Subject is the question. Where is DOGE on the big stuff? The Pentagon wastes more every month in fraud, waster, and abuse than USAID spends annually. But somehow charity gets the axe and Ratheon keeps getting multi-billion dollar contracts, no strings attached. Can anyone put aside the woke distraction and look at the serious problems?!?
Thx for heads-up on that book, I will pick it up. Agreed, the Altman/OpenAI narrative reads like common saga of "Road to hell is paved with good intentions". Many a politician has walked that path.
This. My take is that OpenAI started as a lab of sorts, but then their research started showing real results. But, Altman isn't really a great businessman...look at his Wikipedia page. It's basically Y-combinator, get first investment opportunities in a plethora of start-ups, some pay-out, rising tide you are rich. As a visionary he sucks...this erotic business is almost certainly his idea. As a leader he sucks, his previous leadership fired him and walked out, only to be reinstated by Micro$oft to have a patsy to protect their interests. And as a hiring manager, he also sucks, his CFO, Friar, has a bad track record, his product person Weil, is mid at best. Then pay Jony Ive a billion dollars to do something with smooth edges ?!? All of them look the part but are basically in that category of execs that fail upwards. I expect they have nightly dreams about imposter syndrome
Missing from all of this is an actual plan to sell stuff and make money. They have been able thus far to get investment money thrown at them, but now there is competition. And new paradigms where other firms are figuring out ways to solve for bottlenecks in NVIDIS gpus, memory, power use, water use...land use, etc. All the time Altman has been making speeches and pushing the AGI narrative and random bs like erotic ai, whatever.
Anthropic meanwhile figures out a chart about what current AI can do, and then begins to monetize that. To the extent that they are the only firm in living memory that has willingly passed up fat tax dollars from the US government. They are also more focused only on those places current AI can be sold for money. Legal, business finance, management, and yes computer programming. There are likely dozens of lesser known firms also targeting specific industry verticals like OpenEvidence for medical clinicians. OpenClaw and better iterations of same idea...where is OpenAI in any of this?
tldr; OpenAI was first, but they are being quickly surpassed by others. Their leadership is a joke, no vision, nor business acumen, just the usual VC glad-handing that got them this far but likely not much further. Now the pressure is on from their investors and just now they are trying to focus on an actual business rather than a $300 billion vanity project. But probably too late.
This is one reason the private companies have been able to surpass NASA in spaceflight
NASA plans for big, long term, missions. Then every 4 years (or really 2 years with new Representatives installed) the plans get changed even after development and build has started. Can you imagine if this was a office building...every 2-4 years new architect comes in and scraps parts already built, or tries to repurpose. "Instead of a 30 story office building we will be making a 7 story hospital." The structure would become a monstrosity...and ergo is NASA, I dunno how to fix this given politics and govt budget stuff. Maybe if they were able to just get no strings attached, no need to pass an audit, no reason money like the Department of Defense they could do longer term, expensive projects
Agreed. I will confess to having the algorithm lead me on time sucks. Example, looking up how to fix ice maker on my fridge, stuff YouTube has been historically pretty worthwhile. In the recent past, perhaps I also ended up watching several, people slipping on ice, falling into swimming pools, and bad driving YT shorts. I'm only human.
But within the past, heck 90 days, YT shorts is almost entirely AI slop. It has effectively cured me of clicking on any YT short that isn't one of my real, life, human-based, subs. It's one thing I hadn't considered, which is that instead of taking over completely, the AI online stuff might be de-selected away by consumers.
Anyway, thanks AI-slop, you've helped to reduce my screen time.
I also was sent on a goose chase looking for pics. These are not of the project in the FTA but maybe gives some ideas.
https://imgur.com/a/dc-convert...
Seeing things scaled up for these big projects is pretty cool
What the actual...Crypto generally is used by criminal orgs to move money around. But in this case you've got billions of dollars going to Iran and it's terrorist proxies.
Binance's CEO was charged with overseeing money laundering in 2023/2024...but then given a presidential pardon six months ago.
And now US troops and allies are facing down the kinetic weapons that plausibly have been enabled by Binance's crypto-money laundering.
Is there anyone in Washington DC paying attention to anything any more?
Counterpoint citation: https://osf.io/preprints/socar...
