Every single “vibe coding is the future,” “the power of AI,” and “AI job loss” story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts. Every article written about OpenAI or NVIDIA or Oracle that doesn’t explicitly state that the money doesn’t exist, that the revenues are impossible, that one of the companies involved burns billions of dollars and has no path to profitability, is an act of irresponsible make believe and mythos.
↫ Edward Zitron
The numbers are clear. People aren’t paying for “AI”, and those that do, are using up way more resources than they’re actually paying for. The profits required to make all of this work just aren’t realistic in any way, shape, or form. The money being pumped around doesn’t even exist. It’s a scam of such utterly massive proportions, it’s easier for many of us to just assume it can’t possibly be one. Too big to fail? Too many promises to be a scam.
It’s going to be a bloodbath, but as usual when the finance and tech bros scam entire sectors, it’s us normal folk who will be left to foot the bill. Let’s blame immigrants some more while we implement harsh austerity measures to bail out the billionaire class. Again.
Important clarification: No reasonable person is blaming “immigrants”, most people simply want the already-existing immigration laws to be enforced.
I have heard several good reasons why a country needs legal immigration, but I haven’t heard a single good reason why illegal immigrants who arrived in a country by jumping the border without showing any kind of ID (and nobody knows who they really are) should stay, much less stay and undercut the labor prices for citizens and legal immigrants by working under the table. What’s the benefit for legal immigrants and citizens, aka the people the President or Prime Minister has a legal duty (per the constitution) to take care of their interests?
(also, in the Rupert Murdoch comic you posted, Murdoch’s cookies are in a giant vault called “offshore Panama account” and are untouchable, making any kind of “redistribution” impossible)
The thing that always confuses me is why no one fusses about the fact that at least here in the US all these “illegal immigrants” wouldn’t be here if that same president that’s supposed to be American first and looking out for the constitution wasn’t mucking around in places like Venezuela (like what is happening as we speak) causing insecurity and instability that leads to people coming here!
Stop mucking around and take care of home so that people will stay home.
But nope we currently have a whole fleet off the coast of Venezuela right now threatening the government! And no it’s not there to shoot those little maybe drug boats we have no evidence are drug boats.
So yeah the good reason is if we gonna let our government make a mess then we all got to pay for it.
You really wanna know? Most politicians in the U.S. have been looking the other way for the past decades because there is an implicit understanding that illegal immigrants keep the country running. In the U.S. (and elsewhere), they provide ultra-cheap manual labor for agricultural work, construction, cleaning and various other menial jobs that no one else seems to wants to do – keeping food, buildings, and low-level services cheap for the rest of us!
No, they don’t pay into the tax base, but they also don’t get any social security benefits, health insurance, job security, etc. etc.
Moochman,
Actually they don’t get federal benefits, but do pay taxes.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/fiscal-facts/yes-undocumented-immigrants-pay-taxes-and-receive-few-tax-benefits
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/undocumented-immigrants-can-do-pay-taxes-2025-02-26/
(Prior to this administration) the IRS data was kept intentionally separate from the rest of the government and did not rat out undocumented workers. This made tax compliance far more likely to happen as workers and employers could pay taxes without being punished for doing so. Not reporting employee income created the bigger risk. It might seem weird that it worked this way, but the idea had been to incentivize IRS compliance rather than discourage it. It’s the exact same reason some jurisdictions prohibit the police from reporting undocumented immigrants – as that creates incentives to NOT work with the police at reducing crime. Otherwise when people feel endangered for doing the right thing, it creates a negative incentive.
This year things have changed and the trump administration forced the IRS to hand over data, meaning undocumented workers are no longer able to pay taxes without fear of ICE coming for them. ICE using IRS records to find undocumented workers today probably means that less income will get reported to the IRS in the future. Also those deported will obviously stop paying taxes. This makes me wonder how much revenue will be lost for these reasons.
