"Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behavior". This is true, but what people seem to fail to grasp is that rewarding such behavior == buying the product. If people simply didn't buy it, they wouldn't do it. It's really that simple. It may be hard to not buy, of course. The alternatives may be worse, there may be downsides to not buying, etc. But nothing else will really be effective.
Sure, but there's a power disparity here. I think the clearest example is smart TVs where there have been examples of consumers buying a TV, and then having ads retroactively added to the product a year later. There's not much a consumer could to avoid that. It's our regulatory environment allowing that.
Yeah that is definitely the kind of thing we need regulation to address. In the market, the only power you have is to purchase or not. It ruins the free market's ability to function if the company you buy something from can remotely vandalize it after your purchase.
And this is even worse than with computers where you can, with some training, remove Windows and install a less user-hostile operating system. With a TV, while sometimes possible, most people are not sufficiently proficient in tge dark arts required to get rid of the native OS or to subvert it to your will against the wishes of its corporate master.
On top of that, the TV manufacturers subsidize the cost of their own TVs by shoving as much adware as possible and having it pay for the cost of the hardware. "Smart" TVs will almost always be cheaper than equivalent dumb TVs because of this reason, which forces many consumers' hands. I don't think there's any way to avoid this other than regulation, which likely won't happen because the system moves too slow to keep up.
the solution to this it's to just never enable wifi on the tv and just use it with your box, I for example use a cheap android tv box and my regular computer. The same with kindle I don't buy books from amazon, and just use calibre.
You don't need a TV. If there are only smart TVs then simply don't purchase one.
Most consumers are unwilling to take an option that they perceive as inconveniencing them more than getting screwed by the company inconveniences them.
Telling people to just go without a TV is a little more than a “perceived” inconvenience.
The reality is that companies know they can get away with crap because they all get away with crap. And because they all do it, consumers are powerless.
This is why regulation isn’t a bad the thing that many HNers seem to recoil at. The real problem with regulation is when it’s defined by lobbyists rather than consumer groups. But even then, it’s really no different to the status quo where businesses are never held accountable.
If somebody "needs" a TV then they might "need" some hobbies.
A disturbing proportion of my family spend more than half of their free time watching television (typically while doom scrolling tiktok). They don't "need" TVs - they need to find interests.
What people don’t need is someone dictating to them how they should relax after work.
Besides, it’s not like TVs are the only industry where consumer choice is an illusion. You see the same problem in a lot of sports (I used to fence and there was a great deal of pressure to buy equipment from one specific manufacturer which charged literally 4x the price for their gear).
And it’s not just hobbies either. I need a car for family duties and there are plenty of parts on it that can only be replaced by an authorised dealer.
Replying to this comment since clearly the point is misunderstood.
The core part of what I wrote was "need." If you believe you "need" as in "can't go without" a TV, in this example, then you probably should consider whether or not you may be addicted to consuming television.
Do this as an exercise: Which of these statements indicates that somebody may have a a problem?
- I need a cigarette
- I need a beer
- I need a TV
- I need to eat
- I need some water
- I need to relax
The last three are clearly real needs. The first two are addictive. TV isn't a literal need, so if you find yourself NEEDING it, you may have a problem.
> What people don’t need is someone dictating to them how they should relax after work.
I do get the point you’re trying to make. But at best it’s an irrelevant semantic that, by your own admission, is still a basic need. And at worst, it’s just elitist “I don’t enjoy x so you shouldn’t either” BS.
> What people don’t need is someone dictating to them how they should relax after work.
Nobody dictates that. What we do is to suggest there might be more rewarding things to do with their time off than watching TV between the dopamine hits from TikTok
Not physically forced, but that doesn’t mean the comments weren’t said in a way that might appear forceful to other people due to the combination of bluntness and lack of compassion.
For something to be dictated, you don’t have to be in a position to enforce those comments.
Sure, but you're just choosing hobbies for people. TVs are just one example here. If your hobby is 3D printing, you might've gotten screwed by Autodesk's subscription changes.
TV can be a hobby, but hobbies typically have actual engagement from the hobbyist. There are a lot of people whom watching television/movies is a real hobby, and for those people you can tell that's the case.
In my experience for most people it's strictly a time wasting/filling/background noise activity. If you are spending a considerable amount of time watching television to time waste then you probably should try and find more fulfilling activities. This is not prescriptive of what those would be.
When I was in my 20s I used to hold this belief as well. And as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised those opinions weren’t because TV viewers were wasting their lives, it was because there was so much I wanted to do with my time that I was scared of wasting my life. I was actually getting angry because I couldn’t pack everything I wanted to do in a day.
Needless to say, I now focus on my own free time rather than thinking about how others should spend theirs.
