TLDR: Agreed, if it is taken directly. But indirectly the strategic leaders must take the broader population into account ... and therefore the economy. People who do not behave strategically are very unlikely to become leaders. Therefore decision-makers not taking broader economy of a war into account are very unlikely.

Leaders in democracies are quite limited by laws and parliaments. They cannot go to war only on their own whim. Quite a lot of persons need to be on-board i.e. agree that the war has sense for them as well ... which typically means it has an economic sense. The more people are involved the more it is about overall economy. One leader is very unlikely to prevail if it looks like the war significantly harms the broader population.

As for as dictatorships, dictators have more decision power themselves. But they still need to keep their key supporters happy (at least the lead of internal state security, the lead of internal revenue and the lead of army). And these key supporters need to keep their supporters happy too (i.e. take opinions of more people into account). Anyway, if the dictator can think strategically then he will consider the overall economic consequences. Otherwise the war only hastens his demise. And their long term outlook is not very good anyway. About 20% of dictators are imprisoned or killed.

The point is that it is unlikely a dictator cannot think strategically. If he wants to survive then he must. And since he survived so far then he very likely does think strategically. It is a brutal long term fight to become a dictator.
If it looks to us that a leader went to a stupid war then it very likely only means the leader had bad information about the military power of his country or the military power of the opponent. And as we already know ... a war is a sure way to resolve these information errors.
The leader's key supporters either had bad information too or they plotted for leader's demise.
The war likely does not mean that the leader did not consider the economy of the war. He just made a honest mistake. Shit happens. More likely in dictatorship than in a democracy since more people are involved in a democracy.

E.g. one could think that Putin did not take economy of the war with Ukraine into account and that he behaved irrationally (e.g. on some nonsense like Russian World political concept). I do not think it is true. He just believed that the war will be successful and cheap. He likely believed it will take only a few weeks and Ukraine will give up and become a satellite state of Russia like Belarus is. He likely believed Europe and USA will not do anything significant as they did not do after Crimea. The broad Russian population definitely thought it will be an easy win for Russia. Even western intelligence though so. It was overwhelmingly popular at its start in Russia. Russians believed they can extract enough benefits from Ukraine to bear the small costs of the "special military operation". We do not know the numbers but currently it does not look like the war was a good idea - even if Russia prevails at the end.

Yes, I think it is likely.

Yes, overall for all of us together, war is always worse than negotiated settlement about the division of resources over which the disagreement is. That is not an issue. It was so in the past, it is so now and it always will be so in the future as well. The reason for that is very simple: the war is costly (it damages economic resources). This cost does not need to be incurred if a negotiated settlement happens instead of a war. I think everybody agrees with that. It is kind of obvious.

But I disagree with your second claim. War may not be better (when compared to the situation before the war) even for the side which does win. The war losses may be higher than any gains the winning side will be able to extract after winning the war. Of course, this knowledge of the extreme war cost was very likely not available to the opponents at the time the war started. Otherwise they would be very strongly encouraged to a negotiated settlement instead of a war. From one point of view, a war is a VERY COSTLY way to find out the truth about the power of the opponents. It is a search for information :-/

Anyway, my point was that on average, the cost of a war (when proportionally compared to what can be extracted after winning the war) is higher as economy is more advanced (i.e. the economy requires more educated population, more trade and more capital).

But very little material capital was required for production and people had plenty of kids. Eliminating some of them to scare the rest to compliance with the new upper class was likely an economical decision. Almost no education was required for productivity. Kids could economically contribute to society somewhere from the age of 10. No or almost no education was needed. In a way people were a relatively cheap renewable resource back then.

Also an important factor is that the work was much less sophisticated. That allowed to easily check productivity of the subjugated population and the population could be used for production. Nowadays most of the economic value comes from employment occupations which are not easily checked for productivity (e.g. research, entertainment, ...). It is much harder to economically use unsatisfied subjugated population. That increases the cost of war when compared to simple (international) trading which got cheaper due to cheap transport. Especially the blue see transport which hardly even existed back then compared to nowadays. The war cost is multiplied by the material capital necessity. Most of the productivity gains we get is from this capital. And it is very easily destroyed in wars. Just for an extreme example look at a semiconductor company. Just price for this material capital is around 40 B. But you can completely destroy it with one glide bomb for about 40 k. Hell you can destroy it with a bunch of hooligans armed with hammers!

