7: GenZ: The Fiscally Aware Generation
6375
I am sitting at Paul's cafe at the airport en route to Nairobi via Cairo for Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) Africa (a wonderful conference, more on that later). **In front of me 4 young males, early 20s, they speak loudly in french as they eat the burgers and fries they bought at another restaurant.**
They talk about money.
"You have no idea how much money I lose to taxes", says one of them. "40 to 50%! It's a lot of money, I would make so much more without it". He sees taxes not as a net necessary good, as most have been trained to see it, but as any other cost.
Interesting, that's not the type of conversations you would expect from someone that young. It's not the first time I hear this type of conversation from GenZs. Why are GenZs becoming more fiscally aware than previous generations? I think it comes down to two factors:
- Inflation
- The entrepreneurial culture
Inflation has hit everybody, for obvious reasons. However one constant with inflation is that it hits the poorest hardest. Young people tend to have less money. But that's not enough to raise awareness about a subject that most consider beyond boring. This brings us to the next point: *The entrepreneurial culture*.
As a millennial I witnessed it's burgeoning and blossoming. It started timidly with a few books and blogs, then massive blogs, then best sellers, then YouTube videos and finally podcasts. Not so long ago being an entrepreneur was considered an unwise life choice. Successful people go to work for established companies. Such was common wisdom. However, as the 2008 recession hit and people started to look for more revenue streams, they also discovered the concept that having one's business can also mean more freedom and better financial security.
There is however a big difference between the Millennial Entrepreneur and the GenZ Entrepreneur. The Millennial was still uneasy with the idea of making money and as such would speak about *"making a positive impact in the world"*, the GenZ is not burden in this way. You can see the shift in YouTube ads, today it's all bout how much you will make if you buy this or that business course.
So whatever online business they start, being it drop shipping or whatever, they tend do it in a money aware way. Starting an online business is a hard, the competition is fierce. Naturally, they try to invest their hard earned money wisely. When the tax bill comes, they see it as it is: an unexpected cost that does not necessarily translate to a better life quality. Nothing is free in this incarnation. Some are not even shy about relocating to fiscally advantageous locations like Dubai and making videos about it.
This could be the end of the blissful fiscally unaware generations.
Share:
GenZ: The Fiscally Aware Generation
copy:
https://bluwr.com/p/8912938
8: The near future of AI Economics
8557
The near absolute domination of Nvidia in AI hardware is not going away anytime soon. Despite efforts by major hardware companies and startups alike, supplanting Nvidia is just too costly. Even if a company is able to create better hardware and supply chains, it would still need to tackle the software compatibility challenge. Major AI frameworks like pyTorch and Tensorflow are all compatible with Nvidia, and little else. These are all open source, and although supported by major companies, like all open-source software their foundation is their communities. And communities can be notoriously hard shake. All this suggest that the price of Nvidia GPUs will keep increasing, fuelled by the rise of ever bigger LLMs.
So where does that leave us for the future of AI economics. Like anything valuable, if the current trend continues, GPU computation time will see the apparition of derivatives. More specifically, *futures* and *options* on GPU computing hours could be bought and sold.
The other coming trends are in energy trading, modern AI is extremely hungry for electricity, to the point of needing dedicated power-plants. If the current trends continue in AI, with major companies and countries building and investing into bigger and more power hungry datacenters, this could lead to a trend of significant disruptions in some parts of the energy sector. Again the markets for energy derivatives (*futures* and *options*) could be significantly affected. Finally, *bounds* markets and inflation are also poised for some disruption, as the building of the extremely expensive facilities necessary for AI is likely to result in more borrowing.
When it comes to AI: Nvidia GPUs and Electricity are king.
Link Below: google is buying nuclear power.
Share:
The near future of AI Economics
copy:
https://bluwr.com/p/58698557
9: El Salvador: The most important country you barely hear about
5739
El Salvador has a significant diaspora, so much that money coming from the US is a major source of income. **Not so long ago you would have been pressed to find a Salvadorian who wanted to go back to El Salvador. Now things seems to be changing.**
El Salavador, used to have one of the highest homicide rates in the Americas, now it looks relatively safe. El Salvador showed an interesting strategy. First boost the economy before handling the crime situation. Crime is indeed a part of GDP, albeit a hard one to quantify. Since it is an economic activity, it participates in exchanges and provides people with activities that supports them and their families. Drastically reducing crime has the effect of creating *'unemployed criminals'* people with a skillset that's hard to sell in a traditional economy.
El Salvador probably did take a hit to its GDP, but that was compensated by the increase in economic activity and investments.
Bitcoin was a big part of that.
Bitcoin got a lot of bad press as a technology only used by criminals, or a crazy investment for crazy speculators. These takes failed to understand the technology and it's potential. What Bitcoin offers is a decentralized, fast and secure payment system for free. El Salvador doesn't have to maintain it, regulate it, or even monitor it. All very costly activities that a small country can do without. Bitcoin is a mathematically secure way of payment.
In a country where road infrastructures are challenging, Bitcoin offers people in remote areas the possibility to pay their bills without travelling for hours. In a country that was unsafe, Bitcoin offered people the possibility to go out without the fear of being robbed.
It also attracted a kind of investors that would go nowhere else. And even if these investment can appear small, for a country like El Salvador it's a big change.
The Salvadorian experiment in a freer economy, crypto-friendly and smaller government, in a time of increasing inflation, has a lot of people watching. In a continent that leaned left for so long, this is a big change.
My opinion is that there would be no Javier Millier hadn't there been a Nayib Bukele before. Argentina has been a bastion of the left for decades. If the libertarian policies of Millier succeed in bettering the lives of Argentinians, we might be on the brink of a major cultural shift in the Americas and then the world.
Argentina is a far bigger country than El Salvador, with far more people watching.
Share:
El Salvador: The most important country you barely hear about
copy:
https://bluwr.com/p/9336980
10: A formal Definition of Stealing
5160
One of the basic rules of economy is that value is created by exchanging (not by printing money).
----
==Lets imagine a simple example:==
Person A has lots of pens. For them a pen is only worth 1$, a sheet of paper, however is worth 4$. Person B has a lot of paper for them a sheet is only worth 1$, but a pen is a valuable item worth 4$.
Person A wants a sheet and Person B wants a pen. They decide to exchange A gives a pen to B and, B gives a sheet of paper to A.
At the end of the exchange, both have lost 1$ of value, but got 4$ in return, meaning that they have made 3$ of value each.
A total of 6$ of value has been created by the exchange.
----
Now lets look at what happen during theft. When something is stolen, no exchange happenes between the parties, therefor no value has been created. In fact for society as a whole the yield is negative, as the thief had to spend energy (value) to get what he wanted. So although he enriched himself, he also made everybody poorer.
We can consider this a definition of stealing: A transfer of goods that results in a negative creation of value.
The same is true, to a lesser degree, when one of the parties cheats the other by providing an item that is less valuable than previously thought. Like a pen that does not write.
Share:
A formal Definition of Stealing
copy:
https://bluwr.com/p/22023977
