Yes it was. This was the pitch for as long as Google has existed. The only relevant change from the early days of Google is that now you also need to go to a T20 school and GPA inflation has gone completely insane.

Still, a few some areas of Asia achieved this reputation back when cameras were still extremely rare.

Manufacturing ordnance just to blow up caves in Afghanistan that the USSR already just spent 20 years blowing up doesn't yield fruit - the materials and labor on both sides quite literally goes up in smoke.

Simply, it is absolutely the case that wealth sometimes gets destroyed rather than merely transferred. Sure, the fiat dollars might "just circulate" but that's an uninteresting, trivial tautology. When people talk about "losing money" in the general case, the meaning of those terms transcend the pedantic, trivial case that you espouse.

When the whole world gets feverish over an investment fad that's doomed to fail, "spending money on it" really means "allocating vast resources in the hope that we all get a return on that investment". If we don't get any return, all that investment truly is lost - destroyed, even. There have been cases where we (the humans of Planet Earth) had wealth that we could have done anything with, we chose to put it towards something that didn't work out, and now it's just gone.

(To be clear: I don’t think AI specifically is valueless)

* could "have"

Apparently you can get off scot-free in Britain even if you say/write things that are generally considered defamation per se as long as you claim that you utilized the "JDART" strategy:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593

JDART: "Joke that was badly received, therefore Deleted, with an Apology and then Responsive Tweets to move on from the matter."

> Ford, meanwhile, lowered its job creation estimate from 2,500 to 1,700, though so far it has created zero, and received no state money, as the building is still under construction. The state did, however, spend another $780 million on site preparation.

Most of the claims in the article are slightly obfuscated as to which actually involved any real net cash flow. Even the bottom line:

> Of the $2.7 billion offered, $1.8 billion has been spent—transferred either to companies or to local economic development agencies.

Doesn't make it clear what the local economic development agencies actually did with it - whether the projects were otherwise necessary, etc. Some of the spending was likely defensible even if the originally intended project fell through. Lots of it probably wasn't defensible. Michigan (and every other state) gives a lot of money to 'developers' in ways that don't look great if you bother to look into it at all.

Michigan's state budget probably totaled ~$700 billion over the past 8 years. So this accounts for up to 0.2% of the budget.

So the project pivoted to "try to train soldiers to be able to shoot down drones" and from what I was told, that was a very difficult goal to achieve. As that was 15 years ago, I simply assumed drones have gotten even better at evasion since then and humans with shotguns haven't evolved much.

It’s less about the money and more about:

1) Having a single place to go for any TV show or movie. I found it very frustrating trying to figure out what service had which show - sometimes none of them have it (a few things are still not streamable at all - e.g. “Sharky and George”)

2) Knowing that my streaming service isn’t downgrading the video quality. Even my lay friends notice the picture quality improvement vs Amazon / Hulu etc.

3) Jellyseer lets my friends request media that gets auto-downloaded. So it’s a curated list of content which helps me discover high quality stuff to watch.

The lack of understanding of copyright on HN does astound me, however.

This isn't a case of convergent design (OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Word), this is identical word-for-word with a simple s/room/dataroom:

> When enabled, folders uploaded to Rooms will be mirrored into 'All Documents' with the same structure. When disabled, all documents will be placed in a single folder named after the Room in 'All Documents!

> This action cannot be undone. - All documents and folders will be permanently removed - All links and viewer access will be revoked - All analytics, audit logs, and Q&A data will be lost - Group permissions and branding will be deleted

Those are clear copyright violations.