> MOST PEOPLE DON'T WANT A "FULL-SIZED" FUCKING TRUCK. THEY'RE TOO GODDAMN BIG.

Counterpoint: The Ford F series are the best selling vehicles in the US. Second place is the Chevy Silverado, which is another full size pickup. If you broke out just the F-150 I think it's just barely behind the Silverado (Looks like ~420K vs ~410K so far this year?)

The physical size isn't the problem. Smaller pickups like the Honda Santa Cruz and Ford Maverick do not sell well. The kinds of people who actually want a pickup truck do not seem to actually want a midsize or compact pickup truck.

Cheaper, on the other hand... that's something you can sell to the masses. Sounds to me that the market for EV pickups is still there but the price isn't alluring enough, and maybe people are willing to compromise on the size to get an EV truck that's more affordable.

> Back in my day

It ain't your day anymore; the world has moved on.
=Smidge=

Private insurance looks cheaper because there are millions of insurance plans that don't actually cover anything. I can give every single American full health insurance for $1 a year as long as I never have to pay out a dime to any doctors or cover any medical care.

You always have to lie to make your side look good and to make a case for what you want. The truth always destroys right-wing politics. It has for thousands of years

And are entirely caused by Trump and his national sales tax. Importers do not know from one month or even one week to the next what's going to happen and it's creating chaos. Several auto companies have had to close down production lines because they just couldn't get parts. And that's before the uncertainty around rare Earth minerals which are absolutely critical to the battery in that EV.

Folks have not really fully grasped just how much of a fuck up electing Donald Trump was and is. I think the scale of the fuck up is a little bit too large for most people to comprehend. Trump has done as much damage in 10 months as a Republican president usually does in 8 years. We also did not get the usual 8 years of Democrats fixing the previous Republicans disastrous policies.

Given all the uncertainty and the loss of the 7500 tax credit yeah there is no way in hell anyone can sell EVS profitable unless they're using slave labor to build them like China does.

Meanwhile Tesla is about to give Elon Musk 1 trillion with a t dollars. It's not just more money than the company has ever made it's more money than the company ever can make. It took them 20 years and constant government subsidies to make 43 billion in profit. To pay Elon Musk will take 200 years.

For any other company the stock price would be cratering right now as people sell out as fast as they can but so many people bought in when Tesla was already overvalued that nobody wants to be the one that pulled the trigger and start the downward spiral. Everyone is hoping to get out and give it over to a greater fool. So it's a Mexican standoff.

The whole electric car market is poised to collapse. China might keep it going thanks to the aforementioned slave labor but without that there's nothing to sustain it anymore.

Maybe we'll survive to the midterms and the Democrats will sweep them and put a stop to Trump's insanity but that's unlikely because they need both the lower house and the Senate and the current map just plain favors the Republican party especially with all the cheating they're doing.

I'm genuinely curious what you're Way Forward is. Is it the naive belief that the billionaires are going to completely ignore their dependency on consumers and employees? I bring that up just in case you're Way Forward is to just assume everything is always going to work out and stay the same and that you don't have to think about the future.

I mean you are welcome to ignore technological unemployment, trillions of dollars of negative Financial impacts from climate change, the growing influence of money on politics, the death of the Free Press and all the other thousands of other problems that are coming to ahead. One of my personal favorites is that only baby boomers have enough disposable income to drive a consumer economy and they aren't going to leave anything behind thanks to Private health care and the high cost of recreational vehicles so...

But assuming you're not going to ignore all that and you are going to recognize and admit there are serious structural problems with our civilization what is your way forward?

Go ahead. We're waiting. Or is this going to be another instance of, I'll tell everybody in 2 weeks.

We don't need AI for that we figured it out almost a hundred years ago during the Great depression.

We need voters to stop freaking out over stupid little culture war and moral panics and focus on the economy demanding strong regulation of Banks and Wall Street using already understood principles.

And we need a country of voters that know what a fucking chesterton's fence is.

What we're going to do instead is panic over trans girls playing field hockey in the Midwest and let right wing politicians heavily deregulate Wall Street making things worse.

So we're not going to do nothing what we're going to do is get distracted by Petty culture War bullshit and what the corporate fascists run roughshod over the US Constitution and the American people, AKA us.

You don't nationalize the banks immediately. When they crash the economy that's when you nationalize them.

What you should be doing is heavily regulating the banks and the stock market in order to prevent those crashes in the first place. Ask any serious economist and they will tell you in detail the regulations and laws need it to stop the constant boom and bust cycle the cost is all our jobs. It's all well understood because it's all shit we figured out after the Great depression. We just keep repealing those laws because we're stupid and we don't know what a fucking chesterton's fence is.

Several countries in the wake of 2008 nationalized their Banks and then slowly privatize them again. They came out of the crash much faster and in much better condition.

Nationalization is something you do when you have lost control of your banking system and the people who are in control are using that system against you.

