Samsung strikes trouble as unions threaten walkouts, regulator swoops
Oh great – another potential kink in the silicon supply chain
On-Prem
11 Apr 2024 | 3
Hong postures that the Korean PC video game industry pulled Korea out of a serious unemployment crisis, but at what personal cost to its citizens?
Woah there!
1) There are personal costs to any economic activity. In particular, getting older, losing limbs, generating lots of entropy that one is unable to deal with, getting the idea of having something called "government" etc.
2) The PC video game industry cannot do anything about an "unemployment crisis". Indeed, that industry is all about generating consumer goods. In this case, said consumer goods also demand that the consumer burn further time and money on using the good.
2.1) Resources thus used up and locked away won't go into building and accumulating capital goods of any sort.
2.2) Yes, one can argue to having a large repository of gaming software in companys' vaults is a "capital good" (doubtful) or that there is cross-subsidy of hardware development and graphics algorithms (that would fall under "industrial policy" then), but let's keep things simple.
2.3) So, the lack of capital goods (obsolete power plants, lack of advancement in medical science, clogged sewers, lack of skills in correctly designing plastic injection molding forms, abandoned rice paddies) will then turn out to be a serious problem in the immediate future. In particular, desired goods won't be produced and standards will go down.
2.4) Now, if the interpretation of the gaming industry "being a factor in the unemployment crisis" is correct, then its parallels to a government scheme that performs hidden taxation, the money of which is then spent on make-work schemes of dubious utility (including low-intensity wars), is readily apparent.
2.5) One could segue now into the moral corruption of monetary pumping/Keynesianism and how it would be to get rid of government economists with extreme prejudice, but I digress.
Also, I'm old enough to remember William Gibson writing about Japan being cool in er... Wired, September 2001. Just before the amazingly convenient high-rise airplane prang. NURSE!!!
But I will read the Murakami for sure.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
