mullingitover

Yes, in fact I heard somewhere that this was part of why the Obama administration chickened out on pushing for single payer when it was in reach. The broken window industry is a load-bearing pillar of the economy.

> (Of course this breaks down heavily if the human buying power stops constantly rising and there's de-facto less demand for goods and services)

This is what I'm talking about. I can easily envision waves of layoffs in areas like the service industry that historically have been highly resistant to productivity increases in the past. Hell, there's a whole industry based on arguing with insurance companies over billing that could potentially evaporate overnight[1]. That alone is hundreds of billions of dollars, and that's just one example.

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/excess-administrati...

I suspect there is a lot of demand destruction that AI will end up causing, so many companies are running with inefficiencies that it's really easy to ferret out and fix with agents.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a 5% GDP drop with all the wasteful spend that will end up getting deleted.

This one's still fresh in my mind: "A Missouri newspaper told the state about a security risk. Now it faces prosecution"[1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046124278/missouri-newspaper...

> and destroy any organized labor

Hilariously not any organized labor, just the local group. The largest organized labor group in the history of the world is alive and well, and is headquartered in Beijing.

This was basically just a case of kicking the can down the road really hard. The can is still there, waiting for you, and you are now completely dependent on it (oh and it has nuclear weapons).

As everyone is saying: just don't let it on the network. It's a little annoying because you can't have smart home stuff like "turn off the TV when I leave the house" working, but that's it.

My thing is, don't use an Apple TV. For the last 15 years or so I've just used a Mac Mini plugged into a big TV, and it's perfect. Get a wireless keyboard and trackpad and one of the many available trays that will hold them together. I'm literally typing this right now on this exact setup.

It doesn't say it would cut energy costs in half.

Meanwhile, fossil fuels are only 'cheap' because the users are pushing the negative externalities off on everyone else in the world. Priced properly they'd be even more costly than they already are.

Are we going to end up in an arms race where our local records are defensively sprinkled with prompt injection/agent poisoning/tank_man.jpg?

In the eyes of the ruling class: it's a feature, not a bug.

If students in the public k-12 system were actually being taught critical thinking, the schools would be the targets of strategic bombing by the US military.

Historic, unprecedented failure of leadership.

The price of diesel skyrocketing[1]. The producer price index, a leading indicator of inflation, doing the same[2]. Consumer sentiment cratering[3]. Real weekly earnings plunging[4].

These things aren't even normally the president's direct fault, but in this case it 1000% is.

So it's understandable why he's desperately jangling every set of keys he can get his hands on as the mid-term elections are happening. It can and will get dumber for this lame duck.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GASDESW

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PPIACO

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UMCSENT

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=20eS1

> Who puts a school next to a military base?

These days they’re calling themselves the “Department of War”

> Shadowy forces are behind every loss. Ironically, it's this attitude that undermines democracy.

I mean, this is South America we're talking about. It's not attitudes that undermine their democracy, it's very notoriously US-based three letter agencies.[1][2][3][4][5]

[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/legacy-posting/chile-united-states...

[2] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2025-1...

[3] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB133/index.htm

[4] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB465/

[5] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/events/operation-condor-1975-1980

I dunno, I live in a neighborhood in LA without an HOA and it's great. Housing values have skyrocketed in the decade I've been here. There are a sprinkling of places that don't take great care of their yards: the bane of every Karen-filled HOA. This has done absolutely nothing to harm property values.

I would wager that the money residents might have paid for HOA fees have largely gone into their own home/yard improvements, and it shows. Adding an HOA in this place, and I think most places, would be a burden rather than a benefit.

Sorry, that wasn't my opinion I was trying to debate, that's just a fact reported by HUD[1].

[1] https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/FHEO/documents/FHEO%20Annua...

Adding some context, that they were started out with pretty harmful intentions, to the discussion about how they are harmful today is very on topic.

> 80-90 years ago

Today's HOAs are very frequently involved in racial discrimination suits for violations of the Fair Housing Act.

