California does not have a history of major budget deficits. It has a major deficit this year, but has had recent surpluses. Over 25 years it is close to balanced most years and about as likely to be in surplus as deficit. This year is an anomaly - not a pattern. Look at the data.
All of this is maintenance that should have been done but has been put off.
Grid maintenance is done regularly. There is a very close link between the grid and power generating companies that sell power -- much closer than the link between any commercial user of highways for example. Decades of deferred maintenance does not happen on power grids since that would prevent the generating companies from selling power. They invest, and see to it that there is investment.
EVEN IF all of the power lines in CA were upgraded, we still don't have enough power generation to charge a quarter of the proposed amount of EV's.
Maybe you should read the study. It obliterates your fake statistics.
Electricity grids require an maintenance investment of about 2.5% a year -- you effectively replace the grid every 40 years. If the spending is tripled during the build-out, then 1/3 of that is the grid maintenance cost that would be present anyway. After the EV build-out finishes the cost would be 2.5% of a ~50% larger grid.
The headline was the most extravagant sounding aspect of the report "cost up to 20 billion dollars!" instead of highlighting the conclusion "electricity costs will remain stable".
There will be no EV apocalypse.
BTW from 1960 to 1980 electricity demand increased 5% every year - a similar period of rapid grid expansion. And the major driver for that were air conditioners which were rare before 1960, but all but universal by 1980 -- everyone who wanted them had them. And electricity demand when flat in 1980 and stayed flat for decades after. We have seen this scenario before.
Perhaps, but they can do that with just junk updates.
That's what did in my iPhone 6s last year after 7 years. It started to run down from full charge in 2 hours without doing anything, and getting quite hot in the process. Battery was still at 83% it was just the the software was now eating power for no reason, with no practical way to stop it.
The solution will most likely need to be nuclear fission or fusion. The current thought of covering the planet in [expensive and life-limited] solar panels and windmills and using tons of low-life batteries isn't going to cut it.
Fortunately no one is building your strawman renewable systems. Those "expensive" solar panels provide energy at much lower cost than nuclear power even including the planned panel replacement rate of 3-4% a year (you know that all electricity infrastructure requires investment at about this level to maintain do you not?). Inserting the word "expensive" in front of solar does not make it expensive, it only makes what you write silly. Also, the actual leading contender for large scale energy storage when solar becomes a large enough part of the total grid for this to be necessary is producing chemical fuel from electricity, like hydrogen, to be burned in gas turbines.
It is astonishing to see people here trotting out the claim of solar being an expensive source of power a decade after it became cheaper than nuclear, coal and natural gas.
The problem with this theory is that the Carrington filter isn't really a filter at all.
A recurrence of the Carrington Event would be an extremely expensive set back for contemporary civilization. Heck it might knock out technical capabilities back a few decades. But that is all. We would still know all that we know, have all of the technologies that we have developed, and would rebuild the systems that were damaged or destroyed, faster than it took to build them in the first place. And after an actual Carrington Event the vast amount of data on how our systems failed would permit us to build in safeguards, including hardened (and much more expensive) satellites. So, no, there is no Carrington filter that wipes out all technological civilization.
If you have some insight into (checks notes) "Jedis" then write a summary of that insight here and not just try to create traffic to your video. If you have something to say, say it here, in writing. A "watch my video to make my point" always gets a hard no from me. Minutes of my life I never get back and all that.
I read the article just to see how it addresses this obvious objection, but it does not.
Almost everywhere in the article, you could replace the role of AI with nuclear weapons - it's basically just "what if technological development leads inevitably to self-annihilation." (And for now, nuclear weapons are a much stronger contender for this role than AI).
Right you are. You can get a publication out of a monocausal theory to explain the Fermi Paradox, so every time a real or (in this case) supposed danger of technology comes up it gets proposed as the explanation of the Fermi Paradox, all of which fail to understand Fermi's original insight.
