Comment by kristopolous

Claiming there's a natural order to things is a classic hoodwink powerful people have always done. Whether it's the "natural" law of kings or "natural" social hierarchy that justified slavery or apartheid, people who don't want to justify their decision always reach for a grab inside the "natural order" bucket when they want to screw everyone over and want people to cede any leverage they have and look at cartesian line plots as if James Clerk Maxwell was charting fluid dynamics.

So the actual question here is what decisions were made by whom to cause the current condition, who benefits, what power are they exercising, where is their motivations and what actions can be taken as a power struggle.

Just saying "blah markets" is as wrong as looking at poor people dying of cholera in the 1800s and blaming eugenics when it was really the management of the municipal water supply. Famously so, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...

Also the hand-wavey "maximize profits" is also nonsense. It that really the decisions we want to actively make about how to organize society? Give everything to pillaging antisocial profit maximizing extortionists? That'd be like saying that since rapists want sex the most they should get all the women by law, and we should set up legal structures to guarantee it!

I really really hope in the age of space travel, nuclear energy, and ai, we can do something smarter than stupidboy caveman logic. In Jean Piaget's Cognitive Developmental Theory, children move beyond this way of thinking around the age of 3. I hope we can do as well as a 3 year old.

Things are currently fucked in the hardware market and they won't naturally self-correct ... instead people will fight and struggle and change laws and sue organizations, have court hearings, do investigations, have treaties and new agreements and the price will eventually go down while smooth-brained simpletons that learn through tiktok memes will be like "see, natural correction".

But this won't happen until we fight for it. Micron is perfectly happy with their 50x growth in EPS and they're spending the extra capital on buybacks (and would have done so earlier but laws, those things we control, prevented them from doing it, because we have human agency over things, and there's no natural order, and things are a consequence of human agency) to pump the stock while saying "yeah, bro, AI, it's $3000 and me and my friends are the only game in town". Like they did in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s and stopped because of lawsuits, and human decisions, and court cases, and human agency ... nothing happened "naturally", again, these aren't newtonian physics, their are people who make decisions.