As cultural event's go, what does this one tell us? We all want to be criminals and get away with it?

Hey, it can always get worse. Be thankful that people aren't taking the day off to play Missile Command.

If Europe and the US were doing that too we would be in a much better position regarding climate change. It would doubtless be a huge boon for those economies as well.

This goes to show the utter fecklessness of the right wing positions. If you ignore the environmental side (which is also just abject stupidity), it's obviously good economically, and for national security. These are things conservatives claim to be in favour of, though I've never seen any evidence of it.

Being insulated from externally imposed energy price shocks is good. Circulating money in the local economy is good. Heck if you're a true blue Tory, there's even British companies run by cronies to support.

So... several things to point out here...

First, Elon's politics are not all race-baiting and dog-whistling all the time. That stuff is largely performative. He wants clout and respect above all else, and will essentially do anything in order to get there. Make no mistake, he was publicly advocating for fully-automated luxury communism ("machines work, AI runs politics, everyone lives in paradise") long before anyone else; Neuralink is explicitly about recreating a technology from the Culture series, no matter the cost. This is the same agenda as Altman and Amodei, years before LLMs could drive toward the same issue. Most of what comes out of his mouth is vice signalling, i.e. malicious virtue signalling. There are definitely individual areas in which he inflexibly violates the Left's social covenant, like his approaches to business leadership and labor relations (best described as "penny-pinching miser") but he doesn't brag about those things; they're the result of him being a deeply flawed scumbag, not his politics. His ownership of Twitter is the same thing; he bought the company purely so he could stop people from saying mean things about him on the Internet, and the bile-spewing hive upon it is nothing more than a roost of flying monkeys to him, shaped according to his whims; even under his ownership, it may not always be as it is now.

Second, we tend to give model designers too much credit in the AI ecosystem. The network also includes Palantir and Oracle. It's hard to get much fouler than Thiel, who can't decide whether or not he's the Antichrist and is explicitly pro-monarchy, or Ellison, who has bankrolled his son's attempt to buy up the entirety of the US mainstream media industry and dye it red forever. These companies work together hand in hand, day after day, to accomplish goals like planning ICE raids and bombing schools in Iran. OpenAI and Anthropic stand on a pyramid of other businesses, including SpaceX and NVIDIA. Remove one and their services go offline; their interdependence is not minor, nor is the incredibly byzantine circular financing structure that Jensen Huang forced them all into. They're all essentially in a suicide pact with each other, and every time one of them goes public, more of the economy gets held hostage. When the bubble bursts, either the Fed will have to bail them out, or the entire country will go under. This sort of economic gambit is not exactly anti-capitalist, but it's most certainly in line with modern robber baron small-c conservatism.

Third? Altman is a scuzzy fucking sociopath, and Amodei's actions repeatedly fail to live up to his promises. They talk about the risk of destroying humanity, and the urgency of slowing down, and then immediately flip around and press harder on the gas. Winning the race is more important to them than anything else. For Altman the reward is unquestionably money; when the OpenAI board fired him for lying, he staged a coup and stole the company back, then neutered its non-profit arm. Every other dimension of political discourse is just snakeskin to him, available to shed or don as needed. He does not hesitate to let the Pentagon use his products to murder civilians. Conversely, it's possible Amodei has convinced himself that he's doing the right thing and that people will be grateful to him later, but being left of Altman doesn't mean the Left recognizes him as one of their own. Everything for these two men is justifiable for their ends; they aren't pushing back on the surveillance state, or the gentrification of San Francisco that their companies are driving, or any of a million other serious causes that currently galvanize the Left into making decisions at the voting booth. Money remains king, either as a terminal or instrumental goal, and if they were founded a year ago they might very well never have bothered with toning down sycophancy or trying to eliminate racial and gender bias from their systems. Elon used to act the same way.

In short, they're all horrible, callous people, and they're all using capitalism to win. The color of the car used to get them there does not matter in the slightest.

During this time China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Having visited, I can see that many of them enjoy a good standard of living. In fact some of the apartments and homes I was in are much, much nicer than the ones in the UK. They looked like something out of a catalogue. I could hardly believe that people were living there, with kids and pets no less.

While it's far from universal, it's still hundreds of millions of people. When it comes to quality of life, things like air pollution matter. EVs reduce that considerably. By adopting renewables we can have a better standard of living. It's not a loss, it's a huge gain.

