Be interested to see the perception in other countries with different payment systems. If the cost was 1/3 the current rate all else equal does this polling move? I imagine it does.

It's much like healthcare in that despite all the evidence out in the world Americans treat these systems as intractable laws of nature, the costs are sky high because that's how they are and always have to be. Meanwhile it's just basic economics that tells you why the costs keep going up and yet we take the route of "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".

There are ways to fix these systems and they are obvious once you get over the scary "socialism" talking points and our own hangups that somewhere, someone might get something you personally feel like they "don't deserve"

it has detailed arguments in between making fun of idiots who think hyperloop is real.

If you can't be arsed to learn things though I can't help you. Maybe reddit's "conservative" forum is more your speed then. They'll do a good job of protecting you from knowledge.

Did you know they had a week long gap in new posts when the voting on the Epstein files was going on?

That's part of it but you need to remember that every single one of those Rich fuckers is a crook.

This means they fully expect their kids to be the target of a wide range of scams and ripoffs and they want their kids to be able to think critically so that they don't fall for that shit.

Some of them are so dumb they still do like Trump. But if that happens the elites have solidarity and they take care of each other.

Occasionally you will get somebody like Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes that manages to get through that system but when it happens and they get caught they go to jail for decades.

You know there are people who do this thing called being born and then they grow up and then they have to buy things because you're not born with a 32 GB memory kit. At least I wasn't maybe that's a birth defect...

Away from the build-out being finished. The bubble isn't a bubble it's not going to pop. The infrastructure isn't going to get shut down and sold off it's going to get used.

Like I mentioned on another thread the problem AI solves is wages. Paying wages.

This means that AI isn't going anywhere. Now a whole bunch of companies will collapse and the banks will be in trouble because they would have loaned those companies hundreds of billions of dollars. But you're just going to have to bail those Banks out or they will take the entire economy down with them and you will lose your retirement and your job.

There are solutions to all of these problems but none of them are acceptable to the average voter.

Even in the current environment they are objectively wrong. All the study proves is that propaganda works.

The ruling elite has decided they do not want you to be educated. They have spent a lot of money to convince you that you do not need to be educated.

You can tell they're lying because they don't tell their kids to go become plumbers. They send them to very expensive schools with a lot of humanities courses so that they can be taught critical thinking

I know tech nerds don't like the humanities but when you are dealing with someone who does not automatically think critically about information that is how you teach them to do it. This is why you will always find lots of humanities classes at expensive schools.

Good lord, we agree on something.

Anyway I think the issue is that there are idiots everywhere, and a lot of people who jump on bandwagons and are too proud to jump off once the evidence comes out it's a scam. And while I hate the idea personally, it sounds worse than flying, I would assume a lot of people look at the transportation speeds involved, and just assume it would be successful for that reason, especially in an era where a significant number of people believe America's railroads collapsed due to "flying", when the story is way, way, more complicated (essentially a systemic shock from all sides, over regulation, poorly thought out taxes that weren't applied to rival transportation systems, poor management, and out of control dumbass unions. A perfect storm of crappiness.)

The bubble will need to last 5 years before there's any chance of new players.

40 years ago, sure, you might have been right: silicon fabrication was still a relatively cheap industry to get into. Leaving aside environmental concerns (our old friend MOS Technology of the 6502 managed to end up as a superfund site...) it was quite simply a lot easier to make foundaries that worked on a micrometer scale than on today's nanometers. Gordon Moore said that while his eponymous law predicted a doubling of transistors per IC each year, he also saw a doubling of how much it cost to build a new foundary.

If it were cheap, even in countries that already have fewer regulatory hurdles, someone would have build new factories anyway. It's not like there wasn't any profit in memory production until a month ago. They're not commodity devices.

It's not about cost it's about dependency. As it stands if you're a billionaire you are completely dependent on employees and consumers for your wealth and prestige and power

They don't like that. They don't like that at all.

So they are more than happy to spend more resources especially since they have unlimited resources because we let them have unlimited resources.

When I say that they are dismantling capitalism this is what I mean. It means that profit and loss are no longer the driving motivators in human economic interaction.

To make it happen. You need to come up with a better answer than "that won't work".

Explain to yourself why it won't work. If you can't do that then you are just coping with the coming crisis.

Has several detailed videos that are highly amusing explaining why this is a scam. I am a little surprised to see Europe getting in on the scam though.

I wonder if this is just one of the mill corruption with money being handed out to people or if this is like how in America hyperloop bullshit with used to shut down high speed rail in California.

Whatever the case it's frustrating to see this scam still continuing on

The article talks about a rise in temperature of half a degree causing a societal collapse over multiple centuries.

By comparison the Earth has heated by 1.1-1.2C in the last 150 years and is still rising, currently at a rate of about 0.2C per decade.

So, meteoric rise vs slight rise within the Earth's usual temperature fluctuations. This should tell you two things:

1. The current rise is, indeed, unnatural, and not due to the Earth's usual changes.
2. This is going to cause a hell of a lot more damage than one civilization smaller than the size of a typical European city collapsing.

> * rise of AI that takes control

I think that's unlikely, but I think the AI crap we're currently following suggests a different path.

The LLM fad is most probably going to eat itself, but take down a lot of things with it.

Let's take a look at it: We had the World Wide Web.

