I spent 6 months working as a contractor in MS’ Chicagoland data centers. Nothing worked — phones on the walls ran Windows and did not give dial tone. Security systems unable to function because of Windows updates. Personnel more concerned with their required LinkedIn updates than their jobs. Not one FTE liked their role — everyone had a foot out the door.
When they offered to make me FTE I declined and moved on. Because it was an obvious absolute shit-show.
Sorry for those that are currently employed by MS.
The exponent doesn't have to be as large as it currently is.
The wealth inequality we see now is largely a function of every Republican administration in the last half century passing tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously dismantling unions and failing to enforce anti-trust, allowing market consolidation the likes of which we haven't seen since the gilded age.
The result is that wage growth completely disconnected from productivity growth to the extent that subsequent generations are now poorer than their parents' generations.
None of that happened naturally - it was the result of repeated policy changes by the government.
Regardless of whether wealth should be concentrated like that, it still presents a significant problem for the games industry, and leads to things like loot box economies to milk the "whales" for thousands of dollars, since 90% of the addressable market can't afford the product.
it is unarguably problematic when only 10% of your demographic is able to meaningfully participate in your economy outside of fixed head costs...
not to mention, the marginal propensity to consume for the top 10% is 5-6 times _less_ than the bottom 90%, so I don't know how you can claim the current consumption rate is good?
I feel like you're implying that the mere act of consumption is good for an economy. It is not and the idea was critiqued 200 years ago by Bastiat in his parable of the broken window.
It's perfectly good for the economy if wealthy people save/invest in production instead of consume themselves.
Pointing out that poorer people have higher MPC simply doesn't mean that redistributive policies would increase production or consumption. It's entirely possible that such policies would decrease overall savings rate which you seem to think would be good, but would reduce total production and consumption.
Agreed, they probably don't. But the financials of other companies clearly say that they are not above leasing further compute capacity from Oracle and X and would be part of a narrative that they need to IPO to raise money for such projects rather than it just being a naked payday.
Besides being obviously AI editorialized, the idea that a few fishing boats were the reason Somali piracy stopped and not because of an international coalition of navies is... quite a stretch.
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