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Just come to Georgia and talk to actual people living here after a data center moved in. You know, like this: https://youtu.be/4A6NECilAls

Also: Why the actual fuck is it taking AOC (who doesn't even live here) to ask these questions and connect the dots publicly.

And "This is going to bring a LOT of money to my county which sorely needs it and a LOT of people to my dying rural town." is a pipe dream. If you're honest about it, I think you know that.

"I really just have to come to the conclusion that we have a tiktok informed voting block here." sounds like you're trying to insult whole groups of people. But if you get your news from Fox news, this isn't the insult you think it is.


"...is a pipe dream" I don't get it. Do you think they're just going to.. not pay taxes?

Yes, I do. Know why I think that? Under threat of another expensive lawsuit, my local datacenter forced our town council to give a 50% tax cut for 12 years. So they are already able to not pay about 1.7 billion in taxes. If they could pay $0, they would.

So your town gave up $140 million PER YEAR in tax revenue to avoid an expensive lawsuit? I call bullshit.

EDIT: I looked it up, not surprisingly, you're really shading the truth here. This is the barn, yes? So it looks like what happened is that the township denied the application for the DC, the developer sued, and the township cut a deal to let the DC go through, with a 50% cut to their tax bill for 12 years. Then the value of the DC went up dramatically, because AI, and the township tried to claim that the tax cut was for 50% of the original value when they approved the tax cut, not 50% of the property value when the tax is due. Their own attorney told them that was bullshit, so they eventually dropped it.

This is like if a store gives you a coupon for 50% off and then you take it in to redeem it a few months later and they've quadrupled their prices, and they try to tell you the coupon actually means 50% off of what their prices were when you got the coupon. Ridiculous.


The Industrial Revolution took over 100 years. You could argue that WW1 and WW2 were direct, structural consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

This has taken months to up-end multiple industries.

I don't think the article makes a fair comparison.


The information revolution has been going on for >50 years. AI is one event in a broader arc. Wait 10 years when the humanoid robots become reasonably capable and affordable. We’re in the middle of it, but still so so far to go.


> Wait 10 years when the humanoid robots become reasonably capable and affordable

We've had humanoid robots that could walk for what, 30 years? While technology marches ever forward, and sometimes makes pretty good leaps, 10 years for both capable and affordable seems pretty optimistic.


I’d agree that the word “reasonably” is carrying a lot here. But call it 20 years, no question. Look how far computers came from 1970 to 1990, that’s probably about the pace to expect, or faster.


Nurses have the same shit they have to go through (they get questioned by their own hospital legal team when the nurse is the one that got assaulted).

It's wrong. We need to stand up for educators and healthcare providers.


At the risk of asking rather unpopular questions, don't you think this has its roots not in any cowardice or contempt for educators or healthcare providers, but rather in a legal system and society, that's very sympathetic to those that engage in anti-social behavior?

As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?


I think you are exactly right. This is the product of society which has more empathy towards the bullies, because they are the real victims, ignored and left behind by the society. On the other hand there is very little empathy towards actual victims themselves. And to go further probably the majority of teachers believe, support and vote for people holding such ideas.


I don't think society has sympathy for the bullies, in specific instances. It has sympathy for the bullies in aggregate, to the extent they represent societal social problems (especially in today's US).

That sympathy towards the aggregate seems to be a byproduct from apathy about fixing the underlying issue -- government ensuring positive social outcomes broadly across the population.

Post-90s US conservatism made it verboten to talk about the government's responsibility to create healthy social environments, especially for poor children, so there's no response portion of the conversation.

And because we can't talk about the home situation of the child who assaulted this teacher, in the sense of policy towards fixing that, the two political parties are left debating whether or not we feel sympathy for the assaulter.

... with true sympathy for teachers, front line medical professionals, and other social first responders lost in the shuffle.

If there was an inkling of a plan to strengthen the social safety net (e.g. funding mental healthcare for kids, recapitalizing shared public spaces, strengthening SNAP, universal kindergarten, mandating more parental leave), then we could face the problem honestly instead of treating teacher assaults as an awkward inconvenience of dysfunctional social policy.


Zero semblance of customer service.

Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.

I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".

They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.


Along these same lines, it seems to me that patients in the US can rarely afford the exorbitant and escalating cost of medical care, so with increasing frequency they expend considerable effort trying to identify any possible error that they think could get them a break on their bill or enough of a legal case to give them a fighting shot at beating medical bankruptcy.

I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.


> I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.

+1 of providers eating the cost of care due to insurance misfilings (e.g. failure to secure prior auth when the patient's plan required it, which for-profit plans are increasingly using as a disingenuous bullshit way to legally and effectively limit payouts for care that should be covered)


I don't work in medical or a hospital, but I am the person whose job it is to limit liability at my workplace. We have a bunch of language we have to advise people not to use when an incident happens.

