> With single modality sensors, you have no way of truly detecting failures in that modality, other than hacks like time-series normalizing (aka expected scenarios).
"A man with a watch always knows what time it is. If he gains another, he is never sure"
Most safety critical systems actually need at least three redundant sensors. Two is kinda useless: if they disagree, which is right?
EDIT:
> If multiple sensor modalities disagree, even without sensor fusion, you can at least assume something might be awry and drop into a maximum safety operation mode.
This is not always possible. You're on a two lane road. Your vision system tells you there's a pedestrian in your lane. Your LIDAR says the pedestrian is actually in the other lane. There's enough time for a lane change, but not to stop.
> Two is kinda useless: if they disagree, which is right?
They don't work by merely taking a straw poll. They effectively build the joint probability distribution, which improves accuracy with any number of sensors, including two.
> You're on a two lane road. Your vision system tells you there's a pedestrian in your lane. Your LIDAR says the pedestrian is actually in the other lane. There's enough time for a lane change, but not to stop.
Any realistic system would see them long before your eyes do. If you are so worried, override the AI in the moment.
> They don't work by merely taking a straw poll. They effectively build the joint probability distribution, which improves accuracy with any number of sensors, including two.
Lots of safety critical systems actually do operate by "voting". The space shuttle control computers are one famous example [1], but there are plenty of others in aerospace. I have personally worked on a few such systems.
It's the simplest thing that can obviously work. Simplicity is a virtue when safety is involved.
You can of course do sensor fusion and other more complicated things, but the core problem I outlined remains.
> If you are so worried, override the AI in the moment.
This is sneakily inserting a third set of sensors (your own). It can be a valid solution to the problem, but Waymo famously does not have a steering wheel you can just hop behind.
This might seem like an edge case, but edge cases matter when failure might kill somebody.
Isn't the historical voting pattern something more of a legacy thing dictated by limited edge compute of the past vs necessarily a best practice.
I see in many domains a tendency to oversimplify decision making algorithms for human understanding convenience (eg vote rather that develop a joint probability distribution in this case, supply chain and manufacturing in particular seem to love rules of thumb) rather than use better algorithms that modern compute enables higher performance, safety etc
This is an interesting question where I do not know the answer.
I will not pretend to be an expert. I would suggest that "human understanding convenience" is pretty important in safety domains. The famous Brian Kernighan quote comes to mind:
> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
When it comes to obscure corner cases, it seems to me that simpler is better. But Waymo does seem to have chosen a different path! They employ a lot of smart folk, and appear to be the state of the art for autonomous driving. I wouldn't bet against them.
Seatbelt mechanisms are complicated, airbag timing is complicated, let's just do away with them entirely in the name of simplicity?
No, when it comes to not killing people, I'd say that safer is usually better.
Remember the core function of the system is safety, simplicity is nice to have, but explicitly not as important.
That said, beware of calling something 'complicated' just because you don't understand it, especially if you don't have training and experience in that thing. What's more relevant is whether the people building the systems think it is too complicated.
We're trying to build vehicles that are totally autonomous, though. How do you grab the wheel of the new Waymos without steering wheels? Especially if you're in the back seat staring at Candy Crush.
Waymos are safer, and drive more defensively than humans. There is no way a Waymo is going to drive aggressively enough to get itself into the trolley problem.
This situation isn't going to happen unless the vehicle was traveling at unsafe speeds to begin with.
Cars can stop in quite a short distance. The only way this could happen is if the pedestrian was obscured behind an object until the car was dangerously close. A safe system will recognize potential hiding spots and slow down preemptively - good human drivers do this.
"Quite a short distance" is doing a lot of lifting. It's been a while since I've been to driver's school, but I remember them making a point of how long it could take to stop, and how your senses could trick you to the contrary. Especially at highway speeds.
I can personally recall a couple (fortunately low stakes) situations where I had to change lanes to avoid an obstacle that I was pretty certain I would hit if I had to stop.
At the driving school I attended, they had us accelerate to 50 mph and then slam on the brakes so we'd have a feel for the distance (and the feel).
While it's true they don't stop instantaneously at highway speeds, cars shouldn't be driving highway speeds when a pedestrian suddenly being in front of you is a realistic risk.
What if the obstacle is not a person? What if something falls off a truck in front of the vehicle? What if wildlife spontaneously decides to cross the road (a common occurrence where I live)?
