costs are driven by scarcity. At least for the things like energy, food, and shelter I mentioned. Nobody is hording corn or fertilizer. Its expensive because the supplies are down.

Nobody is charging more for electricity because they pushing it all into some secret battery some place (or pumped reservoir for that matter), nor are they idling their generation facilities. They are charging more because more people want to use more of it then can be produced and delivered reliably. Now i do believe we could have much cheaper energy. That supposes winding the clock way back and making policy choices that would have favored the production gas, and oil fired generating plants, more domestic pipelines, and more domestic oil refining facility.

As it is now US crude is artificially cheap because we can't move it where it is needed, and Obama energy and environmental policy that have prevented building the power plants to burn it. It sad really the public suffers with inflationary pressure and cost of living problems while had we let the market work, those $100 a barrel prices in the mid 2000s would have resulted in 'drill baby drill' and building out generating capacity - instead we got the Paris accords...

Can we just stop with this post scarcity nonsense.

We are not in some post scarcity utopia. We are rapidly running out of real-estate. Yes we can build up but many was not meant to live in endless concrete jungle, most people don't really want to, but the consequence of unbound population growth (which does seem to be slowing, for reasons of scarcity) would be ecological collapse as we take to much away from the remaining natural spaces.

The cost of energy is also going up. Wind and Solar don't actually lower costs, if they did they the oil majors would be building them at the same time they develop fields. you can't make money on window and solar without major tax subsides and fake "green" programs, where because you are in a "green industry" you get side step the impact studies and mitigation requirements any other commercial activity would be required to support/execute/subjected to, whales and birds be damned. - Energy will either continue to increase in cost until someone can make money in wind or we will develop new Fossil resources, but those will also be more costly as the recovery complexity only goes up as we deplete them.

The costs of food continues to rise, yes yes distribution not production problem, blah blah blah.. Might be/likely is true about being able to feed everyone for quite sometime by reducing waste vs output growth, but right now there is no *viable* plan to reduce waste on that scale, and the costs of production are rising, inputs like chemical fertilizer are not getting cheaper and they wont.

As bizarre as it seems we are circling back around the scarcity being about basic needs like food and shelter, because advanced manufacturing has made what ancient man saw as luxury very abundant. In most of the USA $15 will put a very powerful computer and communications platform in the palm of your hand, but it will barely feed you a week at the grocery store - (think homemade pancakes from scratch for two meals, and canned veg/beans for dinners). We have luxury poverty, where people can get some very nice things, but yet can't afford the most basic things they need. Why because there is real scarcity under those basic things.

The answer to most of this, is actually reset the international systems. Every nation/region needs to find away to sustainability produce enough food for their own population. Nations that are net importers of food or have net emigration should be subjected to heavy trade, travel, and monetary, sanctions by other nations. That will force them to fix their economic balance and focus on the right kinds of production. It will also re-balance more developed nations. There are lot of people that just are not fit to work in high-tech, and there are not enough jobs in 'trades' and ditch digging to provide a long term outlet. We actually need economics that allow workers to earn a living wage for 'low-complexity' activities like seamstress, and basic furniture jointing etc; put another way we need enough protectionism to that the domestic appetite for basic household items is satisfied primarily from domestic sources. - Capitalism at the domestic scale will work well for organizing that, after all it did in the past. Capitalism applied at the globalscale, with nationalistic actors looking to game the system will continue to fail.

Wow -

So because someone happens to be winning life's lottery for the moment, they deserve to be killed...

This is the folks is the prevailing thinking on the left. You don't have to do anything, have done any specific harm to anyone. if you have more than they do and are doing anything other then using it to mobilize against anyone else who also happens to have more than them you are target!

If you disagree with them on what is good for people or what love or agÃpi mean, you also automatically deserve death!

This is who they are! It is what drives them. When you see the opinions of Drinkypoo, AmiMojo, or rsilvergun, on here, this is their underlying thesis for everything they say. Just be aware, while no human is garbage these people are actively seeking to be so, always!