If the book analyzes economics of war at all and if it concluded that wars were more expensive in the past than today then I think the book is wrong.

But otherwise I agree that there is less wars nowadays ... and also less crime. I just do not think that it is necessarily because people are better to each other in their core. It is most likely only a simple economic decision.

Wars are much more costly now that they were in the past. Wars destroy (material/human) capital a lot and that leads to huge productivity drops. So it is logical that we do less wars and we would do so even if we were perfectly selfish and psychopathic.
Even common people do less crime likely because law enforcement is better and we live well enough even without crime ... so why to risk doing crime.
Maybe animal cruelty is down primarily because we have much better fun activities like sports, movies, gaming ...

You need to add a significant energy storage plant to solar farm before it is comparable. You know, data centers want to run even when it is dark.

I think Copilot does considerably more errors in the area of software development than trained humans. If Copilot would make less errors then why would developers need to review Copilot output? One could answer this question by: "To improve it even more." But if that would be the case then why just not use Copilot to do the review as well. Allegedly it does better than human. Since it is a review (different context) and due to sampling temperature the internal model "reasoning" would not be the same as during code writing. Still, if Copilot is better than humans then it should do better.

If the above argument is accepted then why would Copilot be better in the area of healthcare than in software development?

Good point!

The danger starts when people notice that the AI was already right about 30 times so they stop to check for errors.

AI told us to cut off the left leg.
Who was supposed to know it should have been the right leg?

Smaller companies and private users may go with locally run models. They are worse (allegedly 8 months behind the comparatively big proprietary models) but may be enough. E.g. you can run Chinese Qwen3.6 27B at home on a old gaming VGA with 16GiB of VRAM at about 22 tokens/second and context up to around 66 000 tokens.

This option to run locally will limit the maximum amount AI companies can charge. The maximum price is also limited by the amount of value AI adds to the users. It is not clear yet how much it is.

Not quickly since nasdaq allows a fast (15 day) entry into index now. That means that all the passive index based funds will be forced to buy into the new AI IPOs. That allows the pre-IPO owners to dump the stock onto public easily. Stock price rise (around the time the passive investors will be forced to buy) will not be surprising.

... will be the next rocket from Blew Origin.

Nonsense. USA can provide weapons to Taiwan which would help to defend it greatly. Especially if USA would do it now before the hypothetical Chinese takeover of Taiwan starts and before arm deliveries are exposed to Chinese attacks. If enough weapons are provided then the Chinese attack is not even likely to happen since it would fail against a strong defense.

Providing weapons to Taiwan does not even require USA to target anything Chinese ... not even mentioning the mainland. If China attacks then collapse of global economy is very likely. Nuclear war is not a given consequence at all.

Are you reasoning based on the unproven claim that "Taiwan's future is with China"? You need first to show that the claim has any merit. Xi is claiming this because it is good for his (especially domestic) politics. He is not attacking Taiwan because his knowledge of the future is given which allows him not to hurry. He is not attacking because he does not have enough landing ships yet. Bad Taiwan attack progress would also destroy his economy and domestic standing more than the domestic morale boost from the unification. If Xi would be ready to execute easy and swift Taiwan takeover now then he would just do it now.

You cannot show China what it already knows. Do you think Chinese officials are so stupid that they did not know "might is right" before Trump?

USA will defend Taiwan if it will be better for USA to defend Taiwan. There are a few good reasons for USA to help Taiwan:
1) To prevent Chinese submarines from having easy access to deep water of Pacific.
2) To protect Taiwanese semiconductor industry (on which also USA economy depends on).
3) To bleed Chinese war machine more (if it attacks Taiwan).

These positives will be compared to costs of potential USA help. If USA decides costs are lower than the benefits then USA will help. Follow youtube videos of William Spaniel if you are interested in more details.