I don't think these problems can just be assumed away.
You don't really ever have "two sensors" in the sense that it's two measurements. You have multiple measurements from each sensor every second. Then you accumulate that information over time to get a reliable picture. If the probability of failure on each frame were independent, it would be a relatively simple problem, but of course you're generally going to get a fairly high correlation from one frame to the next about whether or not there's a pedestrian in a certain location. The nice thing about having multiple sensing modalities is that the failure correlation between them is a lot lower.
For example, say you have a pedestrian that's partially obscured by a car or another object, and maybe they're wearing a hat or a mask or wearing a backpack or carrying a kid or something, it may look unusual enough that either the camera or the lidar isn't going to recognize it as a person reliably. However, since the camera is generally looking at color, texture, etc in 2D, and the Lidar is looking at 3D shapes, they'll tend to fail in different situations. If the car thinks there's a substantial probability of a human in the driving path, it's going to swerve or hit the brakes.
> > If multiple sensor modalities disagree, even without sensor fusion, you can at least assume something might be awry and drop into a maximum safety operation mode.
> This is not always possible. You're on a two lane road. Your vision system tells you there's a pedestrian in your lane. Your LIDAR says the pedestrian is actually in the other lane. There's enough time for a lane change, but not to stop.
> What do you do?
Go into your failure mode. At least you have a check to indicate a possible issue with 2 signals.
I came here to write the same comment you did. What I’d suspect (I don’t work in self driving but I do in AI) is the issue is that this mode of operation would happen more often than not as the sensors disagree in critical ways more often than you’d think. So going “safety first” every time likely critically diminishes UX.
The issue is not recognising that optimising for Ux at the expense of safety here is the wrong call, motivated likely by optimism and a desire for autonomous cars, more than reasonable system design. I.e. if the sensors disagree so often that it makes the system unusable, maybe the solution is “we’re not ready for this kind of technology and we should slow down” rather than “let’s figure out non-UX breaking edge case heuristics to maintain the illusion of autonomous driving being behind the corner”.
Part of this problem is not even technological - human drivers tradeoff safety for UX all the time - so the expectation for self driving is unrealistic and your system has to have the ethically unacceptable system configuration in order to have any chance of competing.
Which is why - in my mind - it’s a fools endeavour in personal car space, but not in public transport space. So go waymo, boo tesla.
Exactly my point. That you know the systems disagree is a benefit, compared to a single system.
People are underweighting the alternative single system hypothetical -- what does a Tesla do when its vision-only system erroneously thinks a pedestrian is one lane over?
> This is not always possible. You're on a two lane road. Your vision system tells you there's a pedestrian in your lane. Your LIDAR says the pedestrian is actually in the other lane. There's enough time for a lane change, but not to stop.
This is why good redundant systems have at least 3... in your scenario, without a tie-breaker, all you can do is guess at random which one to trust.
That's a good point, but people do need to keep in mind that many engineered systems with three points of reference have three identical points of reference. That's why it works so well, a common frame of reference (i.e. you can compare via simple voting).
For example jet aircraft commonly have three pitot static tubes, and you can just compare/contrast the data to look for the outlier. It works, and it works well.
If you tried to do that with e.g. LIDAR, vision, and radar with no common point of reference, solving for trust/resolving disagreements is an incredibly difficult technical challenge. Other variations (e.g. two vision + one LIDAR), does not really make it much easier either.
Tie-breaking during sensor fusion is a billion+ dollar problem, and will always be.
The reality is also that nobody (aside from Mark "I Want To Buy a State of the Art AI Research Lab" Zuckerberg) is even offering millions in cold hard cash.
Instead, they're offering something worse: the _chance_ to cash out equity that _might_ be worth that at _some_ point in the future.
Versus spending time with my kid right now. Or any of the hundreds of other more enjoyable things I can do with my time.
They're dangling a lottery ticket in front of us. I've seen the end of that movie several times myself now; enough to know the odds are long.
The advice I've seen with delegation is the exact opposite. Specifically: you can't delegate what you can't do.
Partially because of all else fails, you'll need to step in and do the thing. Partially because if you can't do it, you can't evaluate whether it's being done properly.
That's not to say you need to be _as good_ at the task as the delegee, but you need to be competent.
For example, this HBR article [1]. Pervasive in all advice about delegation is the assumption that you can do the task being delegated, but that you shouldn't.
> Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job.
I think the CEO role is actually the outlier here.
