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  • shellsortshellsort@mastodon.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 2:39 AM

    @glyph Eh, the exec wages are tiny compared to what shareholders get. Thats the real problem: Institutional money at the stock market. But I wouldnt know where they should put it either. Whole systems fucked man

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 2:46 AM

    @shellsort disproportionate return to capital is indeed a big problem that needs addressing throughout the market. this is mostly in the context of saying that AI is an unjustified externality and e.g. "clothes" and "phones" aren't; there is actually a huge moral difference between these markets, since it's _possible_ to have a viable non-murder-based mineral supply chain and clothes can be made by workers who are not slaves, but you can't really fix AI's inherent structure, for example.

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  • Bubu :progress_pride:Bubu@chaos.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 8:28 PM

    @glyph Why do you say that you can't really fix AI's inherent structure?

    (Which is different from saying that there's not really a chance it will be fixed in this economic system, etc.)

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 8:36 PM

    @Bubu Doom loops. The inherent untraceability of the provenance of input data and its connection to the output.

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  • Bubu :progress_pride:Bubu@chaos.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 11:35 PM

    @glyph Do you have an entry point to the doom loop topic? This is the first time I've heard about this, I think, at least under this name and searching for "AI doom loops" just returns articles talking about (from what I can quickly see) wildly differering things?

    About the provenance: I am not actually sure I care about that? Should I?

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  • e. hashman :kittyfied:ehashman@toot.cat
    Nov 9, 2026, 3:07 AM

    @glyph I mean, this isn't untrue unless you are willing to take advantage of outsourcing and cost of labour differences. There is simply no way you can ethically produce a $10 t-shirt at US labour cost, even if you do it at federal minimum wage. The cost of clothing, until the last ~50 years, used to constitute a substantial part of people's costs for basically the history of humanity. Automated fabric production and synthetics helped bring costs down, but outsourcing labour has also played a huge role.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 3:30 AM

    @ehashman I guess FSVO "cheap" and "ethical". You could be doing wage & currency arbitrage and making $20 t-shirts (nobody's selling a $10 tshirt in 2026, are they?!) without keeping people in grinding poverty by a local standard. But rising standards of living would eventually lead to rising prices as those economies developed. You can make a $35 T-shirt at US labor rates, but even that depends on regional wage arbitrage.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 3:31 AM

    @ehashman this is mostly looking at cut & sew labor rates, maybe the picture gets way worse with raw cotton production (but there's no way that _cotton_ production is problematic, is there? 🙃)

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  • e. hashman :kittyfied:ehashman@toot.cat
    Nov 9, 2026, 6:15 AM

    @glyph > nobody's selling a $10 tshirt in 2026, are they?!

    alas, you haven't looked at Temu

    (There is a huge amount of fast fashion targeting these impossibly low price points rn)

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Nov 9, 2026, 6:46 AM

    @ehashman okay I was vaguely aware of this website but I was not aware that they were undercutting amazon by like 85%. this is wild.

    I think my point still stands; A) nobody needs a $3.50 T-shirt, B) anybody who buys one will clearly need to replace it within 3 months; this perverse system cannot possibly required to clothe the world

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