Apparently the North Koreans were actually doing the jobs. Sure, the money ended up with the North Korean government, but when your own government takes your money that's taxation, and only libertarians call it theft.

Uh, you realize the Federal Reserve already does this with the dollar, right?

Google reported using 32.11 million MWh in 2024. Average cost per megawatt hour for industrial customers in the US was $87.50, so we can estimate (with wide error bars, but the right order of magnitude) about $2.8 billion in electricity cost for the year. Google's net income in 2024 was about $100B, so electricity costs are a small fraction of profit. Electricity expenses are included in their cost of revenue, which was a total of $146B.

I believe the second-order effect of being able to scale faster will easily swamp the first-order effect of saving money on electricity.

Google makes so much money even their enormous electricity bill is probably only a small fraction of profit, yes. But if they can cut the amount of power they use, they can add more compute without having to increase the amount of electrical capacity in a data center (or build more data centers), which not only means less capital expense but also means they can increase compute in less time. So it's definitely a concern.

"Quantum Leap" was RIGHT THERE! How could you miss it?

Once they've got all electric vehicles and a grid reliant on rainbows and sunshine, they'll not only be shivering in the dark but they'll be stuck where they are. Well, France will be OK with its nukes... this is one way for them to move ahead of Germany.

Then you've found Sir Thomas More's Utopia. As the name implies, you haven't.

Welfare and "universal basic income" mean that there's still work being done; it's just that the people not doing the working are getting the benefit. As with Russell's hereditary landowners, "their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others".

The answer to the headline is, atypically, "Yes". But in fact every age has been the golden age of stupidity. When the microcomputer revolution was occurring... most people were idiots. When the transistor was invented... the world was full of morons. When Einstein and Bohr and Heisenburg and Planck and Maxwell and Schroedinger were revolutionizing physics... yes, they saw stupid people everywhere. When Newton was publishing on gravity... yep, dumb people everywhere. When Aristotle was teaching promising young Greeks in the Lyceum, or Plato the academy, the general populace (hoi polloi) were as dumb as now.

You're leaving out an important element, and you can't even really start discussing it validly until you include it. This element is that the union is itself another firm. It is not the workers exercising power in their control; the union exercises the power.

The same people who are now handwringing about how datacenters are going to overwhelm the electric grid were pushing electric vehicles pretty damned hard; they should be happy that both aren't happening.

If the other landlords are also using the software, and all are working off the same information, then the software can determine the prices the other landlords would choose as well. In the limit, if every landlord is using the same software, they can can all act as-if they were colluding even though there is no communication between them.

On the one hand, my libertarian side objects to this. On the other, I think such software can pretty much only be used for evil. Which is to say, allowing the landlords to eliminate all the consumer surplus.

Woz isn't eligible:

Woz is happily not dead yet.

And that's why end-to-end encryption is the only sort which can be trusted by the ends. None of this "SSL added and removed here" stuff. But of course governments strongly discourage its use, and especially any way to make it easier to use, because they want to eavesdrop.