Guid_NewGuid

https://epsteinexposed.com/persons/peter-thiel You will know them by their fruits

It's why I don't get viewers getting angry with a creator for taking a specific sponsor. YouTube sponsorships are basically an advisory not to buy a product. It's like an anti-advert in a sense. Something appears in a sponsorship, that thing is definitely bad even if we don't know why yet.

Like most 'could's this is probably fine, but I really wouldn't want to play dice with mink and the flu. It's basically the perfect laboratory for human spread.

It sounds like for the USDA at least it's partly an unclear authority issue:

"Vaccinating the mink [...] or reimbursement for depopulated animals requires USDA to establish mink-specific regulatory authority and dedicated programs for HPAI response in mink."[0]

But nonetheless, what a supremely stupid way to die.

[0]: https://virological.org/t/preliminary-report-on-h5n1-highly-...

I like that the site footer here says "Make something people want", that's neat to me https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

Also while I was looking through the history this post[0] got a smile from me, Nostradamus walks among us.

    Catalytic converter thefts. I would love a panopticon surveillance state if it would solve that problem and only that problem, but it'd probably used instead for voter suppression, general fascism, or stalking the mayor's ex wife or some other thing that benefits someone in power and not me

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33995402

I think the plastic straw ban was such a self-own that I find it hard to believe it wasn't astroturfed to undermine climate change (it wasn't). While I don't give a shit about straws myself (since I'm not an infant[0]) it was just such empty gesture politics that became a key culture war issue.

As you say it's not really about climate change as such, the problem is climate change becomes an omni-cause grouping pollution, waste management, biodiversity loss, etc. We end up being tarred with the same brush. A reasonable person should feel free to disavow the straw ban since it doesn't achieve its aims and is a distraction from real problems.

The campaign was started by a 9 year old[1] using an estimate that was roughly 2-3 times too high and fed by an unsourced claim[2] around the amount of plastic straws on beaches. As you say it becomes a cultural signifier of effort while achieving basically nothing. And this takes away so much energy around the broader issue of single-use plastics and ocean plastic pollution. Both of these are better served by advocating for domestic landfills rather than the current practice of dumping the plastic waste on 3rd countries.

[0]: yes some disabled people need to use straws as adults

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/22/631254978/one-childs-outsized...

[2]: https://apnews.com/article/c1b6f8666138441d9af6054d8c096086

It's interesting, something struck me as off about the analysis. I mean it could well be true but the price of oil and VLCC daily rates suggest it probably isn't.

There's a tonne of articles resharing this Kpler analysis. The closest to corroboration I could find was references to Marisks and Vortexa data.

This Russian site[0] quotes the following:

> Oil flows from Persian Gulf producers excluding Iran rebounded to more than 81% of pre-war levels in September, averaging 19.2m barrels per day against about 23.6m bpd in the year before the regional conflict began on 28 February, according to Vortexa.

But assuming that analysis is paywalled I can't find it anywhere, and the article also relies on the Kpler analysis extensively.

Marisks is just about ship movements so doesn't really add anything to the picture. All that to say, it may well be true but the current story and way it is being propagated seem fishy.

[0]: https://en.portnews.ru/news/397951

I mean we can't know where they'd be in the counterfactual scenario. Glancing at Shell and Exxon shows BP is probably underperforming similar companies. How much of that is due to this event vs. other factors? I don't know. We wouldn't tend to expect the same extent of up-and-to-the-right behavior from dividend producing shares but BP seem to be failing to capitalize on the current oil price spike.

My point is merely that reasonable people can disagree if there was a suitable consequence to the event. Sure they're out 140 billion, but to a company like this that's not as grand as it sounds and not at all fatal. You provided your view, I am providing mine, which is that they did not suffer sufficiently.

Their stock price is near ATHs and their revenue looks pretty good. Maybe they lost a bit at the time but they don't seem to be feeling any long term consequences from that. The implication is that relative to the damage they caused they don't seem to have suffered any actual consequences. Up to the reader to decide for themselves, but I'm pushing back on the idea this was some cataclysmic event to body-corporate.

Yeah sure... https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BP:LON?window=MAX&tab=e...

For battery storage systems sure, but for panels, not really. The panel breaks you just throw it away and buy another. And sure China can cut us off from buying another, but we have 15 years with most panels to use them while we build out local manufacture if needed. (even beyond that point you likely get usable output)

A panel is just a dumb slate of crystals that shoots out electrons, the wires and inverters and rest-of-system are up to us to design if we're indulging our China-panic. But we're basically being paid to take as many dumb panels as we can warehouse. Whether you believe that oversupply is a weapon, a mistake, or just normal industrial strategy is basically irrelevant.

I'm reminded of the cartoon that circulated some years back where a climate denier asks the speaker "what if we built a better world for nothing?", or something along those lines.

