You know, there could be something to this, if an ISP calculated out rates, found a "one price, without hikes after introduction" pricing, and advertised it as to what you'd save vs. the competition in a five year period or something. Granted, the whole "this quarter" mentality has penetrated the collective psyche enough that people may not go for it anyway. Hey, I think I finally get what trickle down economics is. All the horrible ideas of the bigger movers slowly trickled down to the rest of us.

Trump didn't help, but we can hardly lay the entire blame for this on his shoulders. We've been headed down this path for generations. Probably since before grandpappy Drumph (The actual family name) was a toddler. Trump's turned himself into the posterboy for the issue, but he's good at turning himself into the posterboy for nearly every issue, including human trafficking and sexual enslavement.

My local area is trying some end-runs around the issue right now. Power company is sending us notices of all sorts of "services" meant to "reduce your ongoing bill during peak times." What it amounts to is giving them control over when you're allowed to run AC during the summer and heat during the winter, and control over your food storage refrigerators and freezers, so that they can de-prioritize our power usage and funnel it to the datacenters we repeatedly screamed at the city and county admins that we didn't want. I imagine we're only a year or two away from it just being taken by force because nobody is signing up for these "let the power company yoink your power to pretend to be saving you money." Oh, BTW, our energy bills have already started rising fairly dramatically once the construction on the new datacenters started.

Let's not let MBAitis off the hook for its part. We've had the concept of cutting workforce being a profitable move shoved down our throats for the better part of two generations now, mostly because short-term thinking has become the norm is the business world and cost-cutting on the level of "firing big portions of the workforce" lead to a brief uptick in the bottom line almost every time. We'll short-term thinking our way right off the cliff edge one of these days. Hooray for quarterly profits above all!

As a guy who spends a lot of time just writing, it'd be great if there was an automated "set to normal" that kicks in when I send a task to one of the taxing queues for the processor, and keeps it hovering just above "noticeable lag in the editor" the rest of the time. Underclocking would be great as my daily driving range, with automated 'turn it up' when I kick on the local AI driven editing routines that spill out of the GPU at times.

It's a different world now. I don't doubt there's another world war coming. I just doubt the young men of today are going to be angry enough to want to fight it. They've been told there's no future their entire lives. Most of them are either nose to the grindstone to ignore that constant refrain, or so depressed they have zero ambition, zero hope, and zero fucks to give. Some are transferring their rage into political discourse that's almost as brazen as the current assholes in office, but none of them have the energy to actually turn that discourse into the violence that would be necessary to overthrow the current assholes in office.

By the time the world war truly kicks off? It'll mostly be automated, so even that will be taken away as an option for young men. I would expect the ultimate outcome, somewhere down the line, will be the angrier ones being handed weapons and told to go full gladiator on each other for the entertainment of the owners and the government officials that like to pretend they're a part of the owners. That potential seems far closer than it was even just a couple years ago.

Give us another couple years. We're working on it.

The optimistic (fantasy) view: They hope the hardware will be useful for something else when a sea-change optimization happens in the AI world.

The pessimistic (realist) view: Everybody involved from the tech bros to the investors are so busy sniffing their own and each other's farts that they can't be bothered to look at reality and are instead letting the vapor trail suck them up into the stratosphere with zero protections or parachutes, because even the few left with an eye toward reality have a firm belief that the government will throw the public under them to protect them when they inevitably fall from their lofty heights. What's really sad is? They have plenty of reasons to believe it. It's happened before when big ideas failed. It'll likely happen again. And the more of the economy they can suck into the scheme before the inevitable "correction" comes along, the more sure they can be that they'll get that sweet, sweet bailout relief at the expense of everybody else.

On the bright side, it's Bezos. It'll take him thirty years to go from concept to spin-up. If it were Musk, I'd be worried. That bitch's move fast and break things methodology is *NOT* what we need anywhere near nuclear power.

Not that I'm cheerleading Bezos by any means. Just saying, chances he never actually crosses the line due to caution are higher than they would be with most of the other techbro guys.

The box loading and unloading is getting automated too. There are self-driving forklifts now, and while some of them use a single remote operator to watch over a warehouse full, that's still pairing down a job that used to take between four to ten people to one or two. We're fast approaching the time when the owner class can finally achieve the dream of no longer needing a workforce filled with people. Let's see if they figure out they won't have customers if they don't pay most of the population before it catches up to them.

What they think they're telling the public: "We've learned a lot, and things will be much safer now."

What they're actually telling the public: "Move fast and break things, bitches! NOW WITH NUCLEAR POWER!"

It never ceases to amaze me how many leaps of logic people are willing to make in order to condemn folks they've never met, yet no leaps of logic are acceptable on any level in order to support those same folks. If we had a true UBI, they wouldn't have to throw their UBI money at others to help them survive, whether you want to attribute that survival to buying someone's next meth hit or not. That's the part of this study that failed to me. If we find out the UBI payment is mostly going to family members, maybe the family members should be included in the UBI experiment and see if that doesn't slow the bleeding from the original UBI participants.

That's a count-in, not a countdown.

We know that the economy is not fully encompassed in the stock market, but the view of our decision makers, from the corporate C-suites to our politicians, is that whatever happens within the stock market is 100% the indicator of the entirety of the economy. There isn't enough time for them to concern themselves with the fact the plebs can't afford to eat or keep a roof over their head. I expect we'll hear the ramp-up in rhetoric against the homeless as the economy continues to grind and bind in such a way that the lower classes continue being drained to feed the upper classes, the stock market continues to soar, and the rest of us continue to lose value on the very thing they've legally obligated us into using as our retirement funds through 401k implementations that say, "All your savings are belong to finance bros."

Let's not forget, the tech bros are openly saying there's a 1/3rd chance that AI will wipe us out as a species, but "that's an acceptable risk." Because they might make a profit on the way to extinction. And we're letting them decide for all of us without pushing back.