Seattle is the type of economy that is heavily threatened by AI. Desk jobs that Claude basically already knows how to do, and just needs to be integrated into the existing systems to have impact.
Most people in Seattle "tech" are middle management with no discernible skills other than organizational deckchair arrangement. It is a place to optimize for work-life balance, and not take risk - this is why the region, despite its technology density, has such a disproportionately small startup scene.
AI IS a huge threat to a place like this and I am not optimistic about the ability for people to adapt.
China has 900M people making less than $400/month, and 600M people making less than $100/month. relative GDP is a joke, go to China to see what most of them are eating (hint: it's unsafe food filled with chemicals, or its mostly carbs) and where these people are living (hint: it's shoddy constructed condos or run down farm houses)
Not sure why you have something against the flyover states. I'm sure there's more shoddily constructed condos in Florida/California/New York per capita than there is in the Midwest. Same goes for cheap high calorie food.
Of course, the same can probably be said about the large population centers in China too. More people concentrated in one area tends to mean more poverty in that area and all the things that come with it.
The parallel is that there are rich and poor? It is unscrupulous to argue in imprecise, binary terms while ignoring the difference in scale. People in flyover states are not making only $400/mo or even occupying that same societal equivalent of China in America.
I'm always unbelievably pissed off when I reserve a premium tier of car at SFO for a business trip, and Hertz tries to stick me with a Tesla, as if it is a premium car (horrible interior build quality), and with the assumption I have time to install apps and figure out how to use car charging infrastructure.
The Tesla is not the kind of car I'd like to just jump into for a two day trip, but the neither the car charger or key card entry requires an app, or is particularly weird. You touch the key card to the door column to open or lock, and you plug the charger in.
But the interior build and the touchpad interface mean it'll never be a top choice. It's just awful.
Maybe I want the novelty of trying out an electric car on a business trip. But far more likely I just want a bog ordinary car that I can drive from point A to point B.
My theory is it will work itself out in time. Once let’s say a quarter or maybe half the population is driving EVs, they’re not specialty vehicles anymore. There will be plenty of people willing to accept them so if you run into someone who absolutely doesn’t want one you’ll probably be able to compensate just fine. It will cease to be a specialty car.
It will be a little more like manual versus automatic used to be. Anyone can drive an automatic, but some people can only drive an automatic.
But if you don’t give EVs to people charged and there aren’t enough chargers around then even people who would otherwise take them (owners + the curious) will avoid them.
Sure. At some point EVs become something that someone renting a car would be expected to know how to deal with. Of course, that could take a while though. And it may be unevenly distributed. The uptake of automatics has been much slower outside of the US and, within the US, I've actually had a service associate need to have a tech drive out my car because they couldn't drive a stick.
Conversely, I get frustrated when I ask for a long range electric car and they either only have ICE cars or they have, like, a Bolt (an EV that I love, but long range it is not).
At the same price point Teslas have a very spartan and cheap feeling interiors compared to almost any European manufacturer.
Sitting on a Mercedes CLA is much more comfortable than any Tesla around US$ 45k. It becomes even more disparaging when you go higher on price, a Tesla Model S at US$ 73k interior looks dreadful compared to any Volvo/Audi/Mercedes/BMW at the same price.
It's not even a nice looking minimalism, it's just spartan and cheap looking/feeling.
Base/rental trim -A and -B Benz interiors are terrible (in the US). Hard seats, plastic everywhere, shit tier center LCDs; list goes on. Civics are better.
I agree that the Model S interior falls short of most cars in its price range, though.
I'm comparing from living in Europe, have no idea how these cars are in the USA.
I ride in Teslas cabs quite often here in Stockholm and they are comfortable but not at all what I'd expect from a high-end interior, the Mercedes, Lexus, Volvo, and similar cabs here look much better inside than any of the Teslas I got so far (Model S/Model Y).
The A and B trims in the US are the lowest tiers that Mercedes-Benz offers and are spartan, but tacky.
Tesla’s high-end cars don’t have high-end cabins; we agree there.
In the recent past, a Model S with FSD was $143k for the Plaid trim. This was comparable in price to a Benz S550 or a BMW 750i, both of which have incredible, incredible interiors. Super plush, real leather seats; rare wood grain everywhere; customization to no end; coffin-quiet cabins; plush air suspension; etc.
