I don't think an ICE version would be legal. You can't really hit the emissions targets without electronic engine controls.

As for charging, your house is the charging station. You might have to run an outlet and plug in an EV charger. If you've got a welder you've almost certainly already got a NEMA 14-50 or similar that will work. And if you don't have a welder, you should fix that ASAP! Everyone who lives in the sticks should have a welder and know how to use it.

They try, and often they succeed for a while, but they eventually get disrupted by market changes. The most important thing is to be vigilant for regulatory capture. It's when businesses can enlist the power of the state in maintaining their moats that they can stay on top indefinitely.

You can actually plot improvement as measured by benchmark vs power consumption to train, and you see the power consumption curve upwards while the benchmarks seem to be asympote trending towards a specific limit. I've got a theory on it too. An LLMs basic fitness criteria is "Output text as close as possible to the training data". Well one thing that is NOT in the training data is text generated by anything smarter than a human. Because we've never seen an entity thats smarter than us. So the whole thing seems to be converging on a limit thats essentially 'one extremely well read human", and it has no data to tell it what something smarter than a human would look like.

All training further does is push that curve closer to the limit line, but it can never go above it. Theres a reason a lot of AI researchers are pretty adamant that the transformer LLM is probably not the final form of AI that can do the whole AGI superintelligence thing.

And for your knowledge.

This is the enormous oversight in the Labor Theory of Value. Knowledge is actually more significant than labor. Without the requisite knowledge, labor and capital produces nothing useful. With it, the labor and capital generate something people want. With more of it, less labor and less capital produce more output, or better output.

It's understandable that Marx didn't notice the value of knowledge. He was mostly thinking about agricultural production, implemented with practices that hadn't changed significantly in generations, maybe centuries. The knowledge was already so well-dispersed among the relevant population that it was easy to just assume it as background knowledge, like knowing how to walk and talk. And it changed so slowly it was easy to miss that increases in knowledge enabled increases in production.

But ignoring the contribution of knowledge leads to failing to recognize the power of innovation. That leads to all sorts of foolishness, including a failure to recognize the power of competition and other forces that motivate innovation. The history of countries who tried to follow Marx's ideas are replete with examples of incredibly-foolish decisions by central planners who failed to understand the value of knowledge, both direct and embodied.

Another sort of knowledge people tend to ignore is managerial knowledge, at all levels of the chain and most especially in the allocation of capital (the labor involved in capital allocation is also often ignored). All those irritating financiers who seem like pure parasites are in fact doing critically-important knowledge work (and it is work) by making capital available to the enterprises who can make effective use of it, and withdrawing it from less effective enterprises.

Perhaps the biggest form of knowledge that is ignored is the knowledge encapsulated in prices, which is collectively generated and refined by countless people in every supply chain. Encoded in prices is deep knowledge of every stage of the supply chain and the value that it represents for one usage as compared to another. This is the single biggest source of foolish behavior by central planners. There is simply no way for them to discover the deep, detailed knowledge encoded into prices, and as a result they make terrible choices about how to allocate capital, labor and human knowledge. Markets also don't do it perfectly (we're human), but they do it far, far better. This is the single most important reason why capitalist economies massively outperform centrally-planned ones, though the other reasons also contribute.

I think that's impossible for internal combustion engines. They can't meet the emission control standards without intricate computer engine controls.

However... it should be very possible for EVs. You'll still need a little computerized control of the charging subsystem, but that's it -- and that could be an easily-replaceable module. The rest could be incredibly simple. No more complicated than an electric golf cart, just scaled up.

Some of these things I suspect are old Steve Jobs dogmas. Jobs also hated two button mice. Thankfully you could always turn on the context right click, but even to this day the right-click seems to be something you have to turn on in settings (Not that I've set up a fresh mac in aeons. Jobs hated the ergonomics of touchscreens on laptops.

While I get the reverence for Jobs inside apple. Maybe its time they moved on from him. Well except for the customer service thing. Customer service from apple was *excellent* under Jobs. When the iphone sdk first came out, I wrote an angry email to sjobs @ apple dot com about the waiting time for approvals and how a client was threatening to sue me for delaying the project launch. That night at like 2am I got a phone call from his personal assistant telling me that jobs had flipped his lid and was on a rampage wanting to know why my app had been sitting in a queue for 2 months. Gotta respect that commitment to customer service. Crazy bastard actually read his emails. Even I dont do that lol

To a constitutional literalist, much of what the federal government does is illegal. Unfortunately, the Constitution, if literally interpreted, would not work in a large society with fast transportation and fast communication. It was written for a country that was 90% rural, and where it could take weeks to travel to Washington, DC. It was also written for a country where most of the decisions affecting citizens were LOCAL. Town or county level.

