I'm not asking just to be a sophist. The top tier of molecular identification methods can detect unbelievably tiny amounts of stuff.
Quite. And what is the risk level associated with that concentration? If it's lower than my lifetime risk of being struck by lightning or bitten by a shark, we can file this under "u" for "unimportant".
I can run Linux on a Raspberry Pi. It's got one main chip and maybe a dozen smaller ones.
Even a modern laptop probably doesn't have hundreds of chips. A processor, I/O bridge, memory, and a handful of add-ons. I'd be surprised if it hit 100.
The trade war on US goods has been going on forever. BMW 2.5% import tariff into US. Ford 30% import tariff into Germany. This is US retaliation.
So Germany harms its citizens by charging them an extra 30% to buy a F-150. America is going to respond by charging Americans 30% to buy a Mercedes? "You're beating up your citizens so I'm going to be up my citizens until you stop!"
That story ignores two factors. First, while I believe the evidence says the buyer winds up paying most of the tariffs in most cases, that's not always true. Depending on a bunch of factors, others might bear the burden. Second, even if the buyer pays the tax, the seller is hurt because sales will decrease. That's why American exporters (e.g. farmers) are upset that China is raising tariffs even though the American farmer might not directly pay it.
I believe you're correct about US wealth patterns. Does anyone have any data on European wealth? I'd be pretty surprised if the Rothschilds and Habsburgs were still in the top tiers of wealth and influence. But maybe it takes longer than I expect to dilute 500 years of wealth accumulation.
My guess, based on no data, is the wealthiest people in Europe are also new money. The older fortunes probably still exist but are not the scale of the newcomers. But then again, I believe fewer industry titans are founded in Europe versus the US so the results of entrepreneurship might be much smaller.
The Mediterranean diet is famously healthy.
Is that the latest thinking? IIRC nutrition researchers were backing off a bit. Specifically, the "green zones" were turning out to be more about incomplete recordkeeping than actual life expectancy.
Anyone rich in the 90's was probably still eating a lot of meat, boozing and smoking.
Which is weird because my impression is people smoke a lot more in Europe than the US. I don't have any numbers handy to back up that impression. Same with alcohol. My impression is American probably drink more beer and distilled liquor (on TV, every executive meeting starts by pouring a glass of scotch and TV wouldn't like to me, would it?) while Europeans drink more wine.
We've been talking about the differences between American and European lifestyles for as long as I can remember. Surely we have good data on hand, don't we? No need for me to speculate.
I was just going to say something like that. Capitalism is an idea, a pattern of human behavior, not a thing. The existing companies may fail, investments may shift, but the idea will remain.
Even after a climate disaster, I'm quite sure all the surviving humans will continue to specialize, trade, save, and invest and that's what capitalism is.
Poor being locked out of the credit market
Maybe. I assume they're not dumb and would pay cash if they thought it in their best interest. Since many people don't, I'm going to trust they have good reasons for borrowing. Personally I figured out that paying credit card interest was a losing game and can't remember the last time I didn't pay my bill in full (but I'm lucky enough that I haven't had to worry about cash flow for a number of years).
I'm with the grandpost: capping interest rates will just make credit cards impossible to get unless you have pristine credit. Price caps create shortages, ever and always. Sucks if you have low income or are young but it's for your own good (pats on head). Paternalist busybodies.
Want to source that? Creating a price index is HARD, because everyone is spend their money in different ways, so there are always going to be relative gainers and relative losers compared to CPI.
All true. I've heard any number of economists point out that CPI likely overstates inflation and PPI might be a better choice in some cases.
It really comes down to what you're using the deflator for. I'm not enough of an economist to say which is better in which cases.
There is likely to be a very big new market for capable humanoid robots...
No doubt. Robots are getting better and better quite fast. But that doesn't address my question.
Do these robots need to be designed in the US? By US citizens? Do the companies need to be headquartered or mostly staffed in the US? Is it OK to have US headquartered companies get only 60% of the revenue or does it have to be 100%? Does this include traditional industrial robots? Advanced CNCs? Do we only care about Data and C-3PO?
I don't think there's clear answers for any of this. I also don't think there's a clear answer what we're willing to give up to achieve some sort of dominant position in robotics.
People mock the Chinese ghost cities, but many (I dare say most)of them actually filled up.
Interesting point but not entirely applicable. Data centers have a much shorter shelf life. After about five years, any compute gear is obsolete. I'd be surprised if power and air handling equipment lasts ten years. Houses and offices are useful for much longer.
I'm curious about this. What would it mean to "win"? That the majority of industrial robots are designed in the US? By engineers based in the US? Do they need to be built here? Or sold here? Do the companies making robots need US headquarters?
Then coms the economic question. So we encourage US companies to invest in robot design and production. What do we give up to achieve that? Should we stop having engineers work on data storage systems? AI? EVs? Batteries? Cars? Medical equipment? There's only a limited supply of engineers and capital. To work on one thing, you have to give up working on something else. People encouraging supporting one industry universally forget this tradeoff.
The first law of economics is there isn't enough of everything to satisfy every desire. The first law of politics is to ignore the first law of economics.
A lot weren't stealth. I know a number of people who were overtly laid off.
Word has it the Highly Paid Consultants wanted them to get headcount down to 100k. Looks like they're close.
I honestly don't know what Dell's products are. In my mind they just sell computers made of parts that other companies make. I'm probably wrong about that. Maybe they manufacture their own LCD screens?
You're thinking of the consumer side of the company. Dell also makes a ton of high-margin data center gear. Storage systems in particular have very high gross margins.
Even on the consumer side Dell puts a ton of design work into the devices. It's not just pick a laptop off a Foxconn menu.
Drone sub hunters are becoming a thing.
The headline is really misleading. It's all about confusing gummint (specifically the Bureau of Labor Statistics) job classifications.
Programmers: code monkeys who convert specifications into applications. Those jobs are getting crushed by Copilot and ChatGPT.
Software developers: people like me who ask customers "what problem are you trying to solve?", write the specifications, and when I get lucky, write the code. Software developers are apparently doing fine. There are a lot more of them than programmers.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are never talking about themselves.
