Even if the US had free healthcare, and full social protection in the form of welfare and food stamps, for every citizen, and provided free higher education for everyone, it wouldn't spend even half of what the economy generates, much less *more* than it generates.

How do I know? Nations which generate less money per capita do this, and it doesn't cost more than their economy generates.

There is no need to tax even remotely as high as you suggest to afford infrastructure, health care, education and social services. And it also wouldn't lead to "nobody working"; on the contrary, people who have financial security want to do things, and need money to do that, so they want to make more money.

You're seriously rhetorically asking "why does a car manufacturing plant need a parking lot to place the cars it produces on" and expects it to be some kind of "gotcha".

And that is the absolutely only argument you have; that you can't think far enough to comprehend the need for space to place produced vehicles on.

I've been disappointed by a lot of commenters in my day, but you take the cake.

Corporate America uses Windows because it provides tools for locking down what the users can do, and because nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft. Not because corporate America has some kind of superior comprehension of security or quality.

I used to use Windows 25 years ago. Today I want to get work done and run games and have something just work. That means Linux all the way. Nothing else has the stability and performance, and most of all, allows me to use all the skills I've amassed over half a century.

Employment in logistics gas skyrocketed since trucks and tractors became common.

History since the industrial revolution shows that when the rich hoard wealth, it takes long for common people to benefit from efficiency increases, that's correct, but that has nothing to do with the amount of people needed to perform work.

And now, as yoiur argument is lacking, you're running around with the goal posts, trying to limit the scope to one narrow sector of horse use, one which wasn't even in the original broken analogy.

Thanks for admitting your point was, and remains, vacuous.

Correlation is not causation. Trucks and tractors did not impose the tariffs.

What is clearly observable truth is that with increased capacity to automate things like code generation, like improvements in compilers, IDE's, source control and so on, the demand for code has exploded, and the need for human brain power with it. Currently there is no way for human brain power to even remotely satiate the demand for more code.

Using generative AI to enhance productivity will not reverse this trend. If anything, it will accelerate it.

Unless a massive breakthrough in how generative AI works is done soon, this won't change. Generative AI will not replace human brain power. It will augment it while increasing the demand for it.

The ones laying off staff are US companies. Not European companies. As a general observation, skilled workers in Europe not only have job security, but are being headhunted by companies desperate for more workforce.

Manual labor and such is a different matter, and the majority of unemployment.

Nobody's getting fired from AI, except in some edge cases like first line support where nobody wants to work anyway. Automation in general, in Europe, is done to increase quality and output. And AI is not great for that, yet.

The main drive for automation is not saving money on workers, but increase in quality, reduction of waste and increase in production rate. It's mainly used to increase output and reducing losses rather than removing workers. The exceptions are things like first line customer support and other really menial jobs, where worker turnover is high and the output is extremely low margin and not quality sensitive.

This analogy fails on so many levels.

Thus far, any increased productivity from genai gets absorbed by the need for much more product. It's not like transportation, where the growth in need is limited and increase in transport capability will reduce the number of workers needed to transport things (which incidentally also hasn't been the case; there are a hell of a lot more people working in logistics today than in 1894). In fields where genai is being used, the demand has always been vastly higher than production ability, and there is no end in sight of that being the case.

We can increase output of every programmer and writer in the world by magnitudes, and that wouldn't even remotely satiate the need for more code and more written material.

And of course, it turned out that with the switch to more efficient transportation, what happened wasn't the same amount of goods transported with lower wages, but a vast increase in demand for goods, so even more people got employed and got higher wages.

Sure, the horses were let go, but that didn't impact the number of people employed or the wages negatively. On the contrary.

That's... so completely wrong it's even impossible to address. You don't even comprehend the concept of a token.

Wow.

Considering what people collect, it's not at all obvious there is no such thing. It seems likely there is no sich thing, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone collects something like that.

Either way, both tools simply generate the statistcially most likely response from their input data. Apparently ChatGPT has input data that contains a lot more sarcasm, which I'm not sure I would agree is in any way a good thing.

The old equipment will have to be destroyed anyway, as most of it has an expiration date. Explosives and especially propellants go bad with time, and require destruction and replacement.

That's expensive to do. Shipping them to a warzone to get used instead saves money.

And the replacement equipment was already in production long before the equipment was shipped to Ukraine. The US defense constantly rotates out old equipment and replace it. In practice, supporting Ukraine was extremely cheap, and immense bang for the buck.

Because the answer is self evident with the solution I propose. For the next ten years, keep buying what is required from who sells it, without trade wars.

And then, in ten years when the capability has been built, there will be no need for trade wars.

What is bunk is what is happening now, and all the pathetic excuses made for it.

Then you start companies creating those things using government funds, of which the US has plenty. Do what was done in the postwar era, with progressive taxation and government involved in cutting edge technology.

And on top of that, tariffs will mainly lead to all costs going up in the country. That will lead to less production and less consumption, meaning economic slowdown, meaning even less revenue. There is nothing positive coming from these levels of tariffs.

There are uses for tariffs, sure. They can incentivize keeping specific capability working in a country where it's more expensive. Like a country where it's expensive to grow food can use narrow tariffs to make it profitable to keep some food production running in the country. There are strategic reasons to do that, and take the cost. But even that needs to be narrow, and negotiated, or the net effect will simply be higher expenses for the population and the loss of that capability anyway.