Rather, you pay taxes on the income you use to repay the loan. Plus you pay the interest on the loan.

This basically defers the taxes to a later date and charges you interest for 'em. Which might be worthwhile, depending on how quickly and reliably your capital is growing.

> Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by ...

- And: lobbying their congressmen for tax cuts

A back-of-the-napkin estimate of software developer salaries:

There are some ~1.5 million software developers in the US per BLS data, or ~4 million if using a broader definition Median salary is $120-140k. Let's say $120k to be conservative.

This puts total software developer salaries at $180 billion.

So, that puts $1 billion in Claude revenue in perspective; only about 0.5% of software developer salaries. Even if it only improved productivity 5%, it'd be paying for itself handily - which means we can't take the $1 billion in revenues to indicate that it's providing a big boost in productivity.

If it makes a 5% improvement, that would make it a $9 billion dollar per year industry. What’s our projected capex for AI projects next five years again?

You are ignoring costs

The AI companies are currently lighting dollars on fire if you pay them a few pennies to do so.

The AI models are actually accomplishing something, but the unit economics aren't there to support it being profitable

I strongly bet that this is it.

Which is probably why no one's going to recommend it these days

...but hey, things are different during a bubble.

/imagining using an internal combustion engine here

"Rejecting this pull request because the patch you submitted does not provide enough torque."

And even "predicted" isn't right, as amphetamines were already in decently-wide use by the 1950s.

> I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop.

I don't see any signs that the US is going to give up on AI and data centers, either. (The coming AI winter notwithstanding)

For what it's worth, I've cut back quite a bit on my beef and pork consumption, and now mostly eat chicken. The environmental and ethical arguments finally got to me.

> It's an externality like you discuss.

It's not even an externality? They just pay market price for water. You can argue the market price is priced badly (e.g., maybe prices are set by the state), but that doesn't make it an externality. The benefits/costs are still accrued by (and internal to) buyer and seller.

If datacenters are getting electricity and water at a rate lower than retail (costs passed on to residents or tax payers), and factors like noise and water pollution aren't factored in, then yes there are unpriced externalities.

Still, regardless of the eye-watering amount of money, there's still a maximum amount of useful work you can get out of someone. Demand too much, and you actually lower their total productivity.

(For me, I found the limit was somewhere around 70 hrs/week - beyond that, the mistakes I made negated any progress I made. This also left me pretty burnt out after about a year, so the sustainable long-term hourly work rate is lower)