It's designed to be more like the web was when it was just getting started. It's a lightweight, application-layer internet protocol launched in June 2019 by "Solderpunk" and designed as a minimalist alternative to the modern World Wide Web while drawing inspiration from the text-based simplicity of the pre-web Gopher protocol. It uses a custom markup language called Gemtext for hypertext documents with basic links, supports mandatory TLS encryption for secure connections, and operates on a client-server model with a single request-response structure to keep things straightforward and extensible-resistant. The aim is to revive the early web's ethos of easy, ad-free browsing and organic discovery without JavaScript, trackers, or multimedia bloat. It won't force you to run client-side code. Gemini fosters "Geminispace," a decentralized network of public capsules (sites) accessible via specialized clients, promoting privacy, low-bandwidth efficiency, and sharing.

There are some cool sites and the Lagrange Gemni Browser is pretty nice.

Ol Huang is just mad he cannot find any Chinese girls that want him to sign her tits. Then again, it's gonna take a much smaller signature and much less ink when he does!

No idea of your background but I think it is very very easy to have a pretty biased view about how big the net got and when.

Coming from a fairly upper middle midwest town with parents in tech, we had home computers in the 80s and bbs access in the early 90s and IP Internet access via Compuserve probably around 1993/4 or so. The schools were wired as well pretty early at least the two high schools, not sure about the lower levels.

That said 1997 statics, show only about 18% of us households had a internet subscription. That jumps to almost 50% by 2000 so the uptake was pretty fast but a lot of us older Slashdot posters probably grew up in a bit of tech bubble, at ~1/5 of the population being 'online' it would be easy for an adolescent or young adult to not really be aware others were not sharing their experience.

I think 'the information super highway' lives a little more dominantly in the media of the period (1992-1995) then it actually did in most of the populations lives because it was such a huge area of commercial growth and the people who were using it outside 'the office' were the affluent, which always have driven our later 20th century American cultural conversation.

Recall how big a deal 'Cyber Monday' was, that was because people would shop online at the office, because they did not have access to do so at home! Long rant but i think for most people the Internet became a day to day feature of their lives more in the 1997-2000 span then in the 1994-97 span.

At least we can stop reading endless articles by people who think they are a hell of a lot more insightful than they actually are about how "1984 is not a howto guide" and move on to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - wasn't supposed to represent aspirational social, environmental, and technological targets.

The good news is it should keep both the read to much environmental fiction and read to much AI fictions occupied for sometime and have them fighting over literary terf.

It will be a nice change of pace around here.

The bubble will burst because of a failure to monetize, not a failure of the underlying technology.

People are using AI for free. Why will they start paying hundreds of billions for it?

It was the same in the Dotcom crash. Pets.com had a failed business model, but the Internet didn't go away.

Teachers make a huge difference in student performance. This has been studied and simply documented over and over forever. Why do we let bad and mediocre teachers teach when better teachers get better results? Since the 1980's we've been able to provide remote access to good teachers. The whole thing would have been easy to simply swap out 90% of teachers in the 1980's for a VHS (or betamax if you must) A/V carts. That's right. They should have been fired and replaced with folks with better methods and proven results. Proctors to administer testing and keep the kids quiet and paying attention can keep the kids behavior controlled, but are much cheaper than teachers. However, they also should be trained in the proven-best methods to deal with disruptive kids.

I'll give you an honest example. My brother almost didn't learn to read/write because his teacher believed in some ridiculous teaching methodology that excluded phonetics (the so-far proven-best way to teach kids to read). My parents had to get him an external tutor/teacher to teach him phonetics. He want from a straight-F to straight-A student after that, but the teacher he had in 2nd grade would have left him illiterate and not given a damn. This was a public school teacher who is going to RETIRE after teaching only 20 years. They have the same deal as the cops, firefighters, etc... It's pretty cushy considering private sector workers get no such promises.

Oh and that retirement is something we taxpayers pay for many years after the utility of that teacher is long since gone. It all goes under a heading of "education" like it's just the cost of doing business. It sure doesn't have to be. Those people shouldn't get cushy retirements, constant pay increases, or anything else besides what the private education market will bear (despite public schools constantly under-performing private ones).

Who cares if they use AI or not. What matters is not giving a bunch of whiny teachers gold plated retirement deals, but giving kids the best chance and the best education. We should have long-since been using every scrap of tech we have to do it, but a lot smarter (ie.. use what's proven to work, teach using methods the best teachers use or use those teachers directly by recording them). Right now I see more teachers with a passion to let kids choose their gender rather than to educate them and give them the best chance in life or enjoy learning/reading/etc... No wonder our test scores and literacy keeps dropping. They appear to care more about virtue signaling and their compensation packages.