Ironically, Trump is currently crafting a bailout package of up to $15B for farmers harmed by his own policies, which is kind of nuts because his actions are simultaneously harming productivity and costing us more.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-bailout-trade-hit-us-farmers-expected-this-week-2025-10-06/
Very interesting, I didn’t know about the IRS reporting! It really is (was) a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it seems. And it just drives home the point that ultimately, undocumented immigrants were tolerated because many parties (including the federal government) were directly or indirectly benefiting from it.
Moochman,
Yes I agree.
I found lots of data here!
https://itep.org/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-2024/
That’s a lot of money that stand to be lost in future tax years if a sizable proportion of undocumented workers are deported or go off-grid and stop paying taxes.
So, the US government makes a lot of money on the back of illegal immigrants working for below minimum wage without rights, while forcing Americans to also work for below minimum wage if they want to complete? How is such an arrangement moral? (the US government having a minimum wage law and then sabotaging it by tolerating illegal labor)? How is a president who is ok with such an arrangement moral?
Also, your calculation ignores how many Americans are on the unemployment rolls receiving unemployment benefits and food stamps because they do not want to work for minimum wage to complete with illegal labor (they shouldn’t have to).
Correction: because they do not want to work for *less than* minimum wage to complete with illegal labor
kurkosdr,,
I’m having trouble determining if this was meant to be rhetorical? Most of us don’t favor using undocumented workers. We favor legal options such as H-2A visas that allow seasonal workers to work on farms and cross the border without fear or having to risk everything sneaking into the country. Most people want to do the right thing given the right incentives. Have you noticed things at the border become significantly worse when we make it harder for good people to be moral?
“My calculation”? What’s it have to do with me? I’m just a messenger providing the data, The recognition that undocumented immigrants provide economic value to the country does not mean I support the system that maintains this status quo. Many undocumented workers came into the country as young children and grew up right alongside other children. Their only crime is not having a slip of paper, which isn’t even their fault. We want to rip them away from the only home they’ve ever known, how do you make that be moral? There’s no easy answer, but I’m pretty sure militarizing ICE is one the least humane options on the table and creates a “papers please” hell-hole when we ought to be looking at solutions that incentivize doing the right thing and uphold human dignity in the process.
I also think Windows Sucks made a very good point earlier….our policies are making the situation worse for other countries, allowing life to deteriorate to the point where they become desperate. We spend billions upon billions of dollars combating people who are being poorly incentivized through our own policies. It’s easy for politicians to blame everyone other than themselves, but the truth is they’re not leading by good example, we exploit the poor, increasing suffering and hopelessness rather than helping the world become a genuinely better place for all. We absolutely have the resources to do a better job and to promote viable democracy throughout the world in the process, but that’s not happening right now. I hate to say it, but from policing to out-casting and divisiveness, mainstream politicians today look a lot like the hateful policies of the Nazi party 🙁
Oh, enough with this rhetoric. No country has to care about how rough the citizens of other countries are having it. Those other countries have their own governments, so those other governments should take care of their own citizens. No country has an obligation to allow immigration just because it favors the citizens of others countries, countries should allow immigration because it favors THEM (for example addressing labor shortages, but even Western countries have lots of unemployment right now. so that’s not the case today).
Also, things become worse at the border when you don’t patrol the border. Yes, I personally think Trump’s fence is a good thing, and I don’t care about the fact that it’s Trump who came up with the idea. It’s still a good idea. It’s a defensive structure (it’s not attacking anybody or anything like that) and it makes it harder for both illegal immigrants and drug smugglers to cross the border. What’s wrong with that?
I don’t agree with what Trump is currently doing with ICE btw, there are ways to arrest illegal immigrants that don’t throw away due process.
The US has birthright citizenship (if you were born on US soil, you are a citizen), so when it comes to the US, the whole question is a giant red herring.
kurkosdr,
The US, of all the countries in the world, would be hypocritical to use such an argument because over the past century we’ve been exploiting countries around the world for our own gain, even going so far as to meddle in the politics of 3rd world countries to favor us. Now to turn around and say “your not our problem” not only ignores the fact that we’ve caused a lot of their problems for our profit, but ignores the ethical duty that the most affluent country in the world has to improve the human condition because it’s right. World leaders who view greed as their only responsibility and don’t lift a finger to help anyone in need of help will leave the world worse off, not better.