Abstract: A popular view holds that declining housing affordability stems from regulations that restrict new supply, and that deregulation will spur sufficient market-rate construction to meaningfully improve affordability. We argue that this ‘deregulationist’ view rests upon flawed assumptions. Through empirical simulation, we show that even a dramatic, deregulation-driven supply expansion would take decades to generate widespread affordability in high-cost U.S. markets. We advance an alternative explanation of declining affordability grounded in demand structure and geography: uneven demand growth – driven by rising interpersonal and interregional inequality – is the primary driver of declining affordability in recent decades. For cost-burdened households, trickle-down benefits from deregulation will be insufficient and too slow
"The study doesn’t say that upzoning is a terrible idea; it might allow more people to live nearer where they work, reducing commute times and carbon emissions. What it won’t do, the authors say, is bring down housing prices in any significant way."
The situation is still super broken. Labelling any part of this Open Source means the "senior justice official" is either ignorant or intentionally misleading. Just plain wrong.
Look, there is overwhelming demand for many of these events. The question is do we (as a society of consumers) want to allow shows to become financial trading instruments like so many other things in our lives, or put into place mechanisms to remove the incentive associated with scalping and secondary ticket markets. IMHO this could be done with cooperation of artists and then ticketing mechanisms. But of course Ticketmaster, et al are more than happy to keep the up-bidding going so that they can get their XX% of whatever the overbid price becomes. Tay-Tay isn't getting any of that overbid money so artists like her should be onboard.
The cost of housing is truly one of those issues that is multi-faceted. You are 100% correct that houses are bigger and the number of persons per household is smaller. Also worthwhile to remember that many of the places that are desirable to live today either didn't exist at all or were unsatisfactory decades ago. Easy example is Levittown NY where they massed produced small (750-1000 sqft) single family homes, on small lots for relatively little money starting in 1948
Before it was built, this was just a farm field 25 miles as the crow flies to NYC. How many folks in 2026 are willing to live in a small place like that, 25 miles from city center?
Counterpoint, in 1948 average income** was $3,200 and these homes cost $8,000, so say the house was 3x annual income Now one of these same houses are selling for $650,000 (https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/64-Cornflower-Rd-Levittown-NY-11756/31280843_zpid/) and the annual income is $66,000 so the same house costs more than 9x annual income.
Counter-counter-point. I went into a bit of a black hole on Zillow just now. There are tons of 2-3 BR houses in places like Wilkes Barre, PA and Allentown, PA for around that 3x annual income ratio. The problem of course is lack of a substantial number of jobs in those areas. Having employment opportunities more widely distributed would also seem to be a way to make housing more affordable.
**just using first Google search results for nation. Obviously this varies from place to place
I would add that there is so much more than just the structure in having a "home". A lot of it has to do with your social networks, even after kids have grown etc. My parents have stayed in the same home town they were born in, and have spent the past 3 decades of their lives in the same house. Friends of theirs who moved out to smaller, less maintenance-heavy condos quickly found that a beautiful, fancy condo with all the amenities like pools, rec rooms, etc did not make up for the loss of the social connections of having long time friends and family nearby. More than a few of those folks moved back near their old neighborhoods (albeit in smaller houses, apartments, and the like).
It gets a little old to hear the internet chatter about boomers and others treating their houses like hedge funds, when most homeowners simply want to
a.) live in a safe neighborhood
b.) live near their friends and family
c.) be affordable within their budget/not lose money
d.) close to work / employment opportunities
Very similar story here. I buy from eBay from time to time when necessary, but when I tried to sell for the first time it was a nightmare. Compared to say Craigslist or Facebook marketplace (barf) eBay is not at all simple, friendly or worthwhile. So much friction in setting up an account, they hassled the crap out of me and their system is still begging me to send them my SS# so they can refund $0.40 they owe me for some reason. Ridiculous. I ended up donating the items to local Goodwill.
The other ding against eBay is usually I will search on closest location + price, because I need the item soon. Over the past couple years those institutional type sellers have figured someway to game the system such that items that said they ship from say 150mi away ended up shipping cross country instead, and even a few times from overseas.
tldr; eBay used to be ok, now another example of enshitification. etc etc
Worth a read. Published in 2012 so apparently "The Future" is only 10-15 years ahead of us at any given time now.**
I don't know why everything needs to be politicized...us versus them. Texas vs. California. Glad Texas is moving to renewables. Glad China is adding tons of solar. The climate is global so improvements anywhere are incrementally beneficial to all of us.
My dunk against California is that with a pretty decent installed solar+battery capacity they (PG&E and their CA State govt enablers) have found a way to make the electrical rates 2nd highest in the nation, after Hawaii . It would be sooo much better to demonstrate solar+battery as a viable part of the electrical generation mix that actually reduces rates over the long term. All the shenanigans that PGE has be allowed to pursue via aforementioned State govt complicity ruins that plan.
Guessing we will be getting into negative territory for that group as well.
"It ain't over until it's over." -- Casey Stengel
