I read the book and can also recommend it, but with reservations. I don't think Black had enough technical background to fully understand the structural relationships between data and algorithms, so he didn't sufficiently pursue the algorithmic side that could be ferreted out of the data. Unfortunately the algorithms were rarely documented and by the time he was working on the book the people who knew the algorithms were gone. I strongly suspect that many of those people didn't even appreciate what they were doing. "I took stacks of cards from this machine and put them into that machine..."

IBM's defense is that they were mostly separated from the German subsidiary during this period, but there were links and an important corporate focus after the war was recovering as much of the assets as possible. At least that's how I remember the book after some years.

It's because you're planning on shifting work to anyone that survives. This is a little less than 10% of their corporate staff which is batshit when you think about it but there it is.

I don't know how this is going to work for Amazon because I've known people that do and they work them like dogs to the point where they're already all doing 996. I don't see how you can get any more productivity out of them to make up for the people you're about to fire and I do not believe for a instant that they are just filled with people doing nothing that could be laid off .

There's going to be some engineers they were keeping around to keep them out of the hands of competitors and there aren't really any competitors left so they don't need to worry about that.

But I'm left wondering if they're either going to have major outages and major disasters or if some of these are going to turn into rehires or outsourcing

The reason you haven't felt the worst of the tariffs and the worst of that national sales tax is company's stocked up before Trump's taxes went into effect.

Those stocks are now depleted and they are gradually shifting those costs on to you. They have already said repeatedly in various news articles that they intend to do it slowly so as to not create price shock.

Basically it's boiling a frog only the frog is smart enough to jump out of the hot water. We're getting boiled alive because half of us are too busy freaking out over trans girls playing field hockey in the Midwest and the other half somehow inexplicably believe that the Republican party is better for the economy despite their entire lives directly witnessing the opposite.

Was guaranteed to put us into a recession and that means Mass layoffs.

But mostly Trump's tariffs.

I mean that. We have pretty solid numbers that without Trump's tariffs inflation would be 2%. At 2% inflation we would be getting rapid cuts to interest rates that would create a boom in the economy. Meanwhile Trump has pulled back tens of billions of dollars of funding from Congress that he is illegally withholding from States and he has chased away about 60 billion dollars in tourist dollars with his ice thugs.

I know people don't like hearing it but Donald Trump really is destroying the economy and you are going to start feeling it soon. We are up to a 93% chance of recession.

If you are retired he is also heavily deregulated Wall Street and the systems that prevent your savings from being looted and he is in the process of eliminating the Medicare Gap programs that you use to pay for your health care so that you can enjoy socialized medicine and escape the real American healthcare system.

People have not really realized just how much fucking damage Donald Trump is doing and the heritage foundation who are behind all of this shit.

The thing I think people don't understand is that economies are large and it can take a while for the damage to filter down across the whole system. Plus we here have mostly been pretty well off and done pretty well compared to the rest of the country.

But you cannot break as many fundamental systems as Trump without it affecting basically everyone except the very very wealthy. If you have less than 100 million dollars in your bank account then you are not untouchable.

There's a little bit of jobs of course mixed into that 30k which will be replaced by AI albeit probably very poorly.

But the majority of this is the recession that instituting a national sales tax while putting crooks and thieves in charge of everything was inevitably going to cause.

Oh Jesus fuck look at me I'm explaining. And as we all know from Saint Reagan if you're explaining, you're losing.

While also holding on to that sweet sweet 30% cut they get of every single software and DLC sale.

Basically they want what valve has but they don't want to be valve. They don't for example want to create a user and developer friendly platform run by a guy that everybody trusts not to stab them in the back.

So basically the next Xbox is going to probably cost at least $700 or $800 maybe more. Because Microsoft doesn't want to lose money or even break even on the hardware.

But they are counting on people not being able to figure out how to install steam. Which might work with a lot of console gamers.

As for me the reason I am a PC gamer is that I get good value from the hardware. I can do all my PC stuff and I spend about $400 every 5 years on a new CPU motherboard and RAM and about,... Well it used to be about $100 on a new GPU every two and a half to three years but that's out the window.

The crazy cost of modern video cards is what's changing my calculus. At a minimum I've got to spend $400 to get something worth upgrading from my ancient GTX 1080. Which itself was bought used for $150.

So I'm looking at about $1,000 every 5 years to play games on my computer now. Microsoft has to beat that price at a minimum.

There is one hard part Microsoft is going to have which is if they go full PC they lose the ability to write to bare metal which they do periodically and even for the people who don't they lose the really really advanced automatic resolution scaling that the consoles have.

Both the Xbox and the PlayStation will dynamically scale the resolution whereas with PC you usually have to set a hard resolution scale option.

PC cards have this with dlss and FRS but they don't seem to work as well as on the consoles. Not entirely sure why but it's how the PS5 and the xbone have been able to stay competitive even though they're running what's basically a GTX 2080.

