If people didn't love them they wouldn't sell them. People around me are obsessed with giant trucks.

Ok, shut down data centers and AI farms first. Then I'll consider it.

No, it's really inefficient. In order to be useful for power generation, the three square mile circle it illuminates would have to be completely full of solar panels in order to capture all the energy being reflected. And it it's as bright as the moon, that's about one half millionth as bright as the sun. So those solar panels, assuming no cloud cover, will be operating at one millionth the efficiency of daytime.

Meanwhile, battery technology, particularly for terrestrial power storage, keeps getting better and better. This has zero potential to offset CO2. Which is deeply sad for the science fiction geek in us all, but honestly, right now solar generation technology is starting to feel pretty science-fictiony, so maybe that's okay.

A friend told me that pay-per-play is where the money is, as opposed to buying.

Software has been moving towards subscription-based models because they generate more profit. Just like PC Lint (after Jim Gimbel retired and sold it to Vector Informatik -- I'm still using version 9.0), which has turned into a subscription service. People who do C/C++ programming on a non-regular basis and do not need the newest version, why upgrade? The same thing for Boundchecker or Timeslips. Timeslips is fully SaaS, as opposed to just a subscription that presumably dials home to check whether it has been paid for.

But with full SaaS, where your information is on someone else's servers, you run into security and privacy issues. Which are not the same as the security and IT issues when running on your own servers. Full Saas does offer convenience, but at a price.

The other thing about saving is that if you can depend on UBI, and it's enough to live on, then that takes the pressure off of individuals saving for retirement. Right now the amount of money people have to save for retirement in the U.S. is actually a problem, because there's no safe place to put that much money. And so we wind up with things like private equity and various other forms of securitization a specific group of which led to the 2008 crisis.

All of these securities are just ways of storing value, but you can't actually store value—value is work. "Stored value" is an obligation that someone else will have to work to pay back: I use my wealth to pay you money to do the work that I need done.

So public support for people who need it is actually the same thing as living off savings, except that living off savings is individual, and public support is collective. So public support can take advantage of the law of averages, and private savings can't. Which massively increases the amount you have to save as an individual to be sure you'll be okay in retirement.

And this motivates wealth inequality, which makes things worse and worse for the people who are creating the value you as a person with a decent amount of retirement savings need done. We've already had people saying "no more taxes" because they don't want to work to pay for other peoples' retirements. This is the same thing, and at some point it either turns into runaway inflation, which means your savings loses its value, or else it turns into regime change, which means who knows what? Right now, it means that a bunch of elected people are just raking in money through fraud, which isn't likely to end well for the rest of us.

It's weird how people think of socialism as being somehow expensive in comparison.

https://archive.is/uyPhk

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Anthropic is prepared to loosen its current terms of use, but wants to ensure its tools aren't used to spy on Americans en masse, or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement.

The Pentagon claims that's unduly restrictive, and that there are all sorts of gray areas that would make it unworkable to operate on such terms. Pentagon officials are insisting in negotiations with Anthropic and three other big AI labs â" OpenAI, Google and xAI â" that the military be able to use their tools for "all lawful purposes."

https://livingwage.mit.edu/met...

Typical annual salary, according to MIT's Living Wage Calculator for the NYC Metro, is $84,860.

Poverty wage is $7.52/hr (no kids) and minimum wage is $15.50 which, according to the calculator, should cover 1 adult with 3 kids.

The Brearley School, regarded as the best private school for girls in the nation and charging around $70K, is a non-profit.

What shareholders?

The US has been afraid of those "nefarious Asians" for over a hundred years now.

Replace it with homegrown spyware

They are doing everything they can to drive me away from their platforms. My main use of FB at this point is to stay in communication with some people and a couple of special interest groups I run.

That flushing noise you just heard is the sound of decades and billions of dollars of branding swirling down the money commode.

In other words, "MS has invested so much into the AI boondoggle that everyone had better jump on board before I lose my bonuses and stock options."

Good luck with that with the cuts they've made to NASA and the general contempt for science in this administration. It would likely just be a way to funnel huge amounts of taxpayer money to a few favored companies. Like, ummmm, SpaceX.

And militarize it.