Yes, that's my point. SpaceX understands they need to do many unmanned flights before trusting a launch system with a crew. NASA is trusting Artemis with only a single unmanned flight. That is very high risk tolerance, to the point of recklessness in my opinion, compared to SpaceX.

I think the high loss rate for Starship can largely be traced back to the choice of using steel for the vehicle, which drastically reduces margins across the system. You could certainly say that they had a higher expectation of failure because they made that choice. In that sense, I understand your point. But to the best of their ability, they try to fly every vehicle successfully.

Ads were the path of least resistance, and once entrenched, they effectively prevented any alternative from emerging. Now that we've seen how advertising scales, and how it's ruined our mediascape, we're finally looking at alternatives. Not dissimilar to how we reacted to pollution, once we saw it at scale.

Now which program seems the more risk tolerant?

Yes, the accounting is the problem. As I said from the outset, if they actually just traded chips for stock, it would not be an issue.

The question is, what happens when you have a middling dev iterating with an LLM? And in that case, the drop in quality is probably non-linear---it can get pretty bad, pretty fast.

As I mentioned, I would have no problem if that's what happened. But it isn't. Nvidia recorded the cash as ordinary income. They did NOT record the stock as income. Cash has a clear value; stock does not. You keep reducing the transaction to its effective outcome, which is not where the problem lies, as I outlined above.

Sure we can. As I noted, wealthy people live in this world already. And we don't see all of them turning into couch potatoes once they have passive income equal to UBI. Sure, there's a human tendency to enjoy leisure. But there's also a human tendency to enjoy work. And a human tendency to project negative attributes onto others we don't know. ;-)

And the reason that our infrastructure is crumbling is not some social problem, nor some intrinsic "undervaluing of the future," but something simpler and more pragmatic: our taxation has not kept up with our necessary spending, particularly taxation of the wealthy as wealth has concentrated at the top. Everyone's talking about abundance as if it is something that is yet to come, but we've had rapidly increasing abundance for 50 years, as technology has made the individual worker more productive. And the vast majority of that increase in productivity has been turned into increased wealth for the top 10%. UBI would be the first reversal of that trend, requiring a massive tax on the productivity of AI and robotic infrastructure that in all likelihood will be 90% owned by the wealthiest top 10%. Naturally, they are concerned about that prospect, and so we see articles like this one.

Does that clarify the situation?

So no, little or none of the AI productivity gains will go to workers, barring significant changes in public policy like universal basic income and the massive tax increases necessary to implement it.

The social media companies gave their services for free, and now it turns out they've committed quite a few sins. None of the AI companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor will they be satisfied with subscription revenue. If they see opportunities to make more money by manipulating the population, rest assured they will take those opportunities.