Basically, I tried to buy a train ticket on sbb.ch (it was an eurostar crossing the border, so I couldn't do it through the app).

I selected the day and start looking at the available trains. Before continuing I logged in with swisspass to get my halb-tax discount applied. Once done the page reloaded, I got the updated prices, I selected the train at the time I wanted and I purchased the ticket. Only when I got the ticket delivered on my app screen I notice that it was for the current day and I couldn't reimburse it.

Basically, the page reload after the swisspass login changed the date to the current one and, of course, I didn't notice. It is now fixed, but it costed me 90 bucks and couldn't really do anything because technically is my fault for not noticing it was on the wrong day.

I noticed that a good percentage (between 30 and 50%) is AI generated and I was wondering what impact it had on the actors/musicians/... . I mean, with a few 10s of Euros now you can achieve something that before it would've costed you several thousands or tens of thousands (depends on the quality of the production I guess).

I assumed at the time it must've been a slaughter for that part of the gig economy and this seems to confirm it.

I grew up close to the US base Ederle in Italy. Plenty of the cars that the US folks that brought over were in rough conditions (scratches, dents, ...).

That's much more holidays and ~3 years earlier than any other country I know of

The problem is much more complex. Yeah, France with it's generous holidays, substantial pensions combined with a young retirement age has allowed their boomer population to live above its means. However, this is true for most of the western world.

The other problem is that the era of cheap money has come to an end, and France, like many countries, hoped that they could kick the can down the road a little bit longer so that, by then, the boomers would be dead. Without the biggest cohort (which is the one that votes the most) you could do reforms to lower lavish pensions, make them pay a bit more for healthcare, ... .

So now, with an oil shock that is slowly spreading to other facets of the economy France is fucked because it can't lower taxes to give their population more breathing room because of the above mentioned problems. Italy for instance, has now a lower yearly deficit than France and can borrow at considerably cheaper rates and It used this freedom to lower taxes on fuel since Hormuz closed.

High inflation and and high interest rates with debt this high means that eventually the Fed will print (IMHO).

You can just mod them to run on consumer fans that are designed to spin much slower but have higher diameter

I am panicking a bit TBH

The 11% I mentioned above is the verifiable exposure for banks. It could be a much much higher number and at a time where delinquencies on all sorts of debts are historically high that for sure doesn't bode well.

The money printing that the Fed would do to fix this would be gigantic (several Trillion dollars basically) and on the same scale as the covid intervention which sent inflation to 9+%. And we are already waiting for the oil shock to spread to everything else.

Yeah, the financial system might survive, but the pensions, savings, ... will be fucked up.

[1] https://www.tradingview.com/news/seekingalpha:bce1fc46a094b:...

The problem is that private credit agencies also asked for loans from banks and therefore they are exposed to this as well. I believe the current estimate is that 11% of outstanding loans from the big 4 US banks were issues to private credit firms which then very likely lent themselves to the AI industry complex.

Additionally, by the Fed's own admission, they will never let another "Great Depression" happen again. So they intervened in 2008 and they will intervene again by buying up those worthless assets. And the average person will see their savings real value plummet without even mentioning that a lot of private credits come from pension funds...

Finally, if private credit really goes belly up, private investors will likely lose a good portion of their purchasing power, meaning that the economy will at best correct and at worst crash only because of that. And this effect will be in addition to the AI economy grinding to a halt which will already hit the worldwide economy HARD (also IMHO).

A reckoning is coming. I believe the "let it burn" is not doable as it will take a few banks and the economy with it. A more measured slow bleed with the Fed printing money to buy these junk assets will be more likely.

Additionally, it is really hard to draw a line. For instance, I can develop some logic that could take a screenshot of your phone. It is perfectly fine for debug builds or with explicit user consent while using an app to provide some additional context on some issue. The same logic used to spy on users is not.

I "enable" them, but I won't consider myself responsible or even remotely involved.

As long as these are the incentives companies/execs will continue to do this shit

I don't know if this was a deliberate choice of the governments leading the country those years (the tinfoil hat in me can see big oil pushing for those referendums at those particular times) or pure bad luck. Anyway, public opinion was highly biased which led to "No" winning with fair margins. With that said, I believe NIMBY is a contributing factor and not the whole explanation.

Says you.

All other nuclear nations behave (even Pakistan and India, which are at each other throat all the time). What makes you think that Iran won't? It will also have Russia and China keep a lid on them, same as North Korea. And I don't buy the "Iran is different" gospel. North Korea and China have completely different mindsets than the western world and still play ball.

Additionally, if Iran really is that adamant in getting nukes, I can see them asking some enriched material to Russia as a payment to the 100s if not 1000s of drones they are giving them. They share a "land" border through the Caspian sea and smuggling a few 10s of kilos of enriched material would be relatively easy.

Finally, it is not a good proposition if the hypotethical benefits will be reaped by US/Israel while the suffering is globally spread.

If you accelerate at 1g constantly for 1y you travel 0.5 light years. You do that for 10.5 years and you reach the center of the milky way. You do that for another 4 (~14 total) years and you are in the Andromeda galaxy, and you do that for another 10 years (~24 years total) and you reach what today is considered the edge of the observable universe.

By the time you get there you are basically traveling at a rounding error from C.