You're skipping the step where the failing empire undergoes a period of rapid military expansionism in order to fill its coffers by looting other countries.

America can easily take all of Canada and Mexico and South America and everything of value in it. We can then use that along with the local labor force pressed into slave labor to build a massive war machine and then we can take Greenland and use that to launch offensive into europe.

That is the current plan for the lunatics people keep putting in charge around here and the rest of the world is cheerfully allowing those lunatics to gain power unopposed with the clear help of Russia because they're hoping America will become weaker making them stronger.

Mostly their version of the Epstein class is hoping to be trillionaires instead of America's Epstein class getting to be trillionaires.

The problem is they are figuring that their nuclear weapons will keep them safe because who would be crazy enough to invade a country that has nuclear weapons.

We would. America would. My country is batshit insane and you're about to find out just how fucking crazy we are unless we get very very lucky and the Democrats save us all again.

The thing is people keep rolling those Dice and eventually they're going to come up snake eyes

They're not scaling back because they want to Trump has completely wrecked America on the international stage and it's taking everything American down with it.

Intelligent people warned us however nobody listens to them because to be blunt they're kind of insufferable. On the other hand we probably should not have had to be warned that unknown rapist, pedophile and convicted felon with ties to the Russian mafia shouldn't have been president.

Of Windows CE, Windows ME and Windows NT.

It is a structured system for looting 10 trillion dollars in 401K money. That is more than just a regular pump and dump.

They are tired of being dependent on our labor and our existence as consumers for their wealth and power. They're tired of being the merchant class that's not enough for them. They want to go back to being Kings and emperors and God Kings.

To do that they need to break that dependency because otherwise we can do things like boycotts and strikes or we can just plain not have any money and if we don't have money they don't have money because that's how the system was set up.

AI breaks that system. It's a huge automation push that gets controlled by five or six people in the entire planet. It's an entirely new form of capital for producing work that's going to be in the hands of literally less than 10 people.

We used to say it's a big club and you ain't in it. It's not a big club anymore even. You don't even get to pretend that you're going to be hobnobbing with Jeff bezos and Elon musk. I don't want to even hear people suggesting that.

So to get back to the article this is why these companies can be so ridiculously overvalued and it's why none of them have to turn a profit.

Because in the world that these psychopaths are planning there is no profit. There is no capitalism. They own everything and you have to go through them to get it. They decide if you live or die they decide if you have food or water let alone transportation and education. You are as dependent on them as a baby chick is its mother. And let's not forget, they hate you.

And I have no idea how we do anything else but what they want us to do. Because they say dance and we dance. They say jump and we say how high on the way up.

Not quite but I don't know the actual term for a market that is completely controlled by two or three players.

Basically the major platform holders are going to be the only ones who can differentiate between human beings and AI slop and without the ability to do that any up and coming AI product is going to be trained on freely available data on the internet which is so completely full of slop that the end result is going to be garbage.

AI was a one-time Gold Rush for a couple of companies and everyone else is going to be either microsoft, google, Amazon because they own twitch and then a handful of people like Twitter and Reddit will have half-assed systems that don't work except for specialized use cases like how Twitter will let you undress people you shouldn't be undressing and we let it do that because the owner is above the law...

I've said it before and I will say it again AI is a antisocial technology. It will do nothing but eat jobs and water and electricity while putting a handful of psychopaths in a position of even more power over you. We already had machine learning models for the actual useful scientific stuff. When folks say AI what they mean is something that can replace people that work for a living at enormous cost to society.

And as usual the people getting the benefit won't pay that cost, you will.

Trump doesn't know what day of the week it is. This is all just project 2025. Steve Miller and Peter thiel.

As if millions of baby boomers cried out in unison but weren't silenced because they never shut up.

This is the fallout from not properly supporting students during the pandemic. And from allowing the pandemic to happen in the first place when every single expert was warning politicians it was going to happen.

I wonder who was in charge when all this was going down? And I wonder who was in control of Congress for two years leading up to that and if they were engaging in the same obstructionist policies pioneer in the mid 1990s in order to cause chaos and encourage voters to do dumb things at the polls.

Look all I'm saying is elections have consequences

I need idiots to stop voting for pedophile rapists who make my life harder.

Oh there's plenty of other reasons. Trump is gradually building a private army for his own personal use. Assuming that the Democrats don't win in 2026 and 2028 it will probably become entrenched and it's likely that'll be the end of our democracy.

Young men will lose billions on it. Billions they don't have to lose. It will put them in a increasingly desperate situation when we are already putting them in a desperate situation because we have automated away the jobs they traditionally do.

