> calls by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for Japanese companies to pay workers more as inflation takes hold
So the prime minister wants to fight a phenomenon caused (in large part) by a wage price spiral by calling for accelerating the wage price spiral... we're in for a fascinating macro-economic/political landscape these next couple years...
Japan’s current inflated prices are more visible on gas and electricity which increased by 25~30% in just a few months, and are planned to increase again in the summer.
The PM is basically asking companies to foot the bill for energy costs, which have little to do with wages.
Imported goods have been directly affected by the usd/eur/jpy exchange rate, so yes they rose too. Exchange rate has been slightly going down, so there’s a modicum of hope in this regard.
So, 4% incrises in average prices cause by the sour of gas prices and comoditiess, means employees cause the inflation.
Or b what he wants is the distribution of the Cost of being share between companies and employees.
The inflation Japan is experiencing has not been caused in large part by a wage price spiral. It has largely been caused by US and Japanese monetary policy being out of sync.
Cost of raw material going up (largely due to moving resource extraction away from slave labor) is a much bigger driver of inflation than wages. If 10% of a product's price is to pay for the overhead of personnel costs, a 10% wage increase only increases the price of the product 1%.
we are intently focused on what we anticipate will be the two biggest drivers of the next decade:
The first is the marginal cost of energy going to zero.
I anticipate that this is the dumbest thing I will read from a supposedly serious person in the next decade.
Predicting a 0 marginal cost of energy is basically predicting a post-scarcity society... in the next decade... thanks to solar and wind. Oh and a wee-bit of natural gas thats somehow going to be magically piped out of the ground and transported to power plants free of charge... I guess by the same good folks who will be manufacturing and maintaining all of the solar panels and wind turbines free of charge...
How is one even supposed to seriously discuss or critically examine an article when its conclusion is that we'll build a perpetual motion machine in the next 10 years?
Perhaps, you have misunderstood the meaning of "marginal cost." It does not mean that there is zero total cost. Marginal cost is the cost of producing the next kWh. Once my solar panels are installed (not necessarily cheap at all), the marginal cost of producing power is essentially 0.
You’ve basically mentioned it’s not zero since the cost of the spend on the solar panels would have a next best alternative and a hurdle rate. So each marginal kWh does have a cost, not to mention the depreciative factor.
Maintenance of the power inverter, batteries, wiring, and the panels themselves means that marginal cost is not zero, and as long as we don't know the solution to entropy, will never be "essentially" zero.
All of those things happen the same, and cost the same amount, whether 10 kWh are produced or 11 kWh. The marginal cost of the last kWh is zero for these items.
There is thermal wear on the power management and voltage step-up electronics, but it is small unless design parameters are exceeded in going to 11. So maybe those components would have to be replaced ten milliseconds earlier than otherwise.
Setting aside the article's mention of moderately intensive solutions like natural gas which has a very real and obvious cost per KWH, your panels will still need maintenance and eventual replacement (the current industry standard lifetime for a panel is 25-30 years), as will any peripheral systems required for the panels to work (batteries etc) and even the space they take up has an associated opportunity cost.
Marginal cost is the derivative of the cost function. Fixed costs drop out of the derivative. You’re confusing amortizing a fixed cost with marginal cost.
* provided you’re located in a region that has ample solar power.
Turns out, a lot of the world doesn’t really live in perpetually sunny or windy places.
The solar-wind cult would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic. Entire economies have suffered because they marched headfirst into solar and wind without understanding their own geographical limitations (prime example: Germany).
Agreed, I saw those two predictions and closed the tab immediately. Was a interesting article up to that point but it's evidently bonkers and/or naive.
The article is by Chamath Palihapitiya, a guy who shamelessly attaches himself to whatever is currently popular. When he's arguing in favor of an idea or movement, that tells you nothing except that it's trendy and can be used for self-promotion.
Haha well I'm in full agreement with you (and u/shapefrog below) on your Chamath evaluation, but the sad reality is that his influence, by virtue of both the money and attention he can direct towards projects he deems worthy, is real and serious. Though hopefully statements like "the marginal cost of energy will approach 0 in the next decade" will help erode some of that influence...
This is what gets me about fusion power being touted as “unlimited free energy.” The cost of the coal going in to a coal fired power plant is a tiny fraction of the final retail cost of electricity. If coal were free, retail power cost wouldn’t go down appreciably. So replacing the coal burner with fusion isn’t going to make it suddenly free from the wall socket.
Let's see. There's generation, transmission, distribution and final use.
The most costly part is probably distribution, taking electricity from the 11 kilovolts of transmission grid endpoints to street-level voltage and connecting up each house/factory. That's a lot of wire and a lot of maintenance.
If you can generate electricity and use it at the same place, you avoid transmission and distribution costs. If the cost of an extra kilowatt-hour is zero, as with PV once the systems are built, then the marginal cost for that use is zero.[1]
This implies we'll see large electricity users set up shop right next to, or in, PV farms.
