costs are driven by scarcity. At least for the things like energy, food, and shelter I mentioned. Nobody is hording corn or fertilizer. Its expensive because the supplies are down.

Nobody is charging more for electricity because they pushing it all into some secret battery some place (or pumped reservoir for that matter), nor are they idling their generation facilities. They are charging more because more people want to use more of it then can be produced and delivered reliably. Now i do believe we could have much cheaper energy. That supposes winding the clock way back and making policy choices that would have favored the production gas, and oil fired generating plants, more domestic pipelines, and more domestic oil refining facility.

As it is now US crude is artificially cheap because we can't move it where it is needed, and Obama energy and environmental policy that have prevented building the power plants to burn it. It sad really the public suffers with inflationary pressure and cost of living problems while had we let the market work, those $100 a barrel prices in the mid 2000s would have resulted in 'drill baby drill' and building out generating capacity - instead we got the Paris accords...

Can we just stop with this post scarcity nonsense.

We are not in some post scarcity utopia. We are rapidly running out of real-estate. Yes we can build up but many was not meant to live in endless concrete jungle, most people don't really want to, but the consequence of unbound population growth (which does seem to be slowing, for reasons of scarcity) would be ecological collapse as we take to much away from the remaining natural spaces.

The cost of energy is also going up. Wind and Solar don't actually lower costs, if they did they the oil majors would be building them at the same time they develop fields. you can't make money on window and solar without major tax subsides and fake "green" programs, where because you are in a "green industry" you get side step the impact studies and mitigation requirements any other commercial activity would be required to support/execute/subjected to, whales and birds be damned. - Energy will either continue to increase in cost until someone can make money in wind or we will develop new Fossil resources, but those will also be more costly as the recovery complexity only goes up as we deplete them.

The costs of food continues to rise, yes yes distribution not production problem, blah blah blah.. Might be/likely is true about being able to feed everyone for quite sometime by reducing waste vs output growth, but right now there is no *viable* plan to reduce waste on that scale, and the costs of production are rising, inputs like chemical fertilizer are not getting cheaper and they wont.

As bizarre as it seems we are circling back around the scarcity being about basic needs like food and shelter, because advanced manufacturing has made what ancient man saw as luxury very abundant. In most of the USA $15 will put a very powerful computer and communications platform in the palm of your hand, but it will barely feed you a week at the grocery store - (think homemade pancakes from scratch for two meals, and canned veg/beans for dinners). We have luxury poverty, where people can get some very nice things, but yet can't afford the most basic things they need. Why because there is real scarcity under those basic things.

The answer to most of this, is actually reset the international systems. Every nation/region needs to find away to sustainability produce enough food for their own population. Nations that are net importers of food or have net emigration should be subjected to heavy trade, travel, and monetary, sanctions by other nations. That will force them to fix their economic balance and focus on the right kinds of production. It will also re-balance more developed nations. There are lot of people that just are not fit to work in high-tech, and there are not enough jobs in 'trades' and ditch digging to provide a long term outlet. We actually need economics that allow workers to earn a living wage for 'low-complexity' activities like seamstress, and basic furniture jointing etc; put another way we need enough protectionism to that the domestic appetite for basic household items is satisfied primarily from domestic sources. - Capitalism at the domestic scale will work well for organizing that, after all it did in the past. Capitalism applied at the globalscale, with nationalistic actors looking to game the system will continue to fail.

Wow -

So because someone happens to be winning life's lottery for the moment, they deserve to be killed...

This is the folks is the prevailing thinking on the left. You don't have to do anything, have done any specific harm to anyone. if you have more than they do and are doing anything other then using it to mobilize against anyone else who also happens to have more than them you are target!

If you disagree with them on what is good for people or what love or agÃpi mean, you also automatically deserve death!

This is who they are! It is what drives them. When you see the opinions of Drinkypoo, AmiMojo, or rsilvergun, on here, this is their underlying thesis for everything they say. Just be aware, while no human is garbage these people are actively seeking to be so, always!

No idea of your background but I think it is very very easy to have a pretty biased view about how big the net got and when.

Coming from a fairly upper middle midwest town with parents in tech, we had home computers in the 80s and bbs access in the early 90s and IP Internet access via Compuserve probably around 1993/4 or so. The schools were wired as well pretty early at least the two high schools, not sure about the lower levels.

That said 1997 statics, show only about 18% of us households had a internet subscription. That jumps to almost 50% by 2000 so the uptake was pretty fast but a lot of us older Slashdot posters probably grew up in a bit of tech bubble, at ~1/5 of the population being 'online' it would be easy for an adolescent or young adult to not really be aware others were not sharing their experience.

I think 'the information super highway' lives a little more dominantly in the media of the period (1992-1995) then it actually did in most of the populations lives because it was such a huge area of commercial growth and the people who were using it outside 'the office' were the affluent, which always have driven our later 20th century American cultural conversation.

