Why would you be surprised? Are you expecting some sort of pro-labor movement in a startup focused tech forum?
Modern tech is all about disruption. You get paid way too much because you’re squeezing costs (ie labor) out of business operations.
There was an action movie that filmed car chases in my city about 15 years ago. A bunch of the crew was at a bar I hung out with and we were trading stories. There was a dude who was making alot of money to essentially wet down the streets from a fire hydrant. There’s reasons for that — hydrants require some training to safely operate.
But end of the day, the money guys at Netflix, Amazon or whatever would rather just pay some rando a few bucks and let insurance deal with the damage. Or build a fake street in Serbia.
my view of capitalism is that you can't remove the market. it will exist with or without you, so if you have some control you should incentivize the things that are better for everyone.
To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.
I agree with you, and this happened in the past. The entire system is designed to prevent this, and this newfound love of isolationism is a way to cement it in.
Let’s be real, these giant tech companies are becoming big stagnant bureaucracies. They can’t adapt anymore and want to build a moat to let them lumber along for a few decades.
The core assumption of the policy makers and business people was the idea that the Chinese are a bunch of dumb peasants working for scraps and unable to produce. They seem to be holding their own with AI, cars, trains, aircraft, etc. They may have a credible competitor for the B737/A320 — that’s a pretty big leap.
Modern tech is all about disruption. You get paid way too much because you’re squeezing costs (ie labor) out of business operations.
There was an action movie that filmed car chases in my city about 15 years ago. A bunch of the crew was at a bar I hung out with and we were trading stories. There was a dude who was making alot of money to essentially wet down the streets from a fire hydrant. There’s reasons for that — hydrants require some training to safely operate.
But end of the day, the money guys at Netflix, Amazon or whatever would rather just pay some rando a few bucks and let insurance deal with the damage. Or build a fake street in Serbia.