I can't find anything saying that the Luddites demanded social welfare and retraining. Everything I can find on this (ironically, including asking ChatGPT) says that they merely wanted the end to the machines, and that they ultimately lost.

It allows the company to get loans at better rates. Re-financing existing loans can cause huge savings going forward, which results in higher profits (because of lower costs).

The only effective way to resist things of this nature is to upset The Powers That Be. While it's all fun and games and only the hoi polloi are being trampled they will just take the Big Tech money and parrot the prescribed happy talk.

In this case the thing to do is create fear and outrage by using "AI" to interfere with one or more sacred cows. The financial system or elections, for example. There are many others, limited only by your creativity. Recall how failing to optimally represent certain "protected" classes in generated images provoked immediate action by all involved parties, to the point were certain systems literally could not generate an image without token minorities being inserted, despite any amount of implausibility.

Of course, messing with sacred cows will get you on the establishment shit list like nothing else, so be prepared to pull a Snowden and abscond to Russia. Or something.

Perhaps the safest route is to somehow use AI to become rich very rapidly. That disturbs people a lot; they expedite the creation of whole new crimes and bureaucracies in response, greatly slowing new applications. And, at least that way you'll be able to afford the lawyers you'll need.

Just because there isn't a name or law for something doesn't mean you get to pick a favorite hang-up out of your ass and make accusations.

Maybe it could be a proven to be a conspiratorial pump and dump scheme. If so, my bet is that will happen: the Powers That Be were upset enough about it last time to sic a couple of the precious few effective feebs on it, and the group doing it doubtless includes enough crack brained chuckleheads that weren't difficult to flip, bug or otherwise compromise in the meantime.

Hell, it could be Roaring Kitty they/it/her/him/self. Who can tell?

Sadly, this is the technology many have dreamt of since childhood: an AI that listens with me and sees with me, learns what I want to know, and privately tells me things. But companies can't seem to make products without keeping a history of every possible thing they can and selling it to advertisers. And as soon as a company makes a non-free version that doesn't harvest your data, they go out of business because everybody wants the "free" version.

Guy walking down the hall: "Hey buddy, how's it going?"
My ocular or in-ear AI: "Larry. Coder on project Foo. Son Joey just joined cub scouts."
Me: "Doing okay, how is scouting working out for Joey?"

Larry: "Nuclear power is dangerous and a waste of money."
AI: "That guy has the lowest electricity costs in the state because he lives right next to Blingville Nuclear Power Station."
Me: "S.T.F.U. Larry"

Hell, these guys have hit 548 mph without any engine or motor at all, and without any military backing -- just a lot of carbon fiber and nerves of kevlar.

The problem though is not that the existing plants are not cost efficient, the problem is the scale is too big for anyone to commit to a project. Imagine Design A which cost $30 billion to make. Number of plants built = zero. Design B produces less power, and is twice the cost per kwh. But it costs only $3 billion. Number of plants built = 10. But wait... shouldn't they have built just one Design A plant? Yes! But will they -- no! Because it is easier to manage the risk of multiple $3 billion projects than a single $30 billion project. Perhaps, once we make enough of these, and the nuclear market returns and the public is no longer afraid of them - they we can go back to Design A.

But I thought the Chinese are the world bestest at green everything way ahead of the US and everything!

How dare you accuse China of not being the greenest ever!

But why? They already have a 200 MW gas cooled design in commercial operation now. What great advantage does molten salt deliver over this?

Molten salt requires a complex chemical processing system for continuous processing of high temperature, highly radioactive fluid. This HTR-PM that China has built involves handling high temperature, highly radioactive solid "pebbles." I don't know which is worse. And neither do you. So I fail to see any great advantage for either.

What scares me about all of this is that so far nobody has faced any real consequences except for the whistleblowers, and Boing doesn't seem to suffer all that much.

Building airplanes is a near-monopoly market. It's also a market where few units are sold (compared with, say, smartphones or virtually any other consumer and most industrial goods). That means you can pull stunts like low priority on quality, because you can make the probability calculations and they can end up in your favor. If cutting costs on corner X has a 1 in 10,000 chance to go wrong, in smartphones that means there will be hundreds of failures and your chance of getting away with it without headlines or class-action lawsuits is pretty slim. But if you only ever sell a few hundred or so - even the highly successful 747 has like 1500 units sold in total - then you have a very good chance that the 1:10,000 failure doesn't happen. So a business decision to just take the risk can make sense.

And if the industry and courts don't punish you, severely, the message is clear: It's ok to take these risky decisions.

If we don't want planes falling out of the sky, then the people making those decisions need to go to jail, and pay enough fines to wipe out a couple years of work, bonuses and all.

As someone who has worked with management on all levels, I'm convinced that wide-spread quality-is-a-low-priority attitudes like this don't happen without top management knowledge and at least tacit approval.

It should seem stupidly inefficient because it is. It's a boondoggle that will break down and be abandoned.

The purpose of these boondoggles is providing photo ops for politicians. When money for maintenance of the site is needed there won't be any. The money will be sunk into new boondoggles, because maintaining the existing boondoggles provides no photo op, whereas new boondoggles do.

For some reason the "generic cloud" image for AlmaLinux 9.4 is missing: the latest available is 9.3. Can't tell if it's been been obsoleted and you're supposed to use something else or if it's just not ready yet. Anyone know?

A lot, but not that much.

For example, in the european car industry, a lot of parts are still manufactured locally by relatively small specialist suppliers. Many of the precision machining tools I've seen in factories are not made in China.

Yes, most consumer electronics and stuff is. Agree on that.

The battery will never need to be replaced. Other than defective units, EV batteries will outlast the rest of the vehicle, though they might only have 75% of the original range by the time the vehicle is recycled.