Inflation is the drain on the nation. The reason for all of these 1 Trillion dollar companies is that there are all of these money created by the various governments and banks propped up by government entities, all of the bail outs, money printing, quantitative easing (money printing), etc., all of it is inflation, i.e. expansion of the money supply. Much of it is driven by the pathetically low interest rates, manipulated by the government over the last few decades (as the governments got off the gold), all of it means simply that prices for things (including stock valuations) go up, none of it is increase in any actual productivity, all of it is bad for the world and global economies no matter what the likes of Paul Krugmans and other Keynesian charlatans are telling you.

Basically a trillion dollars is not what it used to be, it used to be inconceivable, now it is just another Tuesday.

I think it plausible that 99% of new energy this year come from renewable sources because many of those sources come from renewable types with relatively short construction times.

Up until recently, the US adds about 50 GW of capaicty per year. There's a huge uptick in generation capacity because of energy demands from data centers, so recently it's more like 65 GW/year. The challenge is you can't exploit *this year's* high market prices by starting a nuclear power plant that won't come on line for a decade. Even a combined cycle natural gas plant is going to take five years. But you can have a wind farm up and running in months.

It's not the renewability *per se* that's driving this; it's profiting from the high prices before the AI bubble bursts. Nobody is rushing to bring new hydropower or geothermal plants online, and they're just as renewable as wind or solar.

This move to renewables is not about changing the world. it's about short term financial optimization. But these short term, local optimizations *will* change the world, and planning to handle the transformations driven by short-term market forces is going to take coordinated, long term national action. At present there are regional mandates that will stabilize the local grid against variations in electricity supply. But carving up the nation into small regional markets means higher prices and economic inefficiencies where electricity is transfered from high price areas to stabilize low price areas. Market economics don't work if there are non-market forces (stability) that trump profitability.

Strictly speaking, Gates' name appearing in the files as a "note to self" isn't dispositive of anything. Epstein was a sociopath, and while he was profoundly and disturbingly weird, not a dummy. He'd already been publicly exposed and convicted of child procurement. So he knew he was radioactive. He might well choose to salt his own records with poison pills.

But that's the context we shouldn't miss: Epstein was publicly known to be a child trafficker years before Bill Gates initiated his contact with him. And Bill Gates has people to look out for him and extensive contacts with Epstein's clientele. He must have known. So the parsimonious explanation is that he was seeking out what Epstein uniquely could provide.

As for Gates, he's really smart in a certain way; he's probably usually the smartest guy in the room. But not one-in-a-million smart. I bet a lot of us know people who are smarter than he is. What his history shows is a willingness to act ruthlessly and transgress legal or ethical rules for personal gain, while being aware of reputational risk. I'm not reducing him to a cartoon villain — he may genuinely care about issues like malaria. But he understands the value of curating his reputation. Epstein is a perfect match for him: high school math teacher smart, sociopathic, but obsessed with amassing social capital through connections with academics with tech-bro appeal that opened doors.

It is indisputable that Gates had a relationship with Epstein — Gates himself doesn't deny it. Gates is contesting the veracity of what Epstein wrote in his files, and you know what? I think ithose things are likely false. If Gates needed to score some antibiotics on the DL, he wouldn't need to beg is pedophile buddy. But if Occam's razor serves here, the STD story is just a distraction. Getting or not getting and STD would just be a matter of luck. It wouldn't change the fact Gates sought association with a known child sex trafficker.

And here’s the other big piece of context we shouldn’t miss: while appearance in the Epstein files isn’t strictly dispositive of anything, the unprecedented structure of Epstein’s plea agreement and the resulting absence of federal prosecution constitute a smoking gun for deliberate non-enforcement by law enforcement. From this, we can reasonably infer that powerful individuals were being shielded from scrutiny. Epstein received an extraordinarily lenient deal that explicitly immunized unnamed co-conspirators — an inversion of standard prosecutorial practice, where defendants are typically flipped to expose broader conspiracies. It is reasonable to infer, in the absence of any credible explanation, that prosecutors were motivated to protect those co-conspirators for some reason.

The economy started collapsing once the government introduced such concepts that allowed it to get to the point of the collapse. 2007 was a result of a number of wrong and bad decisions, it was not the cause. The cause is the government expansion, printing of paper money, federal reserve controlling and manipulating interest rates to be below what market would set, various rules, laws, regulations and taxes that prevent formation of capital and of businesses and promote outsourcing manufacturing.

What we are observing now is just many lines of bad decisions coming together into a single point, everything is being focused together and comes into light.

