Young people in general aren't stupid (again, in general, not just China). They can look around and see they have limited opportunities, will probably never own a home, won't ever be able to retire, will have crippling debt (for college in the US), etc so it's natural to look around and say "what exactly is the point?" and, in some cases, just opt out. In the US you see this with things like "van life", moving to cheaper countries, tiny homes or just spending all your money on experiences because, to you, you have no future. I thin kreligion historically played a huge role in getting people to do those things anyway. But now, why would Alfred Q. Zoomer live paycheck-to-paycheck doing a shitty job just so Jeff Bezos can have slightly more money?

China at least has invested in eliminating poverty, building infrastructure (eg the high speed rail network) and transforming the lives of everyday Chinese people. Like I see Tiktoks from a rural Chinese woman who works in a shoe factory for $11/day but only really spends $1/day to live. She lives in a modern house (20+ years ago it was a rundown shack), has Internet, watches live streams, rides everywhere on an electric scooter and pays for everything digitally (of course).

Part of China's current woes are that Xi Jinping quietly just popped the real estate bubble and declared that houses are for living, not speculation. That market has been correcting itself for years ever since. But that's a long-term good.

I'll take the transformation of Chinese lives (not just in Tier 1 cities) over what's happened in coal mining country, the Rust Belt and agricultural communities in the US. It's not even close.

I suspect your information might be out-of-date because I've seen videos of tourists in Tier 3/4 cities (let alone Tier 2) and honestly it beats most US cities. There's no official list of tier cities but Chongqing is widely considered a Tier 2 city. Chongqing is widely called the "cyberpunk city" [4].

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/china-...

[2]: https://thediplomat.com/2026/05/why-china-treats-lying-flat-...

[3]: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-youth-jobl...

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYpbUCn2lus

I've never been to South Korea. I'd like to go to Seoul. For me though, South Korea is a cautionary tale in what happens to a country when a handful of families get to control all the wealth, all the good jobs, all the good university places and so on while the working class gets squeezed ever more. There are cultural issues here too that are distinctly Korean, namely that women are expected to have a demanding job AND have children, look after those children and take care of the house (traditionally).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74

I will say that it often goes beyond "idealizing". I'd use the word "fetishizing".

I've wondered how much of this stems from being disaffected by the modern (particularly Western) world. I worked with an ethnically Chinese guy who was a massive weebu and that always struck me as odd given the Japan-China history.

Japan has always rubbed me the wrong way: misogyny, racism and denial about Japanese war crimes in WW2 mostly. Also the salaryman work culture. I see videos from Japanese workers and life honestly looks miserable. It's also a country that is dying. The samurais, ninjas, Ronin, shoguns, etc are cool though. Japanese history is fascinating.

My hot take here is that China is actually what people idealize Japan to be. China has the most competent government in the world and it's not even close. It's not problem-free. Nowhere is. But the transformation in the lives of ordinary Chinese people over the last few decades is unbelievable. China pulled ~800 million people out of extreme poverty.

It could be worse than Japan too. I think South Korea is that. As a non-Korean from the outside looking in, South Korea looks like a dystopian run by aristocratic (chaebol) families where the birth rate is the lowest in the world and it's in fact so low that if nothing changes, South Korea simply won't exist in 3 generations.

The most common in the US is the strip mall. This is a largely American, soulless construct of commercial space with parking out front, typically on a major road. There are lots of reasons why this flourished in the US. It's a symptom of society being so car-dependent, which is by design. Rents here are typically lower than other options so some businesses can survive in strip malls that can't elsewhere.

The next step up (density-wise) are actual malls, or shopping centers for the non-Americans. There are different versions of this. You have the entirely indoor mall. You also have other anchor stores that pop up nearby (eg Home Depot) that are popular but can't justify the mall rent costs. Often a bunch of other businesses will sprout around these stores, which is why they're called anchor stores. Anchor stores are also things you generally need in a mall to bring in enough traffic to make the whole thing economical eg supermarkets, department stores. Malls in general have been dying in droves. Basically too many got built in the 1970s through 1990s and online shopping is killing them. There are photography and video channels dedicated to exploring dead malls.

