vannevar

I keep hearing this, but the retail price of AI compute keeps dropping, which seems counterintuitive for a commodity that is supposed to be in such tight supply. It suggests that AI demand is extremely elastic, and belies the urgency of deploying new data centers. AI is something that AI labs think everyone should find incredibly valuable, but the market seems to be saying otherwise.

Like Russia's efforts to aid Donald Trump in 2016, it's hard to tell how much actual impact the propaganda is actually having on the outcome. There are many, many legitimate reasons to oppose data centers, from the local nuisance they create to the energy they consume to their contribution to an already critical level of global warming.

But I think the most damning argument against them is that they aren't needed. The cost of serving models is dropping faster than data centers can be built, and that trend seems likely to continue---AI is such a new technology that we have barely scraped the surface in finding efficiencies. And most of the innovations in efficiency that have emerged have come from the smaller players, because the big AI labs believe they can simply scale their way out of capacity constraints. An increasingly troubling trend is that they are not scaling their way out with cash flow, but with massive amounts of borrowed money. Seen in that light, data centers are not only a physical liability, they could become a catastrophic economic liability.

I think we're well past the time when we should have created an actual public commons instead of pretending that a patchwork of private online services constituted one. The commercial internet sits on a foundation of attention and deception, neither of which is hospitable to truth. I'm not sure that nationalizing Google would change that.

>I think you may be confusing what "real" income means.

Median income is exactly what it sounds like, the median income.

>The deflator used to correct incomes over the years includes housing and education.

That may be the intent, but it is clearly not working, because housing, medical, and education costs have in fact risen as a percentage of income.

Maybe you're confusing the terms "income" and "disposable income"? The latter would presumably include the items you mention, but the former does not. The (unreferenced) numbers you cite are almost certainly income, not disposable income. Or perhaps you're assuming that all costs have increased only by inflation, which is not true.

Median housing cost in 1960 was $11,900, which was about twice the median income at the time. Today it is nearly $400K, which is over 4 times as much as the median income. Medical and education costs have similarly risen faster than inflation (and faster than wage growth). You're right that it's not that complicated, though.

I would take that bet. Let's start with housing, which has almost doubled as a share of income since 1960. (See e.g. [1]). Same thing with medical care (including insurance premiums, since more medical costs were out-of-pocket back in the 50s and 60s).[2] Groceries are a bit cheaper as a share of discretionary income, but only by a few percentage points.[3] And of course we're assuming no one goes to college, which wasn't true even in the 50s and 60s. College costs have soared since then.

1. https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=18800

2. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

3. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa...

I'm pretty sure that one of the ideas that Western societies still promote is the notion that a claim should be consistent with the evidence, and that if it is not, it is probably wrong. And if it's very obviously inconsistent with the evidence, it may in fact be crazy. And there's a ton of evidence that raising a child in 2026 is substantially more expensive today than it was 75 years ago.

>it will cost less as a proportion of people's incomes today.

Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or are you relying on intuition here? A cursory search yields a number of references similar to this one---https://reno.nyloffices.com/resources/articles/starting-a-fa..., which indicate that the cost of raising a child has gone up significantly, at least in the last 40 years. And many of these references do not include the cost of college, which has skyrocketed. I'm not sure what you mean by "bringing up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s." They certainly had housing in the 50s and 60s, and that single expense alone is probably enough to make today's kids more expensive.

>...the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed...

I don't see it in the article, but the progressive nature of the tax is important. It makes it harder for large landowners to pass along the tax, since they must compete with smaller landlords. The net effect should also stabilize land appreciation, which will no longer rise with rapidly increasing wealth disparity as it has in the past couple of decades. And we won't need clunky, patchwork solutions like the ban on home ownership by private equity.

This is pretty much the explanation---the decline in alcohol revenue mirrors the rise in cannabis sales. The alcohol decline started in 2012, when the first states legalized marijuana.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/daily-cannabis-vs-alcoho...

The AI Bubble should more accurately be called the Data Center Bubble. Private credit sold everyone on the idea that AI needs massive data centers right away, because they needed a new narrative to lure investors into funds that are sitting on rapidly deteriorating assets from years of bad loans. As it becomes more and more obvious that these massive data centers are neither wanted nor needed, the Data Center Bubble will burst. AI is going to be just fine, but private credit and the hyperscalers, pension funds, and insurance trusts that they suckered in will be left holding the bag.

AI may be coming for meritocracy, but capital got there first.

Yeah, if your goal is brain health, you're better off spending the time exercising, by a mile. But learning another language may be more enjoyable and certainly has social benefits, so I can understand people choosing it.

> Would this women be better off if Walmart never existed and she was unemployed?

If you think about this a bit, I'll bet you can spot the flaw in your own argument.

I assume it is the same reason Facebook serves dodgy ads: it makes them money and they have had no liability for the material they choose to serve to users. There are a handful of types of content that could generate bad press (some sexual or racist content, for example), so they police those. But ordinary scams generate engagement and make them money, and since they are generally immune from liability for content under Section 230, there's no downside for them. I've always thought there might be an end-run around Section 230 where the algorithm is tuned to preferentially present fraudulent content, thereby implicating the company in the advertiser's fraud. But as far as I know, no one has tested that approach.

It would be more accurate to say Nvidia is the central bank of data center projects. The vast majority of capex associated with AI is for data centers, not the actual technology. Nvidia needs to create data center projects to sell to, hence its role in financing them.