The reasons for all of this is corruption bottom up and top down, it is people expecting free shit to be handed out by government, expectations are that some people will pay for others, it doesn't matter if we are talking about income taxes, bank bailouts, housing subsidies, various rules and regulations, it is just a culmination of the effects of all of these causes.

Marking the value of these companies to market, is that it? For decades the idea for all of these 'businesses' was to collect as many free users as possible (which is why they could get hundreds of thousands if not millions of subscribers per day) and then get paid by the 'investors' (gamblers) for this. Their best business propositions were to sell advertisements and to sell user data. By introducing paid subscriptions AFAIC they are actually marking the value of their businesses to market, as in they are going to find out what their business models are actually worth. What will this do to their share prices you ask? I don't know, I wonder if they do.

No, unless and until they can produce a gallon of gasoline chaper than pumping oil out of the ground, refininging it, and shipping it to the gas station -- an economic miracle if you think about it

This makes sense for remote, off-the-grid locations where you have access to renewable power like solar that you don't pay for by the kilowatt hour. You could make enough gas from a modest setup to meet an inidvidual's needs.

It's one thing to man-rate a *technology*; but the *production processes* and supply chain need to be equally robust. The Apollo Command Module was flown a half dozen times before any manned mission.

Apollo was a project that had economic scale. Many test objects were created and many beta units produced of critical components like the Command Module. While managing larger scale processes has its own challenges, the fact that the processes are *repeated* make them easier to debug.

The low pace of manned missions in the current era adds to their risk. You can man-rate the *technology*, but (a) it's minimally tested and (b) produced artisinally instead of industrially. There were, perhaps, 180 space suits of various types produced for Apollo (not all of which flew), which while below "industrial" production quantities was a lot of repeittion of the operations needed to make them. The astronauts on Artemis missions will be wearing suits produced at a rate of a handful over a decade.

While the hindsight and experience from sixty years of manned space flight reduce the technological risk, that is offset by the production quality risk from low cadence production. Assembly personnel and even vendors can turn over between production orders.

I see this as a rich-get-richer scenario. Smart people, the ones who can outthink statistical parrot, will be able to use its speed at processing and digesting massive quantities of data to improve their productivity. People who can't outthink the things will have to use them *credulously*, and thus become functionally dumber than ever.

My guy, ChatGPT isn't running on a single hard drive with a file system that just deletes the reference to the files in the file allocation table and doesn't happen to overwrite the data for a while.

For a private company, making a profit is necessary for continued existence. Companies that don't make a profit get bought out and liquidated for the value of their assets.

The alternative would be to nationalize drug development -- socialized medical research. Or there's just waiting and hoping for the best, which is what we're headed toward.

Next you'll tell me that people with AIDS who stop talking ART suddenly get the symptoms and effects of AIDS again.

Or that people suffering from schizophrenia who stop taking their anti-schizophrenia medicine suffer the effects of schizophrenia again.

Or that people taking anti-hypertensives get hypertensive 'all over again.'

Just wait until you find out that every person on the planet who ever had cancer also spent their entire lives being exposed to dihydrogen monoxide.

This is already happening today and as many things are done in Ukraine today, much of what is done is done without some order from a high up office. I know that there are AI models trained on real combat data.

I saw a truck company exec spend 7 hours in one day to throw together a working portal that integrated with his TMS, QuickBooks, Slack, Telegram and a system called Border Connect. This portal looks like he wanted, does what he wanted and reduces work load and processing errors in his company. He had no idea what coding is, he had no idea and no interest even to find out what technologies were used, what languages were used to put together the solution. I have to admit it was impressive.

To say that using something like LLM for a solution generation is a good idea or not a good idea you have to look at the final result I think. It may be a terrible idea but what if it works, delivers what is asked of it and reduces expenses for a company? Also I saw how happy the guy was that he could do it, he was proud of his achievement and I must say, for a person with 0 knowledge and no understanding of the underlying tech still to be able to do this was impressive. I was impressed that he was able to achieve this.

Will it withstand the test of time? Only time will tell.

Which part of "advertising that otherwise wouldn't be possible, because it would have required a movie crew" is unclear? I never hired a movie crew and I would never hire a movie crew, so there wouldn't be any advertising shot with a movie crew, because I wouldn't be able to pay for it.

I can, however, pay for a couple of guys making videos based on my requirements by using tools that were previously unavailable and thus costing one thousand of what it would cost with movie crews and traditional filming techniques. Having a commercial done for a few thousand dollars altogether, something that otherwise could easily cost 1-3 million? I am not talking about just being efficient here, I am talking about being able to afford something altogether.