Road maintenance isn't the only cost. Automobiles have a lot of externalized costs that are bared by the government besides just building roads. You need to constantly be building out new cities with new infrastructure in order to make room for cars and a car centric society.

You could tax the car companies themselves to pay for it but good luck with that. Realistically if you have the political power to do something like that you probably wouldn't have a car centric society that shifts billions of dollars of cost on to consumers.

The examples I can find where someone actually got in trouble were explicit calls to violence. The famous one is a guy who wrote for a British sitcom called Father Ted. He explicitly said that if you see a trans girl in a woman's bathroom you should punch them in the balls. The two that got actual jail time were inciting an attack on a hotel full of immigrants during riots. Even in America that's not legal we just very seldom enforce those laws.

The example in the article you linked to the police admitted they were wrong and paid the people in question 20,000 British pounds as compensation. In America the 20K would not have been worth it because every time you interact with police there's a high probability they are going to kill you. When police get something wrong in America the payout should probably be at least half a million to account for that. But as far as I know the cops in the UK don't just randomly murder people for shits and giggles like they do in United States.

I'm not saying that there isn't some abuse going on though. 12,000 arrests is insane.

But at the same time they're probably needs to be a middle ground between arresting 12,000 people and the rampant stochastic terrorism we've got going on here in the United States where we've got idiots running around killing people trying to start a race war.

The wealthy prefer a dystopian hell hole for 99.9% of the population and extraordinarily god-like opulence for themselves. They want to be able to control who lives and who dies on such a fundamental level that they are like the Pharaohs of old literally exalted to godhood.

You cannot as a regular person comprehend the kind of greed that a man like Elon Musk or Bill Gates experiences as their normal state of being. It is way past just wanting money or yachts or any of that and into the point where they want to be transhuman.

And you need to understand that they do not think of you as a human being. You are not at the same level organically or as a species in their eyes. You aren't even at the level that you for example perceive a chimpanzee as in their eyes. To a guy like Elon Musk you're more like a slime mold. An utterly alien existence that might occasionally be useful.

I mean you could stop voting for right-wing politicians because you don't like queer people or brown people or whoever the fuck it is you don't like (in Japan it's certain job descriptions because the Japanese can't tell each other apart well enough to create racism).

You could also get over that stupid 12-year-old feeling of it's not fair when you see somebody having food and shelter without being miserable 40 hours or more per week.

But you're not going to do that. Or if you do your friends and family aren't. So like crabs in a bucket we are going to destroy ourselves.

I'm not acting like there's anything that can be done about it I'm just venting. Flaws in human reasoning and emotions mean our species is doomed and it is incredibly frustrating that we're all going to die for such a stupid and idiotic reason.

Who knows maybe one of the other species will take over after we kill ourselves. Smart money is on raccoons. A few more mutations and they'll have opposable thumbs. Beavers are also in the running.

The population decline from low birth rates isn't drastic enough. You can look up how the math works out but there is a long tail of increased population growth before you see the crash. It has to do with how you already have all these people of childbearing age going through their lives.

So long before our population could adjust we're going to get hit with huge amounts of layoffs that will cause massive amounts of social strife. There's no getting away from it.

There won't be much of an experiment per se. In practice it will quickly devolve into a few big players that control platforms people use so that they can continuously access new training material.

So microsoft, Apple maybe and Facebook and possibly but probably not Twitter (since we just learned 80% of the accounts on Twitter are Russians and bangladeshies pretending to be American conservatives) will continue to thrive because they will be able to tell the difference between a bot and a human being thanks to their control of the platform.

Everyone else was just accessing free training data goes tits up soon. Some of them will be bought out.

In addition to devastating the job market and devouring electricity and water AI is also going to result in huge monopolies because it's a technology that lends itself to monopolies inherently.

It's supposed to be the answer to the question "if nobody buys the wealthy's products how are they going to stay rich?"

The goal here is to replace as many workers as possible and eliminate the dependency on consumers.

The ultra wealthy want to go back to being like kings. Basically feudalism.

They will have a very tiny number of guildsman and scribes and a handful of knights to keep them in line.

Everyone else has a lifestyle below that of a medieval peasant because you're not even needed to tend the land anymore, they will have machines for that.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't realize what's happening here. Even more so there are the people who realize it but just kind of put it out of their mind because the idea of the ultra wealthy dismantling capitalism is so far outside what people view as possible that they can't emotionally comprehend it even if they can understand it intellectually.

And of course there are the numb skulls who think that they are somehow going to profit from the collapse of modern civilization. It's a big club boys and you ain't in it.

Europe like America gives too much money to its 1%. The only way to maintain their economies is with cheap goods made by slave labor in China. That's the only way to offset increasingly large amounts of money being moved from the bottom to the top.

If you want to fix that you have to cut off the flow of money to the top and we're not going to do that. There's a variety of terrible reasons why that is the case but it just is.

I honestly do not know a solution to prevent human civilization from collapsing. I suspect that within 10 or 20 years we are going to hand nuclear launch codes over to religious lunatics and that's going to be gave over for humanity.

I definitely do not know how we avoid regressing back into feudalism even if we don't destroy our species. People just like worshiping rulers and kings and the ones that don't don't have the tendencies towards violence that the ones that do have. If it's one thing Afghanistan taught us it's that a very small number of idiots willing to use terrible violence can install a very very small number of people as absolute rulers.

