And I think it's safe to say they're going to lose sales. I don't think they'll lose all of them but I would expect to lose about half that quarter or about 12%. Worst case it could be as high as 15.

A normal company losing 15% of its sales would be dead meat. Wall Street would cut it up for parts.

But people bought into Tesla when it was so ridiculously overvalued that everybody is afraid of being the one who pulls the trigger. Nobody wants to get caught holding the bag when it eventually collapses.

Meanwhile Elon musk's last two pay packages are worth about $100 billion dollars. If you're wondering how he's going to get that money since those were stock deals he's going to dump the stock into pensions and 401ks. To put that into perspective it's more money than Tesla can make in 50 years with the subsidies...

It's not a question of when company is going to collapse it's just which of the big four are going to buy up the remains and who gets caught holding the bag. I am pretty certain it won't be Elon

After world war II Russia was a burnt-out husk and it never fully recovered. Putting a criminal in charge of the country was the final straw. Russia was never a threat and there was zero reason to have a cold war with them except to keep the military industrial complex going and to line the pockets of well connected defense contractors at the expense of the public at Large.

At this point with Russia not even able to subdue a nation of 20 million it's stupidly obvious they are no threat so we can't use them to go booga booga at voters.

So China is the next step. And China for their part is happy to use America as an external threat to keep their populace in line. Because we've always been at war with Eurasia.

We never fucking learn.

My websites, including two dormant forums were being consumed at about 1TB/mo (half the bandwidth limit) by a combination of facebook, google, alibaba and openai at one point before I blocked the entire IP address range.

Like these fucking companies either need to pay up or need to throttle down the ripping rate so that people who actually want to visit archived content can actually visit it and not get time-out errors. As it is I dialed down the capacity of those sites so that they don't bring the server down.

It's just crazy how much money was spend making that mediocre game. Something like 400 million.

You would think the CEO responsible for that disaster would be drummed out of the industry and never work again but I don't even think they bothered to fire him from Sony. I think it's pretty obvious that the fucker was trying to throw money to create a big franchise so that he could move up in the company. It must be nice to waste hundreds of millions of dollars through mismanagement to advance your career and then take absolutely no hit whatsoever.

Just checking... Was that a coma joke? If not, then could you explain the context?

How fast can we make things worse by burning more fossil fuel? The answer may surprise your children, but not your grandchildren who will be sadly too familiar with the mess we've created for them.

In related news: Bears as in a plague of bears. Not a simple and direct relationship, but they have certainly become a massive nuisance in Japan. New record for human deaths, apparently because the beech trees had a really bad year resulting in lots of extra hungry bears. However what surprised me the most was an estimate of 4,200 bears already "culled" this year. I was checking on the base as the government announced new policies that essentially call for war against the bears and wondered how bad it could get...

Yesterday saw a "Funny" video of a big bear demolishing a bear trap. Smarter than the average bear?

Dude you can put solar on your house if you want nobody's stopping you. The problem is that economies of scale are a thing and a utility can produce a lot more electricity a lot more efficiently than you can slapping some solar panels on your roof...

That's got nothing to do with lobbyists that's got everything to do with how just well, everything works. A large public works project is going to be more efficient than a single person doing something. Again, economies of scale.

What's holding back solar is America has close ties to several Nations who make all their money off of oil and we just elected a bunch of people who are wildly corrupt and will cheerfully accept bribes in exchange for blocking deployment of renewables.

Basically China is colonizing Africa using economics instead of the military. It's the same thing America did for the last 100 years or so.

It's that whole belt and road initiative. I don't think Africa is in a position to do anything about it so they'll just have to try and make the best of it but just like the rest of the world has traditionally exploited the whole continent China is going to do it too.

To get back to the article no this is not how infrastructure is going to be built over the next 50 years. Most countries wouldn't allow China to do what they're doing to them. Those loans aren't coming from inside Africa they ultimately track back to China and the African nations are going to end up with a metric shitload of debt that will be leveraged in order to get obedience on a wide variety of issues.

I guess what I'm saying is this isn't some free market miracle like the article makes it out to be. This is a very large country working to put another country that is in a worse position into debt for various foreign policy reasons.

The rapid expansion of the population seems to have been largely due to economic factors specifically the need to have a lot of kids on a farm for labor combined with the requirement for a lot of kids to take care of the parents in their old age.

Also the lack of birth control but that's believe it or not a lesser effect. Japan's birth rate dropped below sustainability even before they had the birth control pill available. Also Japan didn't legalize birth control until 1995 go figure...

Basically polls show women want 2.6 kids however it looks like maintaining the population requires 2.7 kids. So without economic and social pressure to force women into having more kids than they want the human population actually starts to decline.

Now there are a bunch of religious wackadoodles and psychopaths that want to turn women back into property and bring back stuff like marital rape in order to boost birth rates. Not sure that'll work though without the need for a shitload of farm workers and we just don't need that many Farm workers.