You can’t drive it anywhere that manhole covers might exist, lest you destroy the car and/or turn the manhole cover into a deadly projectile.

*Third generation. They demo'd and took millions in deposits on the second generation roadster that never materialized.

A product reveal implies it's a production ready vehicle.

This was an air tank with a styrofoam shell held together with glue. It's a rough prototype of a concept car.

So this is a completely obvious scam, right? I don't see anyone else calling this out and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell, it would basically be a bomb. Also, the battery pack that would go in the car would be so large that they couldn't do the stunts they showed in their drone vehicle.

Are we not calling an obvious stock pumping charade what it is out of some sense of politeness?

Absolutely. It was a straight-up smash and grab operation, and everyone knows it.

It's important to frame these discussions in human terms. "Intellectual property" is a human invention and the rights associated with it are the results of negotiations between concerned parties. There was no negotiation with the training of the models, though. So no transaction happened, one group is profiting handsomely and whole classes of society which involuntarily had their labor taken are now being harmed.

There's no need to get it twisted, it's frankly quite black and white. The only question is how we'll ensure that the economics are corrected going forward to prevent further harm.

> My question (probably not original) is this: which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists? Which guitarist never listened to classic rock bands? Which painter never looked at Monet? Nearly all successful artists publicly recognize the influence of prior art on their development and style (and the rest are lying).

Those successful artists accessed their training data through legitimate means (please hold your 'well actually' replies about some artist using bittorrent here and there). They didn't all pirate, on a historic, industrial scale, every scrap of creative work that they saw in their lives. That's the key distinction.

> I think this is a terrible property of humans, this hyper-skepticism, and that it has nothing to do with logic, nor deduction, nor reality.

You're not wrong, but it's balanced out by this other terrible property of humans, which is hyper-credulity.

> Dario Amodei is a real person who has a family, a life, a profession.

I never said power was all he cares about, but in general I believe you are what you do. Amodeo could drop it all right now, today and spend the rest of his life with his family, or nose deep in the research project he's the most passionate about. He's not doing that, instead he's spending the remaining irreplaceable moments of his life pursuing the accumulation of power.

> The goal is personal wealth

The goal is power. Having 30 million of personal wealth is enough to retire in luxury and travel the world. They could all have this much right now. That's not what these types of people want.

Having 30 billion gives you the power to order legions of people around, buy and sell politicians, flood ad markets during elections, all with your couch cushion money. That's what motivates these types.

It's a feature of every species that evolves. You can't evolve if you're striving to outcompete your offspring. You quickly game out that not having offspring is the winning chess move there. Now you're not having offspring, and thus you're not evolving. Then the environment changes and you, being unable to adapt in any way, go extinct.

An individual pancreas cell discovering the secret to immortality is a triumph for that cell, and a real bad thing for the body. This is like that, but for the entire human population.

It's very easy to get on a tech forum and say "let's you and them fight," but violent revolution is generally pretty awful and typically ends up with worse conditions than they started with. I don't begrudge anyone for not wanting to go outside the regular electoral process.

> it's understandable why some people are very upset about this.

The people who are looking to lay off all their developers and lazily vibe code ports are furious that other randos are able to lazily vibe code ports just as easily.

/world's tiniest violin plays sad song/

> And the citizens do not have enough spine to bring their politicians to justice.

This really betrays a lack of understanding of the structure of the government in the US. The Constitution, for better and worse, heavily insulates the government from tempestuous public opinion. The framers were readers of greek history who understood that democracy was a condition that a republic could devolve into. They built the system to give the voters the vibes that they had a say in the workings of their government while ensuring that in reality they had no such thing.

All human behavior, including the way humans universally have a sense of right and wrong, is the result of evolution and natural selection on some level. Morality isn't some concept cooked up by aliens, it's a naturally emergent behavior and not just in humans.

Update, I was wrong. Off by three days[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/science/anthropic-biology...