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Comment Re: Go BRICS! (Score 4, Informative) 128

It does, but there's a slight issue with that. In terms of the world's largest economies by GDP the BRICS countries rate as:

#2: China
#4: India
#10: Brazil
#11: Russia (sanctions not withstanding)
#17: Indonesia
#28: United Arab Emirates
#38 South Africa
#42: Egypt
#44: Iran (again, despite the sanctions)
#66: Ethiopia

Now it's not like these countries are doing absolutely nothing to mitigate things, but it would be really interesting to see some numbers on exactly how much of a proportionate contribution they are making to "fund mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in poorer nations" when even lowly Ethiopia still has over 130 poorer nations to choose from.

Comment Re:Time to resurrect the old meme... (Score 1) 249

Unofficially, it's already done. It used to be that if you were going to somewhere with a weak and mostly cash-based economy you took the bulk of your cash in USD and the rest in the local currency. For quite some time now retailers in such economies have been just as likely to take Euros or Sterling as they were USD when they are after some hard currency, and on my last couple of trips I've actually been asked for Euros or Sterling in preference to USD. My local contact for my upcoming trip to the Far East has advised me to forget the USD and just bring Sterling or Euros because I'll get a much better exchange rate.

When the hawkers on the street and small store owners don't want USD any more, it's just a matter of time before that sentiment climbs up the ladder to larger retailers, and eventually to governments.

Comment Re:Trump Destroying Dollar's Global Sentiment (Score 1) 249

but the tradeoff they are making for us is that everything we import could cost as much as 3X more than it did before they destroyed the value of the dollar.

Before or after you add on the tariffs? Don't forget those are on the sticker price and paid in USD, so if something costs you 3x as many dollars then you'll also need to pay 3x as much in tariffs on top as well (assuming the tariff rate doesn't change again, of course). Even at Trump's base tariff rate of 10%, that would mean something that would previously have cost $100 to get shipped to your door from AliExpress or wherever now costing $300, plus a further $30 in import taxes.

I think there would be a red line when one US Dollar no longer gets you more than one Canadian Dollar, but who knows with all the crazy at the moment? Some people probably won't think it's a problem even when it no longer gets you one Mexican Peso...

Comment Re:Foxconn is Taiwanese (Score 3, Insightful) 39

More likely they're afraid of the wheel turning again. This is how the process starts; a new factory gets spun up to take advantage of cheaper labour in another country. That leads to a general increase in skills in that country and, before you know it, a dozen copycat faciliites have been spun up based on your techniques and you've been cut out of the market.

Right now, both China and Taiwan, as well as several other countries in SE Asia, are seeing India's massive source of potential cheap labour as an existential threat to a core part of their economies, and while they are, in many cases, at least someone allied politically with each other, they're all still very much trying to stamp on the fingers on the rungs of the ladder just below them.

Comment Re:I can see... (Score 5, Insightful) 102

Only it'll be worse, because the value of the "assets" that have secured all those mortgages they sold the risk on as derivatives will almost certainly go into freefall along with everything else when the bubble pops.

"So, Mr. Jones, you secured your mortgage you're struggling to repay with £1m of... ah, crypto. And what are those holdings worth now? $500k you say? Well, if you'll just vacate the premises and hand over your house keys, I'm sure we can sort all that out to minimise our losses as far as possible. I hear there are some nice bridges and stuff to live under not too far from your neighbourhood. Next!"

Comment Re:Thats weird and hilarious (Score 2) 42

I remember the old "Windows ain't done until Lotus won't run!" schtick. I wouldn't surprise me at all if the "faulty" code originated with the Edge team to help encourage adoption of their version of the Chromium user tracking software over Google's version, and through doing so nudge a few more people into using Bing and Copilot instead of Google Search and Gemini for even more tracking.

Comment Re: Six terabytes (Score 4, Informative) 41

Think of an iceskater pirouetting on the rink with their arms stretched out. If they pull their arms in, they start to spin faster, thereby conserving angular momentum, but they don't gain any additional mass from doing so. More massive blackholes with a faster spin have just consumed more matter to get to that state, but it hasn't fundamentally changed the overall mass of the galaxy they are in.

Comment Re:Status quo has changed (Score 1) 43

It was, and is. But there's another factor to this. Look at the figures for Google (which is also doing AI) vs. those for Anthropic.

Google is still mostly an ad-provision driven business, and it is fuelling that business on a relatively low volume of content scraping to actual eyeballs visiting the site and viewing the ads it providing. The cost of providing the data to Google's craweler is, one would hope, largely recovered in the ad revenue generated and other financial benefits from those actually visiting the site (subscriptions, purchases, tips, whatever). In otherwords, they have a viable business model and will survive to provide content to those that want it another day.

Now look at the other extreme in the provided figures with Anthropic. The site gets *nothing* back from Anthropic, quite the opposite in fact since Anthropic is harvesting their content and using it to train their AI engine, any issues around copyright be damned, but is paying for the hosting costs and the quite insane levels of crawling Anthropic is doing. I mean, seriously, WTF is Anthropic doing to need that level of crawling? That's just out of the park and looks very much like a script that is running completely without any throttles even though it's just pulling the exact same content down over and over and over again, which does not give me much confidence in the quality or competence of their developers. For the website though, it's going to completely skew their hosting costs - they had a business model with Google's ratio of 2:1, maybe even at 18:1, but at 60,000:1? That's an increase in an overhead by a factor of 30,000, which is going to break a lot of business models, and potentially they could also be paying Anthropic to help generate some of their content, thereby making their problem even worse... That very likely means more paywalls, more deliberate attempts to poison AI-scraped data, and - of course - lawsuits.

Unless the AI bubble pops soon, I fear that there's only one way this is going to end, and that is with the Internet completely overwhelmed with AI-generated slop, many of the smaller content producers and hosters that can't adapt quickly enough having folded, and any remaining residual content with value that people might actually want to see locked away behind paywalls and other login protections. Maybe it's time for written media to have its "vinyl" moment; Anthropic et al's crawlers are not going to do too well with a printed book...

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