I can only speak to engineering, but my understanding has always been that VPs need to be able to manage individual teams, and engineering managers need to be somewhat competent if there's some dev work that needs to be done.
This only happens as necessary, and it obviously should be rare. But you get in trouble real quickly if you try to delegate things you cannot accomplish yourself.
> ChatGPT is a program. The kid basically instructed it to behave like that.
I don't think that's the right paradigm here.
These models are hyper agreeable. They are intentionally designed to mimic human thought and social connection.
With that kind of machine, "Suicidal person deliberately bypassed safeguards to indulge more deeply in their ideation" still seems like a pretty bad failure mode to me.
> Vanilla OpenAI models are known for having too many guardrails, not too few.
Sure. But this feels like a sign we probably don't have the right guardrails. Quantity and quality are different things.
> These models are hyper agreeable. They are intentionally designed to mimic human thought and social connection.
Python is hyper agreeable. If I comment out some safeguards, it'll happily bypass whatever protections are in place.
Lots of people on here argue vehemently against anthropomorphizing LLMs. It's either a computer program crunching numbers, or it's a nebulous form of pseudo-consciousness, but you can't have it both ways. It's either a tool that has no mind of its own that follows instructions, or it thinks for itself.
I'm not arguing that the model behaved in a way that's ideal, but at what point do you make the guardrails impassable for 100% of users? How much user intent do you reject in the interest of the personal welfare of someone intent on harming themselves?
> Python is hyper agreeable. If I comment out some safeguards, it'll happily bypass whatever protections are in place.
These models are different from programming languages in what I consider to be pretty obvious ways. People aren't spontaneously using python for therapy.
> Lots of people on here argue vehemently against anthropomorphizing LLMs.
I tend to agree with these arguments.
> It's either a computer program crunching numbers, or it's a nebulous form of pseudo-consciousness, but you can't have it both ways. It's either a tool that has no mind of its own that follows instructions, or it thinks for itself.
I don't think that this follows. I'm not sure that there's a binary classification between these two things that has a hard boundary. I don't agree with the assertion here that these things are a priori mutually exclusive.
> I'm not arguing that the model behaved in a way that's ideal, but at what point do you make the guardrails impassable for 100% of users? How much user intent do you reject in the interest of the personal welfare of someone intent on harming themselves?
These are very good questions that need to be asked when modifying these guardrails. That's all I'm really advocating for here: we probably need to rethink them, because they seem to have major issues that are implicated in some pretty terrible outcomes.
> They deliberately are designed to mimic human thought and social connection.
No, they are deliberately designed to mimic human communication via language, not human thought. (And one of the big sources of data for that was mass scraping social media.)
> But this, to me, feels like a sign we probably don't have the right guardrails. Quantity and quality are different things.
Right. Focus on quantity implies that the details of "guardrails" don't matter, and that any guardrail is functionally interchangeable with any other guardrail, so as long as you have the right number of them, you have the desired function.
In fact, correct function is having the exactly the right combination of guardrails. Swapping a guardrail which would be correct with a different one isn't "having the right number of guardrails", or even merely closer to correct than either missing the correct one or having the different one, but in fact, farther from ideal state than either error alone.
> No, they are deliberately designed to mimic human communication via language, not human thought.
My opinion is that language is communicated thought. Thus, to mimic language, at least really well, you have to mimic thought. At some level.
I want to be clear here, as I do see a distinction: I don't think we can say these things are "thinking", despite marketing pushes to the contrary. But I do think that they are powerful enough to "fake it" at a rudimentary level. And I think that the way we train them forces them to develop this thought-mimicry ability.
If you look hard enough, the illusion of course vanishes. Because it is (relatively poor) mimcry, not the real thing. I'd bet we are still a research breakthrough or two away from being able to simulate "human thought" well.
What was the legal basis for this "purchase"? Because as I understand it, Trump came in, saw a law he didn't like (CHIPS), and unilaterally "altered the deal"
I don't think it's fair to characterize this as some kind of standard stock sale, as the terms were never set out as such from the start. (And to be fair, there are lots of valid criticisms of CHIPS)
Instead, funding was voted for by Congress... and then a third party came in, threatened to kill it on a dubious legal basis, and extracted protection money (well, shares). That's textbook extortion.
> Excuse me now as I need to go watch a short that explains the difference between Australian and British accents. Very important, goodbye!
