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Samuel Hammond Newsletter
The the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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20 September
17 September
13 September
12 September
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korrents.com
Labor market segments that compete purely on price are the most vulnerable to technological disruption.Their words
One way to look at this is that there's a part of the labor market that competes purely on price-in this case, basically by being the poorest place rich enough to afford fast Internet-and this category is the most vulnerable to technological disruption.
11 September
10 September
9 September
7 September
5 September
3 September
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Their words
The people being worried is in and of itself a problem for jobs.
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korrents.com
National congressional polling tends to stay stable between Labor Day and Election Day in midterm election years.Their words
midterm races in the modern era tend not to change all that much between Labor Day and Election Day.
2 September
1 September
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korrents.com
Writing is itself an act of thinking, so automating the writing removes the thinking, not just the labor.Their words
The act of writing is an act of thinking, and to automate our paragraphs is to populate our screens with words without filling our minds with the ideas necessary to conceive of them.
We Can't Let AI Writing Take Over the Internetderekthompson.org
29 August
28 August
19 August
14 August
12 August
11 August
From one piece Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think that if you imagine this spectrum, it seems in some ways pretty scary to get to a point where like all of the labor is on the like fiduciary side of the spectrum where like it doesn't whistleblow, it does exactly what you say and whatever like our society is maybe just not robust to that
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Their words
the reason why RL environments today are much better than they were in like you know 2024 is not that much because um we have hired way more human experts to make RL environments and is instead much more because we better know what how RL like what RL environments we even want to make and and like how we should structure them and also we're using huge amounts of AI labor to build RL environments.
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korrents.com
Working relationships need to be intentionally redesigned on an ongoing basis, not defined once and left fixed.Their words
This design work is never done, and one of the goals of this intentional conversation is to open the door to revisiting this conversation as our individual needs and the needs of the relationship change.
9 August
29 July
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Their words
So if you experience stress or fear, your contractions will often grow weaker and less coordinated, slowing the labor, sometimes stalling it.
23 July
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korrents.com
Higher-priced AI subscription tiers mainly buy more hours of agent usage rather than a smarter underlying modelTheir words
The more expensive plans are mostly buying you more hours of AI labor, not smarter AI.
15 July
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korrents.com
Now is the best time ever to start a small business, thanks to AI making labor essentially free.Their words
There has never been a better time to start a small business.
28 June
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korrents.com
American overregulation and labor-market rigidity make elevators far more common in Europe than in the US.Their words
elevators are the rare part of the economy where Europeans have embraced market dynamism while Americans choose overregulation and labor market rigidity.
17 June
14 June
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korrents.com
Schools are still preparing children to become knowledge workers, and that game is over.Their words
my kids are in this educational system that is trying to prep them to get into a good college and to be a knowledge worker and I know that game is over
4 June
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Their words
The governed have something the governors need: labor, tax revenue, military service, consumer spending. This dependency is the source of democratic leverage.
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Their words
there's a sense in which nothing's yet been completely automated. If you look at the network-adjusted factor shares of a good, which is to say you look down the supply chain and say not just like the final step, but how much of that is done by capital and labor, but what went into the machines that can automate that final step. You'll find that labor's adding a lot of value down the supply chain.
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Their words
Like right now we're endowed with labor that can turn into uh that can turn into income. When that is no longer the case and we are now at the mercy of the of the elected official for like basic needs, right? So that to me feels like a power sharing arrangement that's really dangerous.
2 June
1 June
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Their words
If AI-driven labor displacement ends up being large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor, it will likely be necessary to go beyond mere incentive programs to long-term income support for a significant fraction of the labor force.
13 May
24 April
23 April
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Their words
the economy now asks every creative person to essentially become a small media company, which is a very specific skill set that has nothing to do with why most of us started making things in the first place
1 April
29 March
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Their words
And I feel like it's a very human way of doing web search, right? Because we enter things in the Google and we see all the like citations, the quotations part. But like why would we limit AI to that? If AI already visit a page, why don't just pull the entire page out?
17 March
16 March
13 February
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korrents.com
Not every token is worth the same amount, so AI will be sold by results and by the hour as well as by the token.Their words
so so I think we're definitely going to see business models that that recognize that, you know, at some point we're going to see, you know, pay for results or you you know, in some in some form or we may see forms of compensation that are like labor. Um, uh you know, that that kind of work by the hour.
12 February
From one piece Speed Can Reindustrialize America 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The robot arm base case saves some hourly labor at the expense of adding more skilled labor, and can easily be negative if it needs reprogramming more than a few times per year.
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Their words
It has a surplus of STEM graduates that are often underemployed, while "Hukou" residency restrictions complicate hiring hourly labor in coastal factories.
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korrents.com
For small strategic materials markets like rare earths the right policy is a stockpile, not domestic production.Their words
Stockpiles provide insurance while conserving our valuable labor.
+ 2 more
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Their words
Industrial policy almost inevitably consumes more skilled labor and reduces what we can produce.
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korrents.com
An industrial robot does not replace labour, it shifts labour from hourly workers to scarce skilled ones.Their words
The key is that robot arms are not labor-replacing, but labor-shifting.
27 January
1 January
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Their words
To be clear, speed in itself does not mean labor markets and employment won’t eventually recover, it just implies the short-term transition will be unusually painful compared to past technologies, since humans and labor markets are slow to react and to equilibrate.
