I have a government for that. I can just have my government do whatever the fuck Google was going to do and then I have more water without greenwashing bullshit.

One of the major reasons you can't afford beef, or at least a good beef, is because we have been in a drought for decades now and it has finally caught up with us on cattle prices. There just isn't enough water especially in Texas to keep all those cattle going so they can be turned into hamburgers.

Water is not an infinite resource. If we had a more functional civilization we could solve a lot of the water problems we have but we don't. So Google lobbying for deregulation and tax cuts so that my government doesn't have the resources to provide water on a consistent basis doesn't help me at all when they offset a little bit of the damage they did from that lobbying.

It is a nice reminder of just how fucking stupid they think we all are though.

At least for that price. The video card in it is roughly equivalent to a 4060 which is okay but for a thousand bucks that's really pushing it.

I really wish we would just shut down all this AI bullshit it's making everyone's lives worse but the people in charge want it and what they say goes. It's funny watching these little communities try to push back against the data centers and then getting their asses handed to them unless it's one of the wealthier communities than somebody just fucked up and didn't realize that.

Somebody ran the numbers and found that most of them are getting put in places with severe water shortages and therefore taking all of what's left of the water. That is of course because of you got a water shortage because of long-standing drought the property values are going to be lower so you're less likely to be able to fight off a data center.

Meanwhile small government conservatives are busy using state governments to force local governments to accept the data centers whether they want it or not. Several States especially Texas have overridden local zoning laws and rulings to force the community to allow the data center and to provide it with the water and electricity.

I guess next to that mess overpriced video game consoles seems a little quaint but it's still infuriating. The handful of things to keep us nerds happy or becoming gradually unobtainable. And of course those small government conservatives are happy to give us somebody to blame that on besides AI slopped devouring all of our opportunities...

Culture wars are absolutely global phenomenon. I have issues with golf courses too especially the private ones. But more importantly the public golf course is at least a public good.

And yeah data center is do guzzle water there are multiple articles about it including ones where forget taking all the water they have caused structural problems with the local ground, not just the groundwater but the ground itself because they pumped so much water out of the ground to use their damn data centers.

Data centers don't have to use all that water but it's marginally more profitable to do so so they do. We could pass laws but well people are busy freaking out over culture War bullshit.

The reason you don't think it's a global problem is because you don't understand the different cultures have different culture or bullshit so you don't see it happening. But it's the same trick everywhere

No the real problem is that it guzzles water and electricity while devouring jobs.

I don't think the billionaires give a shit if AI cost more than an equivalent or even a better human being. They are sick and tired of being dependent on and having to pay lip service to us commoners. So any amount of money they have to spend to get true absolute freedom and true absolute power will be worth it.

As an added bonus we as a species have been so distracted by culture War bullshit for the last 30 or 40 years that we have been falling over ourselves backwards to give all the money in the world to the top 0.1%. so it literally costs them nothing to replace us all with AI and automation.

Even if I can't do everything it's a pretty safe bet it can do enough. Go look up the percentage of white collar workers and ask yourself what's going to happen if even a quarter of them become unemployable. How that's going to reverberate through the economy.

And no, we can't all be plumbers. Blue collar guys don't hire a lot of blue collar guys to do work. And that's before we talk about the actual wages those guys make when you look at the median instead of the average and take out a few crazy outliers working on oil rigs until they're late twenties when they have to give it up because it's too hard on their bodies

It's not a source of truth it's a source of free training data for your shitty AI.

There is a numbnut training in AI off of my comments here and I will periodically drop the phrase trump fucks kids into my comments and his AI chat bot picked it up after only a few comments.

What I'm saying is it's surprisingly easy to manipulate AI chatbot algorithms. It's no different than the early days of search engine optimization.

I don't know nearly enough about the math to say whether or not it's going to be fixable like it was for seo. SEO still has its problems but it's harder tha to manipulate that it used to be.

The real problem is chatbots are approached very differently by people with underdeveloped critical thinking skills then search engines. People get into a conversational mode with them and start to think of them as friendly friends and we'll start believing whatever they tell them. You're basically forming a parasocial relationship like people do with Joe Rogan and well think about how much this information Joe rogan's podcasts spews

They're getting ready for mass firings. California and New Jersey both have rules about how you do that. You can still do it, but it's gonna show up in the press and you can't cheat people out of unemployment insurance or agreed upon severance.

Also you have to report the mass firings. Texas lets you sweep them under the rug.

I'm saying don't move. You'll be fired in a year.

You can't race to the bottom

If Trump backed candidates win then Europe is going to have to do something but if they lose even if it's Republicans winning Europe will see that as a signal that they can back down.

The basic question is will America return to some semblance of sanity with the economy crashing and gas prices skyrocketing or will they just keep doubling down on more Trump. There have been several primary elections where Trump backed candidates won though. So it's not looking good. The basic problem is American voters either are obsessed with voting Republican even when it hurts them economically and a lot of Americans aren't allowed to vote because we do heavy duty voters suppression.

So the country is really going off the deep end here.