Not only does helping our neighbors improve our moral position, it can actually pay off. We can achieve so much more combining resources than using those same resources to fight each other. I always think it’s such a damn shame when our entitlement to be assholes costs us more than being friends.
It’s not a red herring at all. You can’t seriously fault young children for being undocumented. None of this is their fault. They grow up right alongside documented children with similar aspirations and dreams, only to have to learn that they are outcast because of what a government database says.
See? That’s why I said “No country has to care about how rough the citizens of other countries are having it”: it was an attempt to avoid this kind of guilt-tripping. But here it is anyway. Enough with this nonsense, the US has helped more countries than any other country, and anyway, since every big country has hurt other countries sometime in their history, the current generation owes nothing to those other countries, Deal with it. It’s a pointless guilt-trip when people have nothing else to say.
Why, why does an affluent country have an “ethical duty” to help some other government? I never understood this “government-level socialism”. Governments have a duty to improve the well-being of their citizens, that’s what the constitutions of most countries say. Sacrificing the well-being of their citizens to help the “world” goes contrary to that.
There is no such thing as “world leaders”, they are only country leaders, and their duty (as defined per the constitution), is to look after the well-being of their citizens, not the “world’s”.
No, it doesn’t necessarily pay off, if you help a hostile country or a country that isn’t friendly and antagonizes your country (for example, has a government that makes zero effort to curb drug smuggling from their country to yours), helping them only validates their actions. Countries should help other countries only when it also benefits them and when doesn’t sacrifice the well-being of their citizens. There is no “global village”. “The world” isn’t one big happy family. Deal with it.
Again, if they were born in the US, they are citizens.
As an aside, one of the reasons I am for strict enforcement of immigration laws is to avoid this whole phenomenon of “this person has been living here illegally for years or even decades”. What the hell? The fact that this even happened is a major enforcement policy fail in itself and calls for stricter enforcement of immigration laws, not less strict enforcement of immigration laws.
So no, I am not in favor of legalizing illegal immigrants just because they were in a country illegally for a certain number of years (and no sob story will change my mind). Much like I don’t support the idea that if you are occupying public property for decades, you deserve to have it (yes, even if “you’ve built a home” there). Enforcement failure should not be “cured” with more enforcement failure.
kurkosdr,
You can justify it however you like, my point was only that it makes the world worse.
It’s not about sacrificing our well being to help others. That was Windows Sucks’s point. Helping others doesn’t need to hurt us. It’s kind of insane for us to spend an inordinate amount of resources fighting each other instead of improving the world.
Well, that’s the tragedy: knowing we can do better but being held back by people who would rather fight than work together.
There’s a lot of in-built hypocrisy there. The *US* has the drug problem. We are the ones funneling money into drug cartels. Mexico and Canada should be demanding we stop funding international crime organizations. If the US did that, they would have less crime. As usual our politicians just want to point the finger elsewhere, but ethically *we* deserve blame for enabling drug lords just as much as our neighbors. It’s *our* money funding these drug operations. It’s disingenuous to just blame others when *we* are failing to stop it too.
I am sure there are some undocumented people who were born here too, but you’re still missing the point: it’s not a child’s fault they’re undocumented. You can blame the parents, but not the child.
Not offering a path to citizenship is part of the problem though, particularly for children who grew up undocumented through no fault of their own.
And my point is that this isn’t relevant when discussing government policies, country leaders have to care about their country (per the constitution), not “the world”.
Illegal immigration is precisely the kind of choice where a country leader has to choose between the well-being of their citizens (who do not want to be undercut by illegal immigrant labor) and helping “the world”. I prefer country leaders to look after the well-being of their own citizens as a priority, thank you very much.
No, a small minority of citizens does. Still, any country that doesn’t care about outflows of drugs from their country to the US (for example) and does nothing to stop it is not a friendly country to the US. Why should the US help that country? Especially when it has helped that country before and that country is still not friendly to the US?
PROTIP: You can reuse this argument to argue that any adult person with a child should never go to prison, for the child’s sake of course.
