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jjk166

And of course the people writing things in blood are always intelligent, well informed people making strictly rational, unbiased decisions which perfectly balance the needs of all in perpetuity.
Re:The Alien Space of Science on Friday October 23, 2026 @10:00PM (#50217728)
> The real question is whether it would happen in a practical timeframe.

How are we defining a practical timeframe? How many billions of man-years did it take for a human to come up with velcro? In a world without velcro I could easily imagine an llm proposing the idea long before a pure human team.

Re:US threatens Europe over Starlink restrictions on Sunday October 18, 2026 @04:06PM (#50144926)
Europe is putting economic restrictions on Starlink; the technical restrictions the US placed on Starshield are unrelated.
Re:Gold is now the top U.S. export on Sunday October 18, 2026 @03:48PM (#50144710)
So? If you import $100 billion dollars of components and you do nothing to them before reselling abroad, you have $100 billion of exports.
Re:Gold is now the top U.S. export on Sunday October 18, 2026 @03:44PM (#50144653)
> "It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment."

"This experiment" being a radically different method than the one under discussion. Wikipedia pulled something useless from someplace irrelevant, which is exactly what should be described as "pulled out of their butt."

The LHC is also neither a nuclear reactor, nor a gold making machine. You can make gold with it the way you can use a space shuttle to deliver newspapers. That it is possible is an interesting tidbit of trivia which you might include in an encyclopedia article, it is not however evidence supporting the claim that newspaper deliveries cost millions of dollars.

> So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs.

You're assuming that high paying jobs are good jobs. While high pay is obviously desirable, the jobs themselves often suck, and people are paid those high premiums in part to put up with the sucky conditions. If lots of people both enjoyed and were able to perform a job, the pay would be low.

People are saying "AI took our jobs" or are concerned it imminently will. A lot of white collar tasks are doable by AI today.
Ah but I'd take roofing in the summer over septic tank cleaning any day. The existence of even shittier jobs does not make any particular job not-shitty.
Which would you consider more premium, the hotel with a lobby with marble floors or with linoleum? That doesn't mean marble provides any utility that the linoleum does not.
> remove the need for a waiter to come by and ask, or for you to get up and order, but by automating that away you also remove that little bit of social interaction for both the people ordering and the waiters.

Okay, but were you coming to the restaurant for social interaction with the waiters? Have you stopped going to those restaurants that serve you good food at a reasonable price and which are otherwise desirable places to eat because of the lack of social interaction with waiters?

People dislike places that charge too much for mediocre service, and those places disproportionately use the QR codes for ordering and don't pass on the savings from labor reduction to the consumer. Very few people actually miss their waiter interrupting their conversation to tell them the specials.

Re:Gold is now the top U.S. export on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:44PM (#50137375)
You wouldn't enrich the 198 isotope, you'd just bombard natural mercury and chemically separate out the gold afterwards.

> "...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."

Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt. The value of a neutron in a nuclear reactor is the opportunity cost of it not hitting a uranium atom to produce fission. 1 mole of neutrons can produce about $100,000 worth of wholesale electricity assuming 40% efficiency. 1 mole of neutrons could alternatively produce 1 mole of gold, which is worth about $26,500. So it's roughly 4 times the market price of gold.

Of course there would be the cost of building and running the reactor and the associated chemical processes to collect the gold, but these cost are probably similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries. Certainly not 12 orders of magnitude more.

While it's not economical to make gold this way, it is economical to make certain medical isotopes this way.

Re:Gold is now the top U.S. export on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:11PM (#50137183)
Anthropic's quarterly revenue is $16 billion. Assuming they are 40% of the ai market, pretend that all the ai market is american, and pretend all tokens are exclusively sold abroad, that would make AI tokens 7.3% of US exports, comparable to aircraft (7.5%). Of course in reality only a small portion of these tokens are american exports.
Re:Gold is now the top U.S. export on Saturday October 17, 2026 @10:04PM (#50137144)
A single airliner can be half a billion dollars. That's about 1/4000th of the US's total goods exported in a single item.
Re:Gold is now the top U.S. export on Saturday October 17, 2026 @09:45PM (#50137017)
You wouldn't need many ships. The volume of a single shipping container is enough for 1300 tons of gold. Of course gold is extremely heavy, you'd need a specially built container to support that much gold, but the point is the storage space of any ocean going ship can comfortably carry the entire gold reserve of an entire country.

If you actually loaded gold into shipping containers and obeyed the weight restrictions, all the gold in the world would take up less than 8400 TEU, which would be considered a mid size cargo ship.

I watch a guy solve a sudoku every day. The puzzle is always different, but conceptually it's just a minor variant of the same video. I don't watch Mr Beast or that sort of content but I can't judge anyone who does.
I mean if you are of the opinion that people stop watching videos because they don't like them and continue watching because they do, then it would logically follow that by tweaking videos in such a way that people keep watching, you are giving them what they want (even if it's not necessarily what they may say they want). You don't need to be a narcissist grifter to want to make what people want. It's not like this is high art, it's mass consumer entertainment.
> but you certainly can for Germany, which almost immediately fell into recession.

The graph doesn't show that at all.

