alt Hacker NewsA dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost, while watts are constrained by the laws of physics, photons/electrons, supply chain of electricity and all that fun stuff in the real world.
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QuarterReptile • last Friday at 7:15 PM
>dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost
If the abstraction works better for you this way, call them interchangeable units of American and Chinese insolvency. Or incremental forfeiture of domestic ownership.
ElFitz • last Friday at 8:42 AM
> A dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost
It’s still a useful proxy for resources allocation and viability.
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A dollar is still a useful unit as "the fraction of the economy that can be controlled by currency". It's true that printing a huge pile of it and throwing it at GPUs wouldn't instantly convert into more GPUs, but it would meaningfully represent that other things are being squeezed out to allocate more resources to GPU production even so. That such reallocation is inefficient, arguably immoral, and highly questionable in the long term versus other options wouldn't stop that from being ture.