you out of business. Hence the inventions were lost forever (at best, need to be reinvented from scratch) if the original inventor went out of business somehow without sharing the secret.
Patents are a boon for everyone as long as the detrimental effects from the monopoly don't outweigh the beneficial effects of sharing knowledge and general ease of business operation without thick shrouds of secrecy. That is, as long as the time of protection is set right.
That seems unlikely. Americans don't want to do these jobs. And this article suggests that, were wages to rise sufficiently to entice Americans, the economics would justify automation.
Besides, with the rate of progress in robotics, I doubt there will be much labor-intensive farm-work left to do in 10 years anyway.
From the article, it seems the issue isn't immigration per-say but a lack of social services (education, housing guarantees, family benefits, healthcare, childcare, vocational training programs, transit accessibility) amongst the poorer strata of Americans.
That is, we could minimize immigration to perhaps produce a constrained labor market (though that would induce negative population growth, which comes with a host of economic issues), or we could simply redirect capitol to turn unskilled workers into skilled workers.
IMO improving economic (and de-facto social) mobility is a much more sensible policy than inducing negative population growth. An added side benefit would be an overall increase in worker productivity and commensurate economic growth.
You can’t have an economy with only knowledge workers. (Unskilled isn’t a correct term since many of these jobs, like construction, are skilled work.) Your choices are to have an economy with a large class of foreign workers with little political leverage, or an economy with a smaller class of native born workers with more leverage.
Social services don’t fix the underlying economic problems. For example, you can invest in schools, but at the end of the day those kids would have been better off being raised in a two-person family where the parents have access to well-paying jobs that don’t require a college education, than being raised by a single parent receiving a welfare check. Social services can’t replace everything you get from a functioning community where people have meaningful work.
The Great Society programs caused social welfare spending to dramatically increase starting around the same time as the 1965 INS dramatically increased immigration. But during that time, the upward mobility of black Americans in deindustrializing cities (look at Baltimore, Philly, etc.) decreased from what was happening a generation before.
This seems like the standard shift seen in all industrialized countries. Rural areas and small towns don't have the density to maintain economic viability. There just aren't enough labor-intensive jobs to keep small towns afloat.
I would imagine the American development pattern makes the economics even less favorable. Cars are very expensive and most (all?) small towns are designed exclusively for car-dependency. Infrastructure cost scales with sprawl too, so city costs to maintain infra are presumably high per-capita.
I'm not sure what the solution is. We could subsidize rural areas more (we already do quite significantly, but clearly the handouts aren't sufficient). But I think in the end we have to accept that times change, and certain lifestyles just aren't sustainable.
How is that relevant? Houses aren't more expensive because of improved technology. They are more expensive because we chose to make them more expensive via certain developmental policies like car-dependence and suburban sprawl.
So your answer is no, you're not willing to forgo the abundance your parents and grandparents never knew at the same age. Asking how is relevant is just a deflection.
Have 1 phone per family, get married at a young age, have 1 TV that's small or maybe no TV, no computer, no game console, 1 crappy car that you know how to fix, cook cheap food at home, then buy your crappy starter home of 2-3 bedroom with 1 bathroom.
Somethings cost more some cost drastically less. At 22 you probably owned more clothes than your parents did at that age. You probably owned more if everything than they did. We live in a land of abundance of trivial trash that no one is willing to give up to get that house they go on and on about. This is trash the previous generations never had as an option or they would have fallen prey to it as well. So apparently we have much more disposable income than prior generations even if we don't have the same income levels.
if you add all those things together, they don't even come close to the increased cost of housing. My middle class parents had one TV and entertainment center growing up and it cost around $2k and that's early 90s money. we have 3 big flat screens now and they don't add up to $2k and that's in today's dollars. We certainly eat out more than they did, but groceries were a lot cheaper back then too. This isn't a "Dave Ramsey" type problem for most people. All the avocado toast and Starbucks you could possibly eat and drink won't add up to being able to afford a $1 million starter home.
They still are, anyone claiming we can move away from them is ignorant. They're city folk who have never seriously tried living in a rural area in the US, or had a need for getting to other cities on a regular basis.
I wouldn't go that far. It's also possible to do denser, transit-oriented, actual urban, development. Which is what happened naturally everywhere prior to WW2.
I'd also say that the "rural vs. city folk" dichotomy is nonsense for several reasons, not least because The Sprawl is not at all rural. Indeed, continued sprawl destroys rural areas, converting farmland into tract homes, parking lots, Home Depots, and Starbuckses. Rural towns -- actual towns, with Main Streets, the stuff of Small Town America -- used to exist, and sprawl is its enemy.
But, yes, continued development is absolutely necessary. Home building has not kept up with population growth.
I think we're talking about different things. I'm talking about the process that turned orchards outside San Francisco into Palo Alto, Mountain View, and I-280. I'm talking about what turned Connecticut or New Jersey outside NYC into a collection of parking lots and onramps. That which shat itself all over Virginia horse country outside DC. The entire essence of Dallas and Houston -- of basically all Sunbelt cities. That is The Sprawl. Each of those places could be a Tokyo or a Paris, but it isn't. Americans lack the organizational capacity, the taste, the standards, and the ambition.
I'm not talking about Hiko, Nevada or Rapelje, Montana.
An important missing piece in the price analysis is that the M3 chip is not designed for continuous load. It's the difference between retail and datacenter/commercial hardware. You can get an RTX-4090 for 1500. But if you try to train on it for ~a few months it will almost certainly die. There's a reason datacenter hardware has a 5-10x price premium.
Local LLM use isn't really continuous though. You're comparing Apples to oranges.
For training especially and for the datacenter, NVIDIA cards still make absolute sense. But for consumer use cases, and even for developers, it's not so cut and dry. Very comparable performance for short-term bursts of compute.
Fortunately, it is within our power to both change the culture and enforce it.
Thought TBF the underlying reason is that America has a relatively abysmal safety net (healthcare being the most terrible of the lot), so you just have more people falling through the cracks onto the street.
I appreciate the sarcasm! I agree though that there are a lot of crazy car-brains in the US. But I think the tide is shifting. Cities are pushing back against car infestation. If cities can get enough political will to de-car themselves, then inter-city transit will come back too.
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