I said meaningful measure of economic health, not growth. :-) But I'm not sure. The book "Mismeasuring our lives" gives five recommendations for developing improved measures:
1. Look at income and consumption rather than production
2. Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth
3. Emphasize the household perspective (with this they seem to be focusing on more meaningful measurement of in-kind services and inter-sector payments, like government provision of healthcare and education, etc.)
4. Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption, and wealth
5. Broaden income measures to non-market activites (their examples here are things like childcare, where a shift from non-market childcare to market childcare over time can create the illusion of an increase in productivity)
Personally #4 is my biggest beef with GDP (and related measures like GDP per capita). Without some kind of adjustment for inequality, GDP can easily make bad things look good. What we need is not overall growth but equitably distributed gains; even a decrease in GDP could result in most people being better off if it occurred because of wealth redistribution.
and in every metric that encompasses logarithmic values (like income or wealth) normalize the use of the median ffs... Averages are gaslighting the "average" Joe.
Most meaningful alternative measures of growth very strongly correlate with GDP. Which is why we just go with GDP. It has issues but GDP has practical utility.
Sure, but once countries hit a moderate level of development the bulk of preventable infant deaths are handled. E.g. Frances' rate has been flat since the turn of the millennium.
In the end, with the current market prices, chips factories and data centers are being built all over with the assumption of exponential demand growth. When the excitement and demand for AI cools, we will enjoy the additional capacity and better prices. Also see: fiber bandwidth post 2000. Capital poured in, overbuilding happened, prices collapsed after the crash.
Has work begun on increasing RAM production capacity? My understanding is that these companies are specifically _not_ increasing capacity yet while they wait to see if the bubble bursts or not.
There aren't because nobody is betting on ai demand to last. Then they'd have a couple billion dollar fab sitting around doing nothing and employees that'd have to be fired.
There already was scaling back for dram and and production post COVID, where I believe nand was being sold close to cost because of oversupply
Meanwhile on the other side of the world - I noticed in SEA businesses are more like "just contact us" with a phone number directly available / facebook page. Like, they don't want you to do anything with the website, they expect you to chat with them directly.
Youtube is squeezing more and more to push subscribing to premium. Youtube is where "everything" is - they know they can squeeze hard, where else are you going to go?
Ironically it looks more and more like TV with the non stop ads and sponsors.
Can you explain the shadow banking / conversion angle? All I found was that selling knives was used to get a discount on steam balance thanks to price arbitrage.
> "Selling Knives" (挂刀) refers to the technique of buying in-game items from 3rd-party (Chinese) trading sites like NetEase BUFF, C5, IGXE, and UUYP, and then selling them on the Steam Market to obtain a discounted Steam Wallet balance by capitalizing on price differences.
I'm surprised the price difference did not disappear if people make that trade.
China notoriously has intense capital controls. It's difficult for ordinary Chinese citizens to take capital out of the country. CS2 items can be bought and sold in both USD and RMB, and can be transferred between Chinese and international accounts. It's not about Steam wallet balances.
Interesting. I'm curious though, assuming I am Chinese and I trade knives for USD - where would I be able to receive USD to evade capital control? Surely not my bank account or Steam wallet. Or is it for people with bank account in both countries? But in that case crypto could be more convenient? I'm puzzled
Yes you would need to receive in a foreign USD bank account outside of China, the whole goal is to get the capital out of China and into a foreign account. Cryptocurrency transactions/exchanges are illegal in China so that's definitely not convenient! Meanwhile you can buy CS2 items with any ordinary payment method.
Remember the 15% transaction fee on the Steam market? That's why the price difference hasn't disappeared. Players can avoid this fee through gifting and off-platform transactions.
And all of this is just Chinese players trying to buy games cheaper—after all, what else can Steam wallet funds be used for?
Some comments claim this is a way for Chinese people to evade financial regulations, but that's complete nonsense. The Steam market's capacity is entirely insufficient to meet the demand. They could easily choose to legally exchange currency using the foreign exchange quotas of relatives and friends, engage in cross-border wash trading through underground banks, or use fake trade and fake investment schemes.
> Imagine a world where most programmers are primarily LLM prompters with a very shallow understanding of core programming skills or even operational skills pertaining to an app, framework or library. What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what’s really going on?
You could make the same claim to make a case for the usage of any technology that simplifies the coding work, ie: using Java instead of assembly, usage of AWS instead of implementing your own infra, etc. With higher level languages, by freeing up developers from having to worry about specifics of memory management or syscalls, they could become more productive and focus more on the actual problems to solve. Some still understand the underlying because they work on that low level layer, but this is not needed anymore for most.
I think LLMs are another step in that direction, although with caveats.
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