> Ford’s CEO said that if Chinese EVs are allowed into USA it will destroy the US automakers
I'm a strong advocate for giving Chinese EVs an import quota per manufacturer (with a 1.5mm-unit annual cap on total Chinese EV imports, downgradable to 1mm in a recession, representing about 10% of demand).
This gives American consumers–and designers–access to and a taste for what the competition is doing. But it preserves a moat for our own producers.
> forgot to consider whether all this is worth $60B
I see two possibilities:
(1) SpaceX is paying with stock; and
(2) the $60bn pay-out is (a) conditional or (b) never going to be exercised—it was a stalking horse for negotiating the $10bn terms, which gives SpaceX everything it actually wants.
It gives them some amount of paying customer base using AI. That is some magic voodoo you need to sprinkle onto the public sale to get the highest possible price point.
> What’s the endgame? How does this help with the whole vision of “we all live in space and mine resources from the Moon and have data centers on Mars”?
I put this in the other thread, but my personal working hypothesis is the SpaceX/Musk mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere.
Space-based datacenters are a demand excuse for putting solar panels (and eventually, solar-panel fabrication) in space. Cursor is a demand excuse for building more datacenters (and eventaully, learning to fabricate chips). If I'm correct, the next acquisition will be in some chip or solar-panel fabrication bottleneck.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for this mission. (Though I do think the space-based datacenter pitch has gotten more scepticism than it deserves. For realistic interest-rate and terrestrial-delay values, assuming ongoing AI demand, it breaks even for surprisingly-proximate radiator-mass values. Obviously more problems beyond my toy model to solve. But I expected the math to say fuck you out the gate.)
I'm saying this is a good working theory for explaining–and predicting–Musk and SpaceX's actions. Mars explains why SpaceX's engines burn methane. Dyson sphere explains why xAI is building massive datacenters and now finding acquisition targets to fill them with.
So they are trying to take everyone’s money in bigger and bigger chunks until there is no economy left but hype.
Folks, if we spent 1/10th of the time and money we spend on this bullshit on taking care of people’s basic needs and education we would be far closer to the sci-fi future everyone seems so motivated to get to. Covid and the Trump cult seem to have broken almost everyone’s brains and we’re all gonna pay for the hubris.
> only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes
And hours in class. Or productivity of time in class. I'm not saying the former is desirable or latter feasible. But the education "production function" has three inputs.
I used to have an assistant make little index-card sized agendas for gettogethers when folks were in town or I was organising a holiday or offsite. They used to be physical; now it's a cute thing I can text around so everyone knows when they should be up by (and by when, if they've slept in, they can go back to bed). AI has been good at making these. They don't need to be works of art, just cute and silly and maybe embedded with an inside joke.
I'm not seeing how it takes more than 5 minutes to type up an itinerary. If you want to make it cute and silly, just change up the font and color and add some clip art.
If this is the best use case that exists for AI image generation, I'm only further convinced the tech is at best largely useless.
> not seeing how it takes more than 5 minutes to type up an itinerary
Because I’ll then spend hours playing with the typography (because it’s fun) and making it look like whatever design style I’ve most recently read about (again, because it’s fun) and then fighting Word or Latex because I don’t actually know what I’m doing (less fun). Outsourcing it is the right move, particularly if someone else is handling requests for schedules to be adjusted. An AI handles that outsourcing quicker for low-value (but frequent) tasks.
> If this is the best use case that exists for AI image generation
I’ve also had good luck sketching a map or diagram and then having the AI turn it into something that looks clean.
Look, 99% of my use cases are e.g. making my cat gnaw on the Tetons or making a concert of lobsters watching Lady Gaga singing “I do it for the claws” or whatever so I can send two friends something stupid at 1AM. But there does appear to be a veneer of productivity there, and worst case it makes the world look a bit nicer.
It's good that my friends don't make a coffee date feel like a board meeting (with an agenda shared by post 14 working days ahead of the meeting, form for proxy voting attached).
I don't care how many times you write "cute," having my vacation time programmed with that level of granularity and imposed obligation sounds like the definition of "dystopian."
If I got one of your cute schedule cards while visiting you, I'd tear it up, check into a cheap motel, and spend the rest of my vacation actually enjoying myself.
Edit: I'm not an outlier here. There have even been sitcom episodes about overbearing hosts over-programming their guests' visits, going back at least to the Brady Bunch.
> If I got one of your cute schedule cards while visiting you, I'd tear it up, check into a cheap motel, and spend the rest of my vacation actually enjoying myself
Okay. I'd be confused why you didn't voice up while we were planning everything as a group, but those people absolutely exist. (Unless it's someone's, read: a best friend or my partner's, birthday. Then I'm a dictator and nobody gets a choice over or preview of anything.)
I like to have a group activity planned on most days. If we're going to drive to get in an afternoon hike in before a dinner reservation (and if I have 6+ people in town, I need a dinner reservation because no I'm not coooking every single evening), or if I've paid for a snowmobile tour or a friend is bringing out their telescope for stargazing, there are hard no-later-than departure times to either not miss the activity or be respectful of others' time.
My family used to resolve that by constantly reminding everyone the day before and morning of, followed by constantly shouting at each other in the hours and minutes preceding and–inevitably–through that deadline. I prefer the way I've found. If someone wants to fuck off from an activity, myself included, that's also perfectly fine.
(I also grew up in a family that overplanned vacations. And I've since recovered from the rebound instinct, which involves not planning anything and leaving everything to serendipity. It works gorgeously, sometimes. But a lot of other times I wonder why I didn't bother googling the cool festival one town over before hand, or regretted sleeping in through a parade.)
> There have even been sitcom episodes about overbearing hosts over-programming their guests' visits
Sure. And different groups have different strokes. When it comes to my friends and I, generally speaking, a scheduled activity every other day with dinners planned in advance (they all get hangry, every single fucking one of them) works best.
> in boom years the state can't accumulate any general funds for recessions
Genuine question: have states had the discipline not to raid these coffers in the boom years?
The alternative is borrowing in downturns. That works because during recessions interest rates are low. The opposite problem then manifests, however, which is the state continuing to borrow through the recovery.
Maybe instead of citing shortfalls and surpluses, such laws should cite unemployment and income growth.
> have states had the discipline not to raid these coffers in the boom years?
"Let's give the money back to voters because they will like that and we'll figure out something else in tough years" is, like, the quintessential example of "raiding these coffers."
It's basically like big tech companies turning profit into stock dividends because investors love it and the CEO will be handsomely rewarded, and who cares about long-term R&D. When big companies do that we blame MBAs and capitalism.
The UK runs on 240V. A regular outlet would probably be fine.
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