Comment Re:McKinsey ? (Score 1) 107
In the eternal words of a German comedian: Consultants are a lot like eunuchs. They know how it's done...
In the eternal words of a German comedian: Consultants are a lot like eunuchs. They know how it's done...
can we replace CEOs with ChatGPT please?
Sure. But it won't happen, if companies wanted to replace CEOs, they could have done so ages ago.
The Magic-8-ball was invented in 1946.
Rejoice, believers, we are heading into a productivity boom! Preach the prosperity gospel of how more productivity means we're better off!
Are we?
What good is a good that I cannot have?
The irony here is that we're working hard on failing for the exact opposite reason of why communism failed eventually: We will have the goods that people crave. But people will not have the means to buy them. Our economy will not collapse because of a lack of supply, we will break down under a lack of demand. Because if you concentrate the means to consume in a few grubby, greedy hands, you will notice that this will not produce a demand that a strong economy needs to prosper.
Back in the good old days of kings and queens and an aristocracy that pointed to god instead of their bank account when asked who died and made them king, it was no problem that they alone could live in splendor while the plebs plodded along somehow (or just died of dysentery) because the economy was based on subsistence. There wasn't any relevant "surplus", in general you could consider yourself lucky if you managed to produce what was needed. There was no need for a strong demand side. If anything, that would have caused a situation similar to what happened in the East Bloc in the late 1980s: A lot of people who have money and then realize that this money is no good because they don't get jack for it.
We don't live in a subsistence economy, though. Our economy depends on a strong demand to survive. We already produce a surplus of goods that we cannot sell, not because the products wouldn't satisfy the wants of the consumers (again, one of the reasons the communist systems failed, they produced crap nobody wanted) but because too few of these consumers would have the means to satisfy that want and create the demand our economy needs.
So don't rejoice over a productivity boom. If anything, it will create a very pissed population that sees how things will go to waste that they'd need and cannot have. Imagine a starving person watching you dump food (or dump bleach on the food you trash to spite them), just instead of three hobos gritting their teeth in front of your local megastore, you're looking at 30+% of your population.
Which is armed.
It didn't. It should, but it didn't.
In what we call "developed" countries, famines were a past already half a century ago. Yes, until then, that equation held true: More productivity meant more food, more food means more people don't starve. That was for a very long time a critical factor in our economy. It hasn't been for more than half a century now.
What can be said, though, is that certain foods kept their price despite inflation. The price of sugar for example barely moved since the 1970s, at the very least not even remotely at the same pace as inflation. Beef on the other hand got five times as expensive since the 1990s alone.
We don't have a problem keeping our stomachs filled. Yes. With what... well, that's an entirely different matter.
And by the way, food isn't even remotely a relevant factor in today's everyman's budget anymore. Yes, we used to spend more of our money on food than we do today. But we also spent way, way less on shelter.
Apple already knows the EU is going this way.
Apple is probably already close to leaving the EU, since the financial risk of staying there is too great.
A higher minimum wage in a number of states will usher in many uses of robots to take over lots of jobs, and more robots doing jobs like that means more robots being able to move into other jobs more quickly.
Get better employers, or negotiate better. I have an annual training budget at my disposal.
Go read the comment so you can see what it actually said, Internet brave fuck.
Learn to read, son. Nobody agrees with you. We all think you're a dumbass.
AI needs interconnections.
Starlink exists, for locations that cannot be tied back to the primary internet connections of the area.
Also this is more about future profitability than current, assuming projected power needs for AI are correct. At some point it could easily be profitable.
This seems like a pretty good use of otherwise wasted power....
However I wonder if any some point, it would actually be more profitable to use that energy to power compute for other things - possibly AI farms.
Ahh, that Romney bullshit again.
100% of working Americans pay federal income tax. There's a 15.3% federal income tax that starts at the first earned dollar, they hide half of it from you by taxing it before you ever get the check. Then there's the 10% tax bracket that starts after the $13,850 standard deduction, most Americans make more than that.
The only people who pay no federal income tax are the wealthy, because they can hide their income, and when they are taxed on it, it's usually capital gains that are only taxed at 20%.
US taxes are a mess. We really need to bring back the 90% tax bracket and tax capital gains the same as any other income.
Oh, and with the prevalence of 'gig' work now, LOTS of Americans are filing a schedule C.
That's pretty much what we've been doing for a couple decades.
Now kindly piss off.
Russia has already lost. They have spent all of their modern equipment and have to field WWII-era tanks without reactive armor. They have spent most of their regulars and have to send convict conscripts to fight. NATO has never been stronger, or more firmly committed to containment. China is going to wind up owning Russia because Putler is too committed to cut his losses, withdraw, and focus on rebuilding forces. And the rest of us will suffer for it.
It tends to be worse in rural areas. The specialists don't exist at all, the primary care doctors are overloaded, and the hospitals (especially in states that didn't expand Medicaid) are closing.
I've got "good" insurance, but it's a limited network as of last year, so I had to find some new doctors. If I'm out of town, the only thing it covers is emergencies and telemedicine.
And... yeah, it's insane that your eyes and teeth aren't considered worthy of care without separate insurance that is never very good and rarely covers much.
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.