More than that, Germany is democratizing energy. A lot of people have balcony power plants and rooftop solar. There are micro grids even.

As an investment over decades, it has paid off with jobs and economic activity.

The nuclear plants were old and outdated, and would have been expensive to keep going, for a relatively small effect. Better to spend the money on transitioning away from non-renewable sources.

Remember that Germany used to be split in two, with half of it communist. The transition was a huge economic project that involved a lot of redevelopment in the east. The grid alone needed major upgrades.

They will probably use Elon's Grok as the benchmark. That thing is pretty far off the deep end.

No story about his fake robot demo being exposed? Slashdot used to love a failed tech demo.

I mean I can read news articles. And you can find the news articles the talk about the corporate commission overriding the locals.

I think the governor is a Democrat so there's some hope but usually you can steam roll locals especially smaller ones. Arizona has a lot of small towns and small cities that won't have the strength to push back against a combination of large corporations and corrupt state governments. It's a reddish state, I think without cheating and gerrymandering it would be a blue state because the statewide races keep going blue but the local races keep going red and that's usually a sign of voter suppression and gerrymandering...

Whatever the case though it's very difficult for Democrats and un corrupt politicians to win small races like the corporate commissioner because people do not realize just how much power those kind of local races have but you can bet your ass corporations and billionaires do

SpaceX exists only because we fucked up NASA long ago and SpaceX is based mostly on the old work of NASA and what they did could have been done by the old NASA; possibly faster and certainly decades sooner. We had to build an idiotic shuttle which had parts made in every state. Rotating leadership too often is also foolish. They kept/keep trying to funnel money into contractors just like the military does flushing their money.

Of severe RAM and storage shortages. That's because openai has already bought 40% of ram capacity for the next 4 years.

It's possible that the whole thing will collapse before then but I don't think so because AI has the possibility to replace trillions and wages. Remember the problem AI is designed to solve is paying wages.

That's going to keep the 1% pumping all of their money into it and they have about 60 to 70% of the money in the country all to themselves.

While we were getting upset that we couldn't say Merry Christmas or that our kids might be gay they were busy consolidating power and taking all the money.

So she seems to have pretended to be a progressive long enough to get that senate seat and sell her constituency out. Because it's a senate seat it takes 6 years to get rid of her. The people of Arizona did so immediately afterwards. I think she was going to try to run as a independent in the hopes of spoiling the election for the Democrats and giving the seat to the Republican party but she was so intensely hated by democrats at that point she was only drawing Republican votes so she dropped out entirely and became a lobbyist.

Is planning on overriding it. They are all Republicans so they are bought and paid for.

Conservatives and the right wing are all about local government until it gets in their way.

The same model of using the state resources to override local government will be spread across the rest of the country out from Arizona.

Remember it's not small government, it's government small enough to drown in a bathtub. Small enough that you can control with violence...

Right wing politics doesn't work. It's a combination of trickle down and the divine right of Kings and if you have literally any knowledge you know those don't work.

So the only solution is total media control. Like they do in Russia or China. Otherwise we all see the emperor has no cloths and do away with our ruling class.

So right now in America 90% of media is owned by billionaires, but that's not enough. There's still truth and reality available. And that has to stop.

If there was a remote kill switch and China ever got to the point of ordering manufacturers to flip it, you would probably be more concerned about the hypersonic missiles and nuclear warheads coming your way.

Plus they would probably start with the western brands using the backdoors they have been saving for just such an occasion.

Funny you should mention decolonizing STEM, because that's basically what has happened here. Even now many people are in denial about what the Chinese have accomplished. They seem to think that only white people can invent stuff or push the state of the art forward, and that everyone else just copies them, steals their ideas and technology.

Many Western countries put a lot of effort into maintaining existing hierarchies. They would rather some people just don't have access to a good education and opportunities, than be more competitive. Education gets defunded by people who can afford to pay for their own kids to get a good one, or who got theirs and just want a supply of disposable, low cost labour, and lower taxes. The risk that someone else might get something they didn't "earn" is too great to fund anything properly.

What are the odds that the daughter of Bill Gates could secure funding for a start up. Didn't have that on my bingo card for 2025.

Somebody once asked, "If Jeff Bezos can start Amazon in his garage what's stopping you?"

Answer: I don't have a garage.

Billionaires and ruling elites are dismantling capitalism. They have never liked capitalism they have just taken advantage of it when it was available. But they spend every waking moment trying to undermine the mechanics of capitalism.

On the other hand voters simply will not tolerate socialism. If you've ever had a co-worker that won't pull their own weight and felt resentment that's why. The idea of somebody who isn't working being allowed to have anything is really upsetting to a lot of people.

We need some sort of third way and I have no idea what it is. I know Joe Biden was trying to buy time with some antitrust law enforcement and with unions but that wasn't a solution that would it Best buy some time before the total collapse of capitalism.

And that is way too complex for voters to understand so we get another term of trump and capitalism is getting dismantled faster now...

We definitely have to come up with a third option but I have no idea what it could be

The EU had the same question when limiting credit card processing fees. They simply looked at what the costs were and how much profits those companies were reporting from that part of the business.

You can still make it much harder for them. Physically disabled the write pin on the UEFI flash memory chip, for example. Some vendors let you require a password to upgrade the firmware.

None of it is undefeatable, but you have to consider who you adversary is. If it's just the cops and their IT people, it probably won't take much to thwart them.

There are also more passive measures like making sure you have decent CCTV coverage, so they can't do easily sneak in.

We had a similar thing in the UK with the BBC. Conservatives decided that it wasn't helping them win, so destroyed it. The formerly excellent news service, that held politicians to account and kept the other news services at least a little bit honest, was gutted.

The country is far worse off for it, in ways that cannot easily, if ever, be undone.

Trump and his ilk are doing the same thing in the US.