25 December 2025
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Their words
Yes, the labor is cheaper, but that’s not really why.
22 December 2025
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Their words
A good overview of his work in labor economics.
16 December 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
I Deliver Parcels in BeijingTheir words
Perhaps the best of the various gig-worker memoirs published in recent years.
11 December 2025
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Their words
Sweden, for instance, is often praised for its high adoption of prefabricated construction, but since the 1990s Sweden has had roughly flat construction labor productivity, even as it has made more extensive use of prefabrication.
22 November 2025
15 August 2025
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Their words
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
24 May 2025
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Their words
Whereas, there’s also another point, which is having large armies is actually inherently impractical and inefficient, because the larger the army, the more people you’ve got to feed, the more barracks you’ve got to have, the more space you’ve got to have for training, the more people you’re taking out of your workforce to produce tanks and shells, and all the rest of it, because they’re tramping around with rifles.
21 May 2025
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Their words
The Chief Executive — who makes over 300 times more than their average worker — is no longer a leadership position, but a kind of figurehead measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization of their company.
From one piece 3 Years of Extremely Remote Work 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Giving local staff authority over more-qualified remote workers reduces a company's competitivenessTheir words
there's a power imbalance: the local worker is in charge and doesn't have to listen. This reduces company competitiveness.
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korrents.com
Remote workers are often passed over for opportunities in favor of less-qualified local colleaguesTheir words
Opportunities can be given to local workers despite the remote worker being more qualified, or even number one in the world in that area.
15 May 2025
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korrents.com
Forced labour in Chinese clean-energy supply chains is real, and it is not why the goods are cheap.Their words
But my point is that this is still not the reason (or is only a very small reason) why these goods from China are cheaper than elsewhere. The main driver of lower labour costs has been automation; not having a human worker at all.
29 April 2025
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korrents.com
Payroll taxes fall mostly on workers rather than employers because labor supply is inelastic.Their words
Employer-side payroll taxes superficially raise hiring costs, yet the low elasticity of labor means most of the burden really falls on workers.
6 April 2025
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Their words
Grant manufacturing visas, not for labor, but for knowhow.
1 November 2024
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Their words
For rich countries to maintain their working-age population ratios in 2050 through permanent migration (where each worker brings one dependent), Lant Pritchett estimates they would need to become 40-50% foreign-born.
1 October 2024
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korrents.com
Meaning in human life comes mostly from relationships and connection rather than from economic labour.Their words
In any case I think meaning comes mostly from human relationships and connection, not from economic labor.
5 September 2024
From one piece Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
What has kept American shipbuilding uncompetitive is the high cost of its inputs, above all labour and steel.Their words
The first is the high cost of inputs, particularly labor and steel.
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Their words
Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China.
22 August 2024
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Their words
With the declining appeal of communism and then its eventual fall, there was much less need to acquiesce to labor’s demands.
The end of the great order under the Heavenbranko2f7.substack.com
21 July 2024
22 June 2024
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korrents.com
New York's subway cost premium is overstaffing, oversized stations and procurement, not high wages.Their words
Well, we’ve divided the New York cost premium into three tranches: labor (mostly overstaffing, not high wages), station and system design, and procurement and soft costs.
3 April 2024
26 March 2024
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Their words
It means that you have to extend yourself with empathy to the person you're seeking to serve, to the person who the work is for. And you have to extend yourself not just through space, but through time into the future, announcing something that might or might not work. You don't know yet. That's what makes it creative. If you exert the emotional labor to do those two things, sometimes you will have a successful creative outcome. That's a choice.
22 March 2024
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Their words
In short summary, the licenses limit the freedoms of what one can do with the software in order for Redis Labs to be solely enriched, while asking for volunteer labor, and having already
29 November 2023
From one piece Lant Pritchett, economist: ‘Negativity around migration is the last breath of a moribund system’ 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But once the demographics reverse, the challenge will be to find a person for every job. In the coming years, the impact of demographic changes is going to lead to chronic labor shortages.
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Their words
According to my numbers, in the United States there will be a net of 3.24 million new low-skill jobs, but there will also be 4.7 million fewer people in the labor force.
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korrents.com
Without immigrants Spain’s labour force falls from 22.6 to 15.7 million by 2050, far too few to run its economy.Their words
In the absence of immigrants, between 2020 and 2050 Spain’s labor force (its active population) will drop from 22.6 to 15.7 million people. You’re not going to fill all the jobs needed in a modern and sophisticated economy like that of Spain’s with 15.7 million people.
12 May 2023
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korrents.com
Saving time and labour has become an unexamined imperative rather than a judgement made case by case.Their words
The problem is that “saving” time and labor have become default settings and social imperatives.
Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On Ittheconvivialsociety.substack.com
2 March 2023
From one piece Choose People 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
If we collectively devoted the same levels of investment and inventive power and entrepreneurship to developing more and better legal pathways for people to move across borders to needed jobs, including a variety of modalities for labor mobility, we could solve the growing challenge of labor scarcity.
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korrents.com
The world economy is flat for capital, goods and ideas, and has a legal cliff at the border for people.Their words
This is not because there are not people who would drive trucks for Amazon in the world, and not because “natural” scientific progress has made machines that drive trucks easy and cheap, but because in a global economy which is “flat” for capital, information, and goods, there is a legal “cliff at the border” for labor, as prices don’t reflect scarcity.
17 November 2022
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
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