And, yes, the government has clearly drastically altered to interpretations put on many sections, and ignored others. This was necessary because the Constitution is too difficult to amend. (Perhaps they would have done it anyway, but that's a separate argument.) E,g, there is no valid basis in the Constitution for any law either enabling or regulating a corporation. The founders generally didn't trust corporations, and to the extent that they were permitted, thought that they should be regulated a the state level or lower. Some of them thought that corporate charters should be for limited periods of time...but just imagine trying to build a transcontinental railroad without standardized legal corporate laws. (It's been done in other areas, but it sure wasn't easy.)

The poster is a troll, and I completely disagree with the framing that Thomas is some devout defender of the Constitution, but there is actually a point here. The point was highlighted by Justice Sotomayor in the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter.

The TL;DR is that we've been pretty egregiously violating the Constitution's separation of powers for a century, and everyone has just quietly agreed to look away. We've been looking away for very good reasons, and what we really *ought* to do is amend the Constitution, because this is an area where the Constitution's 18th-century design does not work for the 20th (or 21st) century reality.

The longer explanation:

The Constitution sets up a strict separation of powers. Only the legislature can make laws. Only the executive has the wherewithal to enforce the laws. Only the judiciary can interpret the laws, and their constitutionality. Each serves as a check on the others. The president can veto legislation. The legislature can refuse to fund the executive's initiatives. The judiciary can invalidate laws and issue orders to the executive... but the judges have to be nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. It's solid partitioning of power, designed to prevent the monarchical abuses the founders were familiar with, abuses that occur when one man (or woman, or small group) has the power to make the laws, enforce the laws and interpret the laws.

Very nice. But it doesn't work in the modern world.

The reason is that the US is much, much bigger and the world is vastly more complicated than it was in the 18th century. Regulations need to have a level of detail and sophistication that just isn't feasible for generalist legislators, and we don't want to leave the drafting of regulations to lobbyists. What we need is government experts in focused areas (fisheries, energy, mineral policy, telecommunications, etc.) whose full-time job is understanding the minutiae. Then lawmakers can write laws providing broad guidelines for the experts, who study the issues, write the regulations, subject them to rounds of public review and then enact them.

On the judicial side, the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, remain the final line for adjudication, but they're designed to grind very finely, which means they grind very slowly, and at great cost, especially since judges are also generalists so the litigants need to educate them on the detailed issues. To make enforcement of the detailed regulations practicable, we also need, effectively, specialist judges. The way we've handled that is by authorizing the same federal agencies who make the regulations to adjudicate their application.

Oops. Does this sound like we've lumped lawmaking, law enforcement and adjudication all together inside the federal agencies (in the executive branch), in clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, directly defeating the founders' work in dividing them up, re-enabling tyranny?

The letter, definitely. The spirit... not exactly. The other thing we did was to divide those powers up not by category (rulemaking, enforcement, judging) but by subject matter. So while each agency holds great power over its little fiefdom, that power is limited in the aggregate because the potential fisheries tyrant is completely separate from the potential telecoms tyrant. This limits the total power of each and prevents them from getting so big they can't be slapped down.

Unless it doesn't.

This scheme only works if those agencies are independent within the executive branch. And they cannot be independent if the president is free to fire anyone in the executive branch at will, which is what Slaughter is all about. If the president can fire anyone, then the whole of the executive is subject to his will, which means all of those subject-matter-isolated threads of power get gathered up into a single pair of hands.

And if that happens, we're back to monarchy. An elected monarch, perhaps. And possibly with a limited term, and with a few gross checks on power, slow and uncertain in application. But we have a single person with the power to control nearly all of the federal government's power to make, enforce and adjudicate the law, relegating the formal legislative and judicial bodies to backstop positions, generally unable to act fast enough to prevent tyrannical abuses.

So... what we ought to have done is to have amended the constitution to bake the independence of the executive branch agencies into the system. Or, we ought to have created parallel legislative and judicial sub-branches so that each area had its major functions isolated within the Constitutional framework.

This wouldn't have been difficult in the case of the judiciary, though we'd probably have had to create a different hiring process for the thousands of low-level adjudicators required -- going through presidential appointment and Senate confirmation for all of them would be impractical. But on the legislative side, we'd have needed a Constitutional amendment to enable the massive numerical expansion of the legislature necessary for all of the expert rulemaking roles, and those people would also need an entirely different hiring process. Voting on all of them would be impractical.

But fixing the problem correctly in either of those ways was hard, while just ignoring the issue was easy. And ignoring it worked fine for a while. We saw the first potential issues with Nixon, and ever since Nixon almost every succeeding occupant of the White House has chipped away at agency independence. Until Trump 2.0 when we have a president who has smashed a battering ram through all of the norms that maintained it, and is trying to get judicial blessing (the Slaughter case).

If you think the presidential immunity ruling was bad, that's nothing compared to what will be unleashed if SCOTUS finds fully in Trump's favor in Slaughter. We'll have a king with the power to (among many, many other things) unilaterally direct the imposition and enforcement of regulations that impose hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on telecoms companies. In this case, for what I think is a good reason. But whether it's a good reason won't matter if the president wants to do something for a bad reason, he'll have the power.