It is possible that the billionaire class will dismantle capitalism and our modern technological society bringing back a twisted form of feudalism but if they do that the lower cast will almost certainly lose access to reliable food and medicine that allowed the population explosion in the last hundred years or so. And that's without talking about things like world wars brought on by mass unemployment and stuff like that...

Assuming our species doesn't wipe itself out we are probably going to plateau and start to decline in population.

On the other hand ask any expert in foreign policy and they will tell you that at any given time the world is a couple of mistakes away from a large war and this time we have nuclear weapons. I could very easily see us putting crazies in charge of the arsenal too

Just a note - MacOS is Unix https://www.theregister.com/20.... Linux is Unixy as we say. Note that Unix is "POSIX compliant" now, and has been for a long time, (1993) so the pedants among us might want to weigh in on that.

Point is, I bash around in Terminal half the day. The default is now zsh, but bash sounds better to speak.

Yeah, when I have to go into Windows command line, I have to remember to shift my mental state.

Main point is, I have Apple create the ecosystem while I do paid things. Why should I have to do that? My burn rate overwhelms the cost of the phone or computer very quickly. It's like having a starter motor on a car instead of a hand crank. Obligatory car reference.

Exactly. There is a meme that all Apple users are clueless, with more money than brains. Sure, some are. It would be silly to think that Android and Windows users are the intelligentsia of computer, phone, and tablet users. Some are smart and savvy, some are not

You are trying to make the inferior performance of Android product integration a flex. Yes - I get Apple to provide a functioning integrated system. I have things to do that I am paid for, and those things work so much better with an integrated system that I do not have to futz with while unpaid, simply to make them integrate after a fashion. Just getting a computing device to function is so early 1990's.

And my familiarity with UNIX and its close brother Linux - well, I don't know about sleeping better, but I can get more hours of sleep.

Modern models will take into account statistical biases in lotteries. For example, here's ChatGPT:

Pick good lottery numbers for the Virginia powerball lottery

Good question. First, a reality check: Powerball is pure chance — there’s no “good” numbers that are more likely to win. Every set of 5 white balls (1–69) + 1 Powerball (1–26) has exactly the same probability.
wwwuat.valottery.com
+1

That said, I can give you a few tips + a sample “random but balanced” pick, if you’d like to pick your own numbers rather than use Quick Pick.

Some tips when choosing your Powerball numbers

Spread your numbers
Try to pick a mix across the range (low, mid, high). According to lottery-strategy advice, not clustering all your numbers in one group is better.
samlotto.com

Avoid patterns
Many people pick birthdays, anniversaries, or sequential numbers. That’s fine—but if you win, you might have to share with more people because these are popular picks.
lotteryvalley.com

Use “due” or “hot” numbers carefully
Some sites (like lottery-analysis tools) track which numbers are “hot” (drawn recently) or “overdue” (haven’t appeared in a while). But remember: past draws don’t change future odds.
m.lottostrategies.com

Mix even and odd
According to some statistical analyses, it’s less likely to draw all odd or all even numbers.
samlotto.com

Play responsibly
Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are extremely long: 1 in ~292 million.
lotterycritic.com

Sample “balanced” Powerball pick

Here’s a random-but-balanced combination you could use just for fun (or as a basis to tweak):

White balls: 8, 23, 41, 57, 65

Powerball: 12

If you like, I can generate 5 different “smart random” picks for the next Virginia Powerball draw (balanced by probability and number distribution). Do you want me to do that?

It's a damned shame '99942 Apothis' will miss us in a few years

It's not too late to fix that.

The thing is, it very much *won't* be random numbers. It's about as far from a random number generator as you can get.

In a really bad model, one would expect it to likely be "numbers it's seen the most in the context of a lottery". But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one would expect it to think over which sorts of numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates, etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

The funny thing is, think of how this woman will interact with ChatGPT from now on. ChatGPT could say "Abraham Lincoln was married to John Wilkes Booth", and she'd be thinking, "Okay, that sounds really, really wrong, but on the other hand, it picked the right lottery numbers, so..."

In either a great way or a horrifying dystopian way.

Either we get rid of billionaires and ruling classes and we rule together without demanding leaders control us or we let the billionaires take over and become trillionaires and then completely dismantle capitalism. Once that happens the economy collapses, all of us basically regress into feudal poverty and about 1% of the population will still have modern technological civilization and the other 99% will have basically nothing.

That's the plan anyway. People keep asking if none of us have any money who's going to buy the billionaires' products?

You think they haven't asked that same thing? You don't think Elon Musk and Bill Gates have noticed that they are completely dependent on you and your filthy little consumers and worker bees in order to have their wealth and prestige and power?

Of course they've noticed it and of course they don't like it. They are taking steps to eliminate the dependency.

That said I don't think they're clever enough to pull it off completely and I think eventually they will start world wars and go nuclear but time will tell.

Maybe when the raccoons take over as the next dominant species they'll be better off than we were. Or it could be beavers. They're pretty close to having opposable thumbs with a few mutations.