The word "essential" is lifting your entire argument for you. If "essential" means whatever bdauvergne on Hacker News decides humans deserve to have in their lives, and nothing else, then sure, GPUs are non-essential. But that's not up to you. You don't get to pick and choose what other humans deserve, what they want, and what they are allowed to have. That's all "essential" has ever meant: whatever I, the author, whose Word is obviously Divine, think Other People deserve to have. Why even bother using that word when talking about the economy? It's meaningless. Get rid of it and your argument collapses. People want GPUs.
> If "essential" means whatever bdauvergne on Hacker News decides humans deserve to have in their lives, and nothing else, then sure, GPUs are non-essential.
You sure have a weird definition of it.
To make a quantitative claim, I'm not sure anyone would die immediately if Nvidia disappeared overnight, except maybe for a few traders. The potential long term casualties would likely be related to it possibly triggering a stock market crash, rather than first-order consequences of the company no longer delivering products.
Obviously, the disappearance of a company intimately related to logistics would be harder to mitigate.
> You don't get to pick and choose what other humans deserve
The crux of your confusion seems to be that you don't make a distinction between "deserve" and "need". Food and entertainment are both things everyone deserves, but only food is required for everyone to make it to the end of the month.
Or you could recognize that "essential" has a meaning in economic/financial terms, but that would entirely deflate the ad hominem attack you launched to avoid acknowledging that the answer to his question is: "Not really, with a few possible exceptions in some edge cases."
There's absolutely a reason to differentiate between essential and non-essential goods when talking about the economy. Why do you think the US runs a huge food production surplus? Why do you think publicly traded stock sectors include consumer staples (essential goods) and consumer discretionary (non-essential goods and services)?
feoren|6 months ago
pyrale|6 months ago
You sure have a weird definition of it.
To make a quantitative claim, I'm not sure anyone would die immediately if Nvidia disappeared overnight, except maybe for a few traders. The potential long term casualties would likely be related to it possibly triggering a stock market crash, rather than first-order consequences of the company no longer delivering products.
Obviously, the disappearance of a company intimately related to logistics would be harder to mitigate.
> You don't get to pick and choose what other humans deserve
The crux of your confusion seems to be that you don't make a distinction between "deserve" and "need". Food and entertainment are both things everyone deserves, but only food is required for everyone to make it to the end of the month.
bpt3|6 months ago
There's absolutely a reason to differentiate between essential and non-essential goods when talking about the economy. Why do you think the US runs a huge food production surplus? Why do you think publicly traded stock sectors include consumer staples (essential goods) and consumer discretionary (non-essential goods and services)?
AuryGlenz|6 months ago
All we “need” is food + water, shelter, and medicine (kind of). I’d guess people’s economic output doesn’t directly contribute to those.
pletnes|6 months ago