Lmao without milei trying to do super ultra neoliberalism, they wouldn’t fucking need the cash.
Just one more public funding cut, just one more tax cut, just one more deregulation, just one more batch of foreign investment, then the economy will be fixed guys, we promise. Just let the rich rob society a bit more and everything will get better.
It is a mechanically very dense game. There is a lot of depth and complexity to its gameplay. I get why a lot of people enjoy that. But I just kind of bounce off that, I need something to motivate me to engage with game mechanics. I need a story, or like, some kind of theming that I can project a goal on to. Poker but weird just doesn’t do it for me.
Like I adore paradox games, but I can project a broad world buildy-esq self built narrative and goals on to that, even when the mechanics are as broad as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.
Consider, that, much of the dialog is the internal voices of the main character, and that he does in fact have his head firmly lodged in his own rectum.
I switched over about… I suppose 2 and a half years ago now? Honestly it’s been a lot easier to use. Like it’s kind of shocking to me that people will act like windows is cohesive and better put together. Every time I interact with it these days, the more it looks like a taped together ball of junk crusted over with 30 years of repainting.
Like the fact that with windows I had to go to three separate settings programs to find the right toggle, that every program has a dedicated installer and its own path for updates. That there are just default always on programs running in the background eating up a 1/4 of the ram and two of my CPU cores for no damn reason. That a laptop will randomly wake up inside a bag when it should be asleep and run down its battery over 6 hours of trying to connect to an absent WiFi network to run updates.
This gives the same instructions for growing sweet potatoes and normal potatoes.But that method will not work for sweet potatoes, they’re very different from normal potatoes. To propagate sweet potatoes you need to sprout slips from them and then plant those. So half bury the sweet potatoes side ways in some potting mix and wait for sprouts with roots to form on it, twisting those off with roots intacked and growing those. This can also be done by suspending the sweet potato half way in a jar of water with some toothpicks, root end down. Then the sprouts can be planted outside ~3 weeks after the last soil frost.
Sweet potatoes are a completely different family of plants from sweet potatoes, being marigolds rather than nightshades, they don’t bud and spread the same way potatoes do, forming one singular root rather than multiple budding roots.
It has burst in terms of the liquidity of the system, sure the on paper value of the asset hasn’t collapsed, but that’s because the number of people willing to sell has reduced in turn with the number of people willing to buy. Everyone who was going to cash out big time already has, and the people who bought from them are waiting on another order of magnitude increase in value before they cash out, or they intend to hold on to it forever.
They’re dependent on it indirectly. Like, most of the rest of the economic growth that has gone on in recent years has been from the wealthiest 10% of Americans increasing their consumption of various goods, or continuing consumption even as prices rise while wages stay stagnant.
That 10% has felt comfortable spending money due to the value of their assets growing, being able to liquidate some here and there or using them as collateral for loans.
If they lose a significant portion of 1/3rd of their assets in stock, and no other investments are showing rapid growth, they’ll probably pull back on their spending, which will in turn hurt the rest of the market. That won’t be as quick as the panic around “AI” companies, nor as disastrous.
It will be a slow thing, as companies that have moved towards the high margin premium side of the market see sales dry up on their most profitable products.
I mean, given that 1/3rd of the s&P 500s value is in 7 companies who are all heavily invested in AI compute.
I’m sure that the 10% wealthiest who’s consumption makes up over half of consumer spending won’t drastically cut back their spending if they lose a third of their wealth that’s in index funds.
And I’m sure private equity firms that are also heavily invested won’t start trying to liquidate their other assets at the same time.
No way this could see a massive decrease in consumer spending.
Or like, anyone one of the massively cash negative companies with in the bubble being unable to secure more money.
Hey, how’s that deal between SoftBank and OpenAI doing? You know, the one where they get the liquidity they need to keep operating if they convert to a for profit company before the end of the year? Yah? So … they managed to convert to a fire profit company yet? No? Oh, damn, I sure they’ll figure out that incredibly complicated and dubiously legal process by the end of the fiscal year.
All it takes is openAI or anthropic to run out of cash, then everyone providing them compute suddenly has giant power sucking white elephants that are basically useless for anything else (maybe crypto mining LMAO). And then they all stop buying more chips from Nvidia (you know, the company whose valuation is 8% of most index funds, and 80% of their revenue and all of their revenue growth over the past two years has been from data center sales).