Recall how big a deal 'Cyber Monday' was, that was because people would shop online at the office, because they did not have access to do so at home! Long rant but i think for most people the Internet became a day to day feature of their lives more in the 1997-2000 span then in the 1994-97 span.

At least we can stop reading endless articles by people who think they are a hell of a lot more insightful than they actually are about how "1984 is not a howto guide" and move on to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - wasn't supposed to represent aspirational social, environmental, and technological targets.

The good news is it should keep both the read to much environmental fiction and read to much AI fictions occupied for sometime and have them fighting over literary terf.

It will be a nice change of pace around here.

That is just late 20th century thinking. That worked in mono-polar world where we were the only nation really capable of sustain force projection (security), the reserve currency, and at least some technological superiority.

Advanced Medical equipment - If China wanted to take that market they could inside a decade. Same thing with chips at this point, they have all the precursors. There is nothing left we can produce that is a 'you can't get there from here' for them any longer, it is just a pick an item from the list make it priority and fill the gap. It is rapidly approaching the point where if we just cut them off completely all at once they could 'make do'. All your type of think at this point does is allow them to make progress - entirely at our expense on their own terms. It is DUMB

On the other hand be if coffee makers, or COIVD masks, those end up being things you need. You can't make do without them. Robots or people, however they get built in the re-emergence of a multi-polar world the nations that can make THINGS, especially basic necessity will again be the ones with power, both economic in terms of trade, and military in terms of being able to keep supplied. Look at Ukraine, Russia would have rolled over them long ago without a sustained supply of American arms - why because we can produce them. The rest of NATO - LOSERS every one! All together they can't meet basic logistical needs for any sustained conflict. China see that!

They see why Russia even a solid 20 years behind in most tech, remains at least someone combat effective.

Power is about control of production, money is just a tool to facilitate it. The nation that can put engines on chassis, tires on wheels, coffee makers on counter tops, counter tops on cabinet bases, and grain in those cupboards is a nation with a future. The nation that buys all those things, is just waiting to be how far to bend over by the seller and when.

China wants a new world order where they are masters. They also see the lessons of the 20th century clearly. That is it is far better to be the worlds hegemonic master than to try to conquer and rule it in the traditional sense. Exactly non of this is possible though unless their sphere of influence appears irresistible. To that end they can't have a island they claim to rule sitting there doing its own thing, and worse being nominally oriented to the existing global power structure.

They also rightly see the rather 19th century western model of national borders being determined by a few world powers who make agreements about lines on map without regard to the reality on the ground or blood sacrifices the plebs for the political theater of the occasional proxy-'fight' over those borders, as limiting.

China wants to be able to use both soft power and hard power whichever seems least costly / most expeditious and have the results stick. To that end they have seen the muted response to Russia's actions in Ukraine as useful.

However the reality is Ukraine is not part of NATO, Europe is weal and broke, the USA is strong but broke, and nobody wants to see the mass destruction that would result from a atomic contest with Russia. So a truly muscular defense of Ukraine was never going to happen, is never going to happen. The mistake politically was not ignoring the situation. In making a fuss over it we have turned it into the precedent setting event China wants if Russia succeeds.

Ironically as far as US political influence is concerned, thwarting Russia is becoming important in a way it never needed be and wasn't four years ago. We made to big deal about it, so now we have to show we have influence and the ability to impose our vision. What we should of done is handled it like Crimea, looked the other way and it would have been no big deal in geo-politics or US power. Now we have to both avoid a hot contest with Putin AND win proxy-war. We are not that good at proxy-wars... Biden and Blinken really FUCKED UP.

I might be wrong but I don't think move fast and break things referred to that which you were building. It was more about don't worry about the consequences for the rest of the market place, perhaps don't worry about the consequences for cooperative shared infrastructure, like shoveling tons of data over DNS, or say abusing NTP to distribute a bunch of very large binaries..

Another example would be Electron apps, the move fast and break things does not apply to your own app it applies to using the giant frame work to deliver simplistic functionality that could have been implemented in single digit megabytes of resident code at a slightly lower level but chewing up 400MB on another chromium instance is someone else's problem, they can just buy more ram if it 'breaks usability' of the rest of their system.

I don't think move-fast-break-things was about excusing incompetence so much as excusing anti-social behavior or outright turning it into a virtue.

Sure and Nazi's did all the hard work in the decades before that.

The only point you are making is the state of the art advances. Does General Motors suck because Ford did all the hard work of trialing mass production and JIT manufacturing?

Space X has been doing the things that NASA and some of their more traditional MIC partners organizationally have not. The reasons why are only interesting if for political reasons you think we need to have state-run spacecraft production industry or you want to run your own commercial venture and need to know what does not work. As to the more general national and commercial interests Space X is delivering on domestic launch capability in a variety of useful capacity configurations.

NASA as a design house is a just yawn, at this point. I'd say kill everything besides administrative coordination and policy making. Nix the astronaut program, let the private industry train our pilots and space explorers.

Of course I would let them, how could I even stop them? Now would I buy such a film and show it in my theater chain, probably not but maybe some operators in Jordan and Syria would..