It’s my personal opinion that people who came into a country illegally should never be rewarded with citizenship, but I admit that there is no single correct answer to this. About the “particularly for the children” bit, see the previous blockquote, but again, I admit this is a question that can have multiple answers.
Yeah, you can consume a disproportionate share of the world’s resources while taking no responsibility for anything, but you cannot escape the fact that in doing so you are making the world worse for others.
It sounds like you are annoyed about my take, but I don’t think it’s wrong to point it out. Go ahead and push the greed philosophy, I can’t stop you, but then it does seems unreasonable to take issue with my pointing out the harms this causes. Not caring about others doesn’t make it any less true.
Again, there is no “world”, every country is one geopolitical grudge from becoming an adversary to another country. There is no “global village”. This is why most countries’ constitution only mentions the well-being of the country’s citizens, not “the world’s”.
Also, China has surpassed the US in CO2 emissions, so you may want to rethink the “disproportionate share of the world’s resources” bit. Not that it matters, the self-hating and eternal guilt of the average Westerner is deeply cultural.
kurkosdr,
We have neighbors in this world and our actions impact each other. You can refuse to lift a finger to do anything for anyone. It’s your opinion and I know I can’t change that. However refusing to even acknowledge that being a good or bad neighbor can change the world for the better or worse is a huge mental disconnect. I don’t think you want to admit that your apathy harms others, but it still does.
Whoever said China wasn’t a big polluter? It’s funny you should mention pollution though, it’s a great example of a world-wide problem that all countries need to come together to solve. It’s a tragedy that some people don’t feel any responsibility to the world whatsoever: pull out of Paris accords, reduce government monitoring and reporting of pollution, reduce water quality standards, cease satellites missions monitoring CO2, etc.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-nasa-climate-satellites-34f533a1d28db954e30b2101d0ae186c,
This is such a serious problem for our future quality of life and here we are more invested in pointing the finger at everyone else than actually working to solve problems that impact every country in the world. This degrades humanity’s potential. It’s one thing to be apathetic, but to actually be a cheerleader for not taking responsibility is so much worse! Are you able to agree, at least a little bit?
The sleight-of-hand is the above argument is that even if illegal immigration makes “the economy” grow and even if it makes agricultural products and buildings cheaper for the urban elite, it still undercuts manual workers and they still suffer.
I mean, would you like to viewed as “ultra-cheap labor” or have to compete with “ultra-cheap labor undercutting you? It’s why political parties that are in favor of enforcing immigration laws are on the rise, while the “look the other way” political parties are losing voters.
kurkosdr,
I doubt many people are in favor of illegal immigration, I think that’s a mischaracterization.
I might agree on a simplistic level, but if not for those millions of farm workers who happen to be undocumented, don’t you agree that we would have had to withdraw workers from other industries? Other industries that the US benefits from. Please don’t misconstrue this as a justification for keeping a broken immigration system, but part of the reason for our economic success is having these workers to fill these jobs and enabling more workers to specialize in non agrarian industries.
I think you are underestimating how much value these workers add to the economy.
Not really, instead, all those unemployed people currently on unemployment welfare and food stamps will find employment.
There is nothing “broken” about the current immigration system of most Western countries. As long as there are unemployed people, there is no need to import unspecialized workers from abroad (H1B exists for specialized positions that there isn’t enough domestic talent for). Also, if a few unemployed people “don’t want to work in agriculture” despite receiving offers to work legally for at least minimum wage, then they aren’t unemployed and should be removed from the unemployment rolls and not receive welfare or food stamps anymore. Generally, enough with this “Americans don’t want to do manual work” rhetoric, it was always a farce on multiple levels.
kurkosdr,
Yes, really. If we magically disappeared 100% of undocumented workers, the workers who need to replace them come from other sectors. The reality is a lot of the unemployed are not looking for farm jobs. If farm jobs paid more, yes more people would take them, however other industries would still loose workers. It sounds like you are assuming that unemployment means there are no jobs available, but that’s not the case, it also happens because workers are looking for work opportunities that are more suitable to them. Freeing millions of farm jobs does not equate zero percent unemployment if those aren’t the jobs people want.
