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.

Yeah, and when that bubble pops in a few months customers will look at them side-eyed.

We can't have those because they wanted to sell chicken meat to Germany after WWII.

No, really, Fat Electrician has a good video on it.

(our government is just a loony bin now)

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.

I'm not so sure there have even been enough incidents to decide if Waymos are more or less likely to run over an animal, but I *STRENUOUSLY* object to trying to soften it with 'made contact with' in the press release.

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.

First Street very likely doesn't have some magic model that can predict the future better than anyone else.

When you get a mortgage you have to pay for a flood survey. Even my house 700' above the village where the bank is.

Your flood risk is absolutely predicted by the flood history of your location. The bank writing the mortgage has the skin in the game which is why they make the buyer pay for the flood survey.

It sounds like First Street might be liable for damages based on pseudoscience if these Realtors bring a case. It would be interesting to see them present solid evidence that they prospectively beat the existing flood models and survive a cross-examination.

If they've published a peer-reviewed paper then I missed it.

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