None of this money has their name on it. Even if you're a billionaire, you depend on the infrastructure and institutions that make it possible to own thing and spend money. Property ownership in a vacuum is not possible, you have to have a civilization around you to recognize that ownership. And it turns out that even in the West, there are things you don't completly own. Try not paying property tax for a while and see how much you own your own home.

So when the job market collapse is the tax base collapses with it.

That means you can no longer afford police.

It also means that in a country with more guns than people you have millions of people with nothing to lose and no police to keep them in line.

I know a lot of right wingers who are looking forward to this because they think that means they get to shoot people.

So here's the thing yeah maybe you get to shoot the first punk who tries to break in and raid your fridge.

What about the next punk? And one after that? By the 5th or sixth one they get around off and it hits you in the shoulder. You can't hold your rifle anymore. You switch to a pistol but you're not as good with that. The next one gets your wife because of it maybe one of your kids or your dog. Now you're alone and five or six of them show up this time and gun you down.

The baby boomers don't mind this because they're old and they have nothing left to live for so they think it sounds cool to go out guns blazing. In reality you're lying there with a slug in your gut slowly bleeding out but you don't think about that until it's happening.

Meanwhile civilization has collapsed in your 401k has been stolen by a trillionaire so you're living off cat food.

And you made it a point to think about absolutely none of this. Because you've seen way too many Clint Eastwood movies

You need to come up with an answer to that and you need to do it fast. Nobody likes having "their" money taken from them and given to somebody else. We just had a thread about a California billionaire tax and half the comments were people convinced that if we tax billionaires a few percentage points than the next step is to take their fucking houses... That's not an exaggeration.

We are not socially equipped to deal with a work shortage. It doesn't matter how many times you speak reasonably nobody wants to hear it. The average American reads at the level of a 12-year-old and that implies that they think at the level of a 12 year old. Which is why black and white phrases like, if you don't work you don't eat, are so popular.

I am open to suggestions but I want to be clear that explaining to people is not a solution. Like Ronald Reagan said when you're explaining you're losing

They've got plenty of land and wind and solar are both cheaper and safer.

This is for AI slop isn't it? We're going to get a whole bunch of unsafe nuclear reactors thrown up as cheaply as possible to power AI data centers. Meanwhile by 2030 AI slop will be guzzling enough water for 1 billion people.

There is no way the businessmen involved in building these reactors are going to want to spend the time and money to properly maintain them let alone decommission and shut them down when they are no longer safe to run.

The problem with nuclear is social not technical. There is absolutely no reason nuclear power can't be safe but wind and solar are so much better there is absolutely no reason to run nuclear power in any country that has a reasonable supply of land and with the exception of Japan that's pretty much every country. So if somebody is building nuclear reactors in a country with plenty of land like Canada there is a reason for it and it's not good

Why not buy a robot arm and make your own car? Maybe not today, but manufacturing itself is bound to be obsolete one day. And then we can just shrug at GM when they are sad about all the 3D printers and Chinese imports.

Have fun running an economy where nobody has a job. At some point there ought to be a cause for concern, even for the laissez-faire anarcho-capitalist types, at least the ones that can do basic arithmetic.

Got taken by robots and automation, not outsourcing. Automation and process improvement have been devouring jobs and destroying the middle class for 40 years. We just don't like the talk about it. People will bray at you like a donkey yelling luddite if you bring it up.

Not when you're competitors could just cut their prices in half, still make enough money to be doing pretty damn well and wait for you to go out of business after you spent the money building out the fabs.

Just like how if you want competition in sports you need a referee if you want competition in business you need the government refereeing everything. We spent 50 years firing the ref. Why the hell are we all surprised that the game is rigged?

Several of the companies that are in a position to manufacture RAM have let it slip that they are holding off because of the risk that the big players would just lower their prices.

Every single time we have had a huge spike in the cost of electronics in my life after a period of time it has come out that the company's involved were colluding. Whether it was the chip shortages in the '80s or the flat panel prices in the 2000s it always turned out to be collusion. And we always gave them a tiny tiny slap on the wrist after they made fuck tons of profit.

This is a political problem not a technical one. Nerds don't like political problems though. They want everything to be solved with technology like in the Sci-Fi books we all grew up reading. You would think that after all the cyberpunk dystopia sci-fi we also read we'd be able to integrate that into a coherent worldview but nope. I think the reason is that it's the stuff we read as kids that sticks in our brain and we didn't get our hands on the cyberpunk dystopia stuff until we were teenagers or in our 20s or 30s.

But make no mistake just like every other time, I mean assuming we still have a functioning civilization in 3 years, we will eventually get a slashdot story about how the ram manufacturers and the storage manufacturers were colluding and got paltry fines after pinky swearing to never do it again...

And we will never learn our damn lesson until we're in our Graves. You would think with all the autism we'd be good at pattern recognition but nope

;-)

When I was an apprentice, the journeymen were better at arithmetic than this, probably because it was life and death calculation when dealing with a 3-phase 100A circuit. (all my very obsolete and half-forgotten training is in industrial, not whatever they have going on in data centers)

If their not editing Xorg config to add modelines, then is it really Linux anymore?

It helps distinguish it from all the times Microsoft intentionally broke things in order to prevent interoperability with their rivals. I sure am glad that their illegal Monopoly was broken up back in 2000 and we didn't just elect a heavily pro corporate president whose doj dropped the lawsuit the first chance they got... That would have been terrible for computing.

I think the main innovation is proton. I have several buddies that have switched to Linux and it's just fine for them. Several of them switched over because Windows 11 was so effing slow and they just installed Linux and installed steam and stalled their games and played them and didn't think of anything else. It all just worked.

It looks like epic is looking for somebody to Port their anti-cheat to linux. Honestly if it wasn't for all this AI bullshit destroying our entire civilization and the complete lack of any Anti-Trust regulation preventing anyone from making RAM and storage except the existing players then I think this would massively take off and really screw over Microsoft.

I mean I'm running Windows 11 for work and holy fuck is a terrible. Eventually I'm going to get forced to switch operating systems since I'm on 10 and when that happens I don't know what I'm going to do but it's probably going to be installing Linux with proton. I mean assuming Microsoft hasn't found a way to kill it by then. I don't play call of duty so I don't have to worry about that but I could see them going around buying up every company that might possibly make a game I want to play to keep you from doing that...

I am really sick and tired of companies having unlimited cash and zero regulations. I can't even pretend anymore that it's not impacting my day-to-day life and I don't think any of us can without really sticking our heads in the sand.

I've got three PC game pads lying around that would just work out of the box with it. I play on PC but I play a lot of console ports. The steam controller is there for people who are going to play the kind of games best played with keyboard and mouse but they want to do it from their couch. It's hyperoptimized for that. So it makes sense not to include it in the base unit because a lot of people wouldn't actually use it myself included.

Mind you at$1,100 I will not be buying a steam box. The price is competitive with regular pc hardware and for something that small and usable it's pretty good. Keep in mind that if you buy an equivalent laptop and you actually game on it it is likely to have much less performance because of thermal throttling and it's likely to burn out and die in a few years.

But I will stick with my aging ryzen 5600 and my ancient GTX 1080 I picked up off eBay years ago. It's good enough for pretty much everything I want to play except for one ratchet and clank game