See above.
You could do that, promoting and even coercing more workers to go into farming instead of specializing in other industries. After all, historically much more of the population had farming jobs, so maybe we could go back there. But the standard of living would certainly drop and I am skeptical that many people would agree that going back to agrarian work is progress.
Then those people aren’t really unemployed, they are people looking for upwards mobility and are NEETing for the moment. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but taxpayers shouldn’t pay for it, so they should stop being considered unemployed, removed from the unemployment rolls, and not receive welfare or food stamps.
After that, if the number of people on the unemployment rolls falls to 0%, then of course there is a labor shortage and legal immigration of workers would be essential.
If they are offered legal employment and get paid minimum wage, why exactly would the standard of living drop?
kurkosdr,
I’m not that familiar with unemployment benefits, but I don’t think it lasts very long.. It’s your prerogative to argue against welfare and food stamps, but there’s always going to be jobs people don’t want to take not just over money but bad working conditions too. So keep the side effects in mind when you envision zero unemployment by forcing everyone to take any available job…Employers will be not only able, but incentivized, to exploit a system that forces workers to take their jobs regardless of working conditions.
The standard of living improves when workers are not bound to farming jobs. Farming didn’t turn the US into a superpower, it was industrialization and higher education skills. It’s still important to have somebody to do the unskilled jobs, but it’s the skilled jobs that raise the standard of living.
EBTs in the US are income-based, so if you declare zero income, you get them. Which brings me to my point: Those people who “don’t want to take” jobs should not be counted as unemployed and not receive any benefits, including EBTs and the like.
Employers have a minimum standard to meet when it comes to working conditions, their obligations don’t end to just paying minimum wage. Also, just to nip this in the bud: nobody owes you a job you enjoy doing, a job is something you do so you can then go home and eat and do the things you enjoy doing. The taxpayer has no obligation to fund any NEETing that you do while looking for a job you enjoy.
What a nonsensical word salad. Nobody said anything about taking people from specialized jobs or skilled industry jobs and putting them in farming, I am talking the unemployed working farming jobs so they aren’t unemployed anymore (and if they “don’t want to”, their NEETing should cease being subsidized by the taxpayer).
kurkosdr,
You are entitled to your opinions about not offering unemployment and food assistance, but it does not change the fact that the country economically benefits from the work of immigrants.
Again, you’re entitled to that opinion, I’m just pointing out what would happen in reality. Your proposal forcing people to take jobs or go without food invites the exploitation of workers who have to take those jobs. If that’s what you want then so be it, but at least own the easily predictable consequences of your proposal.
We’re talking about tens of millions of formally immigrant jobs. You can force citizens to take those jobs, but regardless it’s going to have opportunity costs and reduces the overall workforce.
Edit: I meant “former undocumented immigrant jobs”.
Again, this is a variant of “illegal immigration makes ‘the economy’ grow and makes agricultural products and buildings cheaper for the urban elite”, so we are back to the root of this thread.
Well, guess what: People who are being undercut by “super cheap labor” are still getting the short end of the stick, and so do the taxpayers funding the unemployment benefits of people who want to work manual jobs but are being undercut by said “super cheap labor”. Expect those people to vote for stronger enforcement of immigration laws. In fact, that’s what we see in the US in most of the EU. Finally, most people are connecting the dots.
Yes, and? Any company that financially benefits from illegal immigrant labor is breaking the law anyway, and hence doesn’t have any right to continue doing business that way.
In fact, I’ll go even further, any company that financially benefits from a bigger workforce is doing it on the back of citizens and legal immigrants (who could negotiate better rates or even unionize if the “overall workforce” was reduced), so again, they have no right to that, Why ending that “right” of companies to cheap labor is a bad thing for the little guy? I’ve asked multiple people, and nobody has explained that to me. All they do when asked that question is disparage the citizens and legal immigrants as “not wanting” or “not being able” to do those jobs (something I reject btw).
