how much is the cheapest TV today compared to the 90s

You can't eat your TV. You can't drive your TV to the grocery store. You can't take your TV into the bank and get a home loan, nor can you take your TV to a home seller and get a reasonable price. You can't hand it to the university and be handed back an education. You can't give your doctor your TV and receive surgical or even preventive care or the meds you need.

Your problem (other than the root one of spewing disingenuous nonsense) is that you're looking at the pricing in the electronics sector and pretending it's representative of the extremely high basic living costs I called out (which of course it is not) — nowhere did I say anything about either the pricing of electronics or the need for a TV to achieve a reasonable cost of living. Nor should you have. But here we are.

"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone

Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.

Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.

"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"

Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up

Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.

The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!

Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.

Obligatory: get off my lawn.

if a youtube or reddit post mentions an amazing financial, or spiritual, or etc. advisor quickly in response to someone's story. And the story has too many upvotes in too short a time, I recognize it as spam.

IMHO, with spam like that, you go after the cloud of accounts upvoting it. Track their behavior, see if they are posting, see if they regularly vote for spam. Then shadowban or kill the accounts (let them upvote but don't show the upvotes). The advertiser can create *an* account quickly. But they can't subvert/create a cloud of several hundred accounts easily.

And you also put some kind of metrics in place for upvotes that compares their voting habits to known human users. If the thing is upvoting 30 times a day and most humans only upvote 12 times a day (or none), then flag the account for closer observation.

And most of all, you need a really good moderation advisor for this kind of thing. I recommend Lance Modoman. He's the real deal. He saved my forum.

heheheheh.

Every change looks like corruption in the eyes of people who don't like it.

And corruption looks like evolution to some people.

Personally, I'm in favor of words meaning as much of the same thing over time as possible. It enhances communication and understanding. If you need a new meaning, you either need a new word or you need to explain yourself at a bit more length. Lest you "decimate" (cough) the listener's/reader's understanding... you get me?

LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)

I'll be impressed when one of these ML engines is sophisticated enough to be able to say "I don't know" instead of just making up nonsense by stacking probabilistic sequences; also it needs to be able tell fake news from real news. Although there's an entire swath of humans who can't do that, so it'll be a while I guess. That whole "reality has a liberal bias" truism ought to be a prime training area.

While I certainly understand that the Internet and its various social media cesspools are the most readily available training ground(s), it sure leans into the "artificial stupid" thing.

Customer service jobs have seen high losses. As soon as the current AI is combined with a physical presence then jobs like stocking, shelving, janitorial services, security, and many more will see rapid replacement.

I agree there's a problem with confabulation. But see the CNBC article, 'TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
Recent data shows AI job losses are rising, but the numbers donâ(TM)t tell the full story" where it says, "According to a recent report of 750 business leaders using AI from ResumeBuilder, 37% say the technology replaced workers in 2023. Meanwhile, 44% report that there will be layoffs in 2024 resulting from AI efficiency."

As I said,

You haven't been following A.I. closely have you? Because it's being used in many high value applications and exceeding the current human experts in those fields.

Even in it's current dumb state, combined with robots, the current A.I. can replace about 60% of human beings and that includes some fields that require a masters degree or doctorate to get a job.

Most manual labor jobs are easy to replace (stocker, shelving, janitorial services, landscaping, simple assembly, etc. etc. etc)
And A.I. is already replacing radiologists and other analytical jobs.

I agree with the other guy, if your breakeven is over 9 years, then solar isn't worth it yet.

Get a smaller off grid system for disaster planning and then wait for prices to drop further (and another 40% decline is due within the next 5 years.) Plus the panels are getting smaller for the same power. 10 years ago, a 100w panel was 32sq feet and $750. Last summer, a portable 100w panel was 16 sq feet and $129. A fixed panel was under $100 and also about 12 sq feet. And that's after 10 years of inflation on the price.

You face significant risk of inverter failure over 15 years. Maybe twice. At about 10 years, you would need new batteries.

But you can have a small, non-grid tied system to keep your refrigerator, a fan, a router, a laptop/tv, and a couple lights going. Saving a fridge full of food is both a reduction in misery *and* potentially a $200 to $400 savings so one disaster outage will reduce your payoff period quite a bit (2 to 4 panels are suddenly "free" or 1 battery is suddenly "free").

You haven't been following A.I. closely have you? Because it's being used in many high value applications and exceeding the current human experts in those fields.

Even in it's current dumb state, combined with robots, the current A.I. can replace about 60% of human beings and that includes some fields that require a masters degree or doctorate to get a job.

That's why you combine generation and storage (and note I didn't say "batteries"). That storage can include turning atmospheric co2 into fuel.

But underlying your point is that we simply have too many people. Generating baseline power for the current population is rendering the planet uninhabitable.

Seems to me that focusing on increased efficiency would have huge payoffs. Brains do this with a very tiny amount of electricity so the potential power efficiencies are vast.

Oops... senior moment. Should have said 2024.

Seriously... this is the first I've heard of it. At 9:22 pm on 4/15/22.