The third rarest option is the walkable district. This is generally the downtown of cities that existed before cars. People generally love these but public transit is an issue. Americans always want to drive even when there are viable options otherwise. That means having to build parking garages and the whole thing kinda falls apart. Or at least it losses some of its charm. The hellish end of this spectrum is Houston.

Some cities have managed to rejuvenate such areas by diverting traffic and generally investing in the area. But what tends to always happen is that businesses will rejuvenate an area and then the landlords will kill it by charging exorbitant rents. I've seen 40+ year old restaurants close because of rent hikes in areas that only really existed for that restaurant.

This is part of the problem with housing being so expensive. It makes everything expensive. That local shops? Well it costs as much to build as a house and a house is easier to sell. But a cafe or a bakery or a bookstore or some other eclectic shop can survive when the rent is $20,000/year. You don't need to pay staff as much when houses cost $100k not $1M. Expensive housing just strangles everything. But when that rent goes to $200,000 over a decade well then suddenly only chain stores and big box retail can survive there so what was once a charming downtown turns into Chili's, a CVS and a Chase bank.

So this can go wrong even in dense places like NYC. There's a real issue right now with so-called "zombie leases". Basically, companies like CVS, Duane Reade and Walgreens signed high-rent long-term leases but then decided to close the store. The store remains empty because the owner has no incentive to rent it for a now-lower market rent while the billion dollar company is still on the hook for it. Enough of these and a street can look abandoned.

I really think that when cities choose to rejuvenate an area they should acquire all of it first. Eminent domain, baby.

I saw a Tiktok awhile ago where someone posited that things we once took for granted get taken away from us and sold back to us. The specific example was walkable cities. That used to be the norm. Now it's a luxury. We can't have that. If people walk everywhere and take a train or bus well then they might not buy a car. Then they'r enot buying insurance and gas and maintaining it. Unacceptable.

Society really is getting dystopian.

Defeating bot buyers, scalpers and resellers would actually be a noble goal but its' really the tip of the iceberg. If anyone was actually interested in tackling this (hint: they aren't) then you need to tackle a much bigger problem: the venue monopoly with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

Many venus, particularly larger venues, have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster also has an official platform for reselling tickets, of which they get a cut. In a more equitable world, you would only be able to resell tickets for their face value. It's alleged (and I believe this) that Ticketmaster only releases a tiny portion of tickets to the general public. The rest they have arrangements to sell through scalpers and resellers and their own platform because, hey, they make more profit that way.

There was a time when businesses were a tool to generate income. Small businesses still work this way. But any sufficiently sized company now is just a tool to speculate on and make a capital gain on. Ticketmaster doesn't need to grow into a trillion dollar company but they want to and, at a cewrtain point, the only way companies can continue to grow is by cutting costs and raising prices.

Back in the nascent days of Internet music piracy it was pointed out that almost no bands make enough money from selling music to live on. It's why the biggest anti-piracy advocates were huge bands like Metallica. Most bands make their living for performance fees ie playing concerts. And even then they might make barely enough to cover gas. What really gets them over the line is selling merch at the venues.

I'd say that music would be in a better state if bands could see more of the value of their labor from playing concerts. But even concerts aren't about bands or their fans anymore. They're about upselling premium services to high-net-worth clients. You ever notice that at sports venue, for example, general seating always gets mysteriously ripped out and replaced by suites? Same principle: venues make more per square foot from a corporate suite than they do from sports fans. There was a time when ordinary people would be fans of their home teams and just go to every home game. That's increasingly out of reach.

In short, the entire system is broken. Spotify participating in it won't change anything.

But the trend here is interesting. I think by 2030 you'll be able to buy fairly cheap hardware that is currently $10k+. I don't know what this does to the trillions invested in AI data centers because the next NVidia architecture after Blackwell will essentially half the value of purchased cards overnight.

I'm not convinced Apple has yet pivoted the Mac Studio line towards this market and the expected M5 Ultras in Q3 2026 will likely be an incremental improvement rather than big leap forward but I'd like to be proven wrong.