We will have to see. There's also the possibility that Microsoft will still slightly subsidize the hardware or that they might get a better deal from AMD then I can buying my own GPU.

I know the 8060 looks pretty impressive but AMD only puts it on super high-end hardware meant for AI workstations so it's kind of pointless because you've got something that has 4060 to 4070 level performance but comes on a $2,000 desktop or a 2500 laptop and at that point I can buy something with a 5060 or even a 5070 that's going to run rings around it.

And finally the question is will the bootloader on Microsoft's hardware be unlocked so I can install Linux if I want to. I'm too lazy to do it right now but when does 11 sucks so hard that I would be tempted. I'm still on Windows 10

It also ignores that moving pictures are not the same as still pictures. When images are moving, you don't see each frame as clearly, so you can get away with lower resolution, and with a moving image, you can actually perceive far more resolution than the actual pixel resolution of each individual image, because things in the real world don't line up perfectly with grid lines on consecutive frames.

So with moving images, you would expect to perceive higher resolution above a certain point as a reduction in eyestrain and other physiological effects, rather than directly as conscious perception.

So they were kind of right I think if you had ideal circumstances. I had a VHS copy of Jurassic Park that was just amazing to watch the first two times. But it pretty quickly degraded and by the fourth watch you could noticeably see a loss of quality.

Early DVDs tended to be single-sided because they were expensive so they would heavily compress the video and it wouldn't come out all that much better. This was especially bad for anime where they would take a series that really should have been put out on 13 discs for two episodes per disc and then compress it down to five or six discs of a 26 episode series. Evangelion famously was one of the worst of the bunch and if you bought pirated DVDs you would get high quality Japanese rips that looked infinitely better.

Blu-ray changed that because you've got at least 25 gigs on a disk. Also by the time Blu-ray was out compression software had improved substantially.

I've got a couple of anime blu-rays they're on 2, 25 gig discs and they look fantastic because it's the equivalent of 11 single-sided DVDs and they were compressed with much higher quality software.

I guess what I'm saying is that under ideal circumstances hd wasn't that big of a jump but in the real world switching to it had huge practical consequences that resulted much much better quality.

The only company making software that could play them has exited the market because it was too difficult to implement the DRM the industry mandates. If you have a standalone player you literally have to hook it to the Internet so it can phone home and make sure you're not a filthy pirate every time you watch your movie.

Meanwhile the quality of 4K blu-rays has gone to shit because instead of doing skillful remasters they're running them through AI. It's one of the cases where if you used to do that work you lost your job for sure but you definitely shouldn't have. Meanwhile again if you're a consumer you're paying a premium for that 4K Blu-ray.

One of the grindhouse producers has a couple of goofy old movies I would like to buy but they only put them out on 4K and I'm not going to go to the trouble of tracking down a 4K player and paying an extra 20 bucks for the privilege for a goofy old movie that is not going to look great running at 4K because it wouldn't even look great running at 1080p...

The TV industry made a crazy amount of money during the switch to HD and they have been trying to replicate that for the last 20 years. It's frustrating because it makes it so much harder as a consumer for no particularly good reason.

And the replacement rate is 2.1 then if you just fix the economy then your population would start growing again.

The point I'm making is that the actual replacement rate appears to be closer to 2.7 based on real-world numbers and the speed at which population decline is happening.

If you Google 2.7 birth rate you will find articles describing it with links to the studies about it.

The 2.7 number isn't something I pulled out of my ass it's the only thing that explains the data.

So right now the premise is that if we just fix the economic issues population growth will continue but it looks like that's not the case.

If you want rapid population growth it looks like you need modern civilization without modern societies. You need women who don't have rights, or the ability to hold their own jobs or have bank accounts but you also need advanced medical Care and sanitation so those women don't die in pregnancy.

We had that for about 80 years and that's where the rapid population growth came from. I just don't think that you can sustain that. You are either going to get social improvements that grant women rights so they can choose when to have kids or you're going to have a breakdown in Civilization that takes away medical Care and sanitation and you go back to women dying in childbirth unable to breed more children.

I don't think the billionaires care because they are planning on replacing us with AI and robots and automation in general but there are still some policy makers who care

Social media may suck, but this issue predates social media and I seriously doubt it was exacerbated by it. It's always about money. Our fertility rate was high when people could afford homes to raise kids in. Our fertility rate was high when it was easy enough to provide for a family on one income. Those are the 2 factors that are killing fertility rate in the advanced world.

1. Education. College is now mandatory for most to enter the middle class and many occupations expect advanced degrees. If you don't get your first real job until you're 26...yeah, that drastically reduces your chance of having kids.

2. Costs. OK, now you need to be REALLY FUCKING WEALTHY to buy your first home or merely to live alone in a place big enough to start a family. This goes back to issue #1. OK...I can't afford a decent home with a HS diploma, so I get a BA...which again...I can now afford my own apt, but it's too small and cramped for me to start a family...so I go get an advanced degree so I can give my kids the life I had growing up...so...yeah....now you're starting families in your 30s and not your 20s. Additionally, long ago, you could raise a family with one income. Now...you really can't, so the mom has to work...if the mom can devote all her attention to it, the family will likely have more kids. If she's either juggling work and kids or taking off and watching the saving drain...yeah, they're less likely to have a large family.

