What is this unhealthy fixation on what someone is "worth"? It is not a billion tons of gold, it is not a quintillion tons of grains. It is a fiction, a fleeting number on paper that signifies current valuation of a business. Musk does not have a trillion dollars under his mattress. Not even 2 billion.

Working from home is an alternative, one that we should use more.

(Of course, I WFH full time and have for 20 of the last 30 years, so I have a bit of a bias.)

I think Musk is a con artist, but why is it difficult to wrap your head around a person benefiting less from his billions than the society? Society gets to use these billions in many ways more than the person himself. Society gets the products made by the businesses that are valued at billions, society gets the jobs and paychecks from all of this money. What does the person get except for a headache of dealing with the norms and rules and taxes imposed by the society upon his business? He really doesn't eat much more than the next guy, though his meals will be more expensive because they are cooked by some private chefs. But the cost of the food, chefs, housing, airplanes, whatever is negligible compared to the value of the company that society gets to enjoy. Even just the trading of the stock market allows people to have something to invest into, there are jobs, there are products, then there are various contracts required to maintain this business, so there are other side businesses that rely on the gigantic companies owned by the billionaire.

Again, a billionaire personally can use maybe a few hundred million dollars, maybe even a couple of billion (if he buys a couple of yachts and a few mansions). The gain to the guy is completely negligible compared to the gain to the society. It is like infrastructure in itself, that's what these huge businesses are. To say that this is 'Libertarian-Randian gobbledygook' is simply to use a personal attack in place of an argument.

But again, I am fully convinced Musk is a gigantic fraud, running his empire almost exclusively on vaporware.

You do know that Musk doesn't actually have a trillion dollars in *money*, right? He doesn't have anywhere remotely close to that much money. His total liquid assets are extensive, sure, maybe as much as a few billion, but nearly all of his incredible net worth isn't money. You could probably call it "potential money".

And everyone should keep in mind that this is true for basically all of the billionaires. Not that there isn't real wealth there, but it's a lot fuzzier than the numbers appear. Basically everyone with astronomical wealth mostly owns shares in companies, and how much of that value is real in any near-term sense depends on a lot of factors.

Musk's wealth is more speculative and fuzzy than most because his companies' valuation is based not on the revenues the companies generate now but theories about what they might generate in the future. Tesla's high valuation is all about the promise of self-driving cars restructuring transportation. SpaceX's is a little bit about cheap access to space changing a lot of stuff and more about AI. In all cases the high valuations are bets on world-changing technology being becoming real, and on Musk's companies being able to capture a good chunk of the resulting revenues.

"Usenet's remaining worthwhile discussions" has been a corner case for well over a decade now.

That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.

It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.

This is the primary driver in the US, too. In fact, wages have not stagnated, not when you look at the full picture including government transfers, and every generation is wealthier than the one before. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current housing price bubble, each generation even has higher home ownership rates than the previous generations at the same ages. Houses and apartments are also significantly bigger and more luxurious (which explains most of their higher prices, actually; do some comparisons on a per square foot basis over time, then adjust for the higher quality and greater amenities we have today).

But if you look at how Americans spend their money over the years, the biggest change you'll find is that we spend less on housing, food and clothing as a percentage of our income (in spite of bigger, nicer houses, far more restaurant and delivered food, and much larger wardrobes) and much more on entertainment -- and that in spite of the fact that entertainment has gotten dramatically cheaper.

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

However, immigration is only a stopgap solution to the problem of population decline, because fertility is declining everywhere on the globe, fast. The global fertility rate is basically at replacement now, but the decline is continuing, and accelerating. We'll drop below replacement as a species in just a few years. Even then population will keep growing for a while due to the "filling out" effect, but then it'll start dropping, fast. And it will quickly become top-heavy (more old than young).

Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amount of knowledge that was learned by doing and isn't -- and maybe can't be -- taught anywhere but on the job.

To some extent we could probably manage with a smaller population if more of the population became highly educated (not necessarily in the academic sense, though we'd need that, too), but that transition wouldn't be easy, in part because there are lots of people who simply aren't interested in highly-technical work. We'd need a lot more of them to become willing to learn and do it anyway. Obviously the first step would be to bring the whole remaining population up to what the developed world considers a basic level of education -- that would enable us to tap new supplies of scientists, engineers and technicians. But the population reduction that seems likely to come means we'd need a lot more than that to be able to maintain our knowledge base and production diversity.

AI might change all this, of course. It could make it completely unnecessary for humans to participate in any of the above. But without something like that, it seems unlikely that our technological civilization could survive with less than a billion people or so, and technological progress would likely take a severe hit long before we hit that level of population reduction.

Even that isn't true. The correct statement is that it's a crime to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater in circumstances where doing so is reasonably likely to incite a panic that would cause death or injury.