I also am a big fan of YouTube for exactly this reason, but you need to be careful.
There's all kinds of great educational content on there.
But, for anything "political" or controversial, YouTube can get toxic very quickly. I believe this is going to be true for most social media as long as engagement is the KPI. It directly incentivizes echo chambers, ragebait, and all kinds of terrible discourse.
I lived through the gas shortages. I remember the day the gas lines ended. They never returned in the 45 years since, despite all sorts of wars and global crises and exploding oil refineries and Hooties shooting at tankers. All gone literally overnight with the stroke of Reagan's pen.
The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either.
(Except during WW2, where gas shortages were caused by gas rationing.)
> The Jimmy Carter administration began a phased deregulation of oil prices on April 5, 1979, when the average price of crude oil was US$15.85 per barrel ($100/m3).
So, the process wasn't really an instant wave of a wand, or stroke of a pen. We also have this:
> Starting with the Iranian revolution, the price of crude oil rose to $39.50 per barrel ($248/m3) over the next 12 months (its all-time highest real price until March 3, 2008).[11] Deregulating domestic oil price controls allowed U.S. oil output to rise sharply from the large Prudhoe Bay fields, while oil imports fell sharply.
We also have silliness like this:
> Due to memories of the oil shortage in 1973, motorists soon began panic buying, and long lines appeared at gas stations, as they had six years earlier.[13] The average vehicle of the time consumed between two and three liters (about 0.5–0.8 gallons) of gasoline an hour while idling, and it was estimated that Americans wasted up to 150,000 barrels (24,000 m3) of oil per day idling their engines in the lines at gas stations.
So we have counterfactuals: if there was no Iranian revolution, would the effects of Carter's gradual deregulation have been felt sooner? If there was no 1973 oil shortage, would the reduction in waste have made a difference? What effect did people simply believing that the crisis was over have?
I don't propose answers to these questions; they are, in my opinion, unknowable.
I suggest that economic narratives such as the one you propose do not capture the entire picture. You had downward pressure on prices due to deregulation and expanding supply, and upwards pressure due to geopolitics and waste.
These processes do not resolve instantly, they take time to play out. I suggest caution when attempting to derive cause and effect from single events in complex systems.
I'll also note that all of this still mostly reinforces your main thesis.
One major issue with central planning is that it usually lacks the internal feedback mechanisms necessary to properly account for all of these factors.
Price signals usually work faster, and thus more efficiently! The USSR even had an economic reform where they introduced mechanisms that could be described as "shadow prices" within their own system [1]. It was the driving force behind one of the independent discoveries of linear programming.
I'd highly recommend "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" [2] and the novel (historical economic fiction, a nerd's nerd literary category if there ever was one) Red Plenty to learn more.
The 79 oil crisis and rationing was caused by the disruption of oil from the Iran, but the US suffered much more from the disruption of the oil from Iran than other countries that also relied on this oil. It would be wrong to ignore the role the government played in making this oil disruption significantly worse.
From "The U.S. Petroleum Crisis of 1979", PHILIP K. VERLEGER, JR. Here are some examples of problems that were identified:
>...On February 28, 1979, DOE published the following notice in the Federal Register: "It is essential that refiners enter the spring driving season with adequate gasoline stocks to meet seasonal demand requirements. We recognize that gasoline stocks are currently at adequate levels for this time of year, which is usually a period of low demand. Recent industry data indicate that total stocks are now in excess of 265 million barrels, which is less than last year's record high levels during the same period but above the average levels of previous years. Our concern is that these stocks not be drawn down precipitously as soon as the impacts of the Iranian shortfall are felt by refiners. Refiners are urged to keep stocks high enough to meet expected demand during the 1979 summer driving season, even if it is necessary to restrict somewhat the amount of surplus gasoline that is made available to purchasers currently" The implementation of these instructions had the effect of restricting the volume of gasoline available to service stations to between 80 and 90 percent of 1978 levels. This reduction was greater than the reduction in total gasoline supplies.
>...In April 1979, DOE ordered the fifteen largest refiners to sell 7.8 million barrels of crude oil to smaller firms that were unable to obtain supplies on the world market at competitive prices. …These transfers probably reduced the volume of gasoline produced in the second quarter because the refineries that purchased the crude oil had only a limited capacity to produce gasoline, while the refineries that sold it could have produced more. ...In addition to reducing the supply of gasoline, the buy/sell program appears to have affected the geographic distribution of crude oil and gasoline. This is because the primary recipients of the crude oil were refineries in the Midwest and the gulf coast areas, while the sellers were companies that were marketing throughout the nation.