Re:Why the Bronze Age Collapsed on Saturday October 03, 2026 @02:30PM (#49946572)
It wasn't chance, it was fundamental to the starting conditions of the two continents and the nature of the exchange.

First there were just more old world diseases which could infect humans than new world diseases. Prior to contact, the old world had about 80 to 90% of the world's total population, so a priori if a disease was to emerge in humans it was overwhelmingly more likely to emerge there. On top of that the old world saw much more domestication of livestock (and particularly livestock animals that had evolved alongside great apes) which in turn created more opportunities per capita for diseases to jump to humans.

For the exchange itself, Europeans were building the ships and sailing them to the New World. It was primarily Europeans on those ships, and especially those passengers who would be most likely to be incubating diseases (the old, young, and infirm) were overwhelmingly more likely to be Europeans headed west. Europeans afflicted with diseases after they reached the Americas would generally not have been allowed on ships back to Europe, or if they were they would likely not survive the voyage. Syphilis likely came from the new world, and it's easy to see how, but if there had been some American equivalent to small-pox it would simply have not been able to make the journey before going extinct as the native populations harboring it were wiped out by Old World diseases.

For it to have been "the other way around" the Americas would have needed a vastly different ecology and the people living there would have needed to beat the Old World to the level of technological development necessary to make contact.

Re:Why the Bronze Age Collapsed on Saturday October 03, 2026 @01:48PM (#49946253)
> On top of being what enabled them to form alliances, it also begs another question. If it was primarily these masses that overwhelmed the Aztecs (and I don't disagree) then what need did they have of outsiders

You presuppose they needed the outsiders. The Aztec empire was not some ancient, unwavering fact of life which the native mesoamericans could not conceive of changing. It only lasted 100 years. It is entirely possible that the rebellion was going to happen anyways in the next few years or decades and the arrival of the Spanish was just the butterfly flapping its wings that happened to trigger it at that moment.

> justified the Spaniards being deemed leaders.

The native allies of the conquistadors installed the Spanish to replace the Aztecs in exchange for a lower tax rate and increased independence. They did not accept spanish leadership, they just preferred empowering a neutral third party than any particular longstanding rival. Spanish domination came later after smallpox decimated the native population and intermarriages with the pre-existing elite meant there was no native power structure left to stand up to them.

Re:Things that apparently cause cancer on Saturday October 03, 2026 @01:12PM (#49946002)
> As long as we don't have a viable explanation, there is something interesting there to discover.

This assumes there is something which needs explanation. For any finite string of gibberish there are an infinite number of languages which can be constructed to ascribe it profound meaning. All patterns in data must be assumed to be illusions until testable predictions made from them are found to be consistently accurate more often than otherwise expected.

Stabilizing ourselves and our allies when an enemy attacks and disrupts petroleum supplies is why we have a strategic petroleum reserve.

It's just incredibly dumb to start a war that will tank global petroleum supply chains before stocking back up.

Article fails to note that the 2010s saw abnormally high per capita wine consumption, and even after the 20% decline in the 2020s to date, per capita consumption is still more than 50% above historical baseline. This isn't the death of a once stable industry, this is a predictable bursting of an obvious bubble.
The decrease in consumption predates the current trade issues. Peak domestic wine consumption was in 2021 and has been falling rapidly ever since. There hasn't been a decrease in demand of this magnitude or duration since the 80s. Despite several years of declining consumption, per capita consumption remains over 50 percent above historical baseline. Combined with demographic changes that will decrease avid wine consumers as a fraction of the population, it's quite clear that the 2010s bubble was the short term abnormality.
Higher demand incentivizes more production, increasing supply which drives prices down. Demand increases only drive up prices if supply is constrained.

Very likely wine demand was not going up, and price increases were instead due to increasing costs and inflation.

> It's a nice claim to say

kinda implies the claim was said

Since 2001 the US has spent 29.7 Trillion on entitlements excluding social security vs 18 Trillion of military spending.

Of course the entitlements are useful spending - these are things people need and benefit from. Had these dollars not been spent by the US government, they would have been spent directly by the taxpayers for the same goods and services. While some money may have been saved if this spending were private, it probably wouldn't change the total economic impact by much.

On the other hand we have nothing to show for the $18 trillion burned on wars that went horrifically. If we'd put that money into useful investments such that it paid interest and stopped our defense spending, we would be running a $300 billion per year surplus right now with no cuts to any other government services, to say nothing of the potential economic advantages if the wars had just never happened.

And don't get me started on the $10 trillion lost to the Bush tax cuts and their extensions.

Because the social security surplus was used to fund the treasury instead of being put towards social security. The 1990s budget surplus that became the Bush tax cuts? Yeah that was the money that was supposed to pay for social security.
But certain groups are probably more likely than others to need to worry about having to prove their citizenship. You don't need to make it impossible for people to vote, you just need to create enough friction that some of them won't who otherwise would.
> Ok, but a significant bulge on one side of the planet will slow all sats, giving the false impression of a homegenous trend.

A bulge would not homogenously slow all satellites, each one would be slowed by a different amount depending on its particular path through the bulge. Those that pass through more of the bulge will be slowed to a greater extent than those passing briefly through. Satellites in different orbits tell you where the bulge is, satellites in the same orbit tell you how the bulge is moving.

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