And it's just common sense...the longer you wait to start, the greater the chance of divorce. LOTS of couples get divorced between age 32 and 38...that's when the person who was wonderful at age 22 either fails to grow into the 32yo you need them to be or becomes a total piece of shit...or you're the total POS and your partner outgrows you...

Additionally, it's a lot harder for most to start families in your 30s than 20s. While I come from trashy stock and there's no such thing as a planned pregnancy in my extended family...many in my cohort needed medical help to conceive. Miscarriages are more common with paternal age as are birth defects. Few have a kid with Down's Syndrome or a nearly fatal heart defect and say "let's have 3 more!"

Fewer people have kids due to our economic and educational pressures.

Those that do?...they start later and thus have fewer...

It's been well studied. You can't really incentivize couples to start families. The most effective route is to fund people who start their families to encourage them to have more kids. If a couple is happy childless, there's no sum the gov can afford to make them want kids.

However, for people like me, who have 2 kids, but can't afford a 3rd...well...we might have considered it if we could get cheaper childcare and afford a bigger house.

I live in the liberal belly of the beast among many pink-haired obese genderqueer manhaters...they weren't "turned". They were broken to begin with and use men as an excuse. Any woman who uses the work feminist far too often in conversation is using men as an excuse. I know these women. I am around them. I have many women in my life whose identity revolves around feminism. They have many issues in their life more fundamental than the patriarchy. In fact, I can't remember the last time I heard "patriarchy" used correctly in a personal conversation.

Nearly every "feminist" I know is some white woman who grew up in an upper middle class home, had a loving father, and failed to live up to their personal expectations and ambitions...usually a liberal arts major. She's married to a nice guy who is a good provider and who puts up with her bullshit and does far more than he should in the relationship (childcare/housework/etc).

They weren't turned. Propaganda didn't make them hate men. Their fundamental issues make them hate...if it wasn't the patriarchy, it would be something else.

They're not holding back fertility rates. Their childbearing participation seems completely independent from politics. It's always about economics. If they're hardcore, they're probably broken and would fail at any relationship...if they're just the standard tedious upper middle class affluent women who need something to complain about, well, they have kids at the exact same time their economic/education cohort has them.

The REAL headline and buried lede for the original post should be:

Trump guts nuclear safety regulations

“The president signed a pair of orders on Friday aimed at streamlining the licensing and construction of nuclear power plants — while panning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its ‘myopic’ radiation safety standards.”

We now have industry capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Who here knows about Admiral Hyman RIckover? All of this is worth reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_record

Seriously look it up.

China and India both have the same birthright problems as all the other countries that you are grouping under Western Civilization.

The idea of Western Civilization is something that was come up with by white supremacists. It was necessary to group groups of people with fair skin into a single banner of Western Civilization because there aren't enough fair skinned people to put up against darker skinned people in an utterly pointless race war that white supremacists use to maintain their power and prestige...

In the real world until it was politically and economically useful to do so the Irish and the Italians and the French and the Russians and the fair skinned Spaniards all hated each other, thought of themselves as completely separate from everyone else and would cheerfully engage in various forms of the exact same kind of pointless racism only using national borders instead of skin color.

I say this because the phrase Western Civilization is constraining your thinking.

If you want the best example of the pointlessness of grouping things by what is more or less skin color go watch the end of blazing saddles with the line about being okay with the n-word but not with the Irish.

Now to answer your inevitable question, why did European countries come up with gunpowder and industrialization and colonization and all that other fun stuff first, it's basically a happy accident of where certain trees grew that let them build big big ships that could be used to move large armies and large groups of people combined with land that could grow enough food to feed those people.

There's a hell of a lot more to it than that of course but a huge part of it was just happy accidents of geography.

Anyway you want to watch out for the phrase Western Civilization especially right now because like I said it's being used by white supremacists and nationalists and they want to rob you blind using old tricks.

Are You Scared Yet?

I would be.

The Department of Energy is selling off more than 40,000 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the Cold War arsenal to nuclear reactor startups. All of which I’m sure will be thoroughly vetted and monitored, because this is done under the direction of a former board member. Yikes!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Wright

Who IS Oklo, Inc. the "private nuclear reactor builder/operator"? Oklo is Sam Altman:

Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman

We're in territory where weapons-grade plutonium is being given at fire-sale prices to billionaires who's ethical boundaries include creating their own demand for otherwise unnecessary, high-risk energy projects. Guys like Altman, who get their ideas from Wikipedia articles about Ayn Rand — because they are one rung lower than people who actually READ that garbage.

But I'm sure no inventory of hot nuke metal will ever go missing.