Particularly dangerous is the combination of:

1. The immunity ruling, plus
2. Absolute authority over the executive branch, plus
3. The unlimited pardon power.

The president can order anything at all done, federal employees will have to do it or be fired, and if it's a crime (a) the president is immune and (b) he can pardon everyone who does his dirty work.

I think the final backstop of impeachment and conviction by the legislative houses is likely to remain in that case as the only real limitation on presidential power. For the conservatives who think this is a good thing, they should think really hard about what a president AOC who decides to fully use the power of the Unitary Executive might do.

Fully-decentralized trust systems just don't work. PGP failed primarily for this reason, while SSL Certificate Authority system succeeded -- which shows that you don't need perfect centralization, a federation can do it, but the federation has to contain a sufficiently small set of authorities that it's practical for those who need to trust them to do so. The SSL analogy is useful in another way, too. Note that end-users don't know or care about CAs, they only have to trust their browser; the browser authors package the list of trusted root CAs, and they're moderately well-positioned to make those trust decisions on their users' behalf (the certificate transparency log is another layer, a global, fully-decentralized oversight mechanism -- but I don't see an obvious analogue for caller ID).

Applying this structure to caller ID trust, the most obvious points of control are the network operators first and phone makers second. Clearly the MNOs should be taking responsibility. They each know the accuracy of the IDs originating in their networks, and they are in a good position to validate the trustworthiness of IDs from outside their networks. Ideally, they should probably just refuse to forward an ID from a network that doesn't commit to anti-spoofing.

However, they're not doing that, and they're not going to do that, and we all know why: It's more profitable for them to permit spoofing.

One possible market-driven solution to this would be if some sufficiently-large networks decided that consumers cared enough about caller ID accuracy to make it a selling point for their services, committing to send only trustworthy IDs, either because they know the origin within their own network, or because the ID came from another operator who made the same pledge. My guess is that this would require renegotiation of interconnection agreements, but it could be done. More importantly, it would require users to care enough about caller ID spoofing to be willing to switch networks to get away from it. I don't know if that's in the cards.

So, what about the phone makers? They're in the next-best position... and Google by itself can put a big dent in caller ID spoofing globally. If Apple does the same thing between their devices, and then if they collaborate with Google (not an outlandish idea; Google and Apple often collaborate on technical standards), they could ensure that any call originating from a mobile phone provides accurate caller ID, and block the rest. And then they could also collaborate with the dumbphone makers and any new entrants to the smartphone market.

I think this is actually not a bad solution, and the market-driven motivations are clear. Phonemakers benefit from happy phone users and don't profit from phone spam.

While true, that's like saying dirt can't exist without gravity.

Capitalism existed long before markets existed, and markets existed before people did. Fish cleaners staking out a site for their business in the ocean is a market. An amoeba storing resources for later use is capitalism in action. (I.e. it's getting stuff now for later use, accumulating capital.)

Most of the things that people attribute to capitalism are only the property of one "dialect" of capitalism. And corporate capitalism is itself a cluster of dialects, that exist under specific legal constraints, which vary with time and place.

So, yes, markets cannot exist without capitalism, as markets are about exchanging stuff, and capitalism is, basically, "the way one handles stuff". I suppose one could rephrase that as "the belief in the way one handles stuff", which would eliminate amoebas, etc., because they don't practice belief, but the way it's commonly used doesn't seem to imply belief.

While money != capital, capitalism isn't basically about improving anything. It's about using the capital you have (i.e. stuff that's under your control, which includes money) to increase the amount of capital you have. This often improves things for at least some subset of the people, but that's a side effect, and if it's missing, what is described is still capitalism.

They did not "withstood AI-driven exploit research". They had fewer bugs than most projects, and they've had to put up with an enormous amount of slop reports, but neither are anything approaching no bugs.

The curl programmers are probably the best C programmers out there at the moment, if I had to do something in C, I'd get them to do it, but I'd still rather avoid C, because even they will end up with bugs in their code. C requires programmers be superhuman.

Agreed. But Marvel / MCU also shows that "Stargate Syndrome" is all too easy to catch. The heroes and villains just keep getting more powerful and dangerous, no wonder the movies are flopping.

No ownership implies no market exchange mechanism. That was a direct response to the OP's "markets existed before capitalism". They didn't, because exchange is tied up with ownership. Once ownership is agreed, you have capitalism. It literally is synonymous with ownership of the means of production. Lands, water wheels, slaves, you name it. If it can be sold, somebody owns it. And if it can be exchanged legally, somebody owns it.

Do you own a shovel or a chicken? Congratulations, those are means of production. You're a capitalist!

Maybe you should (re?)read Marx. Das Kapital is precisely about capitalism in history. Renaming terms because "modern" doesn't invalidate the old terms.

The palace owns the means of production. The rest you can read in the appropriate economics book referenced.