This is the crux of my argument: Zitron provides numbers and he provides a lot of them sourced from reliable and trustworthy sources. He provides counterarguments to numbers-sparse arguments by using even more actual, real numbers with a logical theory formed from them.
This should make it rather easy to dispute his claims, no? So then where are the equally rational disputes?
Just this article has a dozen instances of numbers being used to prop up the argument. They're mostly irrelevant to whatever argument Zitron is trying to make at the time. Some others are straight up misrepresentations. HN really is not a good forum for point by point rebuttals for that many cases. Do you think there's a particularly high impact use of numbers in this article?
Either way it looks like he didn't just "repeat the numbers". He updated them and provided more data to back them up.
Nobody has the patience to read a comprehensive point by point rebuttal to any of it, it's just too tedious.
You say "numbers don't lie". But they do, when the numbers being presented have been adversarially chosen. You just find numbers (no matter how low quality) that fit the chosen narrative, you throw out the numbers (no matter how high quality) that rebut it. If you're trying to predict the future, you can't afford that of bias. If you're an anti-AI grifter, you can't afford to not have that bias, your entire livelihood depends on only showing things that support the narrative.