They're spending most of that money on restoring old Zip drives. Not the 250s, the 100s, the OGs, that died via click of death about three months into usage. Because that's how government works. By moving up the technology chain one sloppy, crappy, ancient step at a time.

That whole inevitability argument is a tough one, because it's become a religious mantra to the true believers, and you can not, will not be able to make any argument against it because it, like all religious beliefs, is sacrosanct, and those who don't already believe it are simply living in denial, completely disconnected from the reality the people holding it occupy, and will be destroyed by their hubris, for daring to stand against computer god. I keep hearing various versions of the same argument. I think my favorite thus far has been, "You either get aboard the AI thing now, or you will be destroyed by it. The only jobs left will be for those who understand AI, and you won't understand it if you don't get into it as fast as you can."

It's only inevitable because we've let it be. As I keep telling folks at work, we lost the machine war before it ever began. We've been handing them more and more of ourselves, bit by bit, for convenience. And with AI, we're accelerating that to include our ability to think for ourselves. Frankly, I'm ready for the Butlerian Jihad. Leave me a machine that can take keyboard input and save it as a file and I'm good. I don't need it to do my thinking for me.

I've had similar things happen. What I've found is that if you just ignore it, they eventually stop, or get counteracted. If you whine about it repeatedly, they keep doing it because they love nothing more than somebody responding to their idiocy. In any way, shape, or form.

Oh, bull fucking shit. The Democrats getting power is expected to result in two years of "we need to build a coalition" and "time to heal the nation" and kumbaya my brothers and sisters all will be well while they shove their entire hands, not just their thumbs, directly up their own assholes to avoid taking responsibility for anything they promised to accomplish while they campaigned. Don't get me wrong, that's still better than letting the Republicans ride roughshod over society while handing the spoils up the financial chain, but the Democrats' "shenanigans" as you call them have traditionally been turning into a simpering bunch of do-nothings the second they have power so that they can whine about how unfair life is the next time the pendulum swings back, which will likely be in two years because they will refuse to do anything other than hand more taxpayer money off to the corporations in the name of building something and talk about how they need to come together with their friends across the aisle who have spent the last decade plus talking about how the Democrats all should be hung for treason.

This country needs an enema.

We're basically at the point where if you use Oxford commas, or write with any eloquence at all, you're flagged as AI. Because humans write slop, according to these checkers. If you don't misspell every third word, fuck you, you robot.

We're idiots in the aggregate, and we're scrambling desperately to make sure those of us who aren't idiots at the individual level are punished for it.

Include the cartels from the outset, make it profitable for them, and probably still save money over what it costs to bribe politicians into compliance inside the US. Win-win-win.

You know, there could be something to this, if an ISP calculated out rates, found a "one price, without hikes after introduction" pricing, and advertised it as to what you'd save vs. the competition in a five year period or something. Granted, the whole "this quarter" mentality has penetrated the collective psyche enough that people may not go for it anyway. Hey, I think I finally get what trickle down economics is. All the horrible ideas of the bigger movers slowly trickled down to the rest of us.

Trump didn't help, but we can hardly lay the entire blame for this on his shoulders. We've been headed down this path for generations. Probably since before grandpappy Drumph (The actual family name) was a toddler. Trump's turned himself into the posterboy for the issue, but he's good at turning himself into the posterboy for nearly every issue, including human trafficking and sexual enslavement.

My local area is trying some end-runs around the issue right now. Power company is sending us notices of all sorts of "services" meant to "reduce your ongoing bill during peak times." What it amounts to is giving them control over when you're allowed to run AC during the summer and heat during the winter, and control over your food storage refrigerators and freezers, so that they can de-prioritize our power usage and funnel it to the datacenters we repeatedly screamed at the city and county admins that we didn't want. I imagine we're only a year or two away from it just being taken by force because nobody is signing up for these "let the power company yoink your power to pretend to be saving you money." Oh, BTW, our energy bills have already started rising fairly dramatically once the construction on the new datacenters started.

Let's not let MBAitis off the hook for its part. We've had the concept of cutting workforce being a profitable move shoved down our throats for the better part of two generations now, mostly because short-term thinking has become the norm is the business world and cost-cutting on the level of "firing big portions of the workforce" lead to a brief uptick in the bottom line almost every time. We'll short-term thinking our way right off the cliff edge one of these days. Hooray for quarterly profits above all!

As a guy who spends a lot of time just writing, it'd be great if there was an automated "set to normal" that kicks in when I send a task to one of the taxing queues for the processor, and keeps it hovering just above "noticeable lag in the editor" the rest of the time. Underclocking would be great as my daily driving range, with automated 'turn it up' when I kick on the local AI driven editing routines that spill out of the GPU at times.

It's a different world now. I don't doubt there's another world war coming. I just doubt the young men of today are going to be angry enough to want to fight it. They've been told there's no future their entire lives. Most of them are either nose to the grindstone to ignore that constant refrain, or so depressed they have zero ambition, zero hope, and zero fucks to give. Some are transferring their rage into political discourse that's almost as brazen as the current assholes in office, but none of them have the energy to actually turn that discourse into the violence that would be necessary to overthrow the current assholes in office.

By the time the world war truly kicks off? It'll mostly be automated, so even that will be taken away as an option for young men. I would expect the ultimate outcome, somewhere down the line, will be the angrier ones being handed weapons and told to go full gladiator on each other for the entertainment of the owners and the government officials that like to pretend they're a part of the owners. That potential seems far closer than it was even just a couple years ago.

Give us another couple years. We're working on it.

The optimistic (fantasy) view: They hope the hardware will be useful for something else when a sea-change optimization happens in the AI world.

The pessimistic (realist) view: Everybody involved from the tech bros to the investors are so busy sniffing their own and each other's farts that they can't be bothered to look at reality and are instead letting the vapor trail suck them up into the stratosphere with zero protections or parachutes, because even the few left with an eye toward reality have a firm belief that the government will throw the public under them to protect them when they inevitably fall from their lofty heights. What's really sad is? They have plenty of reasons to believe it. It's happened before when big ideas failed. It'll likely happen again. And the more of the economy they can suck into the scheme before the inevitable "correction" comes along, the more sure they can be that they'll get that sweet, sweet bailout relief at the expense of everybody else.

On the bright side, it's Bezos. It'll take him thirty years to go from concept to spin-up. If it were Musk, I'd be worried. That bitch's move fast and break things methodology is *NOT* what we need anywhere near nuclear power.

Not that I'm cheerleading Bezos by any means. Just saying, chances he never actually crosses the line due to caution are higher than they would be with most of the other techbro guys.