When she turns 26 she's either going to have to get a 9 to 5 job for the insurance or live without it. Sooner or later she won't be able to live without it. Everybody needs healthcare at some point. It's why civilized countries have universal Health Care systems.

It's possible being in New York if she's making enough money that she might be able to afford Obamacare but the Republicans have pretty well sabotaged it so it's very expensive. It's still a lot cheaper than most of the options if you're self-employed. But the extended subsidies are gone.

So by all means tell me how it recovers from that when it has negative revenue?

I guess it is possible that a third term of trump would send a shitload of taxpayer money to SpaceX. But a third term of trump is also going to mean the end of democracy and the American economy is going to collapse just like Russia's did after Putin got in charge.

So it's kind of a heads you lose tails you lose situation

DUV isn't a dead end. It's a technology used to manufacture the vasty majority of microchips (no, your latest fancy CPUs and GPUs are not remotely the largest market share). There's a reason DUV machines are still being actively built and sold even in the west. The vast majority of the fabs in the world would need those, not the latest and greatest 1 angstrom process.

It took a long time to develop back in the day, it didn't take a long time to develop now. China is very much rapidly developing tech that the west previously spent decades developing.

This relies heavily on knowledge of the past, but it does allow closing of a technological gap and playing "catch up" with the west. If your goal is to export less to China, well congrats, that's what's happening.

I'm sure Trump will throw a tariff or two their way to "even the playing field"

While true that tariffs aren't the cause here, Trump's policies (and to a lesser extent Biden's) certainly haven't helped. There's extreme pressure from the USA to block any technology from being exported to China, so it's less about independence and more to do with basic survival.

When you tell someone dependent on a thing "You can't have the thing." They will look for alternatives to the thing or make their own thing, no broad agenda required. This works on a national level, it works on a personal level.

The only thing they had that they could point to and say would generate enough launches was going to be starlink internet and now they have somebody entering into their space (pun intended).

I'm sure they can ride the AI hype train long enough though to dump the stock into our 401ks using nasdaq's top 100... I'm just not so sure letting them do that was a good idea.

I have people telling me that I should just move my 401k into a structure that lets me pick individual stocks but for fuck sakes that's not a 401k that's a day trading job. The entire point of a 401k is I can just put money in it and not think about it so I can do my job.

Very quickly running your model on the kind of hardware you can afford with the amounts of electricity you can afford just aren't going to be able to match what the companies are doing. It's going to be like having a 3D printer versus a CNC machine.

I think we are done with seeing the cost of hardware go down over time. There are too few companies making hardware and nobody can compete with them because if you try they will just lower their prices briefly until you're out of business. You won't even be able to get the bank loans because the banks are going to know your competition is planning on doing that.

Banks love to throw good money at bad but only if they can expect the government bail out and a company trying to compete with Nvidia or micron isn't likely to be able to pull off a bailout. They're going to collapse too quickly for too big to fail and they probably won't have enough cash to be politically connected.

All of my technical documents are in the style of HP Lovecraft but I don't use AI.

There are multiple good reasons to run local AI. Guard rails may be the most obvious, but perhaps not the most important. Other reasons include not putting your prompts in the cloud for glowies to collect, not having to deal with a model rugpull, never hitting usage limits (although they're replaced by the speed limit of your hardware), and being able to fine tune a model to not even have the guard rails in the first place. If you find something you love as much as some people loved ChatGPT 4o, you can run it forever and nobody can take away that access. You can talk about unethical schemes (as I frequently do, when writing fiction or worldbuilding an RPG campaign) and not worry about a knock on the door from a government official that thinks you *actually* want to dump ricin in the municipal water supply, or microwave your neighbor from the other side of the wall. Refusals are easier to work around in most cases than trying to anticipate cases where your efforts might be interpreted as something much more serious than they actually are.

And then there are always good-looking hosts in their early 20s reading scripts written by people in their 40s and 50s and filmed by people whose age just doesn't matter. Sometimes the 40s and 50s continue to host as well, if they're still good-looking enough (like SciShow).

It's true that even when you adjust for inflation, a movie ticket is more expensive than the good ol' days.

...but it's also true that the experience is so much better. The stadium seats. The sound. The legroom. (Sure, there are jackasses talking and texting but I tend to be able to choose movies & theaters were there are far fewer of them.)

What's also different is I don't have to go to the movie theater to see a movie as much as I did in the good ol' days. Back then my only options were to pay for a ticket or wait for 12-18 months to rent a VHS tape and watch it on 23" TV or watch it edited & with commercials on the ABC Sunday Night Movie.

(Yeah, I know, HBO was in there somewhere, but I didn't have HBO...)

Movies like Sinners, War of the Worlds, Downton Abbey, Nuremberg etc. etc. etc. I can just watch at home with great picture & sound for free or a fraction of the cost of what I would have paid at the theater. So that more than makes up for the cost when I pay to see The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX.

I don’t discount anything. *You* discount what a plus 4 world entails. I don’t use the term “horror show” lightly. It *will be worse* than your fever dreams about the effects of attempted mitigations.

with a quarter trillion than putting a shitload of people out of work.

We're all going to be plumbers. It's plumbers all the way down.

Actually the funny thing is we could all be pretty well off doing basically silly things like cutting each other's hair. Modern automation means we don't have to work nearly as hard as we do. But we would have to reorganize a lot of things and give up big cars and the suburbs most likely to get there. Definitely the suburbs. They don't have the population density to sustain the services they need. And if you do away with the suburbs I don't see where a big cars fit in.

It's a weird thing where we trade 50 hour work weeks and 10-hour a week commutes so we can have a pool party once a week and drive a $80,000 SUV. It doesn't seem worth it to me but I'm in the minority I guess.

The YouTube algorithm is extremely punishing. If you miss one of your regular uploads schedules then the algorithm ruthlessly punishes you and your views collapse. That's because a typical YouTuber even a popular one is going to have only about 30% of their viewers subscribed and even then YouTube doesn't always send notifications. A lot of them used to use Twitter to get the word out about new videos but Twitter is basically dead since Musk bought it...

On top of that you have a wide variety of trolls and scammers constantly trying to either steal your channel or take it down. If you get three copyright strikes meaning three people report that you infringed on their copyright that's it game over. Most professional YouTubers have a backup channel for just that purpose but that means maintaining two channels. You can't just copy your content to the other channel because you won't get views. You need the backup channel there soaking up some views and case your main channel gets taken down by a scammer.

And YouTube just does not give a fuck if you're a little channel gets taken down. Just about every single YouTube channel I know of has had their channel taken down at least once. The bigger ones create a little social media buzz and YouTube will eventually have a person respond. Their automated system will always side with whoever reported the copyright infringement no matter how ridiculous it is. If you're not big enough to create social media buzz when your channel goes down then you just lose your channel and that's it.

I understand why kids want to be YouTubers or tiktokers because when you're young celebrity looks fun and actual celebrity probably is like if you're a movie star or a rockstar or whatever but being a YouTuber is a miserable job. Especially in America without a proper healthcare system