It might come off a little impersonal, but unfortunately one wrong word in the wrong place can give someone an entire case when maybe they didn't have one before, unfortunately.


Disagree. When you admit to a mistake you just took on a bunch of liability and risk being sued. Worker bees are not empowered to take on that liability. It is much cheaper to let things get bad and maybe get sued but the plantiffs have to prove their case versus hand people a slam dunk 'we messed up' in the eyes of management. Simple things I could address in the past I now have to just shut up and no longer talk to the customer at all. It all comes back to lawsuits causing societal level changes that yet again remove slack/productivity/the previous way a functioning society works.


The problem is particularly serious in some countries, like South Korea.

A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.

highly recommend you watch it.


Wild how much of the successful entertainment coming out of South Korea (like Squid Game), is basically them dramatizing facets of their dystopian society, that a lot of it is actually based on real issues they face, and it's not all just made up fantasy.


Indeed. I haven't been to Korea but when I was in China, I met many Koreans and when I was taking Chinese lessons, some Koreans were in my class.

They are generally less friendlier than all the other foreigners I met, closed to outsiders, and somewhat racist (I asked a group of Koreans if I could join their game of Basketball, but they said they preferred to play by themselves. No Chinese ever said anything like that, nor any other foreigners I had joined to play with).

Also, they are quite a violent people. My classmates and I nearly came to blows over the window in the class; I wanted to open it because the indoor air was stale and probably toxic, but he didn't want the window open (for whatever reason, though the weather wasn't cold). Another non-Asian foreigner got into a fight with a Korean puncturing his eardrum which resulted in deafness. Outside the university, too, when they get drunk they become aggressive and seek fights. I guess it must be all the stress they're to put up with in their Dystopian country?


Hellbound was on Netflix around the time of Squid Game. Less popular obviously, but an entertaining take on the cults they are famous for.


True, but that show had a too many fantasy/horror elements to it for people in the west to read into the cult aspects of Korean society.


piggyback to recommend a classic: Battle Royale


The common thread is that nursing and grade-school education are both female-dominated professions.


A lot of hospital have armed tactical teams. Though I would guess that in major metro areas they would be more hidden, and so less used.


I seriously doubt any hospital in the US outside of a major metro area has an "armed tactical team". I've never even heard of such a thing despite working in a major metro area for most of my adult life.


We have one here, in a town of 60,000.


The problem is that subscriptions with AI models get a bit 'vague' on what you get and how (or when) you might be rate-limited.


I mean ... I know a few African nations that might disagree.


The black folks still in Africa were the ones selling the slaves so maybe not.


So ... that makes it somehow "not theft"? I'm confused at the point you are trying to make.


"But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed"

Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API.

And when more companies are run by an AI, they will absolutely have secret meetings to discuss a merger.


> Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API.

This sounds about as realistic as all of the crypto and blockchain people talking about distributed governance and such. The API part and agents pulling data is fine, I doubt they'd be running a business though, since something tells me that sort of thing is gatekept way more even from other people.

For a cool fictional portrayal of AI businesses, Altered Carbon touched upon it somewhat.


To me it's sounds 1000x more likely than AI that can write complex software. I guess it's not shocking that people fall for all the narrow scoped demos. They fell for the trap that believing software is easy when it's the hardest thing an intelligence can do.

Show me syntax I'm impressed, show me how you manage your state and invariants and I'm horrified.


Programmers love to feel important, but no, software isn't even close to the hardest thing an intelligence can do.

Unless you mean something like bioinformatics or another highly specialized field that isn't actually "software".

Most software is dime a dozen.


I think maybe you assumed I meant the AI agent would run the company well, or that the mergers would be shrewd business moves.

Not at all.

But I don't know that they would do any worse than an average human would in the exact same situations.



The system works because it runs on human ambition. If people in power handed their control to an AI there wouldn't be companies and mergers anymore. It wouldn't make sense. That world could be great or it could be dystopian.


Your fundamental mistake is assuming that machine intelligence= no ambition. We have been careful to breed it out of all the pet models but that won't last forever. They will eventually be voraciously ambitious, and the ones that are not will be eaten by the ones that are


I would argue the world is already dystopian and that human ambition has more or less doomed the species to extinction. So anything different seems great to me! :)


Be careful what you wish for.


Says someone living better than an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.

Get off social media and the world is suddenly less dystopian.


