> AI? If everyone is broke because all the jobs got automated, who is buying the products to supply revenue to the companies
Does it matter if you're already a rich oligarch with generational wealth? All these ceos have enough money to last several decades beyond their life span, it doesn't matter to them is the slave class croaks
What are they buying with this money? If you're the rich 1% and have replaced the 99% with AI there is no longer an economy for you to participate in. We don't have to imagine this scenario, we already did feudalism, and it famously boiled down to land and military.
> slave class
This sentiment is by far the most ridiculous because you are simultaneously projecting a reality where AI does everything and so people are no longer needed, but at the same time people are needed and become a slave class. "Oh no the tractor was invented! Now nobody will need humans to tend the fields! They will surely now force us to tend the fields!"
It may exist (with a loose term of exist) but they are all mostly garbage. There's still plenty opportunity to make non-garbage version of things that already exist
This is technically true but also a bit naive. Established incumbents are very difficult to dislodge with merely a better version of their products. This becomes more true the larger the product and the average customer size. A good example is QuickBooks, which is a really janky accounting/bookkeeping software that is almost universally hated, but newer and better solutions haven't been able to capture much market share from it.
It’s hard to actually build a better QuickBooks because to build a better QuickBooks you need 1000+ integrations that each took hundreds of man hours to build.
Taxing the rich means that there are fewer people with absurd money, which means businesses won't have many customers at such high prices. It's like McDonalds charging $5 for a quarter of a potato. They're hoping that the lost sales from the poors at such a high price is made up by fewer high priced purchases by the rich.
If even the rich couldn't or didnt want to afford $5 quarter potatoes then they'd have to lower the price
age verification doesn't work in favor of a tech corp like facebook as they will see some users leave, some because they don't have the age required and some because they don't want to do the verification
We decided that getting people to pay for software was a fool's game. Open source was the bait. "Figure out a different business model"
they said. If open source as a concept had come from Wall Street and not academia, it would have been rejected. Charging people money for things has been how things worked since the concept of money was invented. The real conversation is that we, as software developers, are not good at money. The best software gets taken over by money and business folk. Oracle, VMware, Splunk, and Datadog all come to mind as companies charging huge amounts of money for software that don't sell ads (but are too expensive). But they do not make money by selling ads.
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