And I’ll go even further, any people benefiting from cheaper agricultural products or whatever (the aforementioned urban elite) as a result of illegal immigrant labor have no right to that either.
kurkosdr,
It’s not “illegal immigration makes the economy grow” so much as all workers make the economy grow whether or not they are documented. You are discrediting their value because you hold a deep bias against them, and that’s your choice. But the fact remains: losing ten million workers would cause an economic drain on the country regardless of their citizenship. Where they were born and citizenship records don’t change this fact. Economics don’t care about citizenship status in some database.
Anyone can go work for a farm for minimum wage today if they want to.. The work is already there and they’re having trouble getting people who want to take the jobs.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-unpicked-truth-why-u-s-farmers-can-t-find-workers-for-america-s-harvest/ar-AA1Ha5e1
We can get rid of the undocumented immigrants like you want, but those workers will have to come out of the rest of the economy. We can also get rid of unemployment and food assistance like you said but 1) forcing the unemployed to take those jobs is still not enough and 2) you’re creating exploitative work conditions.
You can say “I don’t care about that” – I can’t really refute your feelings. But don’t try and deny the consequences of losing so many workers or the consequences of culling safety nets including unemployment and food assistance programs.
These are all strawman arguments. I know it’s illegal and I don’t remember saying anything to the contrary. However my point is not about the legality, it’s about economics. If they didn’t produce value then the jobs wouldn’t even exist at all. It doesn’t matter what a government database says, they’re still providing economic value to the country doing important jobs that, in their absence, would inevitably lead to more gaps in our labor force (not to mention tax revenue). I understand you have a very strong dislike for them, but this is all still true.
This, this the point where we disagree: The consequences are a good thing. Lack of “ultra cheap” (and illegal) labor supply is a good thing, because it makes labor more valuable. It will allow workers to negotiate for a wage that is the equivalent of 2009 $7.25/hours adjusted for inflation (which is $10.95/hour in 2025 inflato-bucks). It will force employers to offer good working conditions if they want employees to stay. This alone will make manual labor more enticing to the non-employed. Cutting unemployment benefits and food stamps to those who refuse to work despite those advances will reduce the burden to taxpayers. After all this, if the pool of the unemployed (the actually unemployed) isn’t enough to fill the job vacancies, then we can talk about legal immigration aka people coming legally with IDs to work.
kurkosdr,
I don’t think you fully appreciate the macroeconomic consequence of losing 10M workers, which would significantly reduce economic output regardless of anyone’s legal status. Even if you make farming salaries equivalent to jobs elsewhere in the economy (assuming they weren’t already), you’d still not be able to make up for the loss of 10M workers because the additions to farming would be subtractions from other industries.
Furthermore, we don’t need more low end jobs. These are already available and don’t increase the standard of living like high end jobs do. Policy that creates more low end jobs is not terribly helpful for the US, In exchange for losing the productivity, of undocumented workers, you’ve created low end jobs we didn’t need or want. These days even highly skilled workers can be unemployed, which is the bigger problem IMHO.
https://fortune.com/2025/09/10/wealthy-americans-unemployment-pessimism-new-york-federal-reserve-data/
Instead of creating high end jobs, your plan if taken seriously, coerces highly educated and skilled labor to transition to agricultural jobs instead. Never mind the massive bait-and-switch happening, economically it’s a terrible return on investment not just for the individual worker in question, but for the country as a whole.
In short your solution solves the wrong problem at best, and at worst creates new problems we didn’t even have.
This is laughable, honestly. It’s disconnected from the realities for many lower class workers in the US. From coal miners who don’t have access to proper PPE and medical care to amazon delivery drivers who have to pee in bottles to make their numbers. Employers don’t give a f***.
You’re right we could get rid of social safety nets like you say,, hell the trump administration is doing just that. But there’s a reason we have them and the consequences of ending government assistance will reintroduce old problems going back at least a century. I get that you don’t care, that’s coming through loud and clear, but majority of the population are against dropping federal assistance.
Great, I don’t think that’s controversial. It’s what I said at the start “We favor legal options such as H-2A visas”.
> No reasonable person is blaming “immigrants”,
Oh sweet Summer child.
Let me make it even more clear for you:
No reasonable person is blaming “immigrants”, but some unreasonable people do (some unreasonable people exist in all societies). Most people simply want the already-existing immigration laws to be enforced.
