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People with high socioeconomic status work much more and have less free time. It’s absurd to claim otherwise.

EDIT: please before being outraged at my comment have a look at actual evidence, e.g. Time and income poverty by Tania Burchardt; bottom decile compared with top decile has 12 hours more free time a week!


> People with high socioeconomic status work much more and have less free time

I think you are misrepresenting (or perhaps, misunderstanding) the conclusion of these studies. The increased "free time" is most entirely due to high unemployment at the lower end of income.

If you control for unemployment and under-employment, the graphs pretty much flatten out (as you can observe in the later graphs of the publication you linked below)


No, I think considering only employed people is dishonest, there’s zero reason to do so. And if graph becomes flat then obviously assumption that high income people have more time is not true

If you want to make that argument, then we have to discuss whether those people choose to be underemployed, or are in that state due to fiscal policy that explicitly aims to prevent 100% employment

In the context of this discussion not at all - the comment I was replying to hinted that perhaps benefits from 30 min in sauna might be due to confounding stemming from time availability. Also all I'm saying is that poorest people (bottom 10%) generally have more free time than richest people (top 10%). I'm not discussing why, if it's system failure, their choice or anything else and I don't know why should I? Would this discussion somehow change how much free time each decile has? Of course not.

People with 2 minimum wage jobs have even less time.

Citation needed.

Edit: it’s absolutely not true universally and it’s ridiculous to suggest it is. Comparing averages will be very tricky as well.


Sure - https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cr/CASEreport57.pdf The difference between bottom and top decile is huge - bottom has approximately 12 hours more of free time a week! It’s consistent result that’s replicated multiple times in literature.

how utterly disconnected from reality you are

I’m afraid it’s you that’s disconnected from reality. I know it’s unfashionable to actually consider evidence, but please have a look at eg Time and income poverty by Tania Burchardt. Low income people have MUCH more free time.

The beauty of capitalism is that you can just not use Adobe, Microsoft or drive Tesla. Blaming Trump on capitalism is also quite a stretch.

So the beauty of capitalism is billion dollar companies are free to try to scam you, because you're also free to avoid them?

Maybe I should just stand on the street and be a 3-card-monty...


at least the 3-card Monty guy is dealing with you one on one. These companies hire lobbyist to make the illegal, immoral sh*t legal. Easy to keep winning the game when you write the rules.

Eliminating capitalism will not eliminate people trying to scam you or take advantage of you.

Environmental impact of ai is greatly overstated. Average person will make bigger positive impact on environment by reducing his meat intake by 25% compared with combined giving up flying and AI use.

Is this before or after you account for the initial training impact? Because that would need to be factored in for a good faith calculation here, much as the companies would rather we didn't.

For some disciplines unfortunately that's not true. In medicine the publishing cartel is much stronger than arxiv.

> Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.

What are you talking about? There’s lots of modern music that’s not corporate slop and that’s absolutely great. Never in history was access to great music as easy as it is now.


I'm talking about modern music. Just because a couple of dweebs on hackernews have "totally amazing underground music" doesn't mean the overall zeitgeist agrees. Regardless of your esoteric music tastes, music by sales and music by charting tells a very different story. And that story is one of replaceable slop.

Not because there is no path to profitability (they make a ton of money on inference), they just spend a lot on R&D.

> they make a ton of money on inference

So it is stated, but is it actually true? I am not convinced.

Besides, it's not as if they can suddenly stop training models, the moment you do that you've spelled a death sentence for profitablity because Google and open source will very quickly undercut a 15 year break even timeline.


Agreed, the revenues are big.. but very small next to the datacenter bills.. even if a fraction of which are being used for inference, it's hard to argue they even break even. That's before all the other costs (Super Bowl ads, billions in compensation).

It's widely reported and acknowledged as true.

Well, the only people with any ability to acknowledge it have a massive incentive to do so, and I've been around the block enough times to know that startups will use every trick in the book to paint a rosy financial picture, even when it's extremely misleading or occasionally just straight up lies. In the current climate of AI hype my skepticism is even greater.

I'll believe it when I see it.


Where and by who? Critical context missing here.


The CEO hyping his product and the viability of his business during an interview with Stripe does not, at least to me, qualify as “widely reported and acknowledged”

from what i understand, the issue with inference is it doesn't scale as user count grows the way traditional saas scales. In typical saas adding users requires very little additional capacity. However with inference, supporting more users requires much more capacity to be added. I don't know if it's quite linear but it certainly requires more infrastructure to support additional LLM users than say a web application.

And the existing infrastructure routinely struggles for several of the well known players. You can literally tell when it's getting bogged down by workload. And that's after all the absurdly large datacenters we've already established at significant expense (to both the corporations and the average person).

Afaik Anthropic still loses money for their main product in this space: Claude Code and their Max plans.

This became immediately clear to me over the weekend when I used Opus via API key. I had it review the code for my (relatively small) personal blog to create an AGENTS.MD - it cost me $3.26.

same here... The API costs are absolutely insane for any real usage. This is either high prices to make sure no profitable competitor to claude workspace or other agent system emerges, or heavily sponsoring of their own soluions.

Api cost need not correlate with running cost.

Not really. They are burning money on hardware, resources and payroll without meaningful return prospects.

> 2. This is ripe "red pill" fodder

So what? We should act like attractiveness is not a huge privilege because of that? As with other privileges, I think it's important that we are aware of that.


> Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children?

Effect of tutoring is greatly overstated.


Tutoring companies don't want you to know that though, so they push these articles saying rich people only get better scores thanks to tutoring.

As a university tutor, I agree. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

The most interesting results is that the title is true only for females - for males the beauty premium persisted!

Male beauty is so powerful it can be transmitted over TCP/IP?

Male beauty is mostly being fit, and being fit leads to better outcomes even without biased teachers. Female beauty doesn't correlate to real world performance in the same way, as women that are a bit thinner than optimal health gets rated as the most beautiful.

Absolutely vital insight, yes. Male beauty is arduously acquired, which necessarily means it correlates with other virtues such as great work ethic, persistence, not quitting easily, etc.

This feels like a Zoolander quote.

Why?

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