1. It won't be zero zero, of course. Using the PV system's power control circuits (and possibly internal voltage step-up or step-down circuits) will affect their life. But those costs are pretty small in the scheme of things. Infinitesimal cost rather than zero, perhaps.
The thing is, we are post scarcity for certain goods. If we ignore copyright issues, it costs a few thousand dollars (via Cloudflare R2 and BitTorrent) to distribute a copy of a book to anyone with a smartphone and an Internet connection. If we want to move to a utopian post-scarcity society, we should start good that can be duplicated, basically infinitely, and iterate from there. we'd need to make sure creation of digital goods is still incentivized with some sort of system, but I think that's quite possible if we can manage to revamp copyright. UBI for digital goods!
Just wanted to highlight this because it is a fantastic piece of advice to keep in mind for interviews (and honestly for your career and even crafts or hobbies too). There's a reason doctors and lawyers (for whom the stakes of failure are sometimes measured in lives or years of freedom lost) call what they do "a practice".
Honest question I constantly think about and have never been able to answer about the future of cryptocurrency development: Why/when would a government ever want less control over the primary means used to transact within its borders?
This is one of the, if not the most, important levers it has to wield power. Governments have fought wars and enslaved entire continents to protect and increase the value of their means of account. Even recently, think of how hard the US works to maintain the dollar as the only currency that can be used international oil transactions aka the petrodollar.
Ultimately, cryptocurrency is a technological attempt to solve the problem of a fundamental lack of trust in our traditional institutions. After all, its powered by a set of de-centralized, trustless protocols. If you use crypto as an inflation hedge, that means you don't trust your government to not de-value your labor via printing tons of new currency. If you use it to carry out transactions, it means at least a small part of you has doubts that our that our current, centralized payment processing institutions won't unilaterally roll those transactions back or eliminate them outright in the future. Ditto for property rights and NFTs (and all the other use cases that guarantee a transaction is recorded by distributing it on chain).
Allowing crypto-currencies to supersede local currencies would not only put governments at the mercy of the mob (or perhaps a small number of whales and exchanges) for determining the value of their citizen's output, it would be an existential admission of their failure. Other than governments that have already failed at administering a currency like El Salvador, why would any self-respecting government with a functioning currency admit defeat like this?
Agreed. As long as people make some quick profits, they will blindly support anything, even fight governments - even if that thing makes it easy for criminals to launder money.
It is going to be an interesting battle. I got my popcorn and enough fiat currency to survive whichever way this goes. In the worst case my plan is https://xkcd.com/538/
In my younger years I spent some time working in the film industry as a PA and reading everything I could to learn about the business side of things. Needless to say, after becoming a programmer, I have often asked myself the same question.
The main difference I can think of is that unlike films, which are discreet projects with hard beginning and end dates, software projects never really end. Maintenance can go on indefinitely and usually the most knowledgeable people to do that maintenance are the people that built the project in the first place. That makes some proportion of people likely to stay with a project for a longer time than it takes to just code up the requirements and generally makes turnover cycles less predictable than they are for people working on films. With less predictable turnover, agents (who generally make money at the time a transaction completes rather than continuously) would have less predictable income streams so they are less incentivized to do it. Also, even in movies, from what I saw, outside of top talent who command large contracts, all the other folks didn't seem to have agents. Thats probably because the transaction amounts for a given contract don't make sense for either party to participate. All the grips, electrical people, PAs, costuming, craft services etc workers were finding work just as a software contractor might -- through connections from friends, colleagues, and people they worked with on previous projects. Many are also part of unions for their respective part of the business so I would expect they get some assistance in finding projects from that as well (e.g. if there is a union production in town they are usually required to hire only people part of the various unions -- so if you're one of the only union members in a region you could get work that way).
I don't think agents are totally incompatible with the software industry, but I do think it would take a somewhat rare combination of highly paid project with a discreet, somewhat consistent term of employment (maybe coding up financial some kind of financial model or data pipeline for a hedge fund would fall under this?) to make it worthwhile for agents to specialize in.
Thanks, that's helpful. I did consider that the grips et al don't have agents, but the few actors I know in LA -- modestly successful people you would probably not have heard of -- all have agents.
My understanding is that the agent makes 10% of everything you get, because most agent contracts are exclusive. Agent puts me on Dune 2, agent gets 10% of my pay; I get on Dune 3 because they loved me so much in Dune 2, agent still gets 10% because our contract says she does, unless I fire her in time, which carries reputational risk.
I wonder, do people have agents on soap operas, which are probably the closest analogy to corporate software, i.e. projects that go on potentially forever and have some people spending their entire careers working on them?
(I had a neighbor who was a soap producer, but not in the US, so not a good source of info for this.)
You'd still want an agent even on a soap opera job, just so you'd have someone to handle negotiations when it's time to re-up on the contract.
Hollywood agents are really more deal makers than job finders. You still do most of the work finding your next job, they do the work of negotiating the deal.