I think ‘comprehension’ is not Thom’s strong suit. 🙂
It amazes me people can rant about the bilionaire class while supporting immigration policies that exclusively benefit them. Programs like TFW program in Canada were sold to us under the guise of labour shortages, when it’s a complete farce. There are no labour shortages here in Canada (and most other Western countries where similar programs exist). What there are a shortage of workers willing to work terrible hours for terrible pay. Worse they’ve have conned the “left” into supporting a lot of these programs under the guise of social justice when not that long ago most labour orientated parties opposed these policies for what they were: A deliberate attempt to lower the value and bargaining power of labour.
Dear BSDont,
I wish you were right, but perhaps you will agree that life is complicated. With every change in policy someone gets hurt. If you eliminate illegal aliens on farms, farms will need to compete for the workers for higher wages, but who will pay the higher prices? We saw this already with private label products and the big fast food chains that there are limits on price hikes, people protest. When fruits prices go up, won’t they consume less?
You can say the same for IT, if you have 1 million in your IT budget, and yesterday you hired 10 guys from India, now you will hire 7 from the USA will that make your project go faster? No, because you will be lucky to find 4 people for your positions. Also, you will lose on a few clever guys here and there, but the brain drain had a terrible effect on the host countries, so at least for those countries you do a little good thing.
And don’t forget that each immigrant is also a consumer. Each immigrant needs a car to go to work, each immigrant needs food, needs a home to live in, that home needs to be furnished. If housing is a problem, then houses need to be built, instead the current idea is that the future demand need to be eliminated.
When people complain about “bargaining power of labour” during these low unemployment years, I always wonder, where they were in 2007 or if they were in IT in 2001.
Nobody owes you cheap food, especially if it’s on the back of people who have to work for below minimum wage to complete with illegal immigrant labor.
If you pay Americans a decent wage, they will do the job. Americans have no problem working in construction, oil rigs, sewer maintenance and other *tough” jobs as long as they are paid a decent wage.
Nobody owes me anything. You are very right about that. It is not about me or my wishes.
We very much agree, that people deserve a fair pay, I even think that people affordable health care and a good holiday, though I am afraid that might sound too extreme to some.
I am stating what is the consequence of eliminating the migrant workforce. Some farms will be able to sell their produce for hire prices, some farms will close and some farm will need to change. Consumers will adopt too: China has already started to rely more on Brazil for soy bean. Similarly, when you raise agricultural products it is the American poor that will eat less fresh produce and rely more on canned products. Inflation last year already caused many restaurants to close, another wave of price hikes might crumble that sector again.
You can also see that the government started to prepare a bailout/handout for farmers because things work so well.
The whole point of minimum wage is that if you can’t afford to pay your employees minimum wage, then you don’t deserve to have employees, Franklin Roosevelt was very clear about that (there is a quote of his that says that, can’t find it right now).
So yes, businesses that have been enjoying the financial benefits of paying illegal immigrants below minimum wage will have to adjust or die, and this may lead to some market adjustments, and that’s a good thing! An economy shouldn’t have to rely on people making below minimum wage.
This, again.
About the actual news, nearly all the investment in “AI” (LLMs) is private capital and VC capital, so they won’t be able to hold your bank deposits hostage and demand bailouts like they did when the subprime crisis happened, they’ll have to eat the losses like they had to do with the dot-com bust happened.
That’s assuming Asset Backed Securities aren’t swimming around the pond in there somewhere.
This will be a bloodbath: the crazy valuations have contaminated even useful firms, you think your pension fund won’t get wiped out?
I was gonna post an answer citing the fact that US citizens money has already been poured into this AI craze, with more than half a billion $ spent by US gov on AI contracts between august 2022 and august 2023 (so yeah, it’s probably a LOT worse now).
But in the end, I think I’ll settle for betting this post won’t age well, since the US won’t let all these fortunes burn in flames when the bubble bursts, with all of Trump’s buddies deeply vested in it.
This won’t end in reason, and it won’t end well.