If you shouted "Fire!" in an American theater today, odds are that everyone would just ignore you, and a reasonable person would expect that to be the outcome. That's because fires in modern theaters are (1) quite rare, (2) much more likely to be announced by an alarm and (3) not difficult to escape safely due to the plethora of clearly-marked exit routes that are required by law. So everyone knows that in the event of a fire trampling people in an effort to escape is not necessary for self-preservation, that calmly walking to the nearest exit is better.

It's worth noting that the truth or falsity of the shout isn't really even much of a factor in the legal question. What matters is whether a reasonable person would expect that the shout would be likely to cause unnecessary death or injury as opposed to not shouting. The original Schenk v. United States case opinion in which Holmes used "Fire in a crowded theater" as an example, did argue that truth was an absolute shield, but later rulings, especially the 1969 case that overturned Schenk, removed that protection. If you shout intending to cause real physical harm and expecting that to be the result of your action it's a crime, even if what you shouted was true.

The number of accidents you have depends far more on how you drive than how fast you react. If you and Claude are correct about AVs having slower reaction times that just highlights the importance of driving style over reaction time, because AVs have fewer and less severe accidents than human drivers.

The main thing you can do -- and AV systems do, generally -- is leave yourself more space and therefore time to react, which includes driving slower in areas where sudden incursions into the roadway are likely.

That said, I expect AVs to react faster as their systems improve. All of our AI is excessively compute-heavy right now, but we know that isn't essential because our brains do more with less in spite of the fact that our wetware runs on a significantly inferior substrate. As we learn how to build more efficient AI systems, that should reduce AV compute requirements and make it feasible for them to "think faster", and therefore react faster.

The one thing that is clear is that AVs will continue improving on their already better-than-human safety records.

Women do not want children in more numbers than ever because they are not marrying, because they follow each other on instagram and other mass hysteria sites where they promote hedonistic living to each other and yes, much of it requires resources and time that otherwise would be allocated to rearing children. Unmarried women rely on the government systems that women (and womenized men) have promoted and voted for over decades. This promoted disconnect between generations, grandparents and other family members are not involved in helping with the kids as previously. Two income household means women are working (because of inflation caused by the women as a voting block people are forced to pay insane percentage of earnings as taxes). Taxes used to subsidise classes of people, especially single women require so much more money that women im families have no choice but to work. Their husbands' earnings are more than halfed by the taxes, so need 2 people to work where previously 1 would have sufficed.

So women as a voting block created the environment of high taxation and subsidization, this in turn requires that more women entered the workforce than ever before. None of this is child friendly, women as a block are truly pushing towards childless society. This is self defeating, the people with more children will inherit the world, which will roll back most of these anti child policies. This will require a demographic collapse first, which is coming within a few decades. Within just 2-3 decades most of the world that has anti child policies will be very old of-course. The age of single childless people will cause an age of single old people. Their policies will die off with them giving apace and rise of various fundamentalist cultures, for example Islam. The only hope is that Israel also keeps their births up and somewhat balances out the Islamists. If not, then the few remaining non muslims will feel very lonely on this planet indeed.

Have you ever tweeted something completely made up? What happened? Or, if you haven't done it, what do you think would happen? Suppose, for example, that you tweeted out a claim that "Coca-Cola contains extract of ground-up baby brains". What do you think the legal consequences of that (horrendous!) claim would be?

There is an important legal distinction that this court chose to ignore, which is that you're only liable for incorrect information if it's reasonable to expect that people would believe that you are providing correct information. If you, bubblyceiling, tweet false information, you will not, in fact, be held liable for it, because courts would rightly reject the claim that readers had a reason to believe they should trust you.

Obviously, Google's statements are held to a higher standard that bubblyceiling's. But everyone understood that web search results weren't Google's statements. The question at hand then is whether people believe that Google's LLM's statements are, in fact, statements made by Google, the corporation.

No one could seriously believe that. This court was dead wrong.

I think you missed that most of those comments about Trump are gloating that he is demonstrably failing in his effort to destroy renewable power generation and favor fossil fuels -- and especially Beautiful Clean Coal (just like he's failing at approximately everything else, except this failure is good). Once you have that context, it makes a lot more sense.

Well, China, for one, is building renewable energy generation far faster than we are. They're also building a lot of coal plants so it's going to take them some effort to push their emissions down to the global average per capita. However, note that we're far, far above the global average, and also well above China.

As for India and Indonesia, their emissions are already well below the global average, so they're not really the problem. Once we and China get down to their level, then we can all start pushing the average (and therefore total) down further. We need to cut our emissions by 85% to get to that point. Or keep them constant while importing about 1.7 billion people.