rfwhyte

Lol, classic hand-wavey "Just be rich" nonsense.

People don't invest the bloody stock market because they can't afford rent and groceries.

If labor's share of GDP were more equitable, and more akin to what it was during the US's "Golden age" then sure, us regular folks might have some money to invest, but since the rich are gobbling up literally everything these days, a lot of us out here are struggling just to get by, and don't have money to pay our bills let alone invest.

Something interesting to note, is that while "Hollywood" is fast losing its status as the nexus of the traditional film / tv industries, LA in the broader sense is already very well established as the global (Well at least "Western") hub of the content creator economy. Literally thousands of wannabe / up and coming YouTubers, Tik Tokers and "Influencers" of all sorts are packing up their lives and moving to LA every year in order to be closer to each other, and to the talent pool of cast-off film and tv folks that live in LA.

The "Cost disease" seemingly hasn't yet infected that industry at least (Or the infection is still in its early incubating stage) though I think that's in large part due to the fact most of the content creators aren't working within the established industry framework, but rather are intentionally trying to work outside of it, in order to avoid paying union rates.

This has always and will always be my fundamental concern regarding AI. It will inevitably be enshittified, and its enshittification will be both subtle and opaque, in ways the average users will be ill equipped to identify or avoid.

The ultimate problem will be, unless users are running their own local LLMs (which will of course perpetually remain a tiny, insignificant fraction of all AI users) the AI isn't going to be working in the interests of the user, but the rather the interest of the corporation that built it, and the advertisers that pay said corporation.

At least with social or search there are ad standards that the platforms all broadly follow that identify when something is an ad, where as the AI companies will almost certainly either ignore ad standards guidelines or find some loophole they feel justifies not disclosing to users when the answers their AI provides are effectively ads in disguise.

With search, if you search for say "Cheapest car insurance" you at least have a fighting chance of successfully determining which links are ads, which are spam and which are potentially useful content, but with AI, its just going to provide a single supposedly authoritative answer, that the user will think is the best answer to their question, but is in fact whichever answer an advertiser has paid the AI company to have the AI supply.

We do know pretty much exactly when they pyramids were built though, (+/- a couple hundred years, which in this context is "Exact" enough) as there have been numerous carbon datings of organic material found in the mortar between the stones of the pyramids, which all broadly line up with the other textual evidence (Mehrer texts, etc.) and contextual evidence (Dating of the work camps surrounding the pyramids) and there really isn't any great mystery in how they were built either, just a lack of specificity in terms of what exact method was used (ie. was it an internal or external ramp, were pulleys used, etc.)

When I lived in Japan, one of my roommates was a brown American dude of Dominican ancestry. He, like me, was a clean cut, hard working international student attending a well regarded local university. We had for many months on our daily commutes to and from our school seen an abandoned bike sitting in the bottom of a canal / ditch, and we only had 5 bikes between the 7 of us living in the house, so after many months of seeing this discarded, unused bike rotting in a ditch, we decided to rescue it and fix it up so we could use it. A couple of days later, my roommate was riding the bike while Brown in Japan, and a couple of local cops took issue with this I guess, so he was arrested for "Possession of stolen property." He tried to explain at the time that he'd found it in a ditch, but they weren't having any of it and it ended up with all 7 of us who lived in the house getting hauled down to the local police station in handcuffs and questioned for an entire 24 hours all over a junk bike. We were only ever released when someone from our university got involved, and the cops managed to track down the owner of the bike who told them they'd thrown it in the canal because it was broken. The person who chucked their bike into a canal of course faced no consequences whatsoever, but me and my 6 housemates had to endure one of the most harrowing experiences of our lives all because we fished a rotting bike out a ditch and fixed it up.

After that experience there is nothing anyone can say to convince me the Japanese "Justice" system is anything other than utterly barbaric.

They relied on frontier tech because GREED. Let's not kid ourselves that the decision to use AI here was done for any other reason than it would save this company the labor costs of actual human employees. They decided their profit was more important than the security of their customer's data, and now they are suffering the well deserved consequences for it.

What an utterly feckless and deflection filled response from the person writing this article.

Literally zero personal accountability for the choices they themselves made that led to this outcome.

"Jer" could have chosen to hire actual human developers who almost certainly wouldn't have deleted his production database, but instead, he chose to cut corner and use AI all so he could make himself more money, and when it finally came back to bite him in the ass it suddenly became everyone else's fault.

