I've never met a human who couldn't make a tool. Not a complex tool, but just a tool. Complex tools are a lot more difficult, but anyone who can adapt a towel to a flyswatter can make a tool.

More importantly: Capitalism is an ECONOMY and market system. It is NOT a blueprint for a society. You can run your commerce and trade as capitalism, when you run your SOCIETY along capitalism principles you end up... essentially with the USA.

This is the part that is constantly forgotten. As a society, we have values that are not represented well within capitalism. But for some reason, we dumb shits think that we can treat everything as a market and apply capitalism to it and that will magically solve problems. But in education, just as one random example, the goal of it all is educated adults as output. It is not maximizing profit. Same for the prison system, the healthcare system and two dozen others.

It's greed, pure and simple.

Making a good product is possible. KEEPING making good products for decades is hard. Even more importantly: You will have hits and misses. Which, for a quarterly-result-bonus oriented manager is a no-no. Subscription models mean plannable revenue streams. Then all you need to do is negotiate your bonus package so that the already existing subscriptions will provide and you're home free and can already order your 2nd yacht.

I don't think an ICE version would be legal. You can't really hit the emissions targets without electronic engine controls.

As for charging, your house is the charging station. You might have to run an outlet and plug in an EV charger. If you've got a welder you've almost certainly already got a NEMA 14-50 or similar that will work. And if you don't have a welder, you should fix that ASAP! Everyone who lives in the sticks should have a welder and know how to use it.

They try, and often they succeed for a while, but they eventually get disrupted by market changes. The most important thing is to be vigilant for regulatory capture. It's when businesses can enlist the power of the state in maintaining their moats that they can stay on top indefinitely.

And for your knowledge.

This is the enormous oversight in the Labor Theory of Value. Knowledge is actually more significant than labor. Without the requisite knowledge, labor and capital produces nothing useful. With it, the labor and capital generate something people want. With more of it, less labor and less capital produce more output, or better output.

It's understandable that Marx didn't notice the value of knowledge. He was mostly thinking about agricultural production, implemented with practices that hadn't changed significantly in generations, maybe centuries. The knowledge was already so well-dispersed among the relevant population that it was easy to just assume it as background knowledge, like knowing how to walk and talk. And it changed so slowly it was easy to miss that increases in knowledge enabled increases in production.

But ignoring the contribution of knowledge leads to failing to recognize the power of innovation. That leads to all sorts of foolishness, including a failure to recognize the power of competition and other forces that motivate innovation. The history of countries who tried to follow Marx's ideas are replete with examples of incredibly-foolish decisions by central planners who failed to understand the value of knowledge, both direct and embodied.

Another sort of knowledge people tend to ignore is managerial knowledge, at all levels of the chain and most especially in the allocation of capital (the labor involved in capital allocation is also often ignored). All those irritating financiers who seem like pure parasites are in fact doing critically-important knowledge work (and it is work) by making capital available to the enterprises who can make effective use of it, and withdrawing it from less effective enterprises.

Perhaps the biggest form of knowledge that is ignored is the knowledge encapsulated in prices, which is collectively generated and refined by countless people in every supply chain. Encoded in prices is deep knowledge of every stage of the supply chain and the value that it represents for one usage as compared to another. This is the single biggest source of foolish behavior by central planners. There is simply no way for them to discover the deep, detailed knowledge encoded into prices, and as a result they make terrible choices about how to allocate capital, labor and human knowledge. Markets also don't do it perfectly (we're human), but they do it far, far better. This is the single most important reason why capitalist economies massively outperform centrally-planned ones, though the other reasons also contribute.

Sheesh. Wasn't the total failure of Stargate Universe enough to demonstrate why this is a terrible idea?

That's one of the things that made Stargate work. Even the characters that weren't the most highly educated were still by and large intelligent, or at least capable of logical thinking.

There are a few of episodes where characters were genuinely stupid — not just uneducated, but failing to listen to logic outright. Those episodes were sometimes a bit cringe, but they were also rare. And none of those episodes were written that way just to add artificial drama to make people feel things (ugh), but rather invariably ended up in a teachable moment demonstrating the folly of willful ignorance and not using your head.

I think that's impossible for internal combustion engines. They can't meet the emission control standards without intricate computer engine controls.

However... it should be very possible for EVs. You'll still need a little computerized control of the charging subsystem, but that's it -- and that could be an easily-replaceable module. The rest could be incredibly simple. No more complicated than an electric golf cart, just scaled up.

You mean like the first episode of season 1?

It's bizarre that the various streaming services don't just pick up the director's cut of Children of the Gods and make that the default first episode, and serve up the original one as a separate "show" so that they don't have to have the "nudity" caption on every episode all the way through season 10.

SG-1 poked fun at the concept of a younger, edgier version in season 10... and then three years later, the studio actually did it. I believe the word is "harbinger".

If they had some super powerful analysis and synthesis computer that solves problems for them, would it be able to sort this out?

To a constitutional literalist, much of what the federal government does is illegal. Unfortunately, the Constitution, if literally interpreted, would not work in a large society with fast transportation and fast communication. It was written for a country that was 90% rural, and where it could take weeks to travel to Washington, DC. It was also written for a country where most of the decisions affecting citizens were LOCAL. Town or county level.

And, yes, the government has clearly drastically altered to interpretations put on many sections, and ignored others. This was necessary because the Constitution is too difficult to amend. (Perhaps they would have done it anyway, but that's a separate argument.) E,g, there is no valid basis in the Constitution for any law either enabling or regulating a corporation. The founders generally didn't trust corporations, and to the extent that they were permitted, thought that they should be regulated a the state level or lower. Some of them thought that corporate charters should be for limited periods of time...but just imagine trying to build a transcontinental railroad without standardized legal corporate laws. (It's been done in other areas, but it sure wasn't easy.)

Why?

Even if you could do that effectively, wouldn't that further entrench the idea that The People are the government's bitch

Anthropic urges everybody else to pause so they can get their code bloat under control.

Engineers who suddenly produce 8x more code are almost certainly not doing it by writing clean, efficient code. That would mean that somehow it takes less than an eighth as long to explain to the AI what you want to do AND review that code. And for non-trivial code, adequate code review alone can take 5 to 10% of the time it would take to write the code from scratch. So that would have to mean that engineers are not spending any time telling AI what to do. That or AI is reducing the amount of time they waste in meetings. (That was a joke! Ha ha! Fat chance!)

And that doesn't even factor in the amount of time spent figuring out whether it's the right way to approach the problem in general, which often exceeds the amount of time spent on the code. So even if you could reduce the time spent working on the code to absolutely zero, including review time, it should not be physically possible to exceed a 2x increase in code generated.

And there aren't 32+ hours in the day, so we can also exclude the possibility that they are working 4x as long.

So from this, we can safely assume that either their code quality is an abomination or their architecture is, and possibly both. If that's not true, then it's nothing short of a miracle.