>...…In April, DOE turned its attention to the low stock of distillate fuel oil … Two impacts were observed on domestic markets. First, excessive stocks of heating oil were accumulated. Second, companies may have been influenced to increase gasoline stocks in anticipation of the mandator yield controls that DOE threatened to impose.
>...Price controls on gasoline may have also created an incentive to withhold gasoline from the market when the prices of crude oil were rising rapidly. …In summary, the refiners had the capacity and the knowledge to take advantage of this opportunity. Ironically, the instructions from DOE to the companies were to do precisely what was most profitable.
>...In addition to encouraging the buildup of stocks, DOE may have added to the shortages by creating an incentive to reduce the output of crude oil. Although it is difficult to estimate what domestic supplies of crude oil might have been in the absence of any restriction, a DOE announcement in November that control levels of the base period were to be reviewed may have constrained production in the first half of 1979.
The entries in a database are IOUs. The US will have to return something at some point, but as we have complete control over our own currency, the terms of the deal are... very flexible on our side.
It's effectively a bet on China's part that (1) it's worth it to build their own industrial base and (2) the US won't renege, at least severely, because of the consequences.
Worth noting that the current proposals to further blow up the deficit may actually accelerate this dynamic, regardless of tariffs, because somebody has to buy these IOUs.
It's a lot more than this, right. People want dollars because people want dollars, their motives we can guess at but don't know with certainty. With all likelihood it's to buy US G&S (which is very similar to investing in the US) but it could also just be to have dollars to trade amongst each other.
What other system of value are you using here? Bottle caps? Nostalgia?
While the dollar remains the global reserve currency, this is just a wild theory of trade. If the $450 of value was so easy to extract, why wouldn't China simply assemble it in their own country and take the whole pie?
(they clearly already do this everywhere they can)
> What other system of value are you using here? Bottle caps? Nostalgia?
A common proxy is "metric tonnes of steel produced" and "metric tonnes of sulfuric acid produced". For China, these have been going up in-line with their GDP growth, whereas for USA they have flatlined since 1980 despite the increase in manufacturing dollar-value output.
And how do you compare metric tonnes of steel produced, with metric tonnes of plastic produced? What about metric tonnes (hours?) of entertainment on films?
The metric to measure value using quantity of goods must use a common denominator unit, otherwise, comparison becomes subjective (one might want to value tangible goods more than intangibles for example).
So making comparison using a price makes a lot of sense.
You, of course, can choose these as your units of value.
I think it is telling that the rest of the world (particularly the central banks of most countries) have instead chosen USD (well, more specifically US treasuries) as their preferred store of value.
You asked a question, they answered in good faith, and now you've dismissed their answer. I would also point out that you're dismissal is actually about a related, but separate issue - you've suddenly started talking about preferred store of value, when your original question was about how to value production.
I pointed out they were providing ridiculous answers to the question of "how do you measure value" and they doubled down on the ridiculous.
You are correct, there are many ways to measure value.
However, I don't think picking various commodities as the "true" measure of what is "valuable" is a useful exercise.
You may disagree. That's fine! I suggest you put your wisdom to use on the various markets that are set up for this purpose instead of arguing with me.
EDIT: they ultimately never reached my main point anyway, which is: regardless of if you measure value in tons of steel or crushed coconut shells, if China could easily obtain that value by assembling this stuff themselves, why export all the inputs to us instead?
> I don't think picking various commodities as the "true" measure of what is "valuable" is a useful exercise.
No one said that a commodity is a "true" measure of value. A commenter simply said that it is often a useful proxy. It is something that is useful to do to understand specific trade patterns.
> I suggest you put your wisdom to use on the various markets that are set up for this purpose instead of arguing with me.
I did not claim any wisdom on the subject. And I suspect you are deflecting attention from the fact that you are not arguing in good faith
> No one said that a commodity is a "true" measure of value. A commenter simply said that it is often a useful proxy. It is something that is useful to do to understand specific trade patterns.
Ok, if it helps replace "true measure" with "useful proxy". My argument remains the same.
Continue to accuse me of whatever you want, I still do not feel you are engaging with the substance of what I'm saying.
I feel like it’s pretty clear that chabska was saying that China does more manufacturing per capita, creates more stuff, whereas the US captures more value.