The web was built over a period of a couple of decades maybe (by the mid-2000s it could be considered the primary source of knowledge for everyone in the developed world), with virtually everyone switching to it en-mass. Newspapers went online and closed their paper versions. Magazines closed, to be replaced by websites that were vaguely related. People who once might have written books now wrote blogs or maintained websites with information that was dear to them. Manuals went online. Programmers I think know this more than most, it's easier to search for "Java list to array" than it is to actually go to a physical book and, even with the help of an index, find the method that does that. (Spoiler: Java's version is an ugly hack! I wish Java had kept the original versioning scheme as that'd have made it easier for them to make a Java 2 that didn't rely on the way Java 1 does things, breaking some backward compatibility but implementing things properly. Anyway, I digress.)

So then the first hit came, social media. Not a major hit, and not an obvious problem at first as the first social media sites were glorified blogging platforms. And that was fine, except one of these, Facebook, felt that it was in its best interests to hinder search engines from working with it, which undermined the web.

Then the next hit, the iPhone and Android. Again, not initially a major problem, but over time they encouraged massive amounts of content to be locked behind "apps", with any web interface being a third class option or worse.

Then Facebook came up again, they REALLY didn't like Google. How could they kill Google? By making normal content unsearchable, not just content posted behind Facebook's registration wall. So again, not caring about the web, they came up with a scheme to encourage everyone to post everything as videos. They lied about their own metrics, claiming it showed videos caused a crazy amount of engagement, and the rest of the content providers saw this, and put autoplaying videos on every web page, very often (as was Facebook's intention) without any readable text. Google's search couldn't actually search the videos at that time, so it undermined Google.

Meanwhile... Google was fucking around too. They intentionally made their own search engine less useful, noting that their competitors were apparently just copying them rather than trying to make their own search engines more useful than Google's. So now a Google search is very, very, unlikely to give you relevant answers without a lot of adding quotes to things.

Finally, LLMs. LLMs are the nail in the coffin. They remove any incentive to post anything on the Internet aside from documentation, advertising copy, and rants. There is decreasing incentive at this point to post anything you'd be paid to write or just to make the world a better place. Whether it's journalism, fiction, research, or even a Wikipedia page, fewer and fewer people will ever read what you have to say, but an LLM will, combine it with eleventeen other sources, and produce a summary that's inaccurate and dubious but is "good enough" for people looking for a quick answer.

So what we're left with are LLMs that will tell you things based upon the latest information as of 2025. They'll tell you the latest information as of 2025 today. And they'll tell you the latest information as of 2025 in five years. And in ten years, unless someone's willing to employ an army of researchers whose sole job is to write well researched and accurate articles to be ingested by an LLM, they'll be useless.

But so will the web.

And we don't have a replacement for the web, which is unfortunate because we don't have a replacement for the things we replaced using the web.

And as should be obvious, that means a world without information.

And I can't see how our civilization survives that.

Biden doesn't have dementia. He was showing signs of normal age related decline, sure, as would anyone his age. But his handlers wouldn't have let him out in public, even to speak from a teleprompter, if he had it. As someone who's lived with two people with two different types, I can attest that if he had it, it'd have rather more obvious than "mumbling", which isn't a symptom anyway. (And reading the transcript of the debate where his mumbling was *such* an issue, I think it's rather obvious he's thinking clearly throughout.)

The only neurological condition Biden had was his long term stuttering issue, which he's always had. Unless you're suggesting he had dementia in the 1980s, when his reputation for "gaffes" started, I think the argument he had it during his presidency is a thin one.

I find it all the more ludicrous Biden's opponents keep bringing this up as some sort of gotcha when their own guy very obviously has a major issue. Does Trump have dementia? Can't say! But certainly his constant incoherent streams-of-consciousness speeches raise alarm bells, and are far closer to what I saw in my FiL than anything Biden said, and Trump's actions appear to be substantial enough that his doctors are interested, hence the constant MRIs etc. And Biden's opponents are the ones that would fight to the death to condemn anyone who suggests St Reagan should have not run a second term.

As for orange suits, Biden followed the law. Trump's only getting away with what he's doing because of a scared Republican congress and a SCOTUS that's made it clear they believe in the supreme executive theory, despite that being literally unamerican, a rejection of the entire foundation of this country.

If provocation in the modern world is so ambiguous then so is this. Ukraine has held it's lines for 3 years and there is something we could do, we could supply them with as much arms and information so long as they are willing to fight and the Ukrainian people are willing to fight. It's their blood the least we can do is supply them our iron. Also this isn't even 18th century justifications, bringing up US conflicts is just "two wrongs make a right Lisa". The US being unjustified in invading Iraq doesn't justify Russian invasion, particularly since they signed an agreement that said "we agree on borders".

Again, this is just taking all agency out of the Ukrainian people and assigning your personal opinions on Europe. Also welcome to war, where interests can be varied? You think Poland has a good reason to want to see that "Putin doesn't win"?

And who's choice should that be? Russia's?

Yeah it's a nice story but it's just that, a story, a justification for 18th century diplomacy. Also if Melos or Athens had nukes it changes the story doesn't it? If we're in fantasy land and a wizard disappears all of Russia's nuclear weapons tomorrow it's a different story, so if they want to pull the "it's just the way of the world" card they should bury those in the sea and let the world decide how it wants to handle it instead of hiding behind MAD.