The thing is Europe can't really ignore a mentally unstable United States because we still have this massive military. I know it looks like we got our asses kicked in Iran but the only reason Trump had the back down even a little is that a draft and boots on the ground is still a bridge just a little bit too far.

All it takes to change that is one middle-sized terrorist attack and the American public will freak the fuck out and send their kids off to die in the desert again. Hell the last time when 9/11 hit we didn't even have to do a draft because so many people signed up. Now mind you Iran is a much bigger country and taking Greenland is a bigger deal so yeah we would need a draft, but you can get away with pretty much anything when people think that they are under attack

You need to look up what a mother fucking chesterton's fences.

Deregulating isn't going to create some magical world of competition and wonder and beauty. All it's going to do is what a handful of psychopaths abuse people's privacy and civil rights. Basically the exact same problem the United States has right now where finance Bros have used technology to do all sorts of fucked up shit and get us to where we are right now.

All Europe has to do if it wants to compete with Microsoft is take government money and dump it into software. That's it. Most of the software they need is already 60 to 80% of the way there. After that all you have to do is mandate the use of that software to interoperate with the government and with government contracts and everyone has to follow along because government contracts are worth way too much money to blow them off. It really is that simple and it's only corruption that prevents it from happening.

Every few years Europe threatens to dump Microsoft and Microsoft comes in and gives them tens of millions of dollars worth of free software and free support. This is been going on for at least as long as I've been paying attention and that's going on 30 years.

The reason we are here talking about this shit is because this doesn't look like another cycle of Europe pressuring Microsoft for free support, free software and discounts but instead they are legitimately trying to decouple themselves from America because America has gone bad shit crazy with right-wing extremism and the kind of laissez-faire bullshit that you're talking about when it comes to quote unquote deregulation.

What you're suggesting is basically Europe traveling the exact same road that the United States did which is the exact reason Europe doesn't want to buy software from the United States anymore. Counterproductive doesn't even begin to cover it. That would be batshit insanity.

Did you seriously write that comment or are you just a AI chatbot? Honestly can't tell the difference anymore.

You might want to look up where most telecommunications hardware comes from regardless of what the rules and regs say. Or fuck where do you think phones are made? Yeah some of them are made in India not anywhere close to all of them.

People will buy from dictators all day long as long as those dictators are predictable.

So this isn't about tech sovereignty per se this is because America has gone so far off the rails that we can no longer be trusted.

You will note that Europe isn't busy doing the same thing with Chinese electronics and software. That's because as brutal a regime as China is they are at least predictable. As long as the money flows they're not going to do anything too crazy.

In the era of a second term of trump that is no longer true for america. All bets are off and God only knows what's going to happen.

I don't think people really can process just how crazy it is that the president of the United States threatened to seize Greenland by force and that the only reason he stopped is that Congress told him no. And to be clear not all of Congress just enough of it that he had to listen on that one issue...

At a certain point crazy is so fucking crazy that while intellectually you know it's there emotionally you can't really process it. It's what I call the Dick Cheney effect.

So anyone Facebook really wants and needs will get an exemption and anyone else gets tossed into the grinder. That's how these sort of exemptions work. Same thing they do with remote work.

Every company is going to have a handful of genuinely irreplaceable workers and those are the ones that this policy will be available to and everyone else can go fuck themselves.

And if the other workers refused to work for Facebook they couldn't be more happy about that because the administration will just let them bring in cheap H-1B labor after they claim they can't find Americans willing to work. Because America first and all that.

Sure you can. Just like how some people get a pass on work from home. This is a way to deal with employees you need who credibly threaten to leave while using the process to fire anyone else without severance.

They aren't waiting for America anymore because they can't trust America anymore. They have green lit billions and billions of dollars in additional War funding for Ukraine. They have of course been dicks about it and turned it into loans but they will leverage later on but it means that Ukraine has the resources to keep fighting.

I would like to see the Democrats to get back in charge and deal with russia. I will never understand why Biden didn't do more. Then again the Republican party is pretty close with Russia and Biden was probably trading Ukraine for some domestic policy. He never gets enough votes in the Senate and House to really do much of anything because of the filibuster but it's always too risky to eliminate the filibuster because the Republicans have repeatedly said they will eliminate all voting rights if they didn't have the filibuster stopping them.

So one of the ways to pad your resume is to contribute to open source projects and this is been one of the drivers for open source.

So what we are seeing now is AI slop submissions flooding open source projects from people trying to get a credit without actually doing any work. It's no skin off their backs if you waste the reviewer's time and if your AI slop happens to be legit because you did three or four 500 submissions then that's just fine. Because all you were really after is getting your name on the project for when you apply for a job.

With how hyper competitive life is now because we're all Fighting for our lives out here I suppose I can't blame them but it's fucking things up. It's just another twisted distortion you get when you tie somebody's ability to access food and shelter to their job performance.

Even if the company has a crap product as long as they have a product they can keep taking money from investors and the CEOs can keep paying themselves out of that money. Maybe someday they will have a working product maybe they won't but either way the CEOs didn't have to have real jobs for quite some time.