I know there are a handful of people who are kind of freaked out at the suggestion that we should put a halt to any new technology. But besides that knee jerk reaction is there anyone who genuinely wants to see these data centers built out?

We could just tell the billionaires no. We would have to take their money away because money is power but we could do that. There's about 8,000 of them. There's 8 billion of us.

We could just tell them no.

That people still don't realize they have a ruling class.

Your Masters want this and they are going to get it.

One of the old bugaboos with the right wing is the idea that you work the first 3 months of the year for the government.

But we know about half of the money in any given country goes straight to the top . 01%.

Nobody ever talks about the 6 months you spend working to pay for Bill gates's yacht.

Meanwhile my tax dollars paid for healthcare for people who couldn't afford it. I had a neighbor who had a kid that was only alive because my tax dollars and everybody else's paid for a surgery they need it. Pretty minor stuff but they'd be dead without it. Single mom with a $15 an hour job no way she could afford even a routine surgery like that.

The people at the top have class consciousness but us working stiffs do not. Down here in the trenches it's every man for himself.

if they win they become God-Kings who's slightest whim is made real to the limits of human civilization.

If they lose they just go to their graves insanely wealthy.

There is a *very* small chance they get thrown out of a window or poisoned by a Stalin or a Mao, but it's very, very unlikely. They have their own private armies to protect them.

It'll be about 3-5 years but more or less.

That's how long analysts think the AI build out will last. It's why nobody is building more capacity.

the reason gas prices have been stable is we keep pushing for more fuel economy keeping demand down. EVs help some too, but the huge push for fuel economy is why the national average is only $3/gallon.

I'm saying that those people aren't going down without a fight, and they'll kill a lot of the people who try to kill them.

When the violence starts we all get dragged into it. Nobody gets to sit back and watch the 'parasites' get taken out to their amusement. It doesn't work like that.

Although about 30-40% of the country seems to think it does.

Since 1980 were taken by automation not outsourcing. Google it.

The Trump administration is heavily pushing even more automation.

His commerce Secretary has already admitted that even if tariffs magically brought the factories back the jobs wouldn't come with them because they would be automated.

We are going to have to do something about this. In the very near future, in the life of most of the people reading this, about a quarter of the population is going to be rendered completely useless. We will not have any useful work they are capable of doing.

We are not going to give them money to sit around playing Xbox and getting drunk on Friday night. Nobody is going to tolerate going to work for 40 to 60 hours a week when somebody else doesn't have to. It won't feel Fair and it will make people very angry.

At the same time we are talking about 30 to 40 million people we just have no use for. It's too many to stick in work camps or to kill.

We are going to have a huge conflict between the people who still need to do work and the people who there is no useful work to do. And there is no magical super job that's going to come along and employ them. Read the history on the two industrial revolutions, we had massive amounts of technological unemployment during both of them that your high school history books glossed over. We had 25% unemployment in the lead up to world war II.

I don't know what the solution is. I think what's going to happen is we're going to have another world war and it's going to go nuclear possibly ending the species. But if there's a third option we better figure it out and fast.

The billionaires have decided we're going to have feudalism and are working on dismantling capitalism so that they know longer depend on consumers and employees for their wealth and prestige and power. They are creating a world where they do not need you to buy their products. So they already have a solution to the problem it's just their solution doesn't include you.

Right off the bat updates are constantly crashing it because Microsoft is using shitty vibe coding to do critical updates and then acting like they can have people just check the code. Any idiot can realize quickly that's not going to work because there's going to be enormous pressure to check the code quickly in order to realize the cost savings from the AI bullshit.

Meanwhile Windows 11 is slower and more crash prone because it's filled with AI spyware designed to let Microsoft train their chatbots and whatnot on everything you do.

It is the most user hostile software in existence but because we don't have any antitrust law enforcement it's all we've got.

I keep seeing people talk about Linux but the fact of the matter is unless and until we start electing politicians that will strictly enforce and to trust law and begin the process of breaking Microsoft up Linux is not going anywhere.

The reason Linux is perpetually stuck at 2 to 3% market share on the desktop is because every time it starts to have a breakout moment Microsoft does a couple of nasty little anticompetitive things that are obviously illegal and that's it.

People have to start deciding what's more important when they go to the polls. And I think people here know how they've been making their voting decisions and what they've been giving up for it.

A Japanese game developer has started making recruits draw in front of them because they had so many people sending in fake AI slop and a few slipped through.

the funny thing, I could see AI being a game changer for Manga. A lot of Manga is simple brute force work adding shading and the like that could be better done in software. Though I don't think you need AI for that, good software could do it.

But a lot of it's still done the old fashioned way, which is a shame because several of my favorite manga ended because the author was so overworked they almost killed themselves...

Then again the publishers could just not take all the money for themselves, that works too. Japan needs more worker protections, but they just elected Trump in a dress so that ain't happening.

but if you kill the dog it's just $100 bucks. Unless it's some kind of special dog.

If the dog lives I think you're right, they might be able to sue google in small claims court to recover damages and would probably win. Though it can be hard to collect on judgements like that.

as it stands Waymo won't even be held responsible for that. Those sorts of penalties are waived for self driving cars in the cities they operate.

They have to be because they commit traffic infractions so often that the cops would be pulling them over and ticketing them constantly.

Rules for thee but not for me.

Last I checked the local government said so. They have indemnified waymo in every market they have launched their taxi service. I don't think that would hold up if they killed a human being, at least not one that isn't homeless, but so far it's held up for the more minor stuff that's happened.

Basically waymo cannot be cited for traffic violations and killing a pet is just a traffic violation. The most they could be held responsible for would be the value of the pet which is usually under $100.

It's that we all know this is a grift and we're all trying to figure out how the grift works.

I can think of a few possible things but I don't have enough of a finance background to really say for sure of what they are up to, but I know damn well that billionaires don't just hand out billions of dollars for the hell of it. There is a reason that Bill Gates is still one of the wealthiest people on the planet despite telling us 20 years ago he was going to give away his fortune.

Billionaires have been lying to us for as long as we've had billionaires, some of us just figured that out

But given this administration's history of corrupting everything they touch it's not something we should get behind from this administration because it's almost guaranteed to turn into some kind of scam that puts money in their pockets.

There is nothing wrong with a sovereign wealth fund per se if your government is relatively uncorrupted. Ours is not, the Trump administration is without a doubt the most corrupt and criminal administration in American history and that is saying a lot.

Simply put you cannot expect good things to come out of this administration even if the underlining ideas are fine. And I don't think that's any kind of exaggeration or partisan bickering. The Trump administration is openly murdering Venezuelan fishermen in the lead up to another war for oil without even the slightest pretexts. That alone should tell you we are in for a bad time. You don't have to be a genius to extrapolate from that data point and the dozens of other data points like the illegal tariffs or the huge bribes like the cryptocurrency or the jet Qatar gave the Trump or the fact that the taxpayer is going to be retro fitting that jet for his use...

If I had to guess, and it's just a guess, I would say that they are positioning themselves to profit from the money put aside for the kids. Probably sitting themselves up to redirect the money being invested in the companies that they own.

The one thing we can be sure of though is that this is a scam and the only question is what are the details of the scam.

You don't become a billionaire by being altruistic. People who genuinely care about society at Large stop accumulating wealth long before they become billionaires. To become a billionaire requires a certain level of sociopathy. There's a reason why the old phrase, never ask a Man how he made his first million, exists. That phrase has been around so long that a million dollars isn't a lot of money anymore but you get the idea.