Pluralistic: The housing crisis considered as an income crisis: ‘The American rich are the Spiders Georg of house prices.’
Economics
2024-10-24
2024-10-23
Ed Newton-Rex, who organised the recent anti AI ingesting everyone’s work for free statement that artists of all sorts of fame levels are signing makes a good point.
There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two - sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third - training data - for free.
Big tech AI companies aren’t stingy with their money for everything. That’s one reason why they’re so unprofitable. It’s just that magic third ingredient that often attracts the $0 compensation rate.
New commission may ban English water companies from making a profit: Good: water is both a life essential and a natural monopoly, normal rules of capitalism cannot apply.
2024-10-21
All What Is Delicious to Man: Today’s implausible vision of superabundance is a lot grimmer than the one that they were promised in the 1830s.
The Subprime AI Crisis: Ed Zitron worries about what happens when the unprofitability of the current generative AI business becomes unsustainable.
2024-10-19
The Shareholder Supremacy: One of the many original sins of modern-day capitalism was when we decided companies should focus on pleasing their shareholders rather than their customers.
The Other Bubble: Why “Software as a Service” (SaaS) products - especially the enterprise-oriented offerings - often end up being so awful.
2024-10-18
The Return of the Deniers and the Revenge of Patoshi: One of the analyses that suggest that the creator of Bitcoin owns around 1.1 million of them.
2024-10-18: TIL: Thanks to the innate lack of privacy that the technology has, whilst we might not know who …
2024-10-07: Google's creators envisaged that advertising-funded search engines are a bad idea (but made one anyway)
2024-10-04: 📚 Finished reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.
2024-10-01
Is UK maternity pay excessive and how much does it cost the taxpayer?: No, it’s nowhere near ‘excessive’.
2024-09-21
The case for public funding of UK political parties: One possible alternative to the current system of most funding coming from donors.
Almost half of UK political donations come from private wealthy ‘super-donors’: Maybe letting very wealthy people effectively buy elections isn’t exactly ideal for democracy.
2024-09-07: Fake streamers listening to fake music by fake artists on Spotify allegedly made a single fraudster at least $10 million
2024-08-22: The IFS's interactive 'impact of tax and benefit changes' tool shows the cruel impact of the post-2010 tax and benefit changes
2024-08-01: Once again, managing a government budget is not like managing a household budget
2024-06-20: This month’s The American Prospect magazine has an absolutely - possibly surprisingly - …
2024-06-18: Apparently I was not the only person to rather take advantage of all-you-can-eat deals, at least in …
2024-06-08: A calculator to quickly compare the energy costs of using different types of appliances
2024-04-17: Spotify's new minimum stream threshold means most tracks no longer pay the artist
2024-04-07: Is the UK housing crisis more about who owns the houses rather than how many houses there are?
2024-03-07: From The Guardian: Britain will go into the next general election with taxes at their highest level …
2024-02-05: 📧 Reading the Bits About Money newsletter.
2024-02-04: TIL: Buckingham Palace pays a council tax bill of £1,828 per year. That’s lower than 46% of …