The way these past few years have shown the absolute precarity of fossil fuel systems just proves that, preserving a comfortably liveable climate aside, renewables just make more sense across pretty much every axis.

You still get people fear mongering about Chinese solar, as if we shouldn't make the most of the oversupply subsidised by a supposed geopolitical foe. Like, no, they're not going to turn it off, once you have the panel, the light hits it and the electrons jump the gap. Oil/gas can be turned off yet the speaker is somehow glossing over that.

I'm sure Iran are merely interdicting and destroying enemies of the Iranian state. This is extremely normal and should not be condemned.[0] Upholding freedom of navigation is for weak states.

/s if it weren't obvious. Yes Iran is horrible, yes this is whataboutery, but they should be held to the same standard.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strikes_on_alleg...

This is good friend of a certain 'disgraced financier'[0] Peter Thiel right? Other than knowing what the enemy is up to why should anyone care what this freak thinks?

[0]: https://epsteinexposed.com/persons/peter-thiel (Claudeslop UI on this site)

Like everything since this... fun... adventure started the consequences probably wouldn't arrive all at once.

When the Strait of Hormuz closed the immediate worry was that 20% of world crude oil supply would be cut-off.

Due to various factors the knock-on impact wasn't as large as that loss would imply:

- Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline transported some across to the Red Sea (this might be blown up by now, I haven't been following it closely enough to say for sure)

- The closure wasn't complete, ship-to-ship transfers via the Oman side of the strait provided some flow

- China had large (no one really knows how big) strategic reserves so cut their imports considerably. The US also had a large strategic reserve, reducing/offsetting demand for the new stuff

This cushioned the price shock of the closure, which was felt more by Asia anyway, since that's where much of Hormuz's flows went, due to proximity.

The system is huge and has many complicating factors (refineries, whatever is currently happening with the Houthis as of Saudi's counterattack, China getting back into the global market). But once the stockpiles run out you'd expect to see the price of crude increase. Which, along with the current refinery issues, could make the current discontent about the price of diesel in the US look positively quaint. Probably after the midterms though. But like with the catastrophic predictions around the initial closure of Hormuz, the picture will emerge more gradually, with more confounding factors.

There's definitely something afoot, and something of a schism. From the past 2 days alone:

- https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/grieving-the-loss-of-details/

- https://www.autodidacts.io/vibecoding-isnt-as-fun-as-writing...

- https://mondobe.com/ai-makes-me-sad

- https://www.techspot.com/news/113937-engineer-claude-code-ha...

I'm also pondering routes out. While there's a year until the next academic year starts for postgraduate career switching possibilities, and I've got things I need to finish up this year so I can't jump immediately; I also no longer see a long term future in this industry. Maybe this will pass but I don't think the bell can be unrung.

While "for everything there is a season" is my preferred approach to tech hype cycles this one does _feel_ different. While you could broadly ignore say blockchain and the crypto hype and not really miss much of value; I do think there's a fundamental shift happening as of this year.

If model progress completely froze here what does that future look like? Chinese labs would continue to bring down the cost of what we have and a lot of companies would lose a lot of money on data center buildout but does software as an industry ever close Pandora's box?

As much as I'm loathe to use it and think criticisms about a loss of capability, quality and skill are valid I also think for the majority of software jobs as-was will remain changed for good. There was always a struggle between 'cheap and quick' offshoring and actual quality software but I don't think the author is necessary overreacting by feeling unsettled.

We have torture factories for animals so I'd rate the chances of avoiding LLM torture factories as... not good.

While that might seem a facile rebuttal I think I might actually agree with the substance of the article. My point I guess is that we're societally pretty bad at assigning consciousness to anything non-human. While I don't think LLMs are conscious and this is primarily the ELIZA effect in action I also agree there's something emergent (perhaps within language rather than within the neural nets) that dismissals as a mere stochastic parrot miss.

This broadly covers something I've been musing writing a post about. The real bad things that happen, much like the good things, happen slowly and don't have the salience necessary for people to pay attention in the current age.

We're always looking for catastrophes or victories that happen in a matter of days, something that can be summarized in a Chyron. But in general the systems that really count work more slowly and with more complexity than that.

Things don't have to be apocalyptic to be bad. We have been on a rollercoaster of sea freight costs (SCFI) since COVID and the knock on impact on prices only seems to go in one direction. It adds to demographic and housing crises and government debt crises. Add in an energy crisis following on from the same crisis barely weathered at the start of the full invasion of Ukraine, add in a fertilizer crisis, add in a once-in-a-thousand year El Nino and things fall apart.

Humanity has always faced crises, many thought the world would end in nuclear fallout roughly half a century ago, but things don't have to have the salience of a nuclear bomb going off in the neighborhood to make everything worse. And it is a slow and gradual disaster.

