bpodgursky

Would you rather he didn't regulate them?

US blue-collar labor is very expensive.

Homeowners are getting the short end, but the solar installers are doing well.

Both parties in a lot of civil cases would accept next-day LLM adjudication rather than waiting five years for a judge to see it.

Being cruel to your LLM is bad for your own soul. Don't worry about AI consciousness, worry about your own conscience.

Reflection AI was founded in 2024. Is it really consolidation when new companies spawn out of nothing and get acquired 2 years later? That's just normal M&A churn.

I mean there are some small countries that have absolutely benefitted by giving billionaire expats gentle treatment and keeping taxes low. Dubai, Singapore etc.

Totally fair to claim this cannot scale to a "big" country, but it absolutely works to attract capital.

If the police prosecuted every nutjob tip we have to have to turn Nebraska into a giant open-air prison for 30 million slightly neurotic and/or bored people.

No matter how much testing you do in sandboxes, you have to test behavior in "real life" before releasing the model to users.

Even if it was normal software you'd have to do this, but actually it's software that figures out that it's running in a sandbox most of the time, so the sandbox behavior may or may not actually represent real life.

It would be far more irresponsible to release the model to users without testing how it interacts with real world websites.

Taking out GPUs is more important than storage nowdays.

It did the job

I'm sorry but this is just absurd. Not everyone has the same aptitude for every job. For a company or country to function you have to acknowledge this and put people in jobs suited to their natural talents.

How is it hand waving? It's literally true a large corporation can fire a customer support agent while sponsoring a software engineer, it is not interchangeable talent

Limited to $10,000/employee/month lol. This is just to cut off a few people doing absurd things with low ROI. Don't read too much into it.

They never actually stopped fishing it though. It's regulated at a level to prevent 100% collapse, there was never political support to let it truly recover by banning fishing for a decade or two.

Basically 0, there are only a few species of mosquito that carry disease. Other species fulfill all other ecological roles without spreading horrible diseases.

OK sure but this is like defense in depth. It's a negligible amount of water, most of it doesn't evaporate, and most of what does rains somewhere it's useful anyway. The actual damage here is microscopic.

Also even in the totally fake scenario where that water completely evaporates, it's just gonna rain on Iowa a bit more.

Well, in principle the economy scales to the labor constraint.

Obviously there are practical limitations to how fast things can rearrange but there's no reason in principle you couldn't have an economy where everyone retrained into blue collar work, and all white collar job needs were handled by the magic internet box.

How do you hard-cap S3 and other persistent data storage?

"Sorry, you had a hard cap on AWS spend so we deleted all your S3 data on August 27th". Yeah not going to fly.

I honestly would love to understand — is this your mental model of what motivates the labs to move forward?

Feels like Oracle outsourced all their datacenter construction to organizations that were not nimble enough to line up contingency plans for alternative power sources and expected grid connections to happen "like normal".

Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX even Google have been more hands-on and haven't seen these power issues plaguing Oracle, probably because they have an actual internal A-teams on it, not lethargic contractors.

I'm not convinced Americans really have strong feelings about AI, relative to other issues. The data center pushback seems to be mostly literally about stopping data center construction in their counties. If you build them in Argentina or Norway, they'll stop paying attention.

I think the will be negative if you push an answer out of them, but it's not something Americans are going out to protest and rallying around. There are a LOT of issues people are passively 60% negative on but it doesn't influence their votes.

No... payroll comes from revenue, not profits.

It doesn't work. US corporate profits were $4T in 2025, income tax receipts were $5.23T.

Even if you taxed corporate profits at 100% (which of course, takes the stock market to zero and effectively ends the economy, but ignoring that) you have a huge gap.

That's not that true in the US. In fact, most US rich "avoid" taxes because their income is capital gains, NOT by avoiding taxes on cash income (this is why CEOs don't have high cash compensation).

He's French and used to the rich avoiding taxation by changing jurisdictions in Europe. Well, the US has global income taxation, for better or for worse, you are on the hook everywhere. It's a different world.

The actual solution here is to eliminate the corporate income tax and capture the money via higher capital gains and dividend income taxes.

All of this boils down to politicians knowing (even if they can't say it publicly) that the corporate taxes are badly structured and tax incentives are often revenue-positive (since in reality, every economist knows you should not be taxing business inputs, and in fact European VATs are structured around this idea), but being unable politically to do the sane thing and capture the income at a point it can't easily be gamed.

When I google "what percent of a coal plant operations is cost of fuel" the response is:

> The cost of fuel typically accounts for 70% to 75% of a running coal-fired power plant's variable operating expenses.

I'm not going to do deep research here but it sounds pretty right. And I don't think solar is 4x cheaper than coal yet, especially solar + battery to spread out the load over non producing hours.

The footprint is irrelevant compared to the top competitor (solar).

I'm not going to defend the Cybertruck execution, clearly they misjudged the demand.

But Optimus is a fair play. Don't grub for scraps in an efficient competitive market. Make a new market, go big or go home.

I'm not convinced Tesla's schizophrenic strategy is any worse than the strategy of the legacy American automakers, which is to sleepwalk directly into a volcano (when Chinese EV manufactures break into the market with $10k SUVs)