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)

You can choose a lot of different things. The question remains, is this a viable way to structure an economic system in a world in which all of the necessities of life are produced with no (or almost no) labor?

Are you seriously proposing a world in which eight billion people are employed in producing master-crafted articles (and these master-crafted articles are "long term" purchases, hence with a small output needed.)?

Where do the peons get the money to buy mass-produced items?

A handful are master craftsmen. What about the other seven billion?

To be fair, this is nothing new. The entirety of the industrial revolution has been finding ways to use automation to decrease the amount of human labor used to make things (i.e., increase "productivity".)

The problem is that we do not have an economic system in which a society works when there is no need for human labor, and a small but rich fraction of the population owns the machinery that produces everything.

Right now the drive to diversify is entirely political.
Ok great you hate Trump, congrats.
The FACT is that there is no serious alternative to the USD as a reserve currency.
The currencies mentioned (euro, yuan) are indeed probably the closest in a basically empty field.
The yuan is controlled by a deeply dishonest tyrannical government that hasn't authentically reported financial information for decades. The EU is an anti democratic talking shop that can't manage to stand up a coast guard, much less manage a monetary policy.

Don't get me wrong, there are major, major issues with how the US handles economics. Inter party vacillations every 4 years. Dishonesty about inflation or economic data when it's politically inconvenient. But to the point of real-world contexts critical to underpin faith in a currency, the US remains economically dominant, more militarily secure than all others, and well supplied with food, water, oil, and raw materials.

I think this view gives the crypto bros too much credit. They might now be thinking about taking advantage of the opportunity to wrestle the system away from the Wall Street bros, but there was no such plan.

Or, there's the same amount of stuff worth reading, but it is being diluted by a much larger flow of sewage that isn't worth reading.

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/...

To intercept them you still have to identify them, which you can't do until after they perform the sabotage. Given that, what's the benefit in sinking them rather than seizing them? Sinking them gains you nothing, seizing them gains you the sabotage vessel. It probably won't be worth much, but more than nothing. I guess sinking them saves the cost of imprisoning the crew, but I'd rather imprison them for a few years than murder them.

Sure do :) I can provide more if you want, but start there, as it's a good read. Indeed, blind people are much better at understanding the consequences of colours than they are at knowing what colours things are..

Very much unlike an intern (the doing-over part).

You ignored his core point, which is that "rocks don't think" is useless for extrapolating unless you can define some procedure or model for evaluating whether X can think, a procedure that you can apply both to a rock and to a human and get the expected answers, and then apply also to ChatGPT.

Heh. It says a lot about the pace of AI research and discussion that a paper from last year is "old".

This is a common thread I notice in AI criticism, at least the criticism of the "AI isn't really thinking" or "AI can't really do much" sorts... it all references the state of the art from a year or two ago. In most fields that's entirely reasonable. I can read and reference physics or math or biology or computer science papers from last year and be pretty confident that I'm reading the current thinking. If I'm going to depend on it I should probably double-check, but that's just due diligence, I don't actually expect it to have been superseded. But in the AI field, right now, a year old is old. Three years old is ancient history, of historical interest only.

Even the criticism I see that doesn't make the mistake of looking at last year's state of the (public) art tends to make another mistake, which is to assume that you can predict what AI will be able to do a few years from now by looking at what it does now. Actually, most such criticism pretty much ignores the possibility that what AI will do in a few years will even be different from what it can do now. People seem to implicitly assume that the incredibly-rapid rate of change we've seen over the last five years will suddenly stop, right now.

For example, I recently attended the industry advisory board meeting for my local university's computer science department. The professors there, trying desperately to figure out what to teach CS students today, put together a very well thought-out plan for how to use AI as a teaching tool for freshmen, gradually ramping up to using it as a coding assistant/partner for seniors. The plan was detailed and showed great insight and a tremendous amount of thought.

I pointed out that however great a piece of work it was, it was based on the tools that exist today. If it had been presented as recently as 12 months ago, much of it wouldn't have made sense because agentic coding assistants didn't really exist in the same form and with the same capabilities as they do now. What are the odds that the tools won't change as much in the next 12 months as they have in the last 12 months? Much less the next four years, during the course of study of a newly-entering freshman.

The professors who did this work are smart, thoughtful people, of course, and they immediately agreed with my point and said that they had considered it while doing their work... but had done what they had anyway because prediction is futile and they couldn't do any better than making a plan for today, based on the tools of today, fully expecting to revise their plan or even throw it out.

What they didn't say, and I think were shying away from even thinking about, is that their whole course of study could soon become irrelevant. Or it might not. No one knows.

What in the world do you think happens to the output of sewage treatment plants? Do you think it's teleported to Pluto?

All the water you ever bathed in has effluents that have gone through the kidneys of scores of animals. Merely warming water by a few degrees is trivial.

Air cooling is quite inefficient compared to water cooling. The heat of vaporization of water, 2260 kJ/kg, is remarkable. It will remove a lot of heat. Even the thermal mass of water, with a specific heat of about 4.2 kJ K/kg, is pretty impressive.