As the author notes, there are also electrical/wiring issues that cap how much compute gear you can run in a space not designed for it. I suspect a standard 20A 110V circuit can probably handle 2x RTX 6000 Pros. 15A probably can but that requires more research. Anything more than that and you're using multiple circuits, which has issues, or you need an upgraded circuit (eg 40A 240V) with all that entails (eg heavier duty cables, custom plug, etc).

But yes, for pure inference, the M5 Max Macbook Pros probably aren't there yet. They have other utility though of course. And you can get 64GB and 128GB MBPs at a discount. Micro Center currently will let you buy a 64GB M5 Max MBP for under $4k currently, for example.

The Ada has a memory bandwidth of 960GB/s. The Pro has 1.8TB/s and about 40-50% better performance so is at least equivalent in processing power, much better in memory bandwidth (important for inference) and can hold larger models on a single card.

I've considered buying a rig with 1-2 6000 Pros for similar reasons but I want to see what happens with this year's Mac Studios with a likely M5 Ultra. Macs have a shared memory architecture whereas NVidia segments the market based on max memory where the biggest consumer card (RTX 5090) has 32GB of VRAM but still excellent memory bandwidth (1.8TB/s). A RTX 5090 rig will still trounce a Mac Studio seems to be the conventional wisdom. Despite being able to hold larger models and being able to chain Mac Studios on TB5, their lower memory bandwidth (~900GB/s) and lower overall GFLOPS mean they still come out behind.

That being said, the current Mac Studios are relatively long in the tooth, being released in 2024.

I'm still not sure any of this is really wroth it because things are still changing so fast. I think there's a decent chance of a number of large AI companies going bust in the next 2-3 years such that you'll be able to buy enterprise AI hardware at cents on the dollar, a bit like how Google bought data centers in the post-dot-com crash.

But anyway, nowadays I'd be looking at the RTX 6000 Pro as the sweet spot, having anywhere from 1-4 in a single server.

The electricial issues the author mentions are interesting. I hadn't really thought about the max amperage on a residential circuit. In a DC, these would typically operate on three phase power and much higher overall amperage. I wonder if there's a device you can buy that can combine multiple residential circuits into a single power source for a server this power hungry?

Europe collectively is a US vassal state, not just in tech. As an example, if someone in Switzerland Venmos someone in the Netherland with a description of "Cuba" or even "Cuban" (sandwich), the payment could be delayed or you could be banned entirely [1]. Why should a payment between two Europeans in Europe be entangled with US sanctions?

The danger here for European "tech emancipation" is that the US government will get involved and fight the fights for US companies. The United Fruit Company was the poster child for this where the US deposed the Guatemalan government in 1954 and the 60+ years of Cuban sanctions are basically because the UFC was cheating on Cuban taxes.

Brazil's Pix (IMHO) will come under the pressure of this on behalf of Visa/Mastercard that may include trade retaliation and other forms of pressure and the US government will argue that Pix is "illegally" subsidized by the government. Europe's payment systems will face the same attacks.

[1]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/matthewzeitlin/be-caref...

My position is that these companies are already violating Section 230 so that's the first thing you could attack them on. Section 230 shields "interactive computer services" from strict liability for third-party content. It's enabled the likes of Wordpress and Geocities and the original version of Youtube so they caqnq't be sued for defamation for what users post. This is distinct from, say, CNN, NYT, WaPo, Fox and other media companies that do have strict liability because they're first-party publishers.

My position is that an algorithmic feed and selective distribution turns such companies, which includes social media companies, from platforms into publishers (Section 230 doesn't use that language specifically; it's paraphrased).

Twitter pushes Elon Musk onto everyone's feeds. That's not a "platform". Twitter should be legally liable for doing that. Meta's Jordana Cutler essentially boasted about suppressing pro-Palestinian content [1], in effect consciously pushing pro-Israeli content. How is that different to just publishing the exact same content? I don't think it is.

The other way to handle this is as a product liability issue. Just like tobacco companies, social media companies should be sued for the foreseeable and known harm they produce, such as targeting minors, allowing advertisers to target minors, addictive behavior, pushing dangerous ideas (eg eating disorder content) and so on.

