> If billionaires ran the country we wouldn't be starting trade wars and restricting immigration.
I'm not sure if you're joking, so if you are, this comment is not for you.
In the current monopolized and cartelized economic environment, the only effect of trade wars is the reduction of competition due to the suppression of foreign competition - billionaires just love that because it allows them to increase prices and profits without increasing production.
Immigration wasn't really restricted for billionaires, it was restricted only for the small fish who may not be able to afford the new and not-quite-high fees. The end result is again suppressed competition which benefits the cartels and monopolies controlled by billionaires. As I've already said, they love that.
> During the announcement of the tariffs and the subsequent period, pretty much everything I had invested dropped across the board
Noise. The drop was short lived, the news was used as an excuse to take some profits and realign portfolios, a lot of other announcements wrt tariffs looked a lot like market manipulation too.
Then the market figured that foreign competition is being stomped in the mud and the officially sanctioned inflation is the new and endless excuse for higher prices and profits without actually increasing production in a monopolized and cartelized economic environment.
> If some sectors of the economy become drastically more efficient... overall society has become wealthier
That's a weird one - what's your metric for the "wealth of overall society"? Stock market indexes can't be it because those are subject to extreme levels of unreported inflation and gaming.
How can you measure something that is subject to extreme inflation when that inflation is not only unmeasured but not even acknowledged as a phenomenon?
At present, the "wealth of overall society" is a unicorn metric as opposed to the perfectly measurable and extreme levels of income and wealth inequality. In other words, the overall losses from skewed distribution dwarf the gains from higher efficiencies.
If the orchestra performs less often because the violists have better paying jobs in a factory making the latest and greatest TVs, more homes will have the latest and greatest TVs.
Of course, this relies on the assumption most work - and hence most productivity - is a net social good. If the violinists have instead got jobs operating an orphan-crushing machine, that would be a bad thing. But hopefully your society is structured in such a way that the average worker is contributing to the prosperity of their local community.
GDP produced divided by costs required measures intensity. These will be typically normalized (inflation removed) or, if a ratio, can be nominal since both have the inflation ratioed out.
GDP is known to be an imperfect measure, especially for capturing cottage industry and due to the distribution effect you described, but it's not horrible to start with.
The main metrics are mean and median real income (i.e. inflation-adjusted). Baumol's only occurs if mean real income rises. Unless inequality rises simultaneously, then median real income (the metric most people care about) will rise as well.
Suppose that every single person in society receives the same compensation and has the same wealth, i.e. there is perfect equality.
Society produces housing and other necessities and people consume them in some amount and then have what's left as disposable income to spend on whatever they like, e.g. for going on dates.
Then a law is passed prohibiting the construction of housing with more than two stories. Building ten housing units on ten lots with ten foundations requires more labor than constructing ten units all on the same lot, so the price of housing increases, people have to spend more on housing and have less money left to buy flowers and some people quit their jobs at the flower shop to go pour concrete (while still getting paid exactly the same amount as before).
There is zero change in inequality but the cost of something has gone up and people have to eat it by getting less of something else.
> it’s actually a bit of an oddity that computers had this brief moment of hackability. You can probably turn an old washing machine into a lathe
Yours is a wildly misleading analogy. The design of Washing Machines (WMs) contains no elements solely dedicated to preventing the off-label use of them, the analogy with phones would be a WM that comes surrounded by barbed wire, a moat and self-destruct explosives attached to the WM to brick it in case the owner tried to unscrew some screw or another. Then a technician with an unauthorized key for your home visits you whenever he wants and messes with the WM and its "defenses" at his pleasure.
There was no "brief moment of hackability" for WMs because they were always hackable to the max - as much as the basic usage design allowed. The WM manufacturers neither acknowledged nor prevented the conversion of WMs into lathes or any other artifact for that matter, that's up to the owner to decide. So yeah, make phones like WMs and stop crippling and messing with people's property.
Incidentally, the off-label use of drugs saves a lot of lives every year. Should we add poison to them to prevent that? Because that's what phone manufacturers are doing to the their phones under the merciless prodding of the OS suppliers.
> As a result, the Huawei Kirin 9030 SoC is likely produced at an operating loss
Yields are always bad at first but they improve with time and experience. Besides, stretching DUV to smaller nodes is a stopgap measure while China is working on their own EUVL technology and that research is led by the same people who developed ASML's EUV.
Mostly because online process can scale a lot further and faster. An older cousin can only walk into a store to buy so much alcohol but a stolen token can be reused a million times in a second.
China has 1,000 GW installed solar and 26 GW of wind which generate 2k TWh/yr. The total installed nuclear in China is a mere 60 GW which generate 450 TWh/yr. Therefore, the capacity factor of solar is 2 TWh/GW and that of nuclear is 4 times higher at 8 TWh/GW.
Calling an 4 times higher capacity factor "noise" is actual noise.
Besides, nuclear provides uninterrupted energy supply, no need for storage or special convenient places for installation. That's why China is building capacity of both types as fast as they can.
Europe is in a colder geographic area with less sunshine and more needs of energy during the cold/rainy days, nuclear is an absolute necessity there.
The scales of rollout are so vastly different, it is just noise.
China will add 450GW or more renewables this year alone.
Even after dividing by 4 this represents more additional energy production capacity in ONE year than their 15 year target for nuclear. This is after your capacity factor adjustment.
Nuclear’s contribution to Chinese electricity production at the end of their 2040 nuclear plan is likely to be below 5%. Even less than nuclear’s current global share of about 9% - down from just under 20% in the mid 1990s.
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