Yes, California has long been a "donor state", ie one that pays substantially more federal tax revenue than gets spent there. This shouldn't be too surprising as it's much richer than average and the tax system is approximately progressive.
What's the base rate? Even a very healthy economy doesn't have all sectors growing simultaneously, so I'd be very curious to know if this is a matter of going from "normally 20% is shrinking and now it's 80%" or if it's "normally 49% is shrinking and now it's 51%"
Prices, and feelings about the economy are set at the margin. A 1% change in employment doesn't sound world ending on its own, but the relative power balance between labor and management pushes wages down across the economy.
The author complains about country selector drop-downs as part of the address flow, but if you're collecting zip codes you are already assuming United States. I don't think there's a country-inferer from completely generic postal code tool out there yet, is there?
> if you're collecting zip codes you are already assuming United States
From outside the US: I always thought "zip code" is just what you USers call a postal code. I only found out it's a trademark today, from this HN discussion.
So most people outside the US will see "zip code" and think "oh, they mean postal code but they have this weird term for it".
It's "ZIP Code™", trademarked by the US Postal Service (this is mostly to prevent others from misusing the name). It is exactly equivalent to a postal code, and most US residents will know both terms, although they will always say "ZIP".
ZIP is an acronym for "Zone Improvement Plan", but no one knows that and it's not meaningful if you do!
Essentially the argument is that more dumb money in a prediction market provides an even stronger incentive for smart money to join, moving the price back to an accurate probability.
> No amount of salary would have made me able to afford housing near work in sfbay
I assure you there are people who live there who can afford to do so because they make enough money. Switching from startup salary to bigco at the same experience level in the same location doubled my comp. A few promotions later and it doubled again. That's when housing started to look affordable.
I thought "vibe coding" had come to mean "I used an LLM to generate this code", but didn't really imply we'd given up trying to review and read the output. The author is taking it one-step further by suggesting we not bother with the latter.
It's true that the meaning of "vibe coding" has been somewhat diluted - but the original definition as set forth by Karpathy was to forget that the code even exists (no review, no reading the commits, nothing).
Sure, but the article is talking about people who can and do read code now but will develop software without reading code in the future. Kind of like you rarely look at the object code that the compiler produces.
> * it’s a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031 than it has today
If AI makes workers more productive, labor will have higher value than it has today. Which specific workers are winning in that scenario may vary tremendously, of course, but I don't think anyone is seriously claiming AI will make everyone less productive.
The value of labor i.e. wages depend on labor demand (the marginal product of labor) and bargaining power, not output per worker. If AI is a substitute for many tasks, the marginal value of an additional worker, and what a company is willing to pay for their work can fall even if each remaining worker is more productive.
What you're forecasting is a scenario where total output has substantially increased but no one's hiring or able to start their own business. Instant massive recession is by no means a "sure bet" with technological improvements, especially those that make more kinds of work possible than before.
I'm not forecasting that, and it's a virtual strawman in the face of my much narrower claim: that wages depend on marginal labor demand and bargaining power, not average output per worker. If AI substitutes for labor, the marginal value of adding another worker in many roles can fall. That can mean fewer hires or lower wages in some categories, not 'no hiring' or an instant massive recession. I have no idea what the addressable market or demand for our more productive economy is, but for the record I do hope it's high to support new businesses and a bigger pie in general!
> My statement reflects that increased productivity means that fewer people are required to generate the same amount of economic output.
People have been singing that since the industrial revolution started.
What makes you think it's different this time? Other times increased productivity yielded fewer people doing what a machine suddenly can do. But never fewer people employed or smaller overall economy.
You can argue that our populations are older than ever before. There aren't enough kids, and consumers are saturated with consumption opportunities.
That's maybe never happened before during the industrial revolution. But it's orthogonal to AI.
reply