Probably because they were already planned and too costly to reverse. The trouble is more long-term: the next round and the round after that.

You can slice it different ways. China is at over 4PW/year renewable generation, the US is around 1.1PW/year.

I think per capita emissions are the fairest way, but we should also look at how fast each country is installing renewables.

Known philanderer supporting another philanderer. Shocking turn of events . . .

Remember all the whining about how we would have to go back to being an agrarian society and suffer a massive decline in living standards to get to net zero?

China is proving that isn't true. In fact, it's proving that all the fearmongering about net zero costing us too much is nonsense, and it's actually a huge economic opportunity. They can't make solar panels, wind turbines, EVs, batteries and all the other stuff fast enough to satisfy the huge demand. The energy produced is the cheapest available, which further boosts their manufacturing.

We do need to do a lot more. China needs to do a lot more. But you can't also expect people to accept poverty to get it, so the only way it will work is if we ramp up the transition to a better lifestyle and lower costs as quickly as possible.

What other fair measure is there? Unless you expect China to somehow reduce its population to US levels, per-capital is the only way to do it.

And let's not forget that a lot of those emissions are things made for American companies and sold to Americans.

Because China's population is 1.4 billion people.

What's more important is the rate of change. Every country goes along a curve where emissions increase, peak, and then drop. China was on the up slope as it industrialized, and is now starting on the down slope. The peak was far, far below where the US and Europe peaked per capita, the only reasonable measure unless you think their One Child policy was a good idea.

The rate at which China is installing renewables and storage is staggering. Just the newly installed renewable capacity from 2025 produced as much electrical energy as the whole of Germany consumed that year. Just the new stuff, and this year they are on track for it to be even more. They are adding more than a Germany sized amount of renewable generation to the grid, PER YEAR, and accelerating.

If Europe and the US were doing that too we would be in a much better position regarding climate change. It would doubtless be a huge boon for those economies as well.

China's per-capital emissions are falling now.

The US peaked around 21.5t in the 1970s. China peaked at around 14.5t in 2025.

I suppose it's possible China will grow again in future, but it's looking unlikely given the amount of renewable generation and storage they are installing. The war with Iran has helped that too.

There are issues with the quality of Nintendo's emulators too. They just aren't that good, and actually seem to have got worse over time as they are ported to new consoles.

It's kind of crazy that you even have this problem in 2026.

In Europe carriers are generally required to carry each other's traffic, with fair and reasonable pricing. That way consumers have signal almost everywhere, regardless of what network they are on. They are required to do international roaming at cost as well, so in practice most providers just offer it to consumers for free. Your phone just works, everywhere.

In fact, China's per-person emissions peaked at a fraction of the US ones, and the European ones. They were never, and will never be as bad as us.

The sad part is we could be boosting out economies by making this stuff. Yeah it's hard to compete with China's manufacturing, but we have national security BS to help with that.

I could go on...

I'll do it. Ones I've read below. Some of them are cracking. Some get annoying, but have really good bits (cough cough Neal Stephenson) for miss out the entire ending (Philip K. Dick y u). Some of them are completely bananas (City& the City, the Ninth series) but compelling. Some are just trippy (inverted world, anything by Dick), Some are a book I didn't even know I wanted until I read it (Spinning Silver). Some are great series (Vorkosigan series), there's good space opera, good mil-sci fi in there and on and on.

I won't say every one of these is the best book I've read, but some are really great,many are good and none I found bad (depending on your tolerance for particular author's style). Many of the older one are still really good.

A canticle for Leibowitz
The man in the high Castle
Cat's cradle
The inverted world
The Dying of the Light
Ringworld Engineers
Ender's Game
Speaker for the Dead
Falling Free
The Vor Game
Barrayar
Xenocide
Mirror dance
Memory
A Storm of Swords
A feast for Crows
Old Man's War
Rainbow's End
Halting state
Anathem
The City and the City
Cryoburn
A Dance with Dragons
3 Body Problem
Goblin Emperor
Ancillary Sword
The Fifth Season / Obelisk Gate / Stone Sky
Uprooted
Ancillary Mercy
Seveneves
The Collapsing Empire
Spinning Silver
Gideon the Ninth / Harrow the Ninth / Nona the Ninth
Project Hail Mary