Also, now I’m in my 40s, I treasure the couple of hours I spend a week watching TV with my kids. We play games, sports and such like too. But sometimes it’s nice to cuddle on the sofa and share an experience in comfort.
> Telling people to just go without a TV is a little more than a “perceived” inconvenience.
From personal experience, it really really is barely even an inconvenience. Especially in a world where YouTube exists and is accessible for free from a desktop computer. There's barely been anything good on TV for decades, and the older stuff probably only seemed good because of the difficulty of publishing any competition.
It really depends on the individual. I barely watch any TV and have been like this for the 30+ years that I’ve been old enough to own a display. For a while, I did go fully in with media centres. Even running XBMC on an original Xbox. But I honestly just don’t really care for video content all that much regardless of how it’s delivered.
But I also know a hell of a lot of people who still massively prefer watching content the traditional way. As in, not just TV shows, but on a TV too. And I have no more right to tell them how to consume video content as they do to tell me how I should consume the stuff I want to read.
But that’s not the same thing as saying “people shouldn’t own a TV and instead find themselves a hobby”. Which is the original comment that people objected to.
Lol, your position is, don't watch tv, just watch YouTube. That's not really a radical shift.
Fine if it works for you, but TV has plenty of things going for it... big screens, watch from 10 ft away on a couch, watch with other people, regular schedule (i.e. Jeopardy on the same time every day), live sports, local news, shows with generally high production values. But probably most importantly, passivity - yes that is a feature.
> Telling people to just go without a TV is a little more than a “perceived” inconvenience.
The TV I have has never had an antenna cable plugged, or an internet connection. It’s, from day one, been a large HDMI monitor to an Apple TV, a Nintendo Switch and a C64 Maxi with some other devices plugged in from time to time.
It IS possible to ignore the TV’s software most of the time (mine, luckily, isn’t intrusive at all) and use it as a conduit for a much cheaper and easily replaced (or hacked) device.
I remember how surprised the engineers at [manufacturer redacted] were when I told them they had everything needed to turn their TVs into thin clients and meeting room monitors right into the Linux firmware just a compile away. I’d totally love a 35” X terminal in 2008 with Ethernet and a couple USB ports.
Yes, we’ve all done that. I mentioned earlier about how I used XBMC on an original Xbox.
But we aren’t normal people. Normal people wouldn’t even know how to set up a media centre. And the Nintendo Switch famously has next to no video streaming platforms on it.
I remember some brand was caught connecting to nearby TVs of the same brand to send telemetry to their corporate masters through the neighbour’s internet connected TV. Not sure how far they went with downloading new firmware.
Please make a list of things you don't need so that in case of any issues with the company or system that allows access to them you will know to just stop using them.
The list is longer than you'd probably think. Keeping a principled stance might involve taking on some inconvenience, which could be a problem for some people.
I've dropped many things in the past because of issues with the company/service. Amazon Prime, every single streaming service, I've been car free for over 3 years, and there are more.
Are there some things I would struggle with if suddenly there were issues? Sure. I had to significantly increase my internet spend because of the (much) cheaper option going to complete shit. I require the internet for my career but unless the entire world collapses I doubt I'll run into any true blocker that would prevent me from using it for work.
Most people are just afraid to change their lives substantively. I am too, but I'm also willing to do it for causes I believe in.
I think you underestimate the meaning of the word 'inconvenience'. Hot water is a convenience.
My point is that your list is one list which you are making, but someone else could look at your life and make a different list. Your argument only goes so far you can extend into your own life. If you really cared about something's place in your life, you wouldn't classify it as a convenience, so you are conveniently applying your own classifications to other people's lives, which you don't have a right to do.
This is why we have democratic institutions and authority -- to make these limits about what is tolerable and intolerable -- not what people's conveniences are.
> Please make a list of things you don't need so that in case of any issues with the company or system that allows access to them you will know to just stop using them.
If you didn't expect me to be introspective to MYSELF then why even bother asking? Of course my list is personal.
While it is personal, it also can apply to others. The reality is that most people are completely unwilling to inconvenience themselves.
Go without hot water? Okay, sure. I take cold showers, they are better for your skin. I wash my clothes with cold water. The only thing I use hot water for is dishes. I think that might be a bit weird, but I think dish soap is anti bacterial so it's probably not an issue? Now you can reply to this saying: "well YOU can do that but other people will feel differently." No shit. But most of the world goes without hot water so who cares.
> If you really cared about something's place in your life, you wouldn't classify it as a convenience, so you are conveniently applying your own classifications to other people's lives, which you don't have a right to do.
Most people don't actually care about TV in their life - they just have never thought for a minute to consider the reality of not having one.
> This is why we have democratic institutions and authority -- to make these limits about what is tolerable and intolerable -- not what people's conveniences are.
