> The hyperscalers have already outspent the most famous US megaprojects

[shaknais@mastodon.social]

@buermann

Government spending goes into debt, not profits. Governments usually go into deficit on purpose. The investment is not visible, in the same way, in the same timeframe.

[thias@mastodon.social]

@darkuncle @cwebber the LHC was not a US project, and cost only between 4.7 and 6.5 B. That’s a most a third of what Facebook paid for WhatsApp. Probably less than a week of Iran war.

[buermann@mastodon.social]

@shaknais

Do you think that the private sector does not finance its capital spending with debt, or doesn't do it on purpose, or something? We were at one point comparing the scale of capital flows into infrastructure projects, the structure of the financing is irrelevant.

reuters.com

(www.reuters.com)

[stompyrobot@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cwebber

The counter argument is that computational intelligence grows our ability to do things (grows the economy) to keep paying for it.

The first railroads, power lines, and cell phones seemed like excessively expensive boondoggles in the beginning.

[shaknais@mastodon.social]

@buermann

If there's no difference, why do we even use the debt-to-GDP ratio for measuring governments at all, then?

[dtabb73@mastodon.africa]

@cwebber
I found a handy website (https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.4800.2x16384) to track the price of various types of RAM. I use DDR5-4800 2x16GB in my recently-purchased used laptop. The chart suggests this pair of DIMMs increased in cost by four-fold over a period of about six months!
#bioinformatics #DenyAI

[graydon@canada.masto.host]

@aeva I have no idea if you can usefully search the term, but "capital strike".

This is the idea that holders of capital/capital as a social entity asserts power not by not spending (it's capital, it can't not be spent, that's not how it works) but by spending on harmful things.

And once you're fueling the whole thing off habitability loss/certain genocide/upping the risk of human extinction, a little social collapse hardly seems notable.

@cwebber

[dacmot@sunny.garden]

@cwebber and all we have to show for this insane waste of money is slop, lies and technical debt. Yet somehow the decision makers keep thinking the problem is that we're not spending enough money.

[buermann@mastodon.social]

@shaknais

Debt ratios indicate the sustainability of a budget under different interest rate scenarios, whether a household or a corporate conglomerate or national government, whether the denominator is income or assets or an aggregate estimate of total production. E.g. to get a read on the sustainability of the present federal budget under existing interest rate conditions you would look up net interest payments as a share of GDP:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S

[sandorspruit@mastodon.nl]

@cwebber @photovince even if you correct for inflation it still does not make any sense