The "we're all a big family" narrative is a psychological ploy to try to exploit the need by most people to feel like they belong to some group. This need is deeply interwoven into our psyche. And as more traditional structures of society (extended family, churches, social clubs, etc) erode, it leaves a void that many cannot really understand. IMO, this particular message is almost never true.
Company "mission statements" and such are a similar tactic. Though I think it's a bit less cynical, because the company leadership sometimes (rarely IMO) believes in the mission to a minor degree.
"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back." <= this was never the case. The pitch is that AI will either augment people to make them much much more productive or replace them altogether.
We do know the consequences. Wealthier nations have essentially eliminated 99%+ of the population of the few species of disease carrying mosquitoes in many broad areas. The effect on the ecosystem was not noticeable. Using cheaper methods to help poorer areas will save 10's of millions of lives and eliminate billions of cases of disease. It's overwhelmingly worth it even if it caused ecological harm. To not do this is, to even fight against doing it is, IMO, immoral.
The impact would be saving the lives of thousands of people in the short term and millions of people in the long term.
Even if it is somehow true that mosquitoes play an important part of some ecosystems, to me, it's worth the ecological damage to save the lives of millions of men, women and children in the future and prevent the suffering millions more.
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at ImportMemory (../../third_party/dawn/src/dawn/native/vulkan/external_memory/MemoryServiceImplementationOpaqueFD.cpp:132)
using Chromium on an old video card GTX 1070 with 32GB RAM, Fedora 44 KDE Plasma 4.7. Don't know if it matters but monitor scaling is set to 150%
I think that's pretty blatantly obvious there are other ways to live. After all, there are still millions of people surviving on subsistence agriculture in fairly primitive conditions. Still people leading mostly-pastoral lifestyles herding animals. Still millions living in small isolated villages with few modern amenities. Still millions of people living in crowded dirty cities and working in dangerous factories for long hours the way people did in London of the late 1800's. And everything in between. It's funny how so few people voluntarily leave the wealth post-industrial regions to live in any of those, eh?
That reminds me of another novel called "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson where everyone has a molecular assembler (i.e. nanotech or 3D printers on steroids) in their home. Putting aside the grey goo gone wild tropes, one thing that I suspect was realistic about the novel was that there were still rich people and poor people. Many people were still very unhappy and dissatisfied. Still the criminals and the corrupt.
You'd think that people would realize by now that material wealth (we've long since surpassed basic needs) does not bring happiness. IMO, past a certain point, happiness is more a function of society, family, status, and perhaps even purpose. Personally, I don't think the top three layers of Maslow's Hierarchy are on top of each other, but an interdependent mix. Even so, material wealth certainly makes life more comfy :-)
I'm sure their AI can simulate bad executives very effectively. Good ones, not so much. Humorously, the set of agents don't include an AI CEO, just the execs underneath the CEO. Someone must set the goals, after all and current LLM's have no agency (yet... thank the gods). Finally, the tasks their LLM agents can supposedly do are more the tasks that the executive's staff handles, not the executive themselves. Unless it's a smaller company, I guess.
"anyone claiming the UK’s legal migration is any sort of problem right now, or in the past, should probably not be listened to in any way shape or form for anything they have to say on the matter."
This sort of position is, IMO, disgusting and immoral. I cannot express how appalled I am that someone would state something like this. Anyone who's a citizen of the UK most certainly has a right to express their opinion on legal immigration, either in favor or against.
There's no single set of "international law" in the sense of national laws, state laws or local laws. There are only agreements and treaties between nations that are applied within those nations. As such, what "international law" applies depends on which nation you're in or from or if some nation's law enforcement have jurisdictional reach.
More to the point, nothing about this decision implies statelessness. Every visa applicant is a citizen of another foreign, non-American, nation. Being booted out doesn't make them stateless. They couldn't have applied for a visa if were stateless.
Note, I do agree that this suspension is unfair and a bad idea. But tossing out random accusations that imply that international law is being violated or causing people to become stateless doesn't help our case.
You will never convince those who think the US is a state of lawlessness that the US is (mostly) a lawful, free and prosperous place. They literally cannot comprehend what living in a corrupt and mostly lawless society is like. They've never experienced anything even remotely close to it. It's like someone who grew up in the tropics and complains that they're "freezing to death!" because it's 50F. Someone from the arctic tells them about what real cold is like... they literally cannot understand.
Bloomberg terminal is only $133/day (assuming 240 work days per year). So, while $32k/yr seems expensive at first glance, given the total annual cost of an analyst or trader, it's not huge. Of course, they'd rather not spend the $32k/yr if they could avoid it, if bloomberg can give you an edge on just one or two trades a year, you come out ahead. So...
They're not jumping through any hoops, I think they're simply complying with reporting requirements. It's not on their balance sheet because being recorded as strait debt would itself be misleading. My understanding is that these sort of off-balance sheet "debt" is mostly in the form of deal terms that may or may not be expressed at some point in the future.
An analogy that comes to mind is when companies used to book future sales in the present. They got in trouble for this and is now forbidden. I recall reading that one deal had terms that transferred assets if certain conditions were not met. If terms-based debt should be booked now, then terms-based assets should as well. This stuff makes my head hurt.
Either way, as long as it's not hidden (and it's not for the public companies), then it's fine.
"Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behavior". This is true, but what people seem to fail to grasp is that rewarding such behavior == buying the product. If people simply didn't buy it, they wouldn't do it. It's really that simple. It may be hard to not buy, of course. The alternatives may be worse, there may be downsides to not buying, etc. But nothing else will really be effective.
If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).
People have literally started revolutions and wars over taxes. Empires have fallen because of taxes. People are often emotional and don't even want to think logically about taxes. I suspect that it's been like this since taxes were invented :-)