Do you not think that a hypothetical state without Capitalism could also generate an automated surveillance state? It feels to me to be less tied to the market system and more to authoritarianism. I would simply point to the fact that many European nations under socialism did have very strong secret police spying on the public under the pretext of protection from counter-revolution, which is not really any different to the countries under capitalism today, minus the technology.
Needs to be that everyone agrees at once, otherwise the Palantirs of the world will keep going.
If you’re saying that it’s not a problem in Europe then I can’t imagine how bad it is in America. I get blinded by taller vehicles all the time on the road in Denmark. I also don’t think most people’s automatic high beams work correctly.
Anthropic is projecting a half a billion dollars profit this quarter
AI is getting cheaper every year and the output is becoming better. Look at token prices. The so called frontier models are not that far ahead of the open source models that you or I can run essentially for free, either.
The reality is that you can sit down and automate significant tasks with AI in an afternoon, today. I work in an industry where a significant amount of time is spent auditing and QAing output. A properly trained skill for Claude is able to do the same QA task to 90% of my (senior) level in 2% of the time. Similarly, it is able to coach the junior staff to produce work that is a much higher level than would be otherwise expected of them, reducing the actual audit length on that side too.
I am hugely positive for the future of AI. I am hugely negative about what it means for people.
Companies are competing for the same market share.
As an example, what are you going to do with four times more accountants than the total market needs? There are only a limited number of companies to do the accounts for. If one accountant can do four times the work as before, he might be able to expand. If every accountant can do four times the work as before, they cannot all expand. On a company level, why would you keep all the staff doing only 25% of the work as before? Their labour has been significantly reduced in value.
In my view it is. It’s a race to the bottom. What is a company going to do when they are in a competition with other firms that have less staff but the same output (i.e., a much lower cost base)? The options are either to go out of business or to restructure to the market reality. This is a problem that needs to be solved at the government level.
Japanese cars are currently in a state of industrial shittiness. If the US is still trailing them, there is no hope for the US car industry.
I mean if you’re talking about in a case as limited as RAM, SSDs and HDDs have gone through supply shortages and price increases, then come back down again in the last 10 years.
Essentially you need all streets to be serviceable by trucks, ambulances, etc., and therefore the general minimum is 1 lane. As you add car infrastructure, it becomes relatively more convenient to drive to a destination than take other modes of transport. You are also typically investing in the car infrastructure at the expense of alternatives, a straight opportunity cost and a sort of spiralling trap, as development becomes more and more centred around the car.
Braess’s paradox outlines adding a route can actually worsen overall network flow, and more broadly, new capacity just attracts new drivers until congestion returns to roughly where it started. Suboptimalities like the accordion effect are compounded as more traffic is added to the system.
Induced demand doesn’t imply the current number of lanes is optimal, just that expansion tends to be self-defeating.
Lane reduction alone would just increase misery, so the answer is redirect road space into transit, which absorbs displaced drivers at higher capacity. Otherwise it’s just misery.
I have a civil engineering degree with a focus on transport but never really used it for that, so this is something that I was taught, but had over a decade to devolve more into opinion.
I think so little of American voters that I just assume the democrats could pick any white man and win. For whatever reason, a large portion (i.e., the uneducated) of the American public is too sexist to vote for a female democratic president. The minute the republicans put one forward as a serious candidate, suddenly then it will be great.
Drill baby drill!
For what it’s worth, my totally non scientific personal experience is that in Denmark, the number of insects that I have to clean off the car has trended upwards in the last two years
I have never heard of the water being reused like this in practice. The majority of datacentres I have seen in Europe have a closed glycol loop and a large air based cooling array (i.e., air handling units), the remainder have adiabatic cooling.
Having a closed loop is more expensive and energy intensive than running cold water through the heat exchanger.
Nuclear cats deemed too unlucky to keep around because they keep getting eaten by radioactive wolves
The nuclear priests are obviously hiding something of great value from us, we must kill them and take it for ourselves!
These nuclear waste deterrents have always been a bit bizarre to me. If you make something monumentally ominous then you’re going to get tourists.
People are fucking weirdos. The same idiots that crawl through holes in the ground are definitely the kind that would climb through the giant razor field.
When I spoke about European countries under socialism I meant East Germany (Stasi), USSR (KGB), Czechoslovakia (StB), Hungary (AVH), etc.
None of these countries were capitalist at the time and maintained gigantic security services to spy on the entire population.