Comment by Avicebron
3 days ago
It's not AI. Like the layoffs AI is a convenient scapegoat for the economy creaking to a halt, real world income across most sectors won't buy a house in the state where the job is. It's hate, but it's only "against AI" because AI is being trotted out why people can't get their first home until they are 50 if they are lucky..
I think that the creepiness of the tech CEOs that show up in media has a ton to do with this too, as they seem like cartoonish villians.
Alex Karp, in particular, has some of the most absolutely horrifying clips of his TV appearances circulating all over video social media. But Musk has broader reach, and is even more oblivious and has tied himself to someone who he himself accused of pedophilia.
Andreesen, Thiel, Sam Altman, and the above are great at raising valuations for investors but they are doing it incredibly stupidly in a way that leads to massive backlash. California is voting for a billionaire tax this year, and I think that these tech CEOs only have themselves to blame for the backlash they are causing.
It might not be your intention, but your comment seems to imply that the problem here is more image than substance.
The problem isn't that these people are simply inarticulate and incapable of expressing their views in ways that appeal to people. It's that their views are unappealing (if not downright objectionable) to most people.
Right on.
It's a sign of how disempowered the populace is that these selfish ghouls don't even feel the need to pretend to be decent functioning adults anymore. Because, why bother? What is anyone gonna do about it?
I agree fully with your second paragraph. But regardless of what the core ideas are, they way they have been presented has been abominable, and the politics is judged on the presentation, because the US media largely presents these words unfiltered and without context and completely along the lines of the message that the US tech CEOs want to present.
It's both. A view people do not like, but are unaware of, is one they are not mad about.
I think you are both right. It is true that people only hate these people because of their actual views, but also it doesn't help that they made themselves celebrities and go on social media for attention.
I bet you there are people equally repulsive and influential but face little public backlash because they never show up in front of a camera.
They're all cryptofascists who have become so powerful they can start to reveal themselves more clearly.
I remember reading about superstitious behavior in pigeons.
You feed pigeons randomly, and if they happened to be standing on one foot when they got fed, they will associate that behavior with what happened. So they will stand on one foot while feeding.
In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.
> In the same way, they economy goes bad, they might blame what they read about the government, or AI, or standing on one foot.
Right... but clearly the government has been making some decisions lately that have, in real ways, directly impacted negatively the economy. There's not superstition about that.
Right. It's not AI. It's the corporations behavior in relation to AI. But most people have no experience or interaction with AI outside of corporate services or AI features in things that shouldn't have AI or make it worse (like phone support). So in their lived experience all AI sucks and you can't blame 'em for that perception.
But the real villains here are the same as ever, the most dangerous non-human persons: corporate persons.
As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes, once most of the simpler office work becomes obsolete, because, let's be real, average person's reasoning, work-pay efficiency, obedience and meticulousness shouldn't be too hard to surpass with AI in a few years. AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo, while being harmful to the environment and decreasing the share of current-level-of-above-average-quality-user-oriented output.
So yeah, money becoming less of a proxy of "how much someone contributed to society" and more "how much someone contributed to the oligarchs' goals", while those goals are for AI and for peoples' detriment, makes the situation actually about AI.
The technology that helps extract wealth improves, while most of the purely consumer-oriented products are becoming a con and a scam, especially if US companies are involved. The Mirabell's "original" recipe turned the best treat in the world into a generic candy, all are just palm oil + sugar + shrinkflation. There is also non-repairable tech with non-standard components, non-removable batteries, meat gets filled with water, washing machines die right after warranty ends, every digital service is trying to steal data instead of taking only the necessary or at least being transparent about what's taken and why, entertainment like Reddit and streaming services also get worse... AI slop is just another example, but a bit more visible and with a bit more side-effects.
> AI also makes it easier to prevent a change in status quo
This seems like the polar opposite of what the "AI safety" people are worried about and it seems unlikely that they could both be true at once.
> As I understand it, the last sentence stems from the fact that too large of a share of the total wealth is in the hands of those that don't benefit from more homes. AI is what's prioritised by them and what will lead to even smaller flow from the efficient wealth aggregators to those needing homes
These are both two independent things and two independent sets of people.
The main group of people opposing housing construction is landlords and existing homeowners. The ones doing AI have almost no overlap with that. Moreover, "you get paid less" and "housing costs more due to artificial scarcity" are only tied together in the sense that money going to landlords and banks isn't going to workers, which again isn't the AI thing.
Or to put it a different way, you could mitigate a lot of the "AI problems" by building more housing and the AI people would be pretty fine with that.