FY2026 losses already far exceed their projections and are widening, not narrowing. They postponed their IPO, and two key executives have left very recently. So the evidence leans heavily toward that assumption, yes. See my comment in the sibling thread.

OpenAI lost $12.3B in Q2 2026, which if you extrapolate losses the way they extrapolate revenue, implies north of $40B in losses for FY2026, against their own projection of $14B for the year. Coupled with their postponed IPO (which would have required significant public financial disclosures), and the very recent exit of two high-placed executives, I stand by the assertion that they are in serious financial difficulty.

Informed in this instance implies information aligned with the opinion. He may indeed be informed about Astra's merits, but there may be no correlation between that information and his opinion, because of the overwhelming financial interest in OpenAI's finances.

In this case, Jensen Huang's statements can't be taken as informed, unbiased opinion. OpenAI is in serious financial difficulty and Nvidia cannot afford for OpenAI to fail. Nvidia has provided significant direct and indirect financial assistance to OpenAI; this is just another aspect of that assistance.

>A corporation is just one or more people pooling their resources for legal and accounting purposes.

It is not. That's one aspect, but another major aspect is that those individuals pooling their resources are not liable for the corporation's actions. This immunity from liability for their collective responsibility has a price, and part of that price is that the corporation should not be used in an attempt to manipulate elected officials. Corporations are not people for the same reason that you are not a blood cell. The whole is not only greater than the sum of the parts, it is materially different.

>The only way to make the playing field fair is to allow everybody to take part.

This is one solution, I'm not sure it is truly the only solution.

Why do we treat media companies differently? Maybe we shouldn't. Newspapers traditionally had political coverage, and had no restrictions on political commentary. As a result, their owners wielded enormous political power. Then radio and TV arrived on the scene, and had to abide by the "equal time" rule due to their government-granted broadcast licenses. The internet upended all that. We should look for a good answer, not just an expedient one.

>The problem isn't the unfoundedness it's that it's extrapolated beyond what the foundation supports.

The purpose of creating a "Biden crime family" was to implicate Joe Biden in the actions of his son without needing any evidence that Biden himself traded on his presidency (because there was none). I see the point you're trying to make, but evidence that Hunter traded on his dad's fame simply isn't evidence of any wrongdoing by Joe Biden.

Regarding immigrants, unless it is shown that they commit crimes at a higher rate than the rest of the population---and it hasn't---that isn't a foundation either.

>CU was absolutely the correct ruling as it just means I can take money from wherever I’ve earned it and spend it on publicizing my message.

Are you literally a corporation? If not, you should perhaps read the decision.

>I wonder what else we have in common?

Well, obviously not an appreciation for the distinction between evidence and opinion. The fact is that there is clear, uncontroverted evidence that Donald Trump has profited directly from his presidency, and no clear evidence that Joe Biden did. Not everything is symmetrical in politics, and it's not always "both sides."

The problem with government was that wealthy charlatans were rigging the system in their own favor. Naturally, the solution was to put a wealthy charlatan in charge of the whole thing and eliminate the middle man.

It doesn't seem like they asked about specific levels or branches of government, so presumably the respondents were giving a general impression. And in that case, it's hard to believe that a corrupt President wouldn't strongly influence the response.

>...Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics.

This is not surprising; a big reason that Republican voters were able to justify voting for Trump and open corruption was that they were bombarded with claims that there was a "Biden crime family" in office for four years. No real evidence of that was ever uncovered, but it didn't stop Fox News and every Republican leader from constantly referring to the accusations as if they were true. One the other hand, Trump is openly accepting huge payments from foreign governments, and never even bothered to separate himself from his companies. Republicans were at 87% due to general distrust of government and the rumor of phantom corruption, while Democrats (who tend to be more trusting of government) rose to the same level only on clear evidence of real corruption. The authors don't break it out by parties, but the overall level during Trump's first term is about the same as Biden's. Since the article notes that Republican skepticism is higher in general and more consistent, this implies that Democrats' perception of corruption is much higher in Trump's second term than his first. Which makes sense, the Republican leadership was much more responsible in applying guardrails in the first term than the second. Trump is getting away with a LOT more in his second term.

>The only thing I got out of this article is that both parties + the F500 need to be destroyed.

I don't know, if we'd had an overwhelmingly Democrat-dominated government, we'd have comprehensive bans on government insider trading and we'd correct the bad ruling in Citizens United. Corporatism is definitely a bipartisan issue, but at least Democrats recognize it as a problem, while to Republicans it's a feature. Not everything in politics is symmetrical, and misguided nihilism is actually how we got where we are. Turns out the road to hell is paved with "it's both sides."

No one is excusing them. But it's worth pointing out that in every aspect of government ethics reform, from campaign financing to insider trading by government officials, the legislation promoted by Democrats is stronger than that promoted by Republicans, who often not only don't promote reform but actively oppose it. For example, the recent lukewarm ban on insider trading was opposed by Democrats on the grounds that it was too weak, excluded the President and VP, and included unrelated voter regulation measures. And the Democrats have been trying to pass legislation to correct Citizens United for years. So while it's a bipartisan issue, one party is much more pro-reform than the other.

I was just following the parent's wording. I don't really think they were stupid, or even necessarily greedy and shameless though some no doubt have been. I think mostly it has been ignorance. Likewise the general voting population: I don't think they've gotten dumber, but I do think they've gotten more misinformed. As the saying goes, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Never has that been more true in American politics.