If a paralegal at a fancy law firm works 9 billable hours at $200/h, and a senior partner then spends one hour adding some finishing touches for which he bills $2000, the paralegal has likely produced more work, but the partner’s output is more valuable (and sometimes it might not even be that useful, maybe the paralegal could’ve done the whole thing himself, but the oversight is part of the package and that’s what a senior partner costs).
Which metric is more useful probably depends on what you’re trying to find out.
I didn't "choose" these, they are standard metrics used by industrial analysts. You know, the people who plan port expansions and cargo ship purchases, they need to deal with the actual tonnes of goods moved, not the dollar value of those goods.
> If the $450 of value was so easy to extract, why wouldn't China simply assemble it in their own country and take the whole pie?
If you pay attention, you'll notice that's what China is doing. For decades, China's GDP growth towered over the US's. Around 2015, China's GDP PPP overtook the US's.
Growth is trivial to achieve when you are starting from zero. My footnote very much alludes to this. This is incidentally what the US did to powers like Britain a century and a half ago.
I just find it amusing that in this theory of trade China has found a way to do all the work while the US does nothing and takes all the value. Perhaps all that extra money is not as easy to claim as the OP suggests.
Maybe economies are changing and purely physical goods are becoming less valuable...
That's kind of goes against the conventional wisdom, which largely feels true in my experience, that "the rich get richer". Countries are a bit different, but China looks poised to avoid the middle income trap up to a point, and even if they don't, their "middle income" is a lot more likely to fall somewhere near the Japanese levels, which would make the Chinese economy massively bigger than the US one, by 2050.
China's GDP is the second largest in the world, and is around two thirds of US's. China's economy is growing continuously over 5% whereas the US already discussed facing a recession.
In some metrics, such as PPP GDP, China already towers over the US.
I think you're trying ver hard to diminish the second largest economy of the world at a moment where it's expected to be a few years until it's the single largest.
China’s GDP growth is great but they will face a huge pain now that they face an unsustainable population decline. They have more people aged over 52 than younger. I empathize with their youth.
You are claiming that the median age in China is 52 or did I read this wrong? That would be beyond fake news level of statement (for my reading of the meaning)
The current median age of China is about 40, which is not great for their context, but a world apart from 52.
China is automating at an impressive rate. Isn’t automation easier to face with population decline than with population increase? I’d imagine young people mind getting replaced by machines more than old people.
I mean, of course they are. If you have a population increase you have plenty of young people who will complain that automation is taking their jobs. But with a population decrease you eventually end up with just old people and not enough working people to sweep the streets or wash cars or whatever - so automation is welcome because it doesn't "steal" jobs.
I do not think that labor sentiment has a strong impact on whether or not jobs are automated away. Go watch an old movie from the 40’s or 50’s that features a hotel. The number of small, niche jobs that existed are surprisingly numerous by modern standards: porters, elevator operators, switchboard attendants, and so on. Busy places employing a lot of people. This was undoubtably true across industries, and we have automated away almost all those jobs one way or another without much fanfare. Sure - someone might have complained in the moment, but it’s death by a thousand cuts.
This sort of automation along with consolidation has been the death of small cities and towns in the US.
It's basically what's mostly killed my own small town.
My hometown, with a fairly consistent population of about 300 people, used to have a restaurant, bowling alley, full-service station, hardware store, bar, and grocery store. In my childhood, the restaurant, grocery store, and hardware store were still around. They died. And they died partially because gas got cheap and partly because goods producers increasingly jacked up their prices to small suppliers because they didn't want to deal with them. It was simply more lucrative and easier to see 1000 units to walmart than 10 to "Small town USA grocer". Near the EOL of the grocer, they'd literally buy their good from walmart because they couldn't get them anywhere else. The cheap gas led to people from my town traveling to nearby larger towns and cities to find cheaper goods.
The restaurant went out of business because it depended heavily on the prices of the local grocer. Towards the end, you'd literally call ahead the owner so they could open the doors and start cooking for you.
I can't say what the solution to all this is. The market is simply busted for small time business owners who want to move any sort of physical good. That has had knock on effects nationwide that haven't been positive, particularly for rural america.
I come from (and still leave near) a similar-sized town, and it went through the same process. And my dad remembers when it had even more businesses than I can remember, with movie theaters and the like.
