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Comment So no they're not getting regulated or fined (Score 1) 64

It seems that way because you see headlines that they had such and such multimillion dollar fine levied but they appeal and don't pay the fine or it gets reduced to a tiny fraction of the profits from the illegal behavior. But funny thing the news media never seems to cover that...

I know of companies that literally have a classification system where they figure out which laws they can break. You will be shocked to find that the laws that affect rich people are generally in the list of ones they can't break while the laws that affect you are in the list of laws they can break...

Even under Biden it was difficult to get consumer protection laws enforced and the fines actually levied and paid and now the Trump is president worst case scenario you buy a little bit of trump coin and the problem gets solved.

Comment The problem isn't China's growth (Score 1) 12

The problem is we can't sustain this many billionaires let alone the number who want to be trillionaires.

And we can't take the billionaire's money away because if you try a bunch of old people who grew up on Cold war propaganda are convinced you're going to break into their house and steal their toothbrush. And anyway those billionaires earned it because if they didn't God wouldn't have blessed them /s

Comment Re:Was it a Russian drone? (Score 1) 124

Depends on what the person was doing at the time. If the person who didn't pull the trigger was holding up a liquor store and the police shot the wrong person, there's at least arguably mens rea, which is how we get things like the felony murder rule.

Not quite- that's how you get the proximate cause felony murder rule, of which only a couple of jurisdictions in the US, and none outside of the US in the Western world recognize due to its obvious injustice.

No, it's how you get mens rea for the felony murder rule. You didn't carry the gun with the intent to kill, only to intimidate, but you still had a guilty mind, and if you then used the gun to kill someone in the heat of the moment, there's your mens rea.

And remember that actual cause does not mean literally pulling the trigger. At least in the U.S., the courts apply a "but for" test. If the event would not have happened without the previous event, then the previous event is considered the actual, not proximate cause. The police would not have shot the other person but for the perpetrator pointing a gun at someone (and possibly shooting at the police).

IMO, that's not meaningfully different than involuntary manslaughter convictions for allowing unsafe working conditions at a construction site or leaving your loaded gun out where a child can take it, both of which have happened.

Comment Re:Typical company approach to accounting (Score 1) 45

Using the numbers above, if Meta had the same pre-tax profit of $60B now but was using the 3 year depreciation schedule they used in 2020 vs the current 5.5 year, then instead of depreciation being $13B it'd be $23.8B, meanding they'd lose nearly almost $11B in recorded profits, just from a calculation. So in essence this boosts their stock price by making them look more profitable than they are.

True, but only momentarily. At the end of the first depreciation cycle, assuming purchasing of hardware is not accelerating, you're depreciating 5x as much hardware over 5x the time, and your momentary bubble in the stock price is gone.

And even if hardware purchasing is growing right now, eventually, that will flatten out, and the above will be true.

The only real question should be whether the depreciation rate is reasonable. If you're still getting substantial use out of the hardware after five years, then depreciating it over 3 years is questionable.

Also, the more slowly you depreciate it, the less you save on taxes each year. Faster depreciation is beneficial if you think the tax rate will go down and you will lose the benefit of that depreciation. Slower depreciation is beneficial if you think the tax rate will go up and you will benefit more from depreciating it later. So this may also mean that these companies are expecting corporate income taxes to go up. Make of that what you will.

Comment Re:What's wrong with an accounting trick or two? (Score 1) 45

It's still the exact same silicon and it's got the same problems. Not all of them burn out but some of them do.

The real question is how long until it's replaced by newer or better hardware. Basically will we see custom hardware replace video cards soon for llm acceleration. Similar to what we saw with Bitcoin.

That Won't help consumers because the Fab capacity is just going to go to different silicone, but it does mean that a whole shitload of these gpus will become worthless. I guess some of them will show up on eBay. I got a lot of use out of an old rx580 that was a mining card. I think it did eventually die on me but I got about six good years out of it.

That's a one-time Bonanza though. And it's assuming we get it. The real loser there would be Nvidia since if they get replaced on the AI market with custom hardware then their market value is going to crash harder than I think any market value has ever crashed

Comment "A" cryptocurrency? (Score 0) 70

Money laundering is the backbone of the entire cryptocurrency market. Although Trump has made corruption into a strong contender.

The greatest rap channel on YouTube, Patrick Boyle's, has a video about one of the major scams collapsing because the big boys have integrated crypto into sectors of our economy so there isn't enough excitement about it anymore to keep some of the financial scams going.

Also with the economy collapsing due to incompetent mismanagement from on high the stock market's going with it. And a lot of these scams were riding the stock market.

Still as long as we refuse to regulate the money laundering crypto isn't going anywhere. You'll Still lose your shirt when you invest in it and desperately try to hide it from your wife. But the big boys are in the pool now and so they're going to suck up all the scam money

Comment Remember, the problem AI solves is wages (Score 4, Insightful) 26

Paying wages. That's the problem AI is designed to solve. It is not a consumer product it is capital that will be used to replace you.

And remember they do not need to replace all of us. Doing something like 15 to 25% would completely hollow out consumer spending which is already under threat because massive income inequality means that 80% of our consumer spending comes from baby boomers and those people have about 10 years left before they are pushing up daisies.

And they will not be leaving any inheritance to speak of. What they don't spend on RVs and morning mimosas is going to be eating up by collapsing healthcare systems.

The system of capitalism is being dismantled. It's not breaking down it's being broken down. And if you are under 65 you are going to experience that process. And if you have less than 100 million in your bank account it's not going to be fun.

Comment Reinvented a Sterling engine (Score 5, Insightful) 45

With similar efficiency claims? I am sure there are advantages to this version.

If the article had compared it to existing sterling engines and mentioned how it was better than existing Sterling Engines, that would have made it interesting.

Instead they talked about Super Soakers and mentioned all the obvious industrial uses that such a machine could be used for. The things anyone that graduated High School should have been able to think of themselves.

Was this article written for people that failed High School Physics? Is it an attempt to get an orange skinned fool that was tricked by a Democrat into pardoning him to fund something?

How did this sad excuse of an article get approved here?

Comment Re:Limit to Seven People (Score 1) 61

I recall reading that if you have a meeting with more than seven people, you are probably having an ineffective meeting. I am regularly forced to attend meetings with 20-30 people. It's always the same 3-4 people who speak, everyone else remains silent.

In my experience, with only rare exceptions, the limit should be three. More than three, and you are likely involving people working on multiple projects who don't really need to know what the people on other projects are doing beyond what an email every few months would provide.

Those rare exceptions are situations where you have a meeting of managers in an org or similar with each other, where everybody is working towards the same goals, and they're planning towards those goals.

Or the way I usually describe it is that the usefulness of a meeting with n participants is one over the square of n minus 2 for all values of n greater than 2.

Comment Who thought this service was a good idea? (Score 5, Interesting) 92

I can see a service where you can send a satellite message to disable your car/brick it. But a system where if you lose satellite communication for enough time it bricks itself automatically?

I can see a hundred ways this can go bad - starting with what actually happened.

Horrible business plan.

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