We could counter this with education and critical thinking but even among people who should be well educated all I'm hearing is how we should all go into the trades and be plumbers or whatever. Anti-intellectualism and a hatred and disdain for experts dominates discourse now. That overpowering 12-year-old urge to not be told what to do has completely overwhelmed society and I do not know how you push back against that.

Basically don't tell me what to do.

Another massive round of layoffs.

and neither are their power demands. AI exists to automated white collar jobs. The Demand for that is huge.

When the AI bubble bursts yes, you and I are going to bail out the banks that loaned doggy AI companies hundreds of billions (either that or they'll crash the global economy, remember, you're a hostage not a consumer)

But all that infrastructure you paid for with your tax dollars will just be bought up for cheap by whoever survives and you'll lose your jobs to it.

But hey, look over there! It's a DEI trans girl playing high school sports carrying a happy holidays sign!

Is reserved for approximately 8,000 people worldwide out of 8 billion. This creates a lot of bizarre situations like the problem you're describing.

So basically we need lots of young people to work and drive the economy forward and generate economic activity in order to support the old people in their old age when they're physically incapable of work.

Basically line must go up. The economy has to grow because if it stops growing the people at the top take it out on us and we enter a permanent depression. It's like how you are running from the dragon hoping he eats The Hobbit. That's our economy.

On the other hand AI is taking jobs needed to make the whole system function. We need people to be working but we also need them to be constantly exchanging the value of their labor again in order to keep the economy driving forward and functional.

As the population of young people drops and there is less economic activity you will also have Ward drop offs in the number of available jobs due to automation. The entire economic system we have built will break down and we do not have any replacement for it.

Meanwhile we still have to take 70% of everything we do and use it to satisfy every single conceivable whim of those 8,000 people because they earned it and because clearly God wants them to have all that money and power or he wouldn't have given them all that money and power.

Also if you take away Elon musk's billions leaving him with only tens of millions then the next step is somebody's going to break into your house and steal your toothbrush in your car and probably fuck your wife. That's just logic.

Basically the systems we put in place are not capable of addressing either of the two problems you're describing and the two problems you're describing are going to put different pressures in different places on the system we live in. And we are not capable of reforming or changing that system because we are a nation of 12-year-olds and 12-year-olds don't like change.

All it's going to take is a subpoena and that's that. Writing reviews can be dangerous because businesses will cheerfully sue you if you write a bad review. Free speech is nice and all but you're still going to spend thousands of dollars depending yourself in court.

Everyone is. The economy is collapsing exactly as anyone with half a brain would have predicted when we put Trump in charge. Which is why Trump is hiding all of the reports showing how bad the economy is.

America is a failed state. When your leadership starts to hide report data that's when you know it's over.

We normally get 8 years of Democrats fixing the disasters caused by republicans. We never fully recover and the voters inevitably blamed the Democrats for that and go back to the Republicans because voters are dumb. But we usually get 8 years of relative stability with a little bit of Republican sabotage after the midterms and we didn't get that this time. Like absolutely everyone who isn't either an idiot or a paid shill predicted it's an absolute disaster.

I think one of the major problems is we have too many retirees who are completely insulated from the economy and who really do not give a fuck about their kids and grandkids. The kind that find Fox News entertaining for reasons that I do not fully comprehend. Like the kind of twerp that voted for brexit in the uk. People that can set fire to the whole world and get away with it. Probably anyway.

If you're under 65 though I don't think you're going to get away with it. The damage is too extreme and too fast. We are so fucked and the worst thing is is I don't think anyone has learned any lessons from this.

The internet is filled with idiots who have lost their livelihoods because of Trump's idiot policies and asserting that they will vote for him again given the chance. I do not know what you do with people like that but I know there are a bunch of them here and they like to keep their mouths shut when they're not in safe spaces.

He openly attempted to overthrow the US government. He is also a convicted felon and a rapist. Never mind that he is an incredibly incompetent buffoon who is bankrupted every single company he has ever been in charge of without exception.

And all it took for him to get another term with a shitload of propaganda, the news media being owned by billionaires and the Democrats running a man far too old to be running and a woman.

There was also a metric fuck ton of voters suppression. Literally millions of illegal challenges to signatures and voter registrations. Not to mention multi-hour waits to vote. There's a reason that a state like Missouri that is almost 50% black is a red state and it's not conservative family values.

Every single institution designed to protect you from psychopaths and rapists has failed. Or rather it has been systematically dismantled going back to when Barry Goldwater lost.

So yeah Donald Trump is absolutely going to run for a third term if he is physically able and the corrupt supreme Court that struck down Roe v Wade by citing a literal witchfinder general is going to rubber stamp it.

And I don't think the voters who are allowed to vote are going to stop him because about 30% of them think he is the second coming of Christ about another 10% think he is a business genius and about 5% are so confused they don't know what the fuck and then all the Republicans have to do is stop about 6% from voting and Bob's your uncle third term of trump.

All that for a man who has 28 credible rape accusations eight of which involved children.

If we can elect a rapist who bankrupts every company he touches president twice we can do it a third time.

in America. You can chart a direct line from when smartphones and the internet got cheap and widely available and the decline of religious extremist churches in America. Specifically the hyper-political mega churches that were created and built up by billionaires in order to trick people out of their property and jobs.

That's a good example of something like a one laptop per child having a direct tangible effect in a positive direction. Albeit not as a charity case but just as a consequence of cheap electronics. You went from people having a single source of Truth in the form of a corrupt preacher to being able to Google everything the corrupt preacher tells them.

It also means that all the rape and pedophilia the churches have been actively hiding gets around really fast. I suspect social media has a impact there too.