I like the soap opera analogy -- hadn't thought of that. But keep in mind that actors (and other folks that work in long-running shows) will still take other jobs as at the same time as their main gig -- e.g taking a part in a movie in between seasons. That sometimes happens with programming contractors as well, but from what I've seen its far more rare.
Ultimately I agree with the other responder that Hollywood agents are better thought of as deal makers/negotiators than job finders so maybe what limits it from showing up in the software contracting world (and other parts of the film world) is that contract terms are much more standardized so not as much time is needed for negotiation and thus the programmers can do it themselves.
Yeah but I wonder, how much of this is because we (as a group/subculture) are terrible at negotiating and don't have agents helping us with it?
I mean, I have to actually work with the people and do the job, so in addition to being bad at contract negotiation I'm also factoring in a bunch of stuff that's orthogonal to the paycheck. Whereas the agent is negotiating for a number, of which she gets 10%, and short of making enemies that's the only consideration.
In the US actors in the soaps have agents to handle convention appearances, fan cruises, extracurricular gigs during hiatus, voiceover jobs, plays, etc.
It's tough to avoid this thinking because examples of employees being treated like cogs are often systemic and very public -- like stack ranking at big companies that everyone (even people that don't work there) either knows about or ends up knowing about. Meanwhile, examples of managers risking their own skin are more likely to be individual and private -- sometimes to the point that the affected employee doesn't even know it happened because it was behind the scenes -- like a manager defending a performance review of an employee in a calibration meeting with other managers.
This response strikes at the heart of the issue. Until the wild distortions in the property market are fixed (imo, specifically until Prop 13 gets repealed or significantly amended) big, expensive cities in California will continue have increasing crime problems.
As you can probably imagine, community policing is difficult if you're not a member of the community. And as the cost of living goes up while property taxes remain artificially depressed due to prop 13, the disparity between what municipalities are able to pay for police (which is partially funded by property taxes), and how much those police will need to afford to live there, will continue to grow. It seems like a slow, self-reenforcing downward spiral that will only get re-set if the quality of life deteriorates to the point where people actually start moving out of these communities.
San Francisco has plenty of cops. They like to write tickets, do crossword puzzles, and play chess. (Go to the basement of any precinct.). Let's not forget drinking too much, and lucky if they finished a community college. I imagine those last few sentences are common observations at most Police Squads across America.
It's not prop 13.
As to homelessness---it's bad all over the west coast for obvious reasons. And no it's not because the widow whom rents out a room to a scary stranger so she can stay in the home she raised her kids in. I guess prop 13 is an easy target? There's a part of me that would like you Know it All's whom didn't live through opening a ever increasing property tax bill your wish of repeal.
Let's be real. Tech hate all unions. Many of you guys will be politely shown the door at 50. If you save a bit, and happened to score a home when younger; when you are puttering around the garage ruining the iPad with tools brought from Amazon, while wearing a fishing vest, calling your wife mom; you will cherish prop 13.
Exactly. Government has been backstopping/de-risking asset ownership since the Great Recession and massively increased that program in March 2020. At the same time, they started to de-risk the asset consumer class with eviction moratoriums and significantly increased unemployment benefits.
Seems to me one of those two classes will need to be inconvenienced if we don't want inflation to spiral out of control, because otherwise the asset owners will continue to buy more assets with cheap money that will push prices up, while asset consumers will continue to require higher and higher salaries to afford to pay the increasing rents to the asset owners.
Asset owners should be the ones taking the hit since they have been backstopped for far longer and are in a much better financial position to deal with it. But the asset owner class is also the one running the country and its tough to imagine them doing something against their short-term self interest.
Gonna be interesting to see what kind of equilibrium shakes out. I hope this plane can be landed without crashing...
“ Asset owners should be the ones taking the hit since they have been backstopped for far longer and are in a much better financial position to deal with it. But the asset owner class is also the one running the country and its tough to imagine them doing something against their short-term self interest.”
Very true. The Fed pretty much exclusively worries about asset owners and how to drive up asset prices even more. And most people in political or business leadership are asset owners.
I don’t think this will end well. Either we will become a society of super rich people that live separately from a large underclass or there will be a revolution at some point.
I'm wildly out of my depth, but why couldn't Uber drivers be regulated effectively as micro-franchises? The dynamics seem pretty similar -- drivers benefit from the Uber marketing, brand (which brings trust which is necessary in a business as personal as getting into a stranger's car) and "secret sauce" (the dispatch network and app experience). Uber wants to control some aspects of each "franchise" like the cleanliness of vehicles, making sure that they don't discriminate against customers in unappealing areas, and, to some extent pricing. This is necessary to maintain the Brand and keep customers coming back. Uber doesn't want to get into all aspects of running the franchise (setting hours, making sure drivers are only driving for them etc), because it would un-profitable to do at such scale -- just like McDonalds doesn't want to get deal with the management of individual restaurants.
So the prime minister wants to fight a phenomenon caused (in large part) by a wage price spiral by calling for accelerating the wage price spiral... we're in for a fascinating macro-economic/political landscape these next couple years...