People also hard slop images
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This seems to be a problem limited to specific metros. On the whole, Gen Z is more likely than millennials to be a homeowner at their age. Millennials in turn were more likely than Gen-X to own a home when Boomers were at that age. The idea that living standards and financial milestones have gone down for more recent generations doesn't seem to bear out, this Economist piece digs into detail: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...
Hopefully non-logged in users can at lease see the income-by-age graph: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=480,quality=10...
I thought that was nicely rebutted years ago..
https://prospect.org/2024/05/14/2024-05-14-trendy-nonsense-g...
The piece doesn't seem to refute the key claims made by The Economist, namely that Gen-Z has higher inflation-adjusted incomes than previous generations. It's biggest criticism seems to be:
> The Economist piece and kindred articles are good examples of how to lie with statistics. You can show that the typical 25-year-old’s income outpaces boomers’ income when they were 25 only by failing to adjust for inflation and the rising costs of life’s necessities, or using averages rather than medians.
But the Economist did use inflation-adjusted median earnings in its analysis of incomes by age among different generations. The Economist cited the median after-tax income, adjusted for inflation. (https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...) I'm not sure why this author seems to think that the Economist is failing to adjust for inflation or not using medians, when it says so quite clearly in their graphs.
The Prospect article also says that home ownership among under-35s has gone down, and links to data on the home ownership rates grouped by age (https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/a-02132020-ar...) but the data ends in 2017. The oldest of Gen-Z would only be 20 years old at the time this data ends. When we look at the Economist's wrote:
> Bolstered by high incomes, American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).
A chart of home ownership rates that end in 2017 could not possibly refute this claim given that Gen-Z would be too young to buy homes around the time that the data's source ends. The home ownership rate among under-35s increased from 34% in 2017 to 39% in 2023 (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/07/younger-house...), so when Gen-Z started to enter their earliest feasible home-buying years the ownership rate was in a period of recovery. The Economist's claims seem to bear out.
The rest of the piece goes off on tangents largely unrelated to the financial outcomes related to Gen-Z relative to previous generations. For instance, it cites a pew survey on the percentage of young adults that support their parents. But it does not compare that against earlier decades, so there's no evidence in any change in rate over time. In fact the bulk of the piece shares data that aren't relevant. E.g. how does the racial breakdown of the subprime mortgages relate to incomes by age and birth year?
Fortunately the complaints about the economy and homeownership are also just folk wisdom that doesn't really reflect reality https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/05/how-gen-z-outpaces-past-gene...
The economy, real wages, etc are basically higher than ever (despite idiot Trump's best efforts).
People are mad because being mad is fun and we're all on being mad machines 24/7.
This has nothing to do with reality, where reality means "what people have", rather than "the economy".
"What people have" is robustly measured, well-understood, and pretty much all available evidence suggests that people (at least in the US and developed countries) are doing better than ever on most important metrics. But it is not as seductive as "everything is terrible"!
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Where are you getting your numbers from because the stock market has ceased to be linked to reality for the last decade. Trump fired the stats and numbers office. The only numbers we have are "trust me" numbers which are completely false. Most people would agree that the economy has ground to a halt and everyone I know complains about the gas prices and grocery prices. The reality is there are a lot of people out of work that aren't factored into unemployment numbers because we can't accurately calculate unemployment numbers anymore.
Whether most people agree is irrelevant to whether it's right. You can look at all kinds of numbers which are not the stock market to determine how well people are doing and whether things are getting better or worse. Your conspiracy theories about unemployment numbers are wrong.
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I have to wonder sometimes if the people of the US will ever realize that their housing shortages are self-inflicted. It seems like a massive number of people have somehow been hypnotized into thinking that building more homes increases home prices.
Its not self inflicted. It does have many causes, zoning being one of them, but the reluctance to build a they do in eg China is a problem
Reluctance to build makes it a self inflicted problem, no?
It is absolutely self-inflicted. Most major US cities made the choice to massively limit dense housing construction through zoning and permitting in the 70s-80s, and then shifted into complete amnesia mode and/or active denialism about why population numbers were suddenly growing much faster than housing construction rates.
By coincidence the United States isn’t the only country Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have the same problem lack of affordability for people between 18 and 35 who can’t afford to buy a house/home.
Notice that all these countries are English speaking countries? Aside from speaking English they also have lots in common when it comes to the way the economy and society is run. I can only speak for the United States, but I’ve noticed unfordable not luxury apartments going up everywhere and starter homes are not.
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