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Well it depends. Usually it's far from trivial to fire civil servants in most countries.

> party are not too likely to be competent and incorruptible

As I said, a doubled edged sword. A newly elected reformist government won't be very effective if they can't put new people in power.

On the federal level yes but that only reduced the autonomy that the cantons had, it didn't introduce a fundamentally different system of government, most decisions were still taken on the local level.

> The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.

That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.

> The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor

If you don't count the 80 years of off and on civil wars and political and social upheavals.

> and sufficient to get their job done

Well they were extremely successful military, internal politics were a mixed bag and it slowly turned into chaos and constant gridlock as soon as they ran out of external enemies to fight.

Rome had an arcane deeply adversarial political system which basically relied different powerful men in the elite competing and keeping each other in check while trying to amass as much wealth and political power they could get away with (Ceasar was hardly an aberration besides just being way more successful than countless aristocrats playing the same game).

> effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator),

Sula did that first, in many ways Caesar just emulated him (of course the decision to not murder all of this potential enemies came back to bite him)

> Not every country has a spoil system

Which is a double edged sword since then it's hard to get rid of the incompetent and corrupt people when they are deeply entrenched.

> If only there was a law to uphold this.

To be fair even if that worked out somehow they would be dominated by the professional bureaucrats running the civil service and other day to day government activities. Effectively it would turn into a technocracy with some degree of oversight.

Well yes, Russian gas was obviously cheaper than nuclear if you ignore the environmental and political externalities. It helped growth in the short and medium term and that's the only thing politicians cared about.

Well not exactly. It's quite different this time since most other tech companies used to IPO way earlier. So their valuations weren't based on everyone assuming that they will continue growing exponentially, corner the entire market and effectively become monopolies. You used to have much more uncertainty and therefore potential upside for investors. I mean Anthropic can do great by the standards of pretty much every other public company and still catastrophically underperform the current expectations.

> It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which

Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.

> Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.

That's not that self evident yet. If AI is a multiplier it might be the other way around i.e. can a $300k engineer + unlimited tokens generate more a $200k in extra value compared to a $100k engineer? That should be much easier to achieve with AI than without it? The more you spend on tokens the more it makes sense to hire the most highly skilled people you can find since their salaries are no longer that significant.

I don't think the dynamics are similar to what they are e.g. during the industrial revolution since AI is more than capable of clicking the submit button on its own.

The issue is that wages are based on supply and demand and rarely directly related to how much value you generate.

> Things during dotcom crash looked at least this bleak

And we're still technically in the boom part of the cycle. I wonder how bad it will be after the actual crash.

It just doesn't really make much sense. It's way harder to stop a company in a country which hasn't signed it (not that the congress ever would sign a random document Trump and Xi come up with regardless...) from developing a model than from building nukes. Also if American and Chinese labs stop development it would make it cheaper and easier for others to catch up.

But the question is not so much if they can IPO at those prices but rather if the valuations are sustainable over a couple of years. If they are priced to perfection there isn't much left for public investors besides huge risk that something might not work out 100% as expected.

Storage still has some way to go until comparing the raw price per MWh ceases to be a partially apples to oranges comparison. You can't really have a stable grid in most of Europe with only solar + wing + storage. Unless you are willing to close down most of the factories during winter amongst other things.

To be fair switching to nuclear was an option in the 70s-90s. Obviously it would have a been a bit more expensive but it would have slowed down climate change by 10-20 years.