To explain the apparent absence of extraterrestrial intelligence, under the assumption that the evolution of species similar in abilities to humans is common in the Milky Way, these "explanations" have to apply to every such species. This is what makes the Fermi Paradox a paradox. There cannot be a single one that escapes the supposed filter or otherwise it would fill the galaxy in a cosmically and geological brief time, even if you use a very slow model of the spread. Why would some particular filter happen to every species everywhere? The notion that every species would have a nuclear war that wipes it out, or creates "grey goo" nanotech, or is destroyed by super AI - and that does not itself become a space faring civilization - as if it was a physical law that cannot be escaped (like the speed of light limit) is not really a theory, it is a science fiction story premise. It would rise to the level of a theory if they could show a plausible reason why it would be universal, but no one pedalling these papers attempts to do that, most likely because they can't.
Then there is a trope that gets repeated when this subject comes up that we have only "one data point of evidence" bearing on this subject -- which sounds like a wise observation... until you think about it carefully. In terms of the development of human-like intelligence we have had an astronomical number of experiments conducted by evolution with animals here on Earth over the last 400 million years. Whether you use the number of separate animal-years, or animal-species-years, or number total number of animal species that have ever existed, and even if you throw out all the insect species, you still end up with an astronomical number of data points where human-style intelligence never developed. And if you take a "micro-look" just at the mammal lineages that finally led to humans there is no evident tendency to develop human-type intelligence. Our closest living relative species (the other Great Apes) developed dexterity, social organization, and intelligence similar to early Homo several million years ago and have shown no tendency to develop further toward Homo capabilities. Even with Homo what we suspect from the fossil evidence is that a peculiar combination of environmental events cause an abrupt progression to having much larger forebrains and the development of language and symbolic thought -- no indication of inevitability can be seen.
This evidence suggests that human style intelligence is a very low probability event, something that is astronomically rare. And at the same time the fact that we can now study a large number of exo-planet systems (over 4000 systems confirmed to date) has given us hard data to estimate how frequently Earth-like planets really are. The developing science here suggests that we are a "rare Earth" indeed. The combination of planet system configuration (with a single large Jupiter) and early large Moon formation, in the Goldilocks zone around a non-flaring single star is very uncommon -- thus far we do not have a single candidate system that matches the minimum requirements, which does not even include the improbable Moon filter. So Earth-like planets are rare, and human-like species are incredibly unlikely even when one occurs, starts making the case that the expected number of planets with civilizations is itself a very small number.
You show yourself entirely out of your depth. We cannot currently simulate the behavior of a single natural neuron. The extremely simple functions that create chatbots by scraping and assigning weights to the words of a billion people have only a very remote relationship to the behavior of even the simplest natural neural systems.
flying car.
That runs on water.. But, hey, he has GPUs to sell so anything goes. Its not like he will have to pay a penalty in five years when no AGI shows up, but he will have pocketed money from the hype.
Currently we are making no measurable progress toward AGI, so there is nothing to extrapolate from to say when of if it will ever appear, much less in five years.
We have the existence proof of biological systems that it is possible, and good reason to think that we can eventually replicate the functionality of natural biological systems closely enough to create a synthetic equivalent. So there very good reason to believe it will eventually be done, but we are still trying to understand what the problems that need to be solved are, we are far from coming up with any solutions to them, and have no way to estimate when we might succeed except to say, realistically, enormously more work has to be done than has been done to date.
The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) was replaced by Solid State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS) because Russia still has ICBMs. The system still emits narrow band, narrow beam, high power radar pulses.
A billionaire's hobby. Nothing much more than that. It teaches us nothing, goes nowhere, and will die with Thiel, or if he gets bored with it.
(Pregnancy always has a cost to the male.)
Often not, and even when it does it is nothing like the cost to the female.
A real lady flashing tits at you might lead to a benefit for you. An AI "girlfriend" can not.
Normally having a real lady do it IS the benefit. That's why you have video sex services. And the real lady can also run a scam equally well - it is unusual that you actually meet such a person in the flesh.
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Not sure how exactly you can make money off of people who feel the need to use "AI girlfriend."
You aren't thinking creatively (or suspiciously) here. Personal information is worth hard cash - how much depends who (and how many) you are willing to sell it to, Consider the kind o personal information a bot posing as a "girlfriend" could collect. First it builds up the sucker, err client, creates a feeling of trust, then starts creating the urge to share more information to "impress" the "girlfriend" and get emotional rewards for doing so. To amp this up provide a hot semi-animated GenAI image, which changes its appearance perhaps to entice the client.
If someone feels the need to have a girlfriend they are ripe for scamming. Lonely hearts scams are the oldest in the book.
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