[1]: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...

Well, which is it? Was net neutrality a state or federal issue? The answer is it's, as always, a Schrodinger's STate's rights issue. That is, it's a "state's rights" issue when it suits them, a federal issue when it suits them and it's neither when it suits them. Lack of any kind of regulation is the goal. This isn't some libertarian pipe dream. It's just naked pro-company and pro-billionaire gutting of government to boost profits.

Fast forward to prediction markets. The CFTC regulates this (arguably). Another deregulation hack is in charge. And again, states like Minnesota who already ban sports betting are being sued. "State's rights" btw. We're seeing the exact same pattern.

This on the same day that the president who sued the IRS, which was defended by the president's DoJ and the recess appointee Attorney-General settled a $10 billion lawsuit right as a federal judge tosses it because the case lacked adversity [2].

Besides the J6 slush fund, part of this settlement is that the IRS is barred from ever investigating Trump, his family or the Trump Organization for tax fraud.

The level of corruption and kleptocracy here is beyond belief and what's really frightening is that a good 35-40% of the population not only don't care but actively support something they will never benefit from and there hasn't been (and won't be) any political price paid for any of it. The president's endorsement still carries weight and just today, we've had the most expensive Congressional primary in history (~$35 million) where Trump unseated a sitting Congressmen for daring to push for releasing the Epstein files.

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-f...

[2]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/insight/trump-eyes-1-776b-irs...

[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/19/...

In polling circles, the voters tend to be segmented into high and low propensity voters. High propensity voters will always vote. Low propensity voters won't. But the differences are often so small the results can flip on unexpected turnout in just one segment of the voters.

As an example, the 2024 election turned on 3 big factors:

1. Millions of Biden voters in 2020 stayed home. Affordability was the biggest factor but there are were other huge factors too, most notably Palestine;

2. Trump retained the white vote while increasing his share of the Hispanic vote; and

3. Trump activated younger, low-propensity voters. You'll often osee this described as the "podcast sphere". We're talking the people who end up in alt-right pipeline on Youtube and in podcasts (eg Andrew Tate).

Most recent presidential elections come down the results in about 7-8 states. The other 42-43 are known before you go in with some rare exceptions. The most recent exception was Obama in 2008 who won Iowa, for example. Other big sweeps were Reagan in 1984 and Nixon in 1972.

So, with a modern election you can just flip a coin 7 times and you have a 1 in 128 chance of just being correct, 50 out of 50. This is why you need to show your work with any prediction modeling and polling. You need to show how you reached your prediction in terms of turnout as well as how major demographics will vote.

Every election cycle complicates this with external factors and per-state issues. Covid loomed large over 2020 but it also made voting easier than ever, with easy access to early voting and mail-in voting. This changes the high and low propensity voter math significantly. Also, the Arizona legislature went on a mission to punish Native Americans for flipping Arizona blue in 2020 by disenfranchising Native Americans in subsequent elections in many, many ways.

So what tends to happen is that results are close enough that it become s abit of a guess. No pollster wants to be an outlier AND wrong so there's a convergence to mean thing that happens where they all tend to make the same prediction because everybody being wrong is way better, optically, than you being wrong and everyone else being right.

Add to all this, population sampling used to be done on landlines decades ago. Now we just don't have an equivalent and if your sampling algorithm is off, your results are off. Garbage in, garbage out.

I guess my point is that Nate Silver got kinda lucky in 2012 and came back to Earth in 2016 so I've never been that impressed and honestly I jus tdon't care if 538 exists or not.

1. Everything is great. You either own a lot of capital or you think you will one day. You're fully in support of the current system;

2. There are problems but they can be fixed with a nicer, kinder capitalism, more regulation and so on. This essentially makes you a social democrat. This is still a pro-capitalist position, ultimately. You might also call yourself progressive; and

3. You believe that capitalism is fundamentally flawed and the problems of the current system, such as ever-widening wealth inequality, are an inveitable consequence of capitalism. This is the anti-capitalist position and makes you a leftist. You can't be a leftist and not be anti-capitalist.