Basically when you are in a hostage situation you take the gun away from the terrorist. Then when everything comes down you throw the terrorist in prison and put somebody else in charge of the building you just stormed who isn't a terrorist.

What we did instead was given to all of that terrorists demands and then some.

If 70% of the jobs got automated 30% of the jobs didn't get automated. So yeah there are going to be examples like your sock factory.

However the greater majority of factory jobs were still eliminated using automation not outsourcing. That's because 70% is a large majority.

The point being that the factory jobs are never coming back no matter what.. the only reason China uses people is because they have slaves and although we are very quickly getting comfortable with bringing back slavery we aren't quite there yet. I mean at least 70% of us aren't.

Which has already discussed is the greater majority. The other 30% are what we maga.

On either side of the border but the manufacturing jobs were always doomed. By 1993 automation was devouring factory jobs. We focus on outsourcing because it's more immediate and abrupt so it makes a better news story but 70% of the jobs lost got taken by robots not Mexicans.

Clinton knew that and his solution to it was the kind of out of touch nonsense you get from over-educated Democrats. Well meaning and useless.

His plan and his wife's plan was for all of us to go get advanced college degrees and then Americans would all go into the professional and managerial classes with America becoming top of the line workers for the world and the rest of the world doing all the dirty work for us.

The problem with that was when Bush Jr came along in 2000 he and his corporate cronies decided that the H1B program meant they didn't need a filthy Americans anymore and they could just import already trained labor paid for by other countries so they slashed all the funding to colleges.

We went from government paying 70% of college tuition to government paying 20% of it. Naturally that meant a hell of a lot less Americans getting to go to college and a whole bunch of old people coming up with justifications why that's okay while pretending the government didn't pay for their college.

Mind you even if the clintons plan had worked out it just kicked the can down the road a bit. And neither one of them was going to back cutting high skilled Visa programs so that Americans could be first in line for those jobs anyway.

That's generally the problem with the Democrat party the leadership comes up with plans without taking into account the other side sabotaging those plans let alone long-term societal change is going on. They mean well but meaning well doesn't put food on my table.

But since we have first pass to post voting my choices are a well-meaning party that fucks up and literal Nazi fascists where the head of the military has a Nazi tattoo on his chest. So it's not a hard choice to make. If you have a problem with it go do something about ranked choice voting.

To shut down your vacuum cleaner business. So for example they will fuck with your supply chains so you can't get what you need to make your vacuum cleaners while they also cut the prices of their vacuum cleaners until you go out of business.

You really can't just throw money at the problem of billionaires. They have too much money so they have too much power.

It's not the AI companies to get the bail out it's the banks that overextended themselves loaning to the AI companies.

Unless Americans get enough balls to nationalize Banks when they collapse so that they don't take the whole economy down with them then those banks are too big to fail and they can take on crazy high risk loans and make you pay for them.

And I guarantee you when they collapse you will open up your wallet and your 401k and give them everything because the alternative is to nationalize the banks and that's socialism. And TV will make you so afraid of socialism that they don't even need the rob you you'll follow over yourself to give them your money just like they did in 2008.

We are hostages with Stockholm syndrome.

70% of middle class jobs were taken by automation. The United States produces more factory goods than it ever has we just do it with a robots.

Automation has devastated the middle class. We don't like to talk about it. Google that 70% figure and you'll find a link to the article and the study that goes with it.

We are a country where if you don't work you don't eat. And we are running out of work. We are likely to see 25 to 30% on employment in the lifetime of a 50-year-old. The last time we hit those numbers world war II started.

I don't think there's any solution. I don't think Americans are going to accept people getting food shelter and medicine without working at least 40 hours a week maybe more. Right now companies are moving us all to 996. Salivating over what the Chinese capitalists enjoy.

Ironically is the competition for work increases people have to work more hours and be more productive reducing the number of available jobs increasing that competition. It's a race to the bottom and a death spiral and I know of no way out of it.

It's easy to say Ubi or socialism or whatever but good luck getting Americans to accept any of that and good luck stopping the right wing from sabotaging it. There is bound to be some group of people that you hate and it's easy to get you angry at that group and willing to demand they lose access to food and shelter if they're not working even if there's no work for them to do. Left right up or down we're all prone to that thinking.

No. Like any software, AI requires maintenance, and that maintenance costs money, lots of money.

It does not. Models need nothing more than the storage of some gigs of weights, and a GPU capable of running them.

If you mean "the information goes stale", one, that doesn't happen at all with RAG. And two, updating information with a finetune or even LORA is not a resource-intense task. It's making new foundations that is immensely resource intensive.

Can you integrate it into your products and work flow?

Yes, with precisely the difficulty level of any other API.

Can you train it on your own data?

With much less difficulty than trying to do that with a closed model.

More like dig your own grave.

That dastardly Obama going back in time and causing the 2008 market meltdown that happened under George Bush jr.

I mean have we ever asked where was President Obama on 9/11? Inquiring minds want to know!