Also, we're not a "homogeneous population", you can stop with your pro-racism stereotypes. Immigrants are 20% of our population.

Being big is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It means that the costs to develop a system are spread across a much larger population. Everything we have had to be developed on a comparably minuscule budget.

And I want to be clear in the above: I fully acknowledge the irony, in that the US tech industry has been a powerhouse. There seems to be a massive disconnect in the US between tech innovation and tech infrastructure. The US is a world-leader in the former. It's consistently a deep laggard on the latter. The reasons why the US has so much trouble getting its act together on infrastructure and systems are complex, but it is remarkable to see, as someone who has spent their life in a mix of the US and Iceland. And it's not just Iceland that has it's act together on these sort of things - it's most of the developed world, and even surprising amounts of the developing world.

, with the most sophisticated banking system

Any American who believes this should try living overseas for a year or two. The US banking system is insanely backwards. Numerous aspects of the US medical and government systems as well. It's hard to explain it to you unless you experience it.

Checks are just one symptom (in Iceland, 15 years ago bank tellers would look at you weird and have to get the manager if you had a personal check, and 10 years ago, stopped taking them altogether). For like 15-20 years, we've had free instant bank-to-bank money transfers (no third party involved), everyone on the same service, to the point that if someone is collecting money for a gift for a coworker's birthday, it's always been, they just send an email with their bank details, instead of going around and collecting cash. All your bills - all of them - just show up in your bank's inbox. On and on.

I mentioned the medical system. Let me give a random example. In the US, you go to a doctor and they determine you need a prescription. They or their receptionist have to ask what pharmacy you want it at. It gets routed through SecureScripts (before that, it was all phone based!), and depending, you may also need to also call into the pharmacy before you go there - and if you need it "transferred", it's a multihour process. Here? The doctor just jots it into their computer, that's it. You can literally just walk out of the doctor's office into the pharmacy next door (or any other pharmacy), tell them your name, and they go grab your order.

Everything is connected. Everything is interoperable. All keyed to your kennitala (ID number) . And the kennitala is only a key, not a password. The fact that a SSN in the US is treated as both a key and a password is insane, from a security standpoint; by contrast, you can just post your kennitala online, it's fine. We have multiple actual authentication methods. The most convenient is the Auðkenni system. Our SIM cards store credentials in a separate cryptographic chip. When we need 2FA, for any business or government agency (all on the same system), it sends a special SMS that the phone routes to the SIM card to process, and then (at the OS level) pops up an authentication dialogue, so we have universal 2FA, linked to our kennitala, in all of our phones. It's been this way for like 15+ years.

Or let's talk taxes. You all know what it's like in America, so let's explain what it's like in Iceland. I get an email letting me know it's tax time. I go to the tax office website. I get 2FA login via my phone. My tax forms are right there. They're already filled out, with all of the information already collected. For like 90% of the population, it's just click through, verify it's correct, and submit. Some people may have some things that weren't logged, such as overseas investments or whatnot, but for most people, it's like a five minute process.

On and on. It's been so weird seeing America getting things 1-2 decades after us and acting like, "wow, we're leading in banking technology!", etc. No, you're an aged dinosaur, way behind the rest of the world because none of your systems work together and you're so slow to adapt to change.

... I really liked the first Superman they did.

So you managed to find and watch the Superman serial that Columbia put out in 1948. And if you liked that so much, did you hunt down its sequel, Atom Man vs. Superman that came out in 1950? If not, you really should as they used footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing as part of the first chapter's cliffhanger.

That's FoxGPT

How do you know those aren't subsidized also?

At least not if they were wearing AI glasses imposing VR advertising for next month's improved AI glasses.

Obligatory joke for low hanging fruit.

Adam Smith's biggest mistake was stealing the invisible hand's cloak of invisibility. Mostly downhill since then, now at AI-enhanced speeds.

This morning's weird thought was that Adam Smith's great mistake was to make the invisible hand visible. It was a flawed idea in the first place, basically a claim that things would work out "for the best" without knowing the details, but it was really a justification for social Darwinism before Darwin. In a sense bankruptcy serves as the equivalent of death in evolutionary systems in the biological world.

Once the invisible hand had lost its cloak of invisibility all the scoundrels in the world leapt to the attack, and we eventually wound up with bigger and bigger messes. The controlling hands are still mostly invisible, and now enhanced with AI, but they are still (for now) human hands busily devising new scams for fresh suckers. Leading candidates for the worst actors? My latest list features advertisers, stock brokers, real estate agents, and politicians. (Stock brokers is probably too narrow, but bankers is too broad and FinTech Bros is too trendy (for my tastes).)

Needs a joke for the conclusion, but I'm out of humor these days. Everything keeps running into the "We can't get there from here" oldie.

> and the Chinese are always ready with a cheaper product.

Chinese gov't is likely subsidizing those also to gain market-share. So it's in the same boat, perhaps at a different pace though, as they don't have to care what Wallstreet wants

> Open Source AI thingies

Running on in-premises hardware? If cloud-based, the subsidization time-bomb may still play out.

It's a success if you observe the right cats.

The smart-phone boom saved many techies from the wrath of the mortgage bubble econ crash. Even if a dev didn't work on phones, other devs moving to phones kept general dev demand up.

Investor funds and market-share-fights have been subsidizing the cost of AI for end-users. Even if the predictions in the article are exaggerated, the Day(s) of Reckoning will eventually arrive and there will be lots of WTFs.

Central banks do a lot of useful things, but they don't give currency a value (they can, however manipulate the value others give it by printing it, destroying it, changing interest rates, changing the amount of reserve banks need and the multiple they can lend, etc). What gives a currency value is supply and demand- the fact other people want that currency. Which is also what sets international exchange rates.

There's also the fact you need it to pay taxes, which sets a base amount of demand. But beyond that it's all supply and demand when deciding how much value it has against other currencies or physical objects.

WHich is different from crypto how? You print it from doing large amounts of useless work on a computer that provides no value and is immediately thrown out. Or the new proof of stake algorithms, in which you print it by having previously printed it. I'll take cash, thanks.