The current strain of populism works the same way. Screwworm eradication efforts aren't sexy, they don't have high salience and they play into people's view that the government spends money and time doing nothing. And you remove the system and it doesn't fall apart immediately, and the effects are muddied with climate change impacts and so on. The doomsday predictions don't come to pass and people don't stick around to see the slow, creeping disaster they unleashed.

I feel like I was a line-cook in a bog standard eatery, stressed, drinking to cope and hating the work but now they've replaced the cooking part with using a microwave. The last thing I enjoyed even though I hated it in aggregate, is gone from the job, the skill expression.

I almost feel like it doesn't matter if Joe-public is on board or not at this stage. For as much as capitalism kinda got us into this mess, at this point the flywheel is going in the other direction and it's a natural market consequence that renewables will win. Lack of priced in externalities created the problem but the same economics will now save us.*

The money men have no moral attachment to any source so given how cheap this mix has gotten it basically wins.

* I'd point out without China and its Leninist command economy (as well as publicly funded research) getting the price of these technologies down to where it is now we'd still be doomed, but we are where we are so now the system necessarily will act in its own self interest to use the basically free energy. Is it going to be enough at this stage? Who knows, but I see reasons to be optimistic.

There's a difference between informed speculation and uninformed speculation and most of the opinions so far fall into uninformed speculation where the writer implicitly blames those suffering for poor diet and lifestyle choices.

In addition a lot of the speculation assumes something specific to the US where this is a trend in multiple countries, predominantly high income ones[0][1], but this speculation that it might be 'chemicals' is fairly dull to read and adds nothing. Why this cohort specifically? What commonalities are there between countries with an observed increase? If it's diet why would it only impact the younger cohort?

[0]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2... [1]: https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(21)00010-X/...

I mean doesn't your take strain credulity as well? Let's actually think where most discussion happens these days, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the few remaining newspaper comments sections. I'd struggle to list more off the top of my head.

Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.

Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962005

This site has always been easy to co-opt to fascism with their supposedly apolitical outlook. Flagging from unknown accounts easily kills stories of importance, even where they have relation to the supposed interests of the site. Such as the AI altered image being posted by the White House this week.

The idea we have to treat arguments in good faith like the other user in this story excusing fascist death squads show how well this moderation approach aligns with the Thiel-ite sympathies.

More Zhongnanhai-ology from our cold warrior correspondent.

As usual I feel like he overestimates the US' ability to impose rules and underestimates the Chinese ability to both circumvent those rules while developing self sufficiency. In addition we've all seen the Chinese ability to retaliate across a range of industrial sectors from rare earths to drug precursors. While these embargos would have some impact on Chinese chip development; initiatives like Huawei Ascend clusters and DeepSeek being trained on less powerful chips show that China will find a way to innovate whether or not they have access to the most powerful chips.

I feel like the piece overstates the importance of the AI race specifically. The recent field tests of the US' automated weapons systems are... not encouraging. [0][1] Unless you're an AGI booster that rather implies that crucial ability of US tech that China is missing is being able to generate Sora videos of fat people causing disasters.

In light of the 15th 5 year plan and its focus on self sufficiency without reference to the West these China hawks are increasingly irrelevant to the conversation unfolding outside the borders of the increasingly irrelevant and mistrusted US.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-navy-i...

[1]: https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/anduril-s-autonomous-weapon...

Correct, in every thread about BYD or other car manufacturers people seem to forget about the other 7.5 billion people in the world outside of the US and Europe. Sure the US' broken dealership laws and red-scare tantrums will stop these cars selling there, and in their economic satraps, but for the global majority countries there's no such barrier.

The cheerleaders for the current authoritarian coup that swarm around here are all too happy to conflate the Hunter Biden pardon and what's currently going on. As if we can't currently open a god-damned news website and read about the Comey, James and Bolton prosecutions and deduce that, yeah, Biden pretty much had no choice even though it was a shitty thing to do.

This is because these dipshits are eagerly carrying water for a vindictive dictator. They are not operating in good faith but due to the alignment of the owners of this site with those self-same fascists you are meant to act as if they're not trolls.

It's exactly like cigarettes because it is the same companies. https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-new...

Funnily enough just like guns the reactions in this thread seem to more or less be "no way to stop this says only nation where this happens regularly".

Best as I can tell, and I'm just some guy, is there is a real problem with the job market, not just in the US. AI is mainly interesting for the media to report on and hype for CEOs and the kind of MBA airheads no one with any self respect should pay attention to. It's a fairly cool search, synthesis and retrieval tool with real value but it's not as impactful as 'thoughtleaders' want us to believe.

In the US as elsewhere it's a combination of factors, COVID overhiring and inflation, interest rates going up, market concentration and, US specific, the since Trump-reversed Trump-imposed tax changes. While this reversal probably helps the job market some in the immediate term the indicators of the fundamentals are flashing red everywhere and outside of the US it all just continues to be part of the same Omnirecession since 2008.