America seems weak because we still have some semblance of sanity holding us back from violence. But America absolutely has a production capacity that Russia cannot even dream of. We also have a population that's over twice the size.

The two are not at all comparable. Russia was broken by world War II and never recovered. America has a massive on tapped production capacity that could easily become a terrifying War engine. You won't be able to hold us off with drones. We could quite easily raise an army of boots numbering 10 or even 20 million and we have the capacity to feed and deploy them. Russia on the other hand is a blasted out hell hole with two functioning cities and absolutely nothing else.

Your post is exactly the kind of crap I'm talking about. Folks do not fear America and frankly they should. I'm American and I am absolutely terrified of my country and what it's capable of. We came very close to siding with the Nazis 100 years ago. And again unlike Germany we have the industrial and production capacity to take on The world. Especially if we loot Canada and Mexico and South America first and the rest of the world lets us do it.

Many years. No, bubbles don't pop when you look at them. Yah that ain't real, models will continue to improve, but the rate of improvement may slow. Then there's the vacuum of potential behind it that will take some time to realize. They way we use them is changing as rapidly as the quality, as in models could all stand still a year and in that year you'll see very different ways of extracting more from the same quality model, better harnesses and frameworks, etc.

Bubbles don't go away when everyone agrees there's a bubble. Anyone can tell when the price of a thing far exceeds its fundamental value, and it doesn't matter as long as someone will buy it. FOMO and greater fool theory can maintain bubbles indefinitely as long as there's money to spend and people are willing to take risks. I think one of those needs to change before you see a bubble pop.

That said, what even is the AI bubble, the price of a GPU, a mw of datacenter, monthly token spend? It would help to be able to put your finger on what price is inflated beyond reason. Maybe it's in datacenters/gpu, too much redundant effort being put in to climb to the top and eventually it's going to consolidate down to a few leaders. IDK if that is even co spidered a bubble, but some people think AI is a bubble in the way internet advertising is a bubble, because they don't even look at them, so therefore the entire economic engine powering the free internet is a bubble, and I don't think that's a useful way to characterize whatever that is.

Without having the ocean there isn't really a hell of a lot you can do if the United States becomes belligerent. You need to stop that from happening in the first place. And I think it's painfully obvious you can't rely on us to do it for you anymore.

Digital sovereignty is a good thing for Europe because they've got an ocean between them and America so if we go completely off the deep end by electing another Republican in 2028 (whether it's Trump or Vance doesn't really matter) they at least have some time to prepare. But with Canada we're just going to roll up there and there really isn't a hell of a lot you guys can do. You can't even burn down the White House again Trump already destroyed it.

It has to get them away from Trump.

Trump threatened to invade greenland. The only good reason for America to do that is to prep for an invasion of Europe.

Now that's insane but yeah so is Trump and so are the project 2025 lunatics who are actually running things while that senile old man does increasingly stupid and crazy things to get attention.

I don't think people realize just how much Donald Trump as president has fucked things up for America. Europe no longer trusts us and they are getting ready to start cutting ties. This will gradually cut us out of European markets which will have a significant impact on our jobs and the economy in general.

European nationalists like this because they think that they can safely blow off America while rising as we fall. It's a dangerous game they're playing. As an American I can tell you we are fucking crazy and you should worry about us. We have almost unimaginable capacity to produce weapons that we are not currently tapping. But a little bit of slave labor and a wartime economy and we could do some truly horrifying things and again we are insane so we don't care that you have nuclear weapons...

Europe really shouldn't have allowed Russia to run roughshod over us. I get why they did it they're hoping to replace the US dollar as the primary worldwide currency because that would let some of their guys become trillionaires instead of just one of our guys. But that's not going to help the European people who aren't trillionaires so it's probably not a good idea to keep letting Russia take advantage of us. And we have clearly shown we can't protect ourselves anymore and that we need help.

But to try and get back to the fucking article, Europe is going to start cutting ties with American software companies because they don't trust america. And that means they're not going to give a rat's ass about the cost they're just going to pay it like any other national security expense.

Because it's nice to have a guest over and just watch something on a streaming service than some weird piracy menu...nor teach your kids to steal. Kewl...you hacked the system. I just worked a job and pay the monthly fee for Disney+ so my kids can enjoy the movies they want to see. I don't judge it if you want to...but why is it so unfathomable to you that I'd rather pay a small amount not to steal?