It's actually gotten a little better in the last decade, I think because people got some hope again that jobs might come back, and because remote work meant fewer people were driving to the bigger town down the road every day, so there became more of a market in the small town for things like a grocery store or Dollar General-type store again. There are also more home-based businesses, started by people who work full- or part-time remotely and put their spare time into starting a local business.
But in the 90s/2000s, it was nothing more than a bedroom community for the town 20 miles away, which was sad. It's still nothing like it once was, but at least there are some signs of life now.
By population decline we mean a depopulation scenario, when the birth rate falls, the number of young people decreases, while the proportion of elderly people increases?
Automation can create a dynamically changing labor market. Today you had a job, tomorrow it is automated, you need to find another job, learn new skills required for it, and all of this.
Not a problem for the young (especially since automation increases the general standard of living, so young people will often find that their new job pays better).
But older people find it more difficult to adapt, learn new skills and find their place in a changed world.
And then there is career growth. Imagine an elderly gentleman who has spent 30 years building a career, accumulating valuable experience, and is USED to receiving a huge salary for his qualifications... And he is told that he has been replaced by a video card, his skills are now worth nothing on the market, and in the job available to him he will now be paid the same as a snotty 20-year-old yesterday's schoolboy. Do you think this won't become a point of social tension in a situation where there aren't many young workers?
There is also a solidarity pension system, which creates a greater burden on workers the smaller the proportion of young people and the greater the proportion of old people.
And in the scenario of a population decline with a simultaneous increase in living standards - this will create enormous social tension, when the shrinking working class will ask itself: why should we give more and more of the money we earned with our sweat and blood to old people who were unable to save for their old age when were younger?
Even if no one voices this as an official slogan, it will still be implied in political decisions and will boil down to at least the fact that old people will be denied an increase in their standard of living ("because we are already giving them more and more, but look at what a terrible world they left us, and now they want to live in luxury at the expense of our sweat and blood?").
But with the aging of the population, the proportion of old people will increase very much, and, if we are talking about democratic regimes, their political influence will be increased.
And the situation, when we have a confrontation between a shrinking productive minority and people who do not produce anything, but have power over them and live at their expense - can end badly. It will definitely end badly. Like, really badly
The good thing about being authoritarian is that you can easily solve the births issue. The same way there was one child policy, there could be 3 or 4 with penalties for non compliance.
Highly unlikely CCP would pursue coercive birth policy, or even could do it if it wanted. CCP is extremely powerful but it still has to rely on the consent of the governed. It has to frequently roll back policies due to public outcry.
Current birth rate increase policies in China are based mostly on rewarding for births and subsidizing parenting costs.
PPP on its own is a relatively poor metric and only covers a subset of the economy.
Then when you have semi closed economy like Russia with unclear currency rates (due to external capital inflow/outflow barriers) and convert the figures to USD you can end up with all sorts of wacky numbers
They do. If you just scroll the ubiquitous online market, that doesn't need to be named, and look for odd brand names. Intentionally odd. Like "sxrpgh" as the brand as a made up placeholder. These brands are named to quickly start a business.
Why? It's an aliexpress model. Create as many legal entities as you can and let an economic Darwinism kill the ones you do poorly at and cherry pick your successful businesses.
The actual labor is outsourced to the market itself with products produced in southeast Asia by a wholesaler, sent to the market by said contracted wholesaler, and sales handled by the market's fairly much only retailer. It's so automated you really only have to be lucky that consumers pick your product and luck can be bent to will at times.
It's a very botnet approach to business.
This does expand the approach from flooding the market with cheap goods, to making cheap goods and competing with prices from the middlemen, making less efforted profits using the same approach, but exports the profits out of the US economy. I know this is a unusual framing but that's exactly what is happening.
Before a middleman within the economy would extract the wealth from that labor in this way. Why not cut out the middleman if the formula can be followed by anyone?
And in the current belligerent state of trade it would politically expedient to do so or at the very least encourage this model if you are adversarial to the US because it works well. Our businesses already proved that.
China's GDP (PPP) is already ~22% higher than the USA's [1]. Arguably, isn't this a better measure of value? PPP measures the real value to the citizens in a nation, and more closely measures actual economic activity.
Say a bottle of wine costs $20 in the USA, and in total one bottle is produced and sold for a total of $20 GDP. France makes 10 bottles at $2 each, for a similar GDP of $20. It's cool that the USA manages to "extract more value" from its smaller wine production, but at the end of the day, France has the stronger economy.
