You don't have to eat much better. You can trivially supplement. It's far more important to eat less.

Realistically Japan is very close to being a second tier economy. It's quite plausible that Croatia and Latvia will pass them on GDP per capita over the next decade. 7-11 Japan would be relatively inexpensive for the citizens of any affluent nation, because Japan is so much poorer than it used to be.

The US saved tens of millions of Russians from starvation a century ago. Culturally they have absolutely no clue about that, they're entirely oblivious in terms of their own history. The good deeds never garnered the US any positive credit. Only the bad deeds garner the US bad credit aplenty.

What cut are you talking about?

If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.

If China is going in, we'll start to see large signs of that. They'll begin a number of prominent campaigns, including sabotage, propaganda, extremely large supply movements, and so on.

The masses will have no say in the matter. Just as they had no say in the matter with Google's ads getting ever more intrusive, or cable prices previously, or streaming prices going perpetually higher in the present, or YouTube ads, or anything else. Consumers will have no say in the matter, they'll take it and that's that.

With only three relevant competitors (maybe Mistral in Europe), there will be nowhere to flee the deployment of ads.

GoTo.com -> Google -> $$$

Google's ad business remains far larger and more profitable than AWS. And the advertising segment is drastically larger than the segment AWS is in. Just Google + Meta = nearing $600 billion in ad sales. Amazon will soon have their own $100 billion in ad sales.

Fuller integration into the user's life will bring ever more ad opportunities (and it doesn't matter if the HN base hates that notion, it's going to happen regardless). That'll happen over the next decade gradually.

Shopping, home management, tasks (taxes, accounting, lifestyle, reminders, homework, work work, 800 other things), travel (obvious), advice & general conversation (already there), search (being consumed now), gaming (next 3-5 years to start), full at-work integration (gradual spread across all industries, with more narrow expertise), digital world building (10-15+ years out for mass user adoption). And on the list goes. It's pretty much anything the user can or does touch in life.

There's a lot more money in being Google -> consumer ads, or Amazon -> consumer ads, or Meta -> consumer ads, than there is in being Anthropic -> enterprise.

Just take a look at the enterprise. Amazon's ad business alone is already a better business than Oracle or SAP or Salesforce, with superior margins, and it's growing faster too.

And of course everybody knows the Google & Meta ad monsters.

The only question remaining is who is going to extract all those LLM ad dollars, how will that break out. Right now it's Gemini and GPT in the obvious lead, with Anthropic in third, and Meta & Grok nowhere to be found (permanent situation for those).

January 26, 2024 - "Japanese investment holding firm SoftBank Group Corp has largely cleared its ownership in e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, concluding one of the most successful deals in China's internet industry and a holding that spanned about 23 years."

"SoftBank, which invested US$20 million into Alibaba when it was still a start-up in 2000, said in a corporate filing on Thursday that it was set to book a gain of 1.26 trillion yen (US$8.5 billion) - about 425 times the value of its initial outlay - for the Tokyo-based firm's 2024 financial year after divesting its [remaining] shares via subsidiary Skybridge."

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/japans-softbank-concludes-run...

That includes for example powerful figures in the Pentagon or intelligence agencies that remain from one admin to the next. These people all have agendas of their own, and they network as people do. Dick Cheney was a deep state figure across a couple of decades, often working in the shadows. So was Rumsfeld. So was Kissinger across a few decades during his prime power/influence years. They all had long-term agendas, their ideas about the world, and extremely deep connections throughout the Federal Government.

It's not a mysterious conspiracy. It's just people with power/influence pursuing outcomes that they'd like to see happen, and working with other like-minded people to get there.

The US requires an exceptional surge in manufacturing output for ammo.

Look up General Wesley Clark's seven countries in five years YouTube video. This was the plan all along, Trump has nothing fundamental to do with it, he was just willing to pull the trigger.

Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and lastly Iran

They saw the opportunity with Iran weakened, their proxies were knocked down, and Israel was fully mobilized.

While the US can demolish high value targets all day long (assuming it can find them), it won't be able to sustain volume. And this is against a dramatically outmatched opponent (in terms of air + navy + intel, not boots on the ground).

China will build a hundred cruise missiles per day and truck them in from factories far away from the coast. The US can build 10-20. China's cruise missiles won't be as good, and they won't need to be. And that's the absolute least of what China will hyper produce in a mobilization to a war manufacturing stance. The US should just wave the flag before the first shots are fired re Taiwan given what we're seeing in Iran, it's over before it ever begins.

The US can't control the Straight of Hormuz properly, without taking losses (which it clearly doesn't want to do). That's a trivial task compared to trying to keep China from controlling the waters near Taiwan. The US won't be able to even get close to Taiwan is what this is demonstrating. China can stand-off the US easily.

The US is showing China and the world that it has zero chance at stopping a takeover of Taiwan.

China should be looking at this Iran mess and moving as fast as it can to launch their invasion. The US isn't ready, and won't be.

The US could put up a big fight at a full war mobilization, given some time to spin up. That scenario will not occur with regard to Taiwan. China has the green light.

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edit:

There was a story about the early days of the invasion into Iraq by the US, after 9/11. It was about the US soldiers rolling into Iraqi towns, cities. They thought the US soldiers were maybe superhuman, or at least had extraordinarily advanced technology. An Iraqi boy wondered if the US soldiers could see through buildings with their helmets and goggles. After all they dispatched Saddam from power so quickly, seemingly so easily - one can understand the wonder.

Then they figured out the US soldiers were just meatbags like any other soldiers. That IEDs killed them just the same, and sniper rounds, and so on.

One of the very large benefits to rarely using your capabilities as a military superpower, is so that your enemies are unsure of just what you're capable of if pushed. And if you're lucky enough to put on a staggering outcome - as in the first Gulf War - in which Russia got to see their hardware decimated by vastly superior US weapons, then you should rest on that perception as long as possible. Iraq and Afghanistan substantially weakened the perception of US military domination (just a Vietnam did before that, for a generation). Iran doesn't show the US to be weak per se, rather, it shows the limits of its present endurance capabilities among other things. And that's what China needs to know.

And of course this happens to major powers from time to time throughout history. Russia goes into Ukraine and gets humiliated, its capabilities at the point of launching that war, were revealed to be embarrassingly mediocre compared to what was thought to exist. Or the USSR and Afghanistan before that.

This is the first or second inning in the LLM rollout. It'll take 15-20 more years for full integration of AI agents into the life of the typical person.

The claw experiments for example can just barely be considered alpha stage. They're early AI garbage unfit for the average person to utilize safely. That new world hasn't gotten near the typical person yet.

The compute requirements to get to full integration of AI agents into the life of the average person - billions of them - is far beyond 10x where we're at now.

I had a mistake in which a large back-up file deletion event happened during a robocopy. 600gb of files got 'deleted' (file headers toast etc). Trying to get the LLMs to understand the hunt parameters, what to focus on, what not to focus on - none of them could reasonably come close to doing file content recovery properly. I needed to build a custom solution because the available industry options couldn't do what was required and the LLMs were useless for that (including the latest versions of Claude, Gemini and GPT). They just went around in circles, capped by their apparently weak knowledge of file recovery as a field. That is, creativity was their limitation.

Other nations being sad when you get punched in the nose is only useful if you have no effective way to respond.

Half the world disliked the US during the Cold War. People act like any of what is going on is new.