By your definition stocks are also a pyramid scheme and everyone knows it. The more people that buy it, the price goes up! Sell? The price crashes! What a revelation!
What matters more than the genitals in your pants is the amount of money you have. If you have money you can buy politicians, judges, housing, food, weapons, armies, and the list goes on. If you have a dick and no money, you're nothing but a homeless person with no power at all.
If costs go up because people need more money to earn a living wage, then we should 100% do it. Everyone deserves a living wage.
America is the richest country in the world. We can afford to pay everyone a livable wage. The problem is that there are some extremely greedy oligarchs that have an addiction to greed, which in turn makes the lives of everyone else more difficult.
If everyone stopped tipping servers would realize it's their boss who is not paying them a livable wage in the first place. Stop subsidizing employers.
The only thing the Luddites want is an echo-chamber to feed their confirmations bias'. They'll downvote you or completely ignore you if you bring up any positives regarding machine learning.
LLMs and machine learning are still in their infancy, yet they're doing amazing things. It's a tool in its early stages, not a boogeyman. Look to the billionaires if you want someone to blame. This tool set is advancing so fast that people in this thread are relying on goal posts that were moved long ago. Look at the guy claiming AI can't generate images of proper fingers yet this is no longer true and Midjourney continues to make an insane amount of progress in such a short amount of time.
If you're complaining about climate impact, looking at the big picture isn't whataboutism. It's the biggest part of the dataset which is important for anyone who actually cares about the issue.
You're complaining about a single cow fart, then when someone points out there are thousands of cars with greater emissions - you cry whataboutism. It's clear you just want to have a knee-jerk reaction without rationally looking at the problem.
This is a strawman argument. AI is a tool. Like any tool, it's used for negative things and positive things. Focusing on just the negative is disingenuous at best. And focusing on AI's climate impact while completely ignoring the big picture is asinine (the oil industry knew they were the primary cause of climate change more than 60 years ago).
AI has many positive use-cases yet they are completely ignored by people who lack logic and rationality.
During the course of the entire war, the US has spent $175 billion helping Ukraine. This might sound like a lot until you realize that in just a single year, the US' federal budget is $6.5 trillion. So even if we paid for everything all at once, there's still $6.32 trillion left this year.
Not to mention most of the money goes back into the American economy. We are spending money on weapons that are largely sitting in warehouses that we would otherwise need to be replaced. Weapons don't last forever. So for pennies on the dollar we are saving Ukrainian cities from being "liberated" by our cold war enemy that never stopped being our cold war enemy. Sounds like a great investment to me.
You know very little about the stock market. You should read up on the OTC markets.