Sure there's a difference, but when you can buy the base lens for $100 and 3D print your own cinema housing for $50, it becomes a lot more odious that IronGlass is charging what amounts to around $2100USD for a metal rehousing that is at most $50 worth of materials and a few hours work per lens.

The "Cinema" industry is notorious for gouging its customers, and this just yet another particularly egregious example of that gouging.

Anyone with half a brain, or who doesn't stand to be personally enriched by the plague of parasitical gambling / prediction sites can see they are obviously a net negative for society, yet they stand to make some already very rich people even richer, so they will of course be allowed to run wild regardless of the harm they cause.

We do not live in a world where policy decisions are based on what's best for the people, we live in a world where policy decisions are almost exclusively made according to what will further enrich the wealthy elites, so there's effectively a 0% chance we will see any meaningful regulatory action here, as it doesn't' matter if gambling is destroying the fabric of society as long as some bastards are getting rich off of it, as that's literally all that matters these days.

The only counterpoint to the article's central thesis I really have is that frankly I don't think there even was a "Strategy" for this war beyond the fact it will distract the American populace from the Epstein files and somehow enrich Trump and his political cronies.

That's it. That's the whole damn "Causus belli" for this so called "Special military operation." It isn't intended to accomplish any specific geo-strategic goals, it doesn't have a plan or purpose, it's just a convenient distraction and way for some already very rich folks to get even richer.

This is honestly my major issue with the whole "Geo-strategic analysis industrial blogger / YouTuber complex" in that I think they far too often ascribe deeper meaning and geo-strategic planning or purpose to state actions when they can far more easily be interpreted through the lens of the political capture of nations and institutions by the wealthy elites, their greed / self interest and their monological desire to preserve the status quo and thus their own political / economic power.

Nations very seldom do pretty much anything these days because it would be of benefit to their nation or people, they almost exclusively only do things that benefit the wealthy elites who control them.

This war, like all wars throughout human history, is a class war, in that the lives and livings of us regular folks are being sacrificed at the alters of power and profit, all so certain rich folks can get even richer and keep their boot on our necks.

Capitalism rewards those who CAPTURE the most value, not those who create it. Capitalism at its core is a system of expropriating the value of labor by those with capital who themselves create absolutely nothing.

This post absolutely reeks with the privilege of wealth. For the vast majority of people on this earth, the "Returns" from their labor matter a lot more to them than some vaunted, abstract ideals, as those ideals won't put food on the table or a roof over their children's heads.

The bottom line is that the majority of people alive today have to take whatever deal they are given in a sense, as they absolutely do not have the "Luxury" of not "Playing zero sum games."

Must be nice to be rich enough to get to spout philosophical BS and not worry how you're going to pay for groceries, but most people alive these days are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being millionaires, and quitting a job that pays their bills so they can "Provide value to a community" and not worry about how they are going to get paid just isn't even a remotely viable option.

You can very easily replace the battery yourself for less than $100 USD too if it ever becomes enough of an issue that you feel you actually need to do something about it. My M1 Max is at about 88% battery health, but it still gets 4X-6X longer on battery (At full performance too boot) compared to my old PoS Razer laptop, so I likely won't be replacing my battery any time soon.

Ad buyers wouldn't be buying ads if they weren't effective.

You have to keep in mind that at this point, a substantial majority of Americans are overweight, and something like a full third of the US population can be considered "Obese," and so the notion of them doing any form of physical exercise whatsoever is utterly anathema to their world view. They live their lives in actively avoiding physical exercise at every turn, and so they cannot even fathom that someone would prefer active transportation like cycling that is also a form of excercise to being stuck in traffic in an automobile.

Basically to a lot of Americans, Jesus invented the pickup truck so they could "Exercise" their god-given right to never have to walk anywhere ever, as that's the way they like it. Walking is hard work when you're obese, and its uncomfortable to have your rolls of cascading fat rubbing against one another on a hot, humid day, where as sitting in a rolling leather recliner in their air-conditioned Ferd FteenFiddy is comfortable and requires no physical effort whatsoever.

The thing of it though is they know their choices are unhealthy for both their bodies and their communities on some level, but they'd rather drag everyone else down to their level than have to make and hard personal changes. They see us on our bikes getting where we need to go just as fast or faster than them (Since we're not stuck waiting in traffic), and getting exercise in the process, and they don't just resent us, they flat out hate us for it. We hold a mirror up to their unhealthy lifestyles, and unattractive bodies, and rather than following our lead by trying to be more active themselves, they'll fight tooth and nail to make the rest of us as miserable as they are trapped in their rolling metal prisons.