https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/did-us...

Also suspicious that Iran came to the negotiating table just a couple days after the F-15 mission after insisting for the other 5 weeks that there would be no negotiating and they were not even in contact with Washington.

The mistake here is thinking of the U.S. government as a monolith. Ultimately it's all just people, bound together by being paid for in dollars that are either raised as taxes or borrowed as treasuries. GP's post posits a world where the dollar is worthless; what's binding them together then?

Interestingly, the charge of "can barely code and frequently misunderstands technical concepts" is one that is often leveled at Elon Musk.

This also suggests ways to reverse this: 1) reduce the complexity of the economy 2) have more repeated interactions, where you cannot simply stiff someone and go away to do it to someone else 3) have more information about who has stiffed people and gone away to do it to someone else 4) reduce the costs involved in the sale process, so that this can become a part-time job of someone actually providing the service, rather than having people whose dedicated role is to make the money change hands managing people whose dedicated role is to actually do the job.

The part that the article glosses over is that "Kinship societies destroy economic growth" is a Russell conjugate [4] of "economic growth destroys family formation". Kinship networks provide important intangible support to several important community functions, notably child-rearing. That's the whole "it takes a village to raise a child" aphorism. When you allow people to defect on their social obligations in the name of accumulating wealth, then it turns out they do, and the village suffers. It is exactly as the article said: "The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you." That's exactly what we've observed happening in modern industrialized economies, where people become increasingly atomized and those informal community organizations that create things like belonging and mutual aid (not to mention group childcare and socialization) die off as everyone chases the promotion that will let them afford ever-higher institutional childcare costs.

And this is why the fertility rate in every major industrialized country has cratered, usually right as it industrializes.

[1] https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/awi/forschung/paper_e.bulte...

[2] https://edepot.wur.nl/14918

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

In the U.S. in particular, there's strong respect for individual rights enshrined in the Constitution, and a key role of the judicial branch is ensuring that those rights are respected regardless of what the majority thinks. The majority cannot enslave the minority, for example, regardless of what the legislature votes. Nor can it deprive it of speech or free assembly, or guns, or a right to trial by jury.

More regulation won't help here, because the regulation-maker is itself the hostile party.

What would help is full control over the supply chain. Hardware that you own, free and open-source operating systems where no single person is the bottleneck to distribution, and free software that again has no single person who is a failure point and no way to control its distribution.

Governments too. The defining characteristic of a state is the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Some more recent theories on state formation come down to the state being the biggest bandit of them all, the one that subsumes and threatens to kill all other organized sources of violence, and hence becomes the "legitimate" one simply because it has eliminated all other contenders. One of the most popular courses at my college was entitled "Murder", and the syllabus was largely devoted to this tension between how the worst crime of all, when talking about individuals, is simply how states do business.

AI is dramatically more compute- and memory-hungry than past computing models, so if that's what people are using, it's going to require a large build-out of computing capacity to support the requests that are being made right now.

He didn't last all that long, he had a conscience. I've heard similar things, but not quite in such clear words, from several other people I know who have worked at Facebook/Meta.

The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.

If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.

They're also just as much of a CO2 solution as electric trains are, i.e. it depends on the fuel source for the local electric grid (which today is overwhelmingly solar in most of the places where EVs are popular).

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