Huh, that’s funny that you posted this as I just read this article earlier today saying essentially the same thing but from an investment point of view: https://pracap.com/an-ai-addendum/
This article talks about how AI firms need $160 billion in revenue per year to pay for their data center build out, and then finds out that he’s being overly optimistic with a 10 year depreciation curve. Most data centers depreciate in 3-5 years, so they really need $320 to $480 billion in revenue to make the numbers work. Currently they have $15 to $20 billion in yearly revenue.
It’s insane that anyone is throwing money at this. I think some investors are falling for the sunken cost fallacy.
Thom Holwerda,
AI critics always critique AI for not solving the hardest jobs, but the natural progression for AI was always going to be about tackling jobs that are easier for AI first. There will be plenty of time for AI to work it’s way up to harder jobs after the easy jobs. And this is exactly what I see happening.
For example, more and more fast food places no longer have human cashiers, whether it’s the drive through or the counter inside, humans are being replaced by AI. I’ve complained about this trend, but it is happening and it will continue to happen. In VFX AI is producing more and more impressive results every year. Not that long ago we were making fun of generative AI making funny mistakes, like the wrong number of fingers and continuity errors, but those are actually getting fixed. The quality for both audio and video is getting really good and I don’t think it will be much longer generative AI will rival human quality at far lower costs. Cities are going to continue shifting to AI driven cars.
Obviously there are still domains where AI isn’t beating humans. But the human lead is slowly eroding and I worry that too many people are still holding on to this idea that humans are always going to remain competitive long term. It’s more likely that AI will keep improving to the point where it won’t make financial sense to hire employees over AI. I worry that the Luddite stance has never been a winning formula for the workers, so rather than reject AI, I think we should be more focused on making AI more democratized so it doesn’t end up heavily monopolized.
I just watched John Stewart’s guest on the daily show, he talks about AI the same way I do.
“Tristan Harris – The Dangers of Unregulated AI on Humanity & the Workforce”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=675d_6WGPbo
Like him, I think AI is going to keep improving and taking more jobs with time. A recession/collapse is possible, but that won’t end AI, the remaining AI players will just consolidate and become more powerful. I think AI going away is wishful thinking. Rather than showing up with pitchforks to kill AI,
Perhaps unlike Tristan’s view that we can count on regulation to fix this, it’s my view that the better path forward would be to come together and find a way to democratize AI so that it’s not just a few corporations that control it. Having a FOSS option for example could protect us from dependency on central corporations.
Alfman,
I remember a similar sentiment when AI beat Gary Kasparov. People dismissed that as chess was a very specific problem domain.
Then they started discussing Go, which is an Eastern game played in Japan, China and Korea, and has much higher “search space”. There were predictions it won’t be solved for decades. Then Google’s DeepMind beat the European champion. But, but… the real champions came from Asia… In a few months, it beat all world champions, and left the world with about 50 (?) high end games it played by itself for humans to analyze.
Dismissing the achievements of AI is pretty simple. After all the public sentiment is in that direction.
Actually accepting what is going on is much harder.
So many opinions there in that article, but there is zero mention of local LLMs, and one mention of open source, and that is in the wrong context.
Start here: https://ollama.com/. Download and install your local “OpenAI API Server” and choose some models (depending on the GPU VRAM you have, though you can be adventurous and try them on the CPU, too)
Then install Open WebUI and have a modern interface that has most of the bells and whistles of ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude/etc. It has chat histories, audio and video support, tool calling, web search integration, ability to ingest your document libraries (a real welcome option to do locally… for obvious privacy reasons) and much more.
You do not need to worry about finances of trillion dollar companies, if you can actually use and benefit from open source LLMs entirely on your local machine.
(And, yes, they do work. And, btw, this pretty much addresses all the complaints in that article)
AI or no AI money doesn’t exist lol it’s just made up numbers and it’s created out of thin air.
AI is here to stay because the overlords want it as the control system to rule them all and therefore it’s going to be integrated into anything. Fighting it would therefore require fighting the financial system and that is a lost battle.
@Thom
How do you not just nuke the entire comment section of this site?
Holy hell. You have the patience of a saint.