Not sure how this is relevant. I'm all for consumer protection. But the most apt way to protect yourself is to vote: first for politicians, and then with your wallet.
My point is that it isn't about the individual. You can go without hot water if you like but it isn't going to solve any problems, it will just make you miserable. Going without TV isn't going to make smart TV manufacturers stop spying on people, because they don't know why you aren't buying a TV. They could conclude anything they want from you not buying a TV. The only thing that makes them stop spying on people is a law that says they can't spy on people.
That was my whole point. You are making this about personal choices when it isn't, and using it as a way to judge people who don't make the same choices you do.
Do people really have a choice though? Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less productive is often hard to afford.
Another instance where companies can have more leverage than consumers is gaming. Console exclusives are a thing because they work; not giving consumers the option to play Pokemon on anything but the Nintendo Switch drives switch sales. Microsoft is better off working with other gaming companies to ensure Windows keeps being dominant, than building an OS to gamer's preferences.
I think time has proven many times that consumers aren't always good regulators for the market. The market is best regulated by organized entities.
Not even companies have a choice, for the most part. Their choice of operating system is dictated by the applications they need to run, and only the smallest and most unsophisticated businesses can generally get away with nothing but a web browser.
There is a whole ecosystem that needs to move before they can move.
> Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less productive is often hard to afford.
Sure, but I also think that a lot of the issues with Windows 11 don't really matter much if its just used as a work OS. For example, I refuse to upgrade my home PC to 11, because I don't want Microsoft to spy on me; however, when I am using my work computer, I know that I am already being spied upon, so that's not a concern for me.
If people stopped buying cigarettes there would be no tobacco industry. But the true cost of smoking is not something that the smoker realizes until it's already too late. That's why we had to have huge public health campaigns to deter people from smoking, because the long-term effects aren't obvious when you're just stopping in at the corner store. We all live in our own little bubbles and it's often difficult to see how our actions, individual and collective, shape the world around us.
Consumers can make choices only if it is clear what the options are. In many cases, Microsoft hides behind weasel or made up words. And it takes a security researcher to peel back the layers of their bullshit.
If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).
>There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.
--CGPGrey, Humans need not apply.
You need a paradigm shift in your mind on why the modern world looks like it does. You don't need human consumers, you just need a consumer. Any system that allows you to get the hard resources you need to produce the hard/soft resources required is simply enough. Humans are fungible for anything else that can provide manual or intellectual labor.
As a thought excercize, just imagine a bunch of AIs/robots buying/selling/trading resources between each other. Where are humans required in this?
In this scenario, where the AI and robots no longer rely on human labor for maintenance and growth, their productive capacity exclusively serves the owning elite (including defending them with violence if necessary) and the rest of us are an inconvenient growth occupying land and consuming resources.
This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.
What is the point of producing all this stuff now?
Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.
At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.
I am, of course, referring to the IOUs (a.k.a. cash) they famously are sitting on, and have been sitting on for decades. Technically they can call the debt at any time, but what does average Joe have to give that Apple would want? If there was something appealing they'd have done it already. In reality there is nothing and it will sit there forevermore and the consumers on the other side of the transaction ultimately got stuff for free.
But, as before, it doesn't really matter as rich people aren't interested in things. They already have everything they could ever dream of and physically cannot handle even more. They are interested in social standing.
By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide).
And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.
Apple is not giving away something for free; rather, they are losing possible future gains from immediately putting the cash to work.
> By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free".
If the debt is never called, yes, that is true. However, most companies don't get that luxury. For regular poor people, eventually those who control those companies need to call the debt to get the food, shelter, etc. they need to live and, when possible, things like entertainment, vacations, etc. to make life enjoyable. However, once you become rich, you transcend beyond that — where you cannot ever begin to call all the debt you've accumulated. It's a uniquely rich experience to be able to sit on billions of dollars worth of debt and not think twice about those who owe something.
> If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free
Exactly. In that scenario both the buyer and seller exchange an equal amount of value. No debt lingers to be paid (or never paid, as the case may be) in the future. But Apple wants more. They want you to promise them something else in some hypothetical future.
Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.
And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.
> And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.
According to you, any transaction in which one party A proffers a non-currency resource, and the other, B, offers currency, is in fact the signing of a contract in which B promises to provide the other party something in the future. However, A could then turn around and promise party C for its resources using B's promise - and effectively transfer this promise to C, which then holds the right to demand resources from B.
You are effectively just describing the fiat system of currency where B is the government.
Calling cash, which is fungible and transferrable, "debt", which generally denotes an obligation of some sort, obfuscates what your logic.
Once you pay Apple - ergo, transfer it IOUs that represent your promise to provide resources in the future - it has no way of holding you to your promise other than by giving you back your IOU or giving it to someone else. This does not square with the definition of "debt".
Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people. Of course a billionaire would not be able to "call all the debt [they have] accumulated". You're just saying that they maintain so much value that they can't ever trade it all for tangible goods and services. However, no-one except the government has to honour their request to trade their so-called "debt" that they have accumulated from others for actual resources.
> Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people.
Quite possibly. But that doesn't actually matter because if they don't understand something they will ask questions until they do understand, just as it seems you now do. That's how communication works. It is bidirectional for good reason. I admittedly don't understand what you are trying to add with this. What are we supposed to learn from this?
I would argue that most people already understand money in the way you describe it: as a medium of exchange. Your description of money just frames this function through the idea of an obligation of some sort which doesn't exist actually for anyone except the government.
There is no framing beyond my intent. One may originally misinterpret my intent, but that's again why communication is bidirectional. I am still unsure of your intent in this. My failed interpretation is that you are trying to invent some kind of hypothetical communication problem that isn't one, but what are you actually trying to get across here?
What I'm trying to say is that I don't see any benefit in describing cash as "debt" and instead find it misleading as it implies an obligation to be fulfilled that doesn't actually exist for anyone except the government, and certainly not its customers.
In fact, to address an earlier comment:
> Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.
> And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.
The cash Average Joe proffers for a product - what you describe as "debt" - wouldn't be in Joe's possession without first being exchanged for Average Joe's simple labour. Simply put - Average Joe cannot be indebted to Apple without first trading his labour for someone else's indebtedness, which he then gives to Apple in return for his iPhone. If his labour has no value, he has no unit by which to even denominate any potential indebtedness he may offer.
1. Well, cash is debt. Obviously all things in life are dependent on perspective, but the framing should be useful to separate the idea of a company seeking cash not because they want the raw silver, or what have you. If you try to think too hard about it you might end up confused, but then you ask for clarification and then are no longer confused. This is where I fail to understand what you are trying to say. We get it. You didn't understand the intent originally. That is why you asked for clarification. But your subsequent comments indicate that, upon receiving that clarification, that you do now understand. So the communication worked perfectly. My continued flawed interpretation is that you still seem to be trying to invent some contrived hypothetical, but that doesn't make sense, so I will have to ask you to clarify once again. What are you trying to say here?
2. At least where democracy is found, the government and the customers are the exact same people. The distinction you are trying to draw isn't clear either. What do you think government is if not people?
1. Whether it is debt or not makes no difference so long as someone else will take it. You imply that Apple having cash means customers owe Apple something. I say that Apple having cash just means Apple could have something else in the place of cash in the future if someone chooses to take Apple's cash for it.
2. I disagree. An autocratic government is fully capable of issuing fiat currency, and a the government being obliged to provide resources in return for its currency is a concept orthogonal to democracy. It doesn't matter whose "debt" cash stems from. All that matters is that it can be traded easily.
Also, I updated my comment to point out more clearly where I disagree with your conclusions. (Apologies for such a late response. I hit HN's rate limit.)
A debt never called is the same as giving something away for free, yes.
Technically they can still call the debt, but the question remains outstanding: What do you have that they would want in return? The answer is effectively nothing, and increasingly so.
There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.
Why wouldn’t an advanced AGI robot, trained on human behavior, not want their own house and mode of transportation? Sure it’s basically kayfabe for them to ‘want’ the stuff we do but if we’re following the script of who will buy all the stuff, then the answer will be the robots I guess.
You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.
You act like I produce the silver I spend. No, the miners and minters do, who debase our currency mining and minting more.
Even if we tied our economic system to shiny rocks the vast majority of us aren't involved in the production of shiny rocks. We're still just trading tokens we agree have some kind of value.
In Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff.
I feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.
The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.
This is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.
This is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model.
I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
While you're correct we still need a lot more, the advances in the past 5 years represent more than I've seen in most of my life.
Just look at the speed in which we can train a humanoid robot things now. We can send out a mo-cap human, get some data, and in few hours run a few hundred trillion simulations, and publish a kernel that can do that task relatively well.
LLMs allow us any perception at all. They feed vision to scene comprehension an then let the robot control part calculate a plan to achieve a goal. It's not very fast, and fine motor controls have a long way to go, but it is possible.
People have literally started revolutions and wars over taxes. Empires have fallen because of taxes. People are often emotional and don't even want to think logically about taxes. I suspect that it's been like this since taxes were invented :-)
Yes and no. it's not like they ever extracted taxes from most of the natives living in the amazon jungle. Saying that you rule over people that have literally never heard of you is, IMO, stretching the definition of "rule" quite a bit :-)
Since when is taxing all subjects a necessity? Britain didn't tax people in the 13 colonies so could we conclude that before the American Revolution they were not part of the British Empire?
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