If we're measuring in a vacuum without medicine, then absolutely, the measles is dramatically more infectious.

If we're measuring in the real world where medicine exists, the measles has a safe, cheap and effective vaccine. New case rates dropped 76% between 2000 and 2018 due to extensive vaccination campaigns, and new cases of the measles globally sits a hair below TB right now. The WHO has a plan to eradicate it (and rubella) just like polio.

Meanwhile TB is now the leading cause of infectious death in the world, and the WHO estimates 1 in 4 people globally have either active or latent TB. Despite having similar new case numbers, TB kills 13 people for every 1 person the measles does.

I would describe a disease that 1 in 4 people globally have and is the world's leading cause of death as "shockingly infectious". I doubt it is the most infectious, but I think shockingly infectious is apt.

> i lived with someone infected with TB.

If they were latent, no one would expect you to have contracted TB. Latent TB isn't infectious. If they had active TB, I would personally get tested for latent TB. Not showing symptoms isn't dispositive of contracting TB, it can lay dormant for a long time or forever. I'm not saying you would definitely have contracted it enough, but the odds are high enough and risks serious enough that I'd want it treated before it became active.

Once it’s multi-drug resistant, if you’re poor then you get an incredibly depressing choice. Rich countries pay for expensive drug resistance testing.

Poor countries have to answer an impossible question. You either do nothing and see if they live, or you try to guess what drugs will work and give them those. However, if you’re wrong and the treatment doesn’t work then the risk that you’ve just made the strain immune to one or more of the drugs in that cocktail skyrockets.

They get asked to either do nothing, or do the best they can today knowing it will make tomorrow worse.

TB is also shockingly infectious, which is sad. You can at least take steps to dramatically reduce HIV risk, it’s much much harder to avoid TB.

Thus it feels like breaking that contract to have a substantial block of voters who will not only be recipients of increased benefits without ever having to pay more, but can run benefits programs into the ground and kill them without worry because they’ll die before that happens.

They don’t have any skin in the game. They stand to benefit, but never really lose.

I’ve not really worked that into a functional idea, though. The gist of my thought process is that you shouldn’t be able to vote on things where the delay on systemic issues occurring is beyond your life expectancy. So I could vote to change social security today, but probably not when I retire.

I have no idea how to quantify that delay in any reasonably objective way, though, and that’s where my idea falls apart.

It seems likely to become another political dog and pony show where the parties try to get arbitrary age cutoffs to get a demographic advantage. The idea that it would force parties to cater to younger voters more is interesting but I’m not sure a net positive. The impacts are too wide for me to gauge any kind of third order effects.

A huge pile of gold isn’t inherently powerful, you need someone willing to accept gold to do what you want. They would also generally be intimately involved in doing the thing, so you paid premiums for dangerous or unpalatable work.

These days technology lets you turn resources into planes, tanks, drones, etc in a way where 100 soldiers with limitless resources probably beat 1000 with a constrained supply line pretty consistently.

You see the same with domestic conflict. Once upon a time, finding and tracking down revolutionaries was a tedious, labor-intensive process that usually resulted in failure. Now those resources can be converted into surveillance that is much more effective, and much less reliant on another human being willing to help.

I do IT, I can’t make any kind of art to save my own life. The art the AI generates is neat to me because I get to feel in control of making something beyond my own skills.

The flip side is equally true, though. The things I make are derivative, and not particularly neat to other people (and actively irritate actual artists).

AI software is a lot like that. I’m happy people who aren’t software engineers can make their own thing and be totally in control of that. I’ve also yet to see much AI software that blows existing stuff out of the water. Most of is derivative of something that already exists, if not an outright clone with a slightly different emphasis (think Jira but for a very specific workflow).

> we store and use lots of toxic pressurized liquids all the time. Lots of people run all their energy needs off propane tanks, after all.

That’s stored at rest, not being pumped through pipes. We could probably store it locally and send people to collect it, that might be cheaper than power lines.

I would be surprised if maintaining pipes to transport pressurized liquid or gas was cheaper than power lines. Power lines aren’t free, but super cheap relative to pipes that can leak everywhere.

Pure ammonia is toxic to animals. At normal outdoor temperatures it also only becomes a liquid at ~100 PSI (it’s like 150 at 80F). The boiling point at STP is like -27F.

I’m doubtful running a power transmission line to these places is harder than maintaining pipes that transport either a toxic gas, or a toxic pressurized liquid.

If you could turn it into ammonium nitrate, that’s a solid at room temp and easier to transport. It’s explosive but insensitive so it shouldn’t without another explosion first. Even if it does, this sounds remote enough that it shouldn’t matter and ammonium nitrate is a no -toxic fertilizer. Wildlife shouldn’t even notice.

It’s usually a lot cheaper and safer to condense all that demand into a purpose-built facility where they can hire an engineer to look after all the generation, have centralized container storage, backup parts, etc.

None of that prevents putting the panels or windmills on farmer land, though. You could imagine some sort of “get a discount on ammonia if we can put a solar panel in your field” scheme. Or, even more simply, put up your own panels, sell the power back to the grid, use that money to buy fertilizer from the factory buying your power off the grid.

My home still has 100 amp service (as does almost the whole city, most of it is a historic district), but it was built in 1910 so that's not shocking.

> A electrician can plop in a electric car charger for instance, that is a 40-50 amp circuit.