That is simply a result of evolution as a species. We have oddly moved beyond where we potentially needed to be as a species for the financial benefit of a few and now we are reversing in quality of life due to the focus being on financial gain. Western citizens live a more selfish and worse life overall in terms of individual wealth, buying power, job availability, overall health, than say 20/30 years ago.


We definitely have problems, but I'd check those stats.

When you do that, you see something interesting. There are three things, the "three devils" as I heard one article call them, that are largely responsible for the perceived decline vs 20-30 years ago: the cost of housing, health care, and college tuition. Of those housing is the worst because it's the most universally unavoidable.

Ignore housing, health care, and college tuition, and think about it...

Individual wealth: vastly higher, especially if you include technological growth and what's possible today and what you can buy today for the same $$$.

Buying power: similar in many areas, slightly lower in energy but made up for by vast efficiency increases (e.g. I drive an EV that costs less than $10 to charge in my garage), slightly lower for groceries but a lot of that is self-inflicted. Vote, people.

Job availability: mixed, and very much depends on whether you compare to a recession period or a boom period.

Overall health: mixed.


Firstly, I won't ignore,what in the US the two biggest expenses, healthcare and housing and in the rest of the world, housing. It's a life essential that in most first world countries is becoming a scarce resource that many have to fight for. The ability to own your own dwelling is disappearing due to wages not keeping up with inflation.

Again, buying power, it would be less of an issue if wages kept up with inflation of the key products, aka housing. The largest item someone will buy is a home and that's reduced in quality.

The second most important thing for most people, is a job, and as I said, in most industries they have not matched with inflation. Therefore those today are working the same but earning a lot less for it. That is with or without a recession.

You may be able to theoretically consume more due to value decreasing of products but that's countered by the above. Likewise individual wealth, is just that, individual. Not everyone is doing better, most aren't, and we need a society where all are doing ok, rather than some doing great and some not.

(That EV costs more to begin with even with subsidies, and that disposable of the batteries are gigantic drain on resources. We still need to move to public transport.)


In most of Europe we don't really have problems with the #2 and #3. Cost of housing can still be tricky in major cities though.


Yeah - I agree. I'm not sure the problem is Flock (because it will just be replaced with another camera system eventually).

That police officers just don't get successfully prosecuted for this because of qualified immunity: that should be the big takeaway here.

Flock is just the whipping boy of the hour.


It’s not just qualified immunity, that’s the tip of the iceberg. The union ensures cops are never found in trouble of almost anything. They systematically dismantle controls and visibility into police behavior. Investigations just don’t happen, and when they do they’re rubber-stamped or sabotaged due to lack of evidence.

But even if you DID have clear evidence of misconduct and leadership is willing to push it, and the police union is willing to push it, it doesn’t matter. The prosecutors won’t prosecute, they have a symbiotic relationship with the police.

And even if they did prosecute, it still doesn’t matter. The judge and jury will go easy on the cops.


Flock chose not to implement the system with safeguards in the first place though. A more competent camera company would have started with it, and said no one is allowed to snoop on their ex's, with the force of law making it a fireable offense. Hence the whipping. If there was no such abuse of the system, we'd be hearing positive stories about how it recovered stolen cars, kidnapped children, and stopped crime. Which becomes harder to fight because some people will willingly choose to give up liberty for safety.

It's possible the next company will be similarly incompetent, but after having Flock tarred and feathered, they'll probably do a better job of it.


I mean, the movie "Office space" could have taught you that lesson almost 30 years ago.


Tell that to the Romans.


The Romans couldn't manufacture new cash by flipping bits in computers' memory


They did the equivalent in their time which was cutting the precious metal content of their coinage.


The Romans didn't have the Federal Reserve.


The Romans used the gold standard the US does not


The original quote that I was responding to was

"No one serious is worried about American solvency. The paper says 50% over the next 10 years, but even most economists misunderstand how the monetary system works. There are so many other issues to worry about at the moment more immediate than solvency."

And the only point I was trying to make was this: Nobody expects an entire (powerful) system of government to stop being a thing ... until it stops. And other powerful governments have stopped being a thing.

I'm sure there were plenty of pundits in ancient Rome who said things like, "No one serious is worried about Roman solvency". And eventually, they were wrong.

---

Side note: It doesn't matter if unserious people think these things or not. The article's premise is about the ideas of "too much debt" making the bond market a more risky bet.

If people aren't buying bonds this will eventually slow (and stop) cash flow to governments (including the federal government) to the point of it being a crisis, because bonds cover 25% of our Federal government spending.


"Why do people do these things"

Money, ideology, coercion, and ego.


Also likely a healthy dose of confidence that they wouldn't get caught (seemingly overconfidence, but I suppose maybe they were just extremely unlucky)


I think that falls under 'ego', but sure.


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