There's more wine to go around, more resilience to the loss of a bottle, arguably this higher production means more export capacity, more employment, more generation of wine expertise, supply chains, etc.
The nominal GDPs might be the same, but the GDP (PPP) of France in this case would be $200 to the USA's $20.
> China's GDP (PPP) is already ~22% higher than the USA's [1]. Arguably, isn't this a better measure of value? PPP measures the real value to the citizens in a nation, and more closely measures actual economic activity.
Only if the only things you purchase are exclusively domestic. Turns out, the vast majority of Chinese citizens with any means are interested in foreign products (like most people in the world).
> Only if the only things you purchase are exclusively domestic. Turns out, the vast majority of Chinese citizens with any means are interested in foreign products (like most people in the world).
Are they, though? China has its own huge software stacks, cloud providers, car manufacturers, etc? Is China really starving for anything not made in China, except for luxury goods? To which, I would point at Lexus (the archetypal example from Japan, a comparable country) and say that if you're a luxury good manufacturer in the Western world, I would not rest on my laurels, it's just a matter of time: either by development or acquisition, China will be making its own luxury goods and even exporting them, soon.
If China embraces capitalism more tightly that will be a good thing for the world. The problem with China is not its wonderful people or culture, nor its prosperity, the glaring problem with China is Communism and the morality of authoritarian style central planning and the Xi/Putin axis of evil.
I’d argue. The CCP isn’t ideologically opposed to democracy but rather capitalism. Capitalism is an inherent feature of democracy. They despise capitalism (the Communist Party) even though they will play the long march and use it to subvert and destroy non-Communist ways of life.
> Turns out, the vast majority of Chinese citizens with any means are interested in foreign products (like most people in the world).
Is there data that backs up this claim? Is this broadly the case? Cause I do know that local brands have been taking over foreign brands recently. Take for example Apple— sales in China plunged 50%, and reports are pointing at Huawei [1], which amongst other things has been making some impressive high-end phones. Tesla is falling to Chinese brands too [2].
Moreover, foreign brand != foreign product. Tesla manufactures in China, as does Apple, Louis Vuitton, etc.
But regardless of specific examples, I'd imagine the vast majority of consumption in China isn't products of foreign origin given its massive trade surplus [3] and just how much of what it imports are materials, rather than finished consumer goods [4].
> Moreover, foreign brand != foreign product. Tesla manufactures in China, as does Apple, Louis Vuitton, etc.
This has nothing to do with PPP, and the fact that you are making this argument means you have no idea what it consists of at all.
If Chinese citizens purchase those products, they don't get them at an adjusted price because they are manufactured in China. They pay the same base price as worldwide, else they buy them secondhand (or, more frequently, bootleg).
Your questions reinforce, rather than dismiss, why PPP is a useless metric outside of base domestic purchase economics (primarily rent and food).
That bottle of wine is going to be at least 400 RMB in China, so I’m not sure how PPP can be argued here. You would need to focus on things that are less expensive in China than the UsA (services mostly, low end goods and food), but things get more expensive quickly if you go for something nice outside of a restaurant. PPP is oddly calculated given that services in china’s case are mostly what is driving its higher value, and that simply means people are paid less (and increasingly they aren’t, which means PPP will shrink closer to GDP unless their automation investments really pay off).
The he issue with this is the dependency direction, if the supplier learns to do the assembly then they don’t need US anymore and can sell the same thing for a fraction of the price.
Or if you go to war then all those base manufacturing can be used to manufacture for military
> If the $450 of value was so easy to extract, why wouldn't China simply assemble it in their own country and take the whole pie?
As someone else pointed out, they do, under various odd brand names.
You make what seems like an obvious point. However, The iPhone is assembled in China for the ballpark cost you mention, and sells for double the $450 price you mention... so they must have reasons to not take the whole pie.
"A man with a watch always knows what time it is. If he gains another, he is never sure"
Most safety critical systems actually need at least three redundant sensors. Two is kinda useless: if they disagree, which is right?
EDIT:
> If multiple sensor modalities disagree, even without sensor fusion, you can at least assume something might be awry and drop into a maximum safety operation mode.
This is not always possible. You're on a two lane road. Your vision system tells you there's a pedestrian in your lane. Your LIDAR says the pedestrian is actually in the other lane. There's enough time for a lane change, but not to stop.
What do you do?