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Tastes change though. A look that was popular 15 years ago might appear garish or old fashioned today.

Well if 1-2% inflation is "normal" and the goal of most central banks then yes 5% is very high.

> that 5% is approximately the mean rate over the past 70 years.

Besides a few years in the 90s it was always either significantly higher or lower than that.

> man who has stated repeatedly why he wants "maximum truth-seeking AI".

Right, fair enough since Musk and the sort of people he supports and associates with are widely know for not being the biggest liars and hypocrites in generations.

Well it depends. Usually it's far from trivial to fire civil servants in most countries.

> party are not too likely to be competent and incorruptible

As I said, a doubled edged sword. A newly elected reformist government won't be very effective if they can't put new people in power.

On the federal level yes but that only reduced the autonomy that the cantons had, it didn't introduce a fundamentally different system of government, most decisions were still taken on the local level.

> The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.

That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.

> The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor

If you don't count the 80 years of off and on civil wars and political and social upheavals.

> and sufficient to get their job done

Well they were extremely successful military, internal politics were a mixed bag and it slowly turned into chaos and constant gridlock as soon as they ran out of external enemies to fight.

Rome had an arcane deeply adversarial political system which basically relied different powerful men in the elite competing and keeping each other in check while trying to amass as much wealth and political power they could get away with (Ceasar was hardly an aberration besides just being way more successful than countless aristocrats playing the same game).

> effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator),

Sula did that first, in many ways Caesar just emulated him (of course the decision to not murder all of this potential enemies came back to bite him)

> Not every country has a spoil system

Which is a double edged sword since then it's hard to get rid of the incompetent and corrupt people when they are deeply entrenched.

> If only there was a law to uphold this.

To be fair even if that worked out somehow they would be dominated by the professional bureaucrats running the civil service and other day to day government activities. Effectively it would turn into a technocracy with some degree of oversight.

Well yes, Russian gas was obviously cheaper than nuclear if you ignore the environmental and political externalities. It helped growth in the short and medium term and that's the only thing politicians cared about.

Well not exactly. It's quite different this time since most other tech companies used to IPO way earlier. So their valuations weren't based on everyone assuming that they will continue growing exponentially, corner the entire market and effectively become monopolies. You used to have much more uncertainty and therefore potential upside for investors. I mean Anthropic can do great by the standards of pretty much every other public company and still catastrophically underperform the current expectations.

> It was knowledge work that brought us fertilizers, tractors, trucks and large ships, which

Yes but the number of people who actually worked on the R&D and the amount of time they spent on it is absolutely insignificant on the grand scale of things.

> Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.

That's not that self evident yet. If AI is a multiplier it might be the other way around i.e. can a $300k engineer + unlimited tokens generate more a $200k in extra value compared to a $100k engineer? That should be much easier to achieve with AI than without it? The more you spend on tokens the more it makes sense to hire the most highly skilled people you can find since their salaries are no longer that significant.

I don't think the dynamics are similar to what they are e.g. during the industrial revolution since AI is more than capable of clicking the submit button on its own.

The issue is that wages are based on supply and demand and rarely directly related to how much value you generate.

> Things during dotcom crash looked at least this bleak

And we're still technically in the boom part of the cycle. I wonder how bad it will be after the actual crash.

It just doesn't really make much sense. It's way harder to stop a company in a country which hasn't signed it (not that the congress ever would sign a random document Trump and Xi come up with regardless...) from developing a model than from building nukes. Also if American and Chinese labs stop development it would make it cheaper and easier for others to catch up.

But the question is not so much if they can IPO at those prices but rather if the valuations are sustainable over a couple of years. If they are priced to perfection there isn't much left for public investors besides huge risk that something might not work out 100% as expected.

Storage still has some way to go until comparing the raw price per MWh ceases to be a partially apples to oranges comparison. You can't really have a stable grid in most of Europe with only solar + wing + storage. Unless you are willing to close down most of the factories during winter amongst other things.

To be fair switching to nuclear was an option in the 70s-90s. Obviously it would have a been a bit more expensive but it would have slowed down climate change by 10-20 years.

It certainly was in the 80s and early 2000s if negative externalities like CO2 emissions were factored in (of course nobody cared about that back then)

> The temporary transition to coal was studied long time ago and identified

When and by whom? The "phase-out" in 2002 was enacted by a government led by a person who later turned out to be a paid Russian agent. How did that work out? Germany did almost nothing for 10-15 while it increased it's dependency on fossil fuel imports from Russia...

Well point is that Germany's CO2 emissions could be the same as in France had they not stopped building nuclear plants in the 80s and 90s. Obviously the psychosis amongst environmentalists who were hellbent on maximizing CO2 emissions (in addition to Germans electing a Russian agent to lead their country in 1998) was just one of the factors.

By 2011 hardly mattered anyway. Nuclear was doomed when Western countries stopped developing and building new plants in the 80s and 90s.

Some of the planet is already much nicer than it was 100 years ago. At least in the European countries that industrialized the first or had high population density even before that.

> pre-industry levels within the next 500 years

For instance there are more forests in much of Europe than we did before the industrial revolution, let alone the 1800s. e.g. more of France is covered in trees now than it was as far back as 1300. Of course that's a very narrow and specific "KPI", mostly just shows that humans already had a massive impact on the environment and ecosystems long before the industrial revolution.

Most of those small and medium hydropower plants generate near insignificant amounts of electricity, even if you damn all the non major rivers you can (and destroy all the surrounding ecosystems) it would be hardly noticeable.

a ~5HW hydropower is insignificant and can be replaced by a handful of wind turbines and solar panels. Not sure if it's worth sacrificing local biodiversity for that.

Both opinions are worth very little if they are anecdotal and both sides don't share the same frame of reference?

> Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans.

Well it depends. If you are white or Asian and live in a more developed state and earn above median income is that really true?

> and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class.

Well not in the west where the elite was replaced by uneducated barbarians for several centuries and it took quite a while for the church to teach them how to read and write again.

> Those famines were not created by the Victorians.

The one in Ireland certainly was. The famine was an outcome of the exploitative economic system that they imposed on the native Irish population. The problem wasn't that there wasn't enough of food available in Ireland (or that it didn't have the capacity to produce enough food). Rather the people living there couldn't afford to buy it and due to free trade/laissez-faire policies imposed by Britain that food was exported to England.

> • The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.

Yes they gave back a tiny fraction of resources they extracted from Ireland back. Fact is that if Ireland had its own government and wasn't an exploited colony the outcome would have been very different.