Oh yeah, I was mostly talking about having to upgrade the service to the house from the pole. A new circuit with a single outlet isn't horribly expensive, but needing to upgrade service is pretty rough.

We do, we export almost twice the amount of goods. The margins on services are so much better that the majority of the profit from exports is from services. I can’t find a study that has traced export revenue to export profit, but the services sector floats around 50% margins and manufacturing is around 15%. That would ballpark goods export profit around $30B and services around $50B.

> America is the second-largest manufacturer in the world by a long shot.

America is the third most populous country in the world. Normalize by population and we’re pretty middling; America is 53rd in merchandise exports per capita (63rd in overall exports per capita). South Korea exports over double our manufacturing per capita.

> Where are most of these?

The most companies, or where the most tokens are going? If you mean “where are the most tokens going?” it’s probably not the US.

The best data I can think of is OpenRouters usage leaderboards, which probably don’t include enterprise customers, and that’s dire.

You don’t hit a US model until #7 and it’s Nemotron which Nvidia is serving for free. The first US model that actually charges is Opus 4.8 at #9 and it handles about a sixth the traffic of the top model (Mimo-V2.5).

There’s really not a ton keeping inference in the US on a moderate time horizon imo. Tencent has Hy3 up for free right now, all Chinese inference, and it’s doing double the tokens Nemotron and Opus 4.8 are doing combined. For free, via the API.

It might not be China, but their aggressive investments in power generation and green energy make it seem likely. They just need GPUs and they seem to be nearing the point where they can offer them based on the Hy3 inference.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they were over a billion in revenue at this point.

I would imagine big chunks of the company also aren’t technology. They seem like they have a sizable PR and marketing presence, community liaisons (read: support), HR to support it all, legal for dealing with illicit content that ends up there instead of OnlyFans, etc.

AIs promise is undercutting knowledge work, which is our primary export. Manufacturing left ages ago.

In theory, if OpenAI/Anthropic win then the US still wins since they’re headquartered here.

If open or Chinese models succeed, it undercuts our knowledge work market and that money starts flowing out to inference providers instead of in to US companies and their employees.

8.3% of US households had low food security at some point in 2024 (read: had to resort to less varied diets like rice and beans, or visit a food pantry).

5.4% had very low food security at some point in 2024 (at least one family member had to disrupt their eating patterns and skip meals or eat less due to food availability).

Those numbers don’t overlap, it’s 13.7% experienced some variety of food insecurity.

It’s worse in families with children, 18.4% experienced some form of food insecurity. Thankfully, even in most households with very low food security the adults bear the brunt and make sure the kids eat enough, but in 0.9% of households even the children have very low food security.

Talking about welfare for AI models is utterly insane while those numbers are above 0%. I do not give a single shit about model welfare when we have human children skipping meals. Frankly it’s the inverse and if Anthropic has money to piss away on this then we should increase their tax rate and feed some kids, fix some roads, do some good. They can go look at model welfare after they’ve chucked us into the post-scarcity universe they keep telling us is 2 model releases away.

The electricity prices are relevant because if you paid $0 for your H100 and didn't use it a single time, you could buy millions of tokens in inference just on the electricity it draws while idling. If you can't keep that thing saturated through the night, you're probably underwater overnight. Likewise, it's too small to run even the frontier open source models so you need to be able to live with worse models.

Max power matters because you aren't going to run many of those H100s before you blow breakers in most houses. Newer houses in the US are 15A service to non-kitchen breakers, so 1650W (that might be peak rather than continuous, not sure). If you're plugging that into an existing run, you could maybe run 2 before you start blowing breakers? You can't just plug 4 H100s into the wall in a normal house.

Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'd be curious, it'd be neat to run my own inference for something more than what'll run on a 3080.

Land where people want to live is scarce. Obviously a variety of factors but one of them is that land is bifurcating the way income is. Small amounts are growing in value rapidly and the rest is declining (or growing more slowly). Urban property is skyrocketing, rural property in coal country is struggling.

I don’t think it really changes the property value because those interior walls are usually cosmetic and not load bearing. If the bank has to foreclose, the next buyer will be well aware they can strip those walls out for nothing relative to the cost of buying the building.

I’m doubtful it pushes the tax revenue for the same reason, everyone is already evaluating based on what it could be.

Smaller units are probably just not worth the effort to manage. It’s a lot of over head to start auditing old duplexes where the owner has a property or two and isn’t a giant company with a whole compliance department.

I have seen things get hacked for bandwidth, back in the days before you could rent a gbps uplink from the cloud for $0.12. Some scene release groups would hack into universities or companies to do the initial seeding over their super fast links. It used storage, but that wasn’t really the goal.

File edits are just tool calls under the hood. If you’re using a decent agent then you should be able to override or extend the filesystem tools. If you’re on ACP, file reads/writes get proxied to your ACP client and you can inject your hooks there.

It’s pretty trivial to implement, this is well within the bounds of things most agents implement (for open source agents anyways, no idea how to extend Claude Code or Codex these days).

Also many places I’ve worked, storage is a huge part of the spend but that depends a lot on what you do. e-commerce doesn’t use a ton of it, but if you handle user-generated content or do any kind of training (LLM, computer vision, etc) then you can very much end up in a place where storage becomes a top line number for infra spend.

GitHub pre-Copilot was probably like that. They host a shitload of data, most of which is just at rest the majority of the time. Storage and networking are probably the majority of their infra costs.