Short-term crime will go up. Long term those young men will be organized into gestapos and secret police and pointed at you with guns.

Whatever else you think about ICE you need to realize that from Donald Trump's perspective they are his personal army at his beck and call. Now that is currently not true but there is work being done to fix that...

If you don't understand why that's a bad situation for you to be in I'm not sure what to tell you. But what I am trying to get across is that you can't just abandon large swaths of the population to be exploited. No matter how many guns you stockpile sooner or later you're going to run out of bullets before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose.

Something that was initially impractical because it couldn't be used at scale but that advances in technology elsewhere suddenly made it useful for ton of applications.

Technology is not a one-way Street it's a complicated mess of back roads and by roads.

We have a lot of major disasters we are ignoring. Climate change, boomers dying and taking all the money with them causing a collapse in disposable income spending, AI taking all the water and electricity, fascism, etc etc etc.

But just for fun let's add another on the pile. Specifically we are running out of basic research.

Basic research is stuff you do that is not immediately profitable but is extremely expensive. For centuries we didn't do that and we called that time to dark ages.

The merchant class combined with world wars caused us to start doing some basic research funded by the government. A shitload of money was made and for a very brief period of time private industries like Bell labs were doing some basic research. It wasn't profitable enough so they stopped.

Billionaires want to be trillionaires so the government can no longer do basic research because all that money got turned into tax cuts and subsidies for the upcoming ultra Epstein class. This all happened to me mid to late 1980s and was finished by the late 1990s.

So we have been over 20 years without a serious push into basic research. But it's a pipeline. Basic research done today won't pay off for 20 or 30 years maybe longer.

This means that we are using up a resource most people don't even understand exists because it's way too complicated a topic to discuss.

I don't know exactly when the well will run dry but based on what I've read we're not too far off from it. We're going to start seeing advances slow and we have been relying on those advances to stay ahead of the rapacious Epstein class devouring money. Basically productivity has been rising so much that no matter how hungry they are they can't gobble up everything. But without those absolutely enormous productivity gains from all that basic research paying off after 20 or 30 years or more... Well it's going to bring everything screeching to a halt at exactly the same time everything else is going to shit.

And as usual people will blame the Democrats or whatever the local equivalent non-fascist party is and then shit's going to get real fun. What the Chinese call interesting times.

I mentioned it on another thread but I wish I had died before it all started to happen. There was this very brief period of time the baby boomers enjoyed when as long as you were reasonably white or lucky enough to be born in one of the nicer parts of America you made out pretty damn good. Those times are over.

Into groups useful for large corporations owned by the Epstein class. They aren't there for you to learn and if you do that's a happy accident and the Herculean efforts of a teacher trying to go against the system.

This is partially why the cost of education per student is skyrocketing.

In the past it was really easy to sort the kids. It was basically two groups the ones who were teaching themselves and only needed a minimum amount of oversight, what we used to call academically inclined, and everybody else who was on their way to the factories and going to be taught just enough reading and math to be useful over there.

The factories are full of robots now so there's nothing for the second group of kids to do. What we've been trying to do at Great expense is actually teach those kids enough that they might be able to land a job and if we can't do that we can at least keep them out of the job market for a little while while we try to figure out what the fuck we're going to do with tens of millions of people who have no reason to be alive besides inherent limitless value of human life (I'll wait for everybody to stop laughing)

If you ever pay attention to Rich schools notice how expensive they are. That's not because of the marble in the walkways or the edible food in the cafeteria it's the small class sizes, large number of books and lots of paper for writing and lots of extra programs for things like the humanities and music where kids can learn critical thinking skills even if they don't just naturally have them.

If you look at how rich people teach their kids they don't do any of this experimental bullshit and they don't give them Chromebooks they use the same techniques we hammered out from about 1910 through about 1970. All the experimentation is done on the poor kids.

The point is you have too many people and nothing to do with them. We're running out of work and we are a society where if you don't work you don't eat.

AI breaks this entire system even faster than the factory automation did. It doesn't just expose the cracks it Rams a crowbar in between them and then uses a machine to pull them apart. Students can bypass the sorting mechanism designed to decide who is and isn't worthy of the attentions of the 1%. The teachers for their part are dumbfounded because they haven't ever quite come to terms with the fact that our education system does not serve the students it serves big business...

Sooner or later something has to give and I just kind of wish I had died before the shit hit the fan

There's nothing else worthwhile to say on this thread. We all know this is corruption and gambling.

Better or cheaper than not putting it there in the first place. When you see stuff like this it's greenwashing. Like how recycling does basically fuck all but we all get told as kids to do it because the plastic industry pays to have you told that bullshit.