As someone who read Biological War: A Scenario last week… ah geez.

When I think of an automated system that can protect itself, ED-209 comes to mind for some reason.

Your writing is a pleasure to read. Thanks for this.

Oh my God, I just checked and me too.

Neat. Please forgive my ignorance, but what is scratch?

As for your valve question can you rephrase your question another way and provide details? From skimming your website I’m unsure of where the comparison should begin (perhaps I am unaware of all the things valve offers).

99% sure this person is cosplaying as QWOP

IMO Canadians should examine the war in Ukraine to get an idea about how to prepare, but keep in mind Russia’s relative military ineptitude.

The way accounting works, if the money is going on to their books, it had to come off of someone else’s. So the rest of us are not the same, you are correct, we are actually poorer, collectively.

Billionaires’ accumulation of wealth is basically self perpetuating once they get to the point of being a billionaire. They can’t possibly spend it all, so they invest anything left over, which gains more profits, which they invest again and so on.

They eventually run out of regular investments to invest in (see stocks just going up and up), so they move into investing in things like housing, which is why that bubble refuses to burst. Meanwhile, you can’t afford to buy your own house because of the astronomical cost, and you’re left renting your housing from the billionaire class who effectively own it, creating more profit for them. Even if you buy a home, you likely have a mortgage, with that money having been lent by… investors (see above), creating more profit for them.

Unfortunately, every dollar lent for anything requires an interest payment, which, if you know how that works (see “fractional reserve banking” to get an idea), forces money to be printed in order for there to be enough money supply to keep the whole system working. Printing money causes inflation, which lowers the buying power of any money you do have.

For regular people, that means we’re collectively poorer.

For billionaires, they’d never notice the inflation, both because they already have more money than they could ever spend, and the growth is self perpetuating because they have no other way to spend it.

If you follow that out, obviously they’ll end up owning absolutely everything.

But people have to eat, so one day, shit is going to hit the fan. The longer taxing billionaires heavily is delayed, the larger that shit storm is going to be. The people who are right now living in shantytowns, in their cars or RVs, are the tip of the iceberg.

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This doesn’t even touch on things like shrinkflation (which is just another part of general inflation).

Some people might say “oh, fractional reserve banking is dead”, but what they don’t say is that the reserve part is dead, meaning the engine is now fully pinned instead of just red-lining.

When things get dire, the fast and high bandwidth Internet we know will be gone, but a form of slow, intermittent Internet will probably be around; still technically an Internet.

The E stood for Elimination.

Part of me wonders if they sell your driving telemetry to your insurance company, and if those companies pay out more for data on worse offenders. If so, they’re just letting you tie your own increased insurance rate noose by providing that option, for their own financial gain.

Oh, so that’s why Google is killing sideloading.

Then again, I could have accomplished the same thing by knocking off work for the day and going to the driving range.

Hey, look at the bright side, as long as you were chained to your desk instead, that’s all that matters.

uninformed for skeptical

Perhaps one begets the other.

The article is not fishy, you are just uninformed. They are powering the datacenter with turbines fueled by natural gas. You are right about the datacenter though, it’s beyond fishy, into crime territory. To top it all off, they have approval to run only a handful of turbines (after not even seeking approval in the first place, i.e. running them illegally), but they are running a ton of them.

*looks around* That’s a pretty big if.

I feel there’s a certain sad irony about the domain on that link.

I am having flashbacks to the scene in Idiocracy where the doctor is talking about his wife.

Autopilot hasn’t received any updates for years.

Like I said, demonstrates neglect.

If Kleenex were the only ones doing facial tissue, then this could be, “toilet paper vs. Kleenex”, and you’d be wondering “why isn’t this Charmin vs Kleenex?” while Charmin happened to be the TP brand they chose because they had access to it.

Tesla is the only one doing camera-only self driving, so there’s no point in delineating the two. Lidar you can expect from any other brand, so it’s a token choice in this instance, especially for an engineering entertainment video.