The fact that you think that's a flex says more about you than your realize. We've all heard it before, it's fucking tedious and shitty. You're worse than a vegan who won't shut up about being a vegan.

Not owning a TV is not a virtue. You're not superior to anyone who does. Also, if you couldn't find a single thing worth watching on Netflix...again...you're the issue. There's a fuckton of good Netflix content on there. If you can't find ANYTHING in Netflix's decades-long production run as well as all the content they license....well you either didn't look very hard or you're an insufferable hipster.

NO ONE has ever heard someone say "Ackchyually....I don't own a TV" and thought..."What a great guy!" "I bet he has something interesting to say". "Please, wholesale reject a MASSIVE form of entertainment that nearly everyone enjoys to some degree". That is why you're better than those of us who enjoy Netflix from time to time, good sir!

Not quite. The dealership is doing basically what we do as well: Pay for charging stations for private use, but because they partnered with a company they need to be publicly accessible. So they set a ludicrous rate for the general public and then discount it for employees / customers by a high number.

It's not that out of the ordinary.

The dealer explicitly said the charger was intended for their use and the high prices are to try and prevent members of the public from blocking it from the employees.

No the prices were posted but the guy admits he didn't even look and just blindly assumed. Also he would have not looked twice, since he mentioned he used the EVGo app to find a charger, the EVGo app lists the fees when you click on the charger.

That said... he's may not be completely stupid, he did say it was a rental car. I can imagine this could catch someone out if its their first time charging an EV. You don't get this kind of price variance on gasoline.

You can admit to failing in business and customers getting sick of your enshittification as well as facing economic headwinds due to interest rates, chip-prices, and tariffs and all your bad decisions in the past....or you can layoff folks and proudly claim you're super-good at AI and riding the AI wave of the future!

The tech industry had a record expansion, but hit a brick wall due to rising interest rates...which lucky for those fraudsters, happened a year or 2 after OpenAI had their first release. I remember Marc Benioff being one of the very first frauds to AI-wash, claiming he didn't need those workers because their AI was soooo good....yet he has no demo and doesn't want to earn a FORTUNE selling this magic AI that can replace so many jobs at an advanced big tech company like Salesforce????

They have a long history of claiming to lay off people due to advances in AI, but in reality, all evidence points to there being none. They simply didn't want to advertise their overhiring in the past and the economic headwinds they're facing...especially with the Trump administration, which has taken vindictiveness to a level never seen before. If a major company lays of 5% of their workforce and blames economic headwinds, most of which were DIRECTLY CAUSED BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION'S TRADE WAR, then they risk getting on his radar...and no one wants that. Love Trump or hate him, if you're a CEO, it's very bad for business to be on his bad side. It's best to avoid confrontation and wait out until his term ends or all the cocaine and cheeseburgers finally catch up with him.

Life was a LOT better for the tech companies 4 years ago. Interest rates were super low. Globalization and free-trade hit their peak. The economy was in much better shape. Record number of people were falling in love all over again with their devices due to lockdown. The future was bright.

Today, the future is VERY uncertain. Admitting that makes you look weak...so they lie outright to investors....Oh...we didn't overhire...oh no, we're not being DESTROYED by the RAMpocalypse + Tariffs!!!!!....people aren't losing interest in our products due to our late-state enshittification. We're laying people off because we're so amazing at AI.

I use Claude daily. It's cool. It's fun to play with. I can do things with Claude I couldn't do before....but.....not a fucking thing I do with it is related to what I am paid for. For my actual job?...IT SUCKS ASS!!!! I've used it daily for 2 years, by employer mandate. I can say the code it generates compiles successfully more often. Now I get compilation failures weekly instead of daily. But the code it generates is wrong, daily....objectively wrong...meaning it understood my intent and made an objective error. I never count it when it fails due to me giving vague requirements. In the end, it takes Claude longer to do my job than it would have taken me to do it myself...literally....even if it got it right the first time!...it churns for 15 minutes doing a task I can do in like 30 seconds to a few minutes. Adding in the frequent error correction, it does my job much worse than I do. It's good at letting me do other people's jobs...but in there are caveats:

1. I am paid to do my job, not other people's jobs.
2. For other people's jobs, I don't know enough to know if it did the job correctly or not. For example, I don't know how to write a React UI....so having claude make me one...well, I can tell you if it loaded without error, but I beyond that, I don't know if it did an adequate job, good job, or shit job.
3. If you force me to learn how to write a UI in React, I'd get better with time and become a more valuable asset to my employer. By throwing it to an AI, well, I am not learning much.

