In addition, the part of that money spent on computer centers will be useful even if AI doesn't pan out. It's not like investing in tulip bulbs. If AI doesn't pan out, it will just take a few years longer to pay for itself.

That said, AI will pan out. Even if there's no further development (HAH!) the current AIs will find an immense number of uses. It may well be "growing too fast", but that's not the same as worthless. (But expect well over half of the AI projects that are adopted in the next few years to fail. People don't yet understand the strengths and weaknesses. Unless, of course, AGI is actually developed. Then all bets are off because we REALLY don't understand what that woud result in.)

It's going to take more than one more efficient algorithm. OTOH, there've already been improvements in more than one algorithm. Nobody knows how far that could go, but the best evidence is that it could get a LOT more efficient. (Consider the power usage of a human brain...it uses a lot of power for an organ, but not really all that much.)

I'm guessing this is a summary:
Banks are legally allowed to loan more money than they have in deposits...to a degree. They've occasionally been found to go well beyond that limit. And they aren't carefully audited often enough.

Whether that's an accurate summary or not, it's true, if a bit shy on details. (I don't know the details this decade. But there probably haven't been any basic changes in the last few decades.)

If a store does this and they give you any guff at all about being let out you pull out your phone, call 911 and report a kidnapping in progress. Because that's what it is. The store's within it's rights to deny you entrance, but to deny you exit they have to have reason to believe you've broken the law in some way. You haven't. Their policy isn't the law. Let the authorities explain this to them.

Yep, the fire code is how you know the story is wrong.

Are they vagrant if they aren't moving around?

Sorry but from an outside perspective that just sounds nuts. So let's take your 'worst case' - $129M overall cost making it $434 per entry - you're saying there are only 297,235 (129M / 434) tax payers in the US? A quick search from me shows the number of filings to be at 145M+. If everyone could file for free, that $129M would be 88c per person.

And I'm speaking from experience. I'm in the UK. I've recently filed my annual self-assessment tax. I used the free service on the UK government web site and the thing that took the longest was working out how much to put as charity donation. Whole thing done in less than an hour and a half.

I seriously cannot comprehend the approach where you have to pay to be able to pay someone. It's...well...it's nuts.

That's a real problem, but it ignores that the labor statistics are manipulated for political ends, so you can't trust them.

It's not at all clear to me that we currently have low unemployment among those who would be seeking jobs if they thought they had a chance. (Once you've been unemployed for a while I believe they stop counting you. Admittedly, it's been over a decade since I looked into that.)

Tesla stock is only up a cumulative 6% from the peak it achieved exactly 4 years ago. That is not even close to keeping up with inflation - 18% over the same time period. So if just getting attention from a market flop is a strategy for driving up the share price, I guess it isn't working very well.

What is this obsession with pedophilia? I'm really getting rather suspicious of MAGA. I suspect your average Catholic priest or Southern Baptist youth pastor thinks about nude children less than most MAGA individuals.

"Oath of Fealty" wasn't a dystopia, it was an attempt at utopia, that wasn't working out all that poorly. Nobody who didn't want to take part was forced to do so. Some people liked it and other people didn't. A few people hated it. The viewpoint character's assessment was (paraphrase)"not all cultures need to be the same".

Yeah, nobody would consider this a story without the "billionaire" buzzword.

When my kids were small many of the wives from her church organized a summer school for all the kids. It was great.

I notice this whole thing is a zoning dispute and nothing else. Probably because the level of education being delivered is exceptional, since why wouldn't it be?

Lots of people want full-sized pickups, unfortunately. The F150 has been one of the top selling vehicles in north america for literal decades, and while it used to be smaller, it's been pretty big for at least 10 years.

But the Lightning is SUPER expensive and a lot of the folks buying full-sized trucks are doing it for the optics. They want to appear tough and rugged, and they can't do that without a loud engine, I guess?

The depreciation on EVs is also astronomical. Pay $100k for a Lightning and it'll be worth $60k next year. There's no point in buying a brand new EV right now.

I agree that people SHOULD want smaller trucks, or—get this—CARS, but the big car companies love their margins. Ford's eliminated every passenger car in their lineup except for the Mustang (even the Mustang Mach-e is classified as an SUV for some reason).

You can make a simple statement like "nobody starves to death in America" and it offends people every time. They'll call you deaf dumb and blind yet they can never say who it is that's starving to death.

There are homeless people wandering around all over the place, they produce nothing, ever, yet somehow food just keeps materializing for them. In fact they hardly resemble truly destitute people actually starving around the world. I'm glad that's how it is here and wouldn't want it any other way but it's strangely difficult for people to "admit."

I think the single biggest reason is because demand for healthcare is basically bottomless and we have a lot of money to throw at it so we do.

I haven't seen any emphasis on this factor but look at the correlation between per capita GDP and per capita healthcare costs:

https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

That is a strong correlation!