None of that addresses his very strong point. I read his post as "Let markets work". I have no idea what your point is. All I want to know is who do you want to coerce or steal from to accomplish this pro-EV dream or can you suck it up and let markets work?

No. That would explain a general lack of new car sales, but that's not what's happening. It is only EV sales that are stagnating. People are still buying gas cars.

EV sales are booming in China. A big reason is much lower prices. In China, EVs are cheaper than equivalent ICE cars. That is also true in Southeast Asia, which imports EVs from China. But the West restricts EV imports, so the prices are much higher.

The site is hundreds of miles from the Cascadia fault line.

There is a major mountain range (the Cascades) and many miles of desert between the site and the coast.

For me what ruins them now is the shamelessly communist slant on just about any article that touches any political topic. Elon is about to disenfranchise them with some basic competition. I'm sure that'll cause just as many tears as when he fired Twitter's censorship team (about 3000 people). I wonder how many of those Wikipedia donations ends up paying some Leftist to smash-"moderate" any unfriendly Capitalist propaganda. I'll definitely support Grokopedia over Wikipedia once it gets going and I've already pretty much banned using Wikipedia for any non-technical articles. I used to donate to Wikipedia, but I will never do so again.

Sounds a lot like "trust the authorities". Yeah, no. Tell your fucking mama to trust them. I have my middle finger up for your "studies" till the end of time.

Sure maybe everyone but the "authorities" (oh and you of course) are just too dumb. Suuuuure..... but maybe the problem is that corporations and government agencies can pay for and cajole any result they want from "studies" then smarmy "It's not personal" folks like you can "fact check" using "experts". I notice science and skepticism don't really enter into it at all. It's just institutional authoritarianism given a convenient way to shut down any skepticism.

If "team science" wanted to have calm, rational, science based debates they'd have done that instead of screeching censorship and going after folks jobs and other highly personal attacks. I saw first-hand "Team Science" dumped sand and mulch into outdoor skate parks to "stop the spread" (those brilliant geniuses then forced kids inside to play video games, minus the ventilation and UV, instead). They shut down small businesses while letting big business remain open while demanding Churches and right wing protests shut down. More apropos to this conversation, they flooded the journals with flimsy propaganda style papers that were later found to be wanting on all kinds of topics like how effective Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were, Ivermectin impacts, origin research, and mask studies. So, fuck your political "studies". Your pathetic "team" already ruined that avenue of argument by diluting their "work" with propaganda whenever they found it convenient (it's called lying, by the way, and it's how you lose credibility). You don't get to point to ginned-up "papers" anymore, cunts, that ended in 2021, if it was ever a valid strategy for arguing or proving anything.

That is just late 20th century thinking. That worked in mono-polar world where we were the only nation really capable of sustain force projection (security), the reserve currency, and at least some technological superiority.

Advanced Medical equipment - If China wanted to take that market they could inside a decade. Same thing with chips at this point, they have all the precursors. There is nothing left we can produce that is a 'you can't get there from here' for them any longer, it is just a pick an item from the list make it priority and fill the gap. It is rapidly approaching the point where if we just cut them off completely all at once they could 'make do'. All your type of think at this point does is allow them to make progress - entirely at our expense on their own terms. It is DUMB

On the other hand be if coffee makers, or COIVD masks, those end up being things you need. You can't make do without them. Robots or people, however they get built in the re-emergence of a multi-polar world the nations that can make THINGS, especially basic necessity will again be the ones with power, both economic in terms of trade, and military in terms of being able to keep supplied. Look at Ukraine, Russia would have rolled over them long ago without a sustained supply of American arms - why because we can produce them. The rest of NATO - LOSERS every one! All together they can't meet basic logistical needs for any sustained conflict. China see that!

They see why Russia even a solid 20 years behind in most tech, remains at least someone combat effective.

Power is about control of production, money is just a tool to facilitate it. The nation that can put engines on chassis, tires on wheels, coffee makers on counter tops, counter tops on cabinet bases, and grain in those cupboards is a nation with a future. The nation that buys all those things, is just waiting to be how far to bend over by the seller and when.