So is AI helping my team? We don't know. I can't say no for sure, but I am pretty confident it's not helping much. My boss doesn't know either...nor does his boss. We know we want to be super proficient in leveraging AI. But our velocity has gone down, not up...which again, we are not even sure if it went down to AI or just this year's requirements & workload are more complex than last year's. Story points are a very crude estimate...but if Claude was as magical as they say it is...we'd know...the story point boost would be high enough it wouldn't matter if we did a great job at consistently estimating.

This charger DID have that. In fact if you look at the video in TFA you can clearly see the charger lists $5/kWh + $5/min of connection right on the screen of the charger. Additionally the EVGo app will have listed these prices too.

I'm thinking far more likely it's a private public charger. Rates aren't fixed, they can be varied depending on who is charging. In TFA the dealership says the rates are jacked up as the charger is for employees and customers only.

For the record we do the same thing where I work. The chargers in the public parking lot have insanely high prices, but employees who tap on with our card get a 90% discount. It stops other people from clogging the chargers installed for our employee fleet vehicles.

Because 100% of petrol station owners are a paragon of virtue and no one has ever been caught price gouging consumers at a pump?

The fee was listed up front on the screen of the charger. Additionally the EVGo app the person used to find the charger also lists the fee of the charger. There were multiple warnings here to avoid this cost.

The guy basically said in news article he just didn't look and blindly assumed what the price will be. He also said about the same thing for gas, "Going to a gas station and expecting the average price to be around ..." so he doesn't look at gasoline prices either clearly.

What they're doing is the same as charging ridiculous money for gas at an airport. Basically you take your car to be serviced and it needs a bit of a charge so they hook it up to their charger and charge you an arm and a leg.

Most of the time they get away with it because your vehicle probably didn't need that much charge and you're already there for what is likely to be an expensive bit of maintenance because electric cars generally don't have a lot of cheap maintenance done to them it's an all or nothing kind of thing.

Basically by having it that high it lets them tack an extra $100 on your bill but it becomes a problem when somebody just flat out uses the charger.

They aren't going to post signs because if they do they won't be able to tack the money on when they do service. It'll be too obvious what they're doing. Eventually it'll get around but it'll take a while and the owner will make a ton of money in the meantime. Honestly it's probably not even the owner thinking about the money since that's still kind of small potatoes it's the manager trying to hit some arbitrary goal the owner set for them to get a bonus.

Bad incentives do bad things.

I absolutely bear ill will for people who want to hurt me. And billionaires want to hurt me.

I am not cruel though. I do not want to see them hurt. I want to see them lose their power over me and their ability to hurt me.

If you look through my comment history on any topic related to prison you will find me complaining about how we use prisons to torture people and that we should not do that under any circumstance. Even for the most heinous of crimes.

I believe that scientific advancement will eventually give it a chance solve all crime. Human beings are fundamentally a social species and antisocial behavior is either caused by bad incentives or broken brains. But I also recognized that we can't just magically wave a wand and fix everybody's brains and make those bad incentives go away and because of that we need to contain people who are going to hurt us. We first do that by taking away their opportunity to hurt us and then if we can't do that that's the only time we should be locking people up.

I'm saying all this because you can go fuck yourself with your oh no you're upset that she might get healed because she's rich bullshit. I'm not upset she might get healed I'm upset she wasn't already healed because assholes like her father have our species of thousand years behind the curve where we should be.

You should be upset about that too but for some god-awful reason you're not. Broken brain I guess I'll have to get my magic wand.

Dude China and Singapore are full of people doing the exact same thing. They are both fascist dictatorships. All that people's communist rhetoric is just bullshit they tell the rubes. China doesn't even have a universal Health Care system they have a private health insurance system like the United States