The entire history of entertainment? Really? There were a lot of Everyman plays. You bet the troop in the next town just "stole" it and did their own.. You are the one trying to apply a lens of what is actually very recent history here.

Yes someone should absolutely be allowed to generate and sell Superman Porn, the character is what ~85 ears old now! Why on earth should DC still be allowed to milk it, not a single persons who worked on the original character is still drawing a salary there, if any are even alive.

Exactly its business. The product is what is valuable. The buyer does not care at all what your production costs are, only if he can get something competitive elsewhere. Competitive might even be an inferior but cheaper substitute. If someone can make money with AI slop they should, if they can make money with really good AI products - even better. It is illegal until someone decides the change the law gets changed. There is enough money in play the law absolutely will get changed, get over it.

Writing stories is hard because it takes a lot of effort, people used to pay wild someones of money for large textile products too, than progressively more automated looms were invented. We don't only get sloppy low quality blankets and rugs, I can go to Walmart get something nicer than my Great grand parents could have for the cost of several months salary! Sure there is also a lot of junk, but that is choice! Sometimes you just want slop because new kitten will probably pee on it. Same thing with film, sometimes you just want to crappy movie to unwind with in your motel room, you'll fall asleep before it is over anyway, it might even be better if it is slop! On the other hand lots more creators can see their ideas thru to full production without the enormous investment risk.

I don't hate the industry, but I don't love it standing in the way of progress, at the expense of everyone else. While the same people who demand protection for their work, would turn around and destroy the livelihood of some commerical driver by importing 1000s of illegals and handing license to "no name given' and pretend to be virtuous. The world changes the entertainment industry needs to "fucking deal.."

The Red Army has never been very good at logistics either. They may or may not be self-aware enough to know it. I am not military history expert but it seems to be from the October Revolution on the story of the Red Army has been logistics failures, and their successes have largely been situations where they either had numbers wildly in their favor or their opponents suffered even more severe logistics failures, the two world wars.

Wow that's kool-aide drinking there. Let's be real Zhirinovsky project looked a lot more like creating an eastern EU, than a return to the USSR.

Basically at a time when the a long oppressed Russian public needed lesson in how Democracy and freedom work, include how that sometimes mean change isnt as rapid as many would wish, the US Administration and a lot of Western Europe showed them "Elections only matter if we like the outcome!" That pretty much opened the door for Putin's rise.

Both the Neo-liberal, and Neo-Conservative movements in the US and Western Europe completely botched their handling of a young Russian democracy, utterly unable to escape their Cold-War era thinking, posture, and assumptions. Just like they irrevocably harmed the Western Economy and created an existential threat in China via PNTR. The entire school of foreign policy from Kissinger - Hillary Clinton as sec-State need to be told to just STFU. They have been wrong about literally everything of consequence. All the textbooks of the era need to be toss and relabled as case studies in things not to do.

This deserves an up mod.

I think you are spot on here. If we had a more balanced system where it was possible to build on something that was at least popular in ones own lifetime, people would be a lot more likely to chose the path of legal-challenge avoidance and play with the availible content.

By taking essentially everything from living memory off they table they have invited direct challenges and scoff-laws alike

The Entertainment industry wants to have it both ways with copyright. They want everyone talking about their stuff and creating interest in their characters, personalities, sound, and other properties because otherwise nobody gives a hoot and they don't make any money on them. The instant someone else earns a dollar with it thought they demand the entire pie and the right hold onto it until the heat death of the universe!

Let's be perfectly honest ever since some guy probably refereed to as 'ook' started banging to sticks together and dancing in a circle for the amusement of others everything in entertainment has been in some way derivative. If it is worth anything it comes down to two things, was enough effort put in to make the new thing good, as in well executed, and did the creator add any new vision. To that end I think a good prompt + quality GenAI probably meets the definition of 'art', just because a machine did most of the effort does not negate the value, after all the machine required input energy run and capital to build.

If GenAI can make as good a movie as troop of thespians, team of writers, camera operators and directorial staff, VFX studio and associated staff, all while doing it cheaper and faster, why not? While some people are worried about 'jobs' there certainly isn't the same 'omg omg omg, the customer support reps' there isn't even the same sentiments for internal devs cranking out CRUD apps being replaced with 'vibe coders'. This entire concern here is just Hollywood Neppo-Baby Privilege talking. They are 100% right about the threat it represents to the them though. If you can make a decent 1:30 clip for next to to nothing, you can do the same thing with a 1:30:00 art-house film for not much more, and it won't be long after a few successes there you can do feature films. A-List Actors, and big Hollywood Studios are probably seeing the beginning of their final act here.

There is literally no way to handle those topics in any commercial entertainment product right now that isn't going to enrage 15% of the audience. Those 15% will certainly use social media to make the normal people who understand it is just a fictional game, to uncomfortable to want to deal with it.

I would have canceled it too. There is no winning marketing something like that right now.