Kinda crazy how 7 companies, all heavily invested in AI cloud compute, in one way or another, make up about a 1/3rd of the S&P 500.
I mean, good thing the AI bubble couldn’t possible pop any other bubbles. I mean, it’s not like nearly a decade of low interest rates could possibly have built any other bubbles in any other sort of asset markets.
Ah! They said there would be a second season in 2025, but I guess spring 2026 is close enough! Very excited. Just finished the manga last week. Serendipitous timing.
The reality is, its only impact has been as a cover story to conceal jobs that were already going to be cut.
It’s patently ridiculous how many people in positions of authority have parroted talking points about this and laughable how many journalists and publications have uncritically reported those talking points as if they have merit.
To those who believe that truth derives from authority, and not from debate backed with evidence, a website where the debate is visible and clear undermines its authority. But just because we don’t see that process at other publications doesn’t make them more reliable, it just means we can’t judge the quality of that process.
Wikipedia’s system has its flaws, but the ability to know that, to see those flaws and be aware of them, makes it more reliable. It also makes it very difficult for authoritarians to seize control of for their own ends, to shut down debate and impose consensus. That’s the real reason it is under attack, because those who wish to impose consensus have justify them selves publicly.
I think a big part of it is the nature of the US car market over the past 10 years, where the growth has come from sales of “premium” vehicles. The standard and budget market segments have underperformed and thus most US car companies haven’t invested in them much. Consumer spending is increasingly driven by the wealthiest 10% of the population. Everyone else is struggling and cutting back where ever they can, that means buying used cars and holding on to their current cars as long as they can, if they’re even in a position to own a car. The middle and low end consumer is doing so poorly that they’re not just moving down market, they’re not buying at all.
EVs just aren’t super competitive in the premium market. One of the biggest real selling points of Electric vehicles is their low operating cost. Electricity is cheaper than gas, way less maintenance is needed, and the most expensive and failure prone parts are absent, reducing repair costs. To a wealthy person, none of that is particularly compelling. What can an EV sell on in a premium segment? Acceleration and the “saving the environment” vibes, and that’s just not compelling enough to take significant market share.
So why isn’t what remains of the budget market dominated by EVs? Because there are no Budget EVs on the US market. The cheapest EV on the US market is the Chevy bolt and that’s got an MSRP of around 30,000 dollars. None of the companies are willing to invest the money needed to make a budget EV production line and the required supply chains. They’d rather take their capital and put it in to high margin premium vehicles, and service the anemic budget market with legacy production lines.
I’m more talking about diminishing capacity rather than temporary disruption, the less valuable or complicated any given part, the easier it is to replace it fairly quickly. Cutting a line is annoying, but it can be repaired fairly quickly, transformers, battery banks, and panels are more expensive and difficult to replace, but order of magnitude easier than a gas turbine.
Like say a bomb gets dropped in a field of solar panels, it’ll destroy some in the direct blast, and damage others near by with debris or other things, but, a significant portion of the field would probably be fine and could be running again fairly quickly. A bomb that blows up the turbine at a gas plant is a causing a lot more pain.
Solar and wind are fundamentally not something that can be effectively protected from attack, it is necessarily exposed and dispersed over wide areas that will be essentially impossible to guard comprehensively. You can’t have someone with a MANPAD or AA gun guarding every single windmill or field of solar panels. but there are no particularly valuable points in the system, no Achilles heel. It will take damage, it will require constant replacements and repair, but, it will be extremely difficult to comprehensively disable it. And so long as the cost to replace and repair is not much more than the cost of munitions used on it, then it’s not exactly an economical usage of the attacker’s resources.
As supposed to a system of refineries, large power plants, and pipelines. Those are dense high value targets, you can plaster them from head to toe with high end air defense because there aren’t that many to protect. But if those defenses fail or are overwhelmed, replacing them is a multi year multi million dollar project. And realistically, the bomber will always get through, eventually the defenses will fail and you will loose a huge chunk of capacity that can’t be replaced easily. Even if it takes 10 cruise missiles, 100 drones, and 20 informants on the ground feeding information about defenses, it’s still much cheaper for the attacker to destroy than defender to defend or replace.
Lmao without milei trying to do super ultra neoliberalism, they wouldn’t fucking need the cash.
Just one more public funding cut, just one more tax cut, just one more deregulation, just one more batch of foreign investment, then the economy will be fixed guys, we promise. Just let the rich rob society a bit more and everything will get better.