Solar + storage is on an exponential growth curve to largely entirely replace fossil fuels (coal mostly, but eventually natural gas) for electricity generation globally. It will take decades, but at this point the economics are undeniable. Which is in part why Texas (oil country) is blanketing with utility-scale solar farms. Energy businessmen have no particular ideological wedding to what will make them more money, and Solar is a far simpler business than oil.
It is not a mode of production problem. The people do have that power at the ballot box, and choose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.
The historical case of Enron and Arthur Andersen is instructive. No one from Andersen went to jail but it had to be argued up to the Supreme Court for their charges to be dismissed. The company was disbanded but the conviction against it was overturned afterwards. This is certainly some evidence for "killing the company" not being the right move.
Several Enron execs did go to jail: Kenneth Lay the