Last century and going back to even the 2000s, tech companies and their founders were upstarts, rebels and often counter-cultural. That era is long gone. Some here might decry how often politics creeps into HN but all that's happened is that tech companies have gotten so large that they have become tools of the state. You can't be a rebel and a trillion dollar company. To maintain your status, you end up moving in lockstep with US domestic and foreign policy.

My point is there is no making this system more humane without overthrowing the US government, essentially. Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism and there is no true opposition to American imperialism in the mainstream US political system. Like, at all.

The nature of trade is a complex web of many interdepdencies and this applies to war too. Like for awhile, the US was letting Iran-flagged ships headed to China and Chinese-flagged ships to pass through the Strait. Why? Because of the repercussions of an energy blockade on China to the US and its allies. China produces like 30-40% of the world's "stuff". China dominates rare earth production and an export ban on that would cripple the US military long-term.

Part of the reason the US is going it alone in Iran is because of all the torched good will from the tariffs. You broke it, you bought it. This event is a seachange in the international order that will take years to play out. What's ironic is that the US designed this international order post-WW2 for their own benefit and they're probably going to destroy it in a single presidential term.

The one point I'll disagree with is that sanctions do prevent you paying Iran even with crypto. I mean, you can fund your own wallet and give money to Iran but you've technically committed a crime and a pretty serious one. It's also one that's fairly easy to document and prove that you did it.

Oh, also the impact of cutting the world fertilizer supply hasn't hit yet. That'll come later in the year when the harvests are down, primarily in the Global South. This will also impact food prices in the West so look forward to that.

Your last comment suggests weakening of the petrodollar. I don't know if you meant it this way but let me dispel that myth: the USD doesn't have strength and power because oil sales are denominated in dollars. You have it backwards. Oil trades are denominated in dollars because of the demand for dollars and the root of that is the US military.

I still think humanity's far future is in orbitals in space, not on planets and certainly not on planets as hostile as Venus is. I'm not sure how well living at 50km above the surface would work. You still need a lot of buoyance to float large structures.

The atmosphere is also a solvable problem. One idea I've heard is using so-called "fusion candles". That is a fusion-powered device in the atmosphere that sends waste gas into space and waste matter to the ground in an equilibrium that keeps them airborne, all powered by fusion. You could extract carbon and/or oxygen this way from the plentiful atmospheric CO2.

Still, if you ever got the atmosphere down to a non-hellish level at surface, the surface would still be covered with all sorts of exotics and metals, many of them toxic. You'd probably be looking at geologic timescales to rehabilitate it.

But whenever these terraforming questions come up (often with respect to Mars), people really don't appreciate the scale and the energy budget required. The energy budget is many orders of magntidue what our civilization currently uses. If you have access to that much energy, there are far better options.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I

1. Estoppel. If a party relies on your conduct then you can lose the right to sue over it;

2. Laches. This is a defense against prejudicial conduct, typically by waiting too long to take action;

3. Waiver. Your conduct can waive your right to sue. Imagine you live with someone and they don't pay half of the rent so you cover it. At some point your continued conduct means you lose the right to sue; and

4. The statute of limitations. Some claims simply have to be brought within a certain period. How this applies can be really complex. For example, we saw this in Trump's fraud convictions in New York. His time in office, away from the jurisdiction, essentially suspended the statute of limitations.

Some crimes like murder have no statute of limitations. Others have unreasonably short statutes of limitations. For example, probably nobody can be charged in relation to sex trafficking in the Epstein saga because the statute of limitations is often 5 years with such crimes. This is unreasonable (IMHO) because often the victims are children and unable to make a criminal complaint.

It's also worth adding that not all legal systems have such wide-ranging statutes of limitation as the US does. Founding principles of those other legal systems is that the government shouldn't be arbitrarily restricted for prosecuting criminal conduct. The US system ostensibly favors "timely" prosecution.

So not being within the statute of limitations is typically a legal issue so what must've happened here is the jury would've been asked if the earlier OpenAI-MS deals were substantially similar to the latest deal. I can't find the verdict form or the jury instructions but I'll bet that was the key issue the jury decided.