Lower classes live the best life they have ever lived in history of humanity. Not only are they not living the normal state of lower class which is starving, in constant pain, infested by large amount of parasites, quite ill, and extremely overworked.

They're living the opposite life: abundance is insane, to the point where poor are fat, parasite infestations are exceedingly rare, they have a wide array of pain mitigation for when they do experience it, and they have actual legal rights in terms of work, rather than normative "work harder slave or the whipping will commence".

The sole reason for this is is technological progress and automation. It has elevated value produced by work of even lower class workers to the point where just short amount of time worked can afford them the kind of food selection kings didn't have half a century ago. The kind of health care kings didn't have twenty years ago. Etc.

This utterly insane myopia of modern Western far left when it comes to grasping that it's in fact those worst off that had the most benefit from modern economic system and its technological progress is probably one of the greatest feats of stupidity humanity has ever managed to create.

Honestly, it never ceases to surprise me how many people never had to manage other people. Because the moment you have to do that, you find out just how incredibly unreliable people are.

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

>However, it isn't perfect.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Notably, this is also the difference between engineers and scientists. Latter live in the world of perfect abstraction. Former live in real world, where perfect abstraction is exceedingly counter-productive, and good enough is the gold standard.

"a do no harm oath, just like most other industries"

Like which other industries?

First, an MBA is not an industry. Most likely they are not even industrialists. They are cogs in the machinery,

Second, again, what other industries have a 'do no harm oath'? Doctors claim to subscribe to this, Realtors purport to adhere to an ethical standard that could be confused with the do no harm mantra, Professional engineers have professional responsibilities to do work 'correctly', for lack of a better single word.

Do you think pharmaceutical researchers even bother with pretending to adhere to such an oath? recent experience would seem to deny this. Same for much of the food industry, certainly the financial industry (such so that we need copious law to restrict their behavior), and there are other examples. Even if you exclude sales, which if they followed such oaths would be in a position of serving two masters...

The premise is flawed, and demonstrably false. We wish everyone else treated us so, but in reality we often do not ourselves, out of self-interest. Which is sometimes understandable, and sometimes excusable. But not always.

While the whole "GRU/KGB dealt with it" aspect is real, it's so rare that it makes headlines every time. It's also worth noting that this is rarely if ever for "speech" reasons. Most of it is standard Russian Mafia style "you got our money/you betrayed loyalty" internal fighting. It doesn't really concern general public. They just don't rank high enough to warrant that level of attention.

It's the same thing how Chinese billionaires occasionally vanish for "re-education". Not really relevant for general public.

This is why everyone and their grandmother is all in on AI. It's adoption lags for the sole reason of "people haven't caught up with what it can do, and learned how to let it do it".

Whatever investment is currently in AI is dwarfed by what value it can already technically do, as long as people actually integrate it. It's the "get people to integrate it" part that is the choke point.

Meanwhile AI and robotics advancing rapidly is constantly increasing the amount of work it can perform adequately (about as well or better than typical human worker in that job).

As has been said before, primary problem with AI is no longer model quality, or robotics quality. It's human adaptation to "these tasks can be done by AI as well or better than a human, so we should develop workflow where these tasks are handed off to AI so humans can focus on other things that AI can't do".

Meanwhile models and robotics continue to rapidly advance, so this remains a moving target, making it even harder to hit at any given point in time.

Notably, by far the biggest all in on AI right now is in PRC, where entire factories are going to AI, most of research work is already AI assisted (hence the demand for 4090s and 5090s that have enough VRAM for narrow models commonly used in research), and things like robotics are among top if not the top of the world. Everyone else is behind.

Just so we're clear, they have more arrests for speech, expressed opinions and unexpressed opinions (failure to visibly express a correct opinion in certain settings, i.e. people getting arrested for silently standing alone next to abortion clinics doing absolutely nothing but) than Russia and China for these kinds of offenses COMBINED.

Oh wait, that was previous decade. 2023 numbers suggests it was over five times combined China and Russia, and UK trend is upwards.

Most recent reporting suggests that UK may have climbed to having over 100 times arrests than China for free speech related offenses alone.

Not per capita. Arrests in total. Those two have a combined population that's over twenty times that of UK.

UK is self evidently not a liberal democracy (which I assume is what you refer to when you call it "Western Democracy").

But not the same way luminous matter (the "standard" stuff) clumps up. The mass distribution needed to explain spiral galaxies assumes that this "dark matter" remains at the periphery of the galaxy, keeping the rotational velocities constant as one moves away from the galactic center. So now, dark matter has to be something that doesn't interact with gravity (or curved space-time) the same way normal matter does. It curves space-time like normal matter does. But it isn't pulled into the gravity well (space time curve) toward the center of a galaxy the way other matter is.

Or, our model of gravity/space-time isn't quite right.

Every computer made in last ten years or so has full inference capability. The "AI support" on the sticker is just marketing.

Bad news. Basically every x64 computer sold in last decade or so is fully capable of doing inference. The main problem is going to be speed, which in turn is mainly about "can model doing inference be fit into RAM?"

> It used to be my go-to site for all things computer related.

Me too.

They were slightly cheaper than Amazon for the same product, then I did a big project which got slightly downsized and I wound up with $400 in "restocking fees" for a couple of pieces of factory-hologram-tape sealed network gear, after I paid $100 in return shipping.

Learned my lesson real fast.

A lot of people seem to not realize that windows 11 does in fact officially support all that older hardware. Fully.

The gating isn't hardware support. It's the license. To get officially supported version (that contains all the same driver packages, APIs, and layers), you need to get win11 IOT.

Good luck getting an official license for that instead of going the genocide burial route.

To be fair, they then gave everyone an easy way to continue having access to free updates to 10.

And current price hikes on RAM aren't helping the "hardware sales" part.

27% of the cosmos is not insignificant. Unless it is distributed very unevenly. So now your theory has to explain that.