That’s before taking the dealer experience into account. I don’t have experience with Benz dealers, but my understanding of them is that they are actually worth spending time in, and they take care of you when things go wrong (loaners of equivalent trim or just below; great coffee; clean centers; etc.)
Meanwhile, both Teslas offer cabins that I’d say are beneath what you’d get from a maxed-out Honda Accord. I have two Model 3s (old and new designs) and have rented the S a few times now, and I love Teslas, for what that’s worth.
Mobile service kicks ass, but if you need to bring the thing in for service, you’re probably looking at Uber credits. Shameful for the price.
Technology was the only thing the Tesla had the upper hand in.
The funny thing is. China can talk about removing the U.S. dollar and trade when Yen. But they need a stable currency to convert between and so conversion is still done with the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar won’t be removed from trade in our life time.
China doesn’t let the RMB float freely, so trade still happens in dollars. Also, the American government buys a lot of treasuries, so it’s easy to save a few billion quickly when you need to, which isn’t really supported by any other currency…saving money by lending it to the USG conversely prevents it from re-entering your own economy and stoking inflation (China isn’t the only country to use the USA like that, Japan buys more treasuries than China usually).
They are blocked because they don’t censor content. If they did agree to, they would be allowed - just like Microsoft, Bing, Apple, and a handful of other digital products are not blocked in China.
Edit: for those downvoting me, Google literally shut down their China operations because they were unwilling to comply with censorship requirements. Conversely, Google and other US companies seem completely willing to comply with national security letters that compel them to spy on non-US persons, which should make other countries where US companies operate equally uneasy.
"Doesn't censor content" is probably not describing the situation correctly; while some companies like Google have typically resisted such in the aughts, they regularly take requests from other countries of this sort, and it'd be very simple for them to reenter the China market by having a stance similar to what they have for other countries.
The issue here is probably caused by the requirement for an ICP recordal which requires removal of violating user-generated content within 15 minutes, which is probably a very tight deadline, probably coupled with a strong false positive rate which is why said companies are also hesitant to introduce automation.
It could also be argued that Tiktok is not completely value-aligned with US interests, although this has not been provably shown and whatever we have thus far is speculative.
> Copy from other comments, "So China can't spy on Americans and astroturf propaganda"
The Chinese versions of these services are walled off from the rest of the world (otherwise the ICP license probably ends up applying to the worldwide service), so this is not even a plausible explanation.
Further, asserting that the requirements imposed by the ICP recordal as being equivalent to following laws in other democracies is laughable; since most democracies make considerations towards good faith motives towards following a law even though there might be misses otherwise, not to mention the kind of content being censored.
I agree, but they have clearly not met the standard for what China needs. I mean Zuck literally was jogging around Beijing 10 years ago trying to build goodwill to get in, and it was Google that made the decision to exit the market.
In China. They obviously run censorship globally in every country that demands it, it's just that China's demands were worse than everyone else's and they decided it's not worth the effort.
Both founders having grown up in communist block countries supposedly had something to do with their aversion. At least that’s what I heard (was working for MS china back then).
(As I heard it, the legend is mostly attributed to Sergey pushing for it, and every time I've heard Eric talk about it it felt there was some disdain there, so I would agree with you that Larry was probably convinced also, otherwise Sergey alone wouldn't have pulled it off.)
the reason behind millions of death because the grain rationing system leaving little to none food for peasants in the 1960s, yeah it's still economical issue.
Bad things happen when the state controls everything.
The US banning a foreign-owned service from operating on its soil (when that foreign country bans many US-based services from operating on their soil) is not a "planned economy". Please don't use low-effort, bad-faith arguments.
Americans can definitely invest into most Chinese tech companies- the exception is direct investments into non-tech, licensed companies, that require a VIE structure, which enables Americans to still invest.
Most people in Seattle "tech" are middle management with no discernible skills other than organizational deckchair arrangement. It is a place to optimize for work-life balance, and not take risk - this is why the region, despite its technology density, has such a disproportionately small startup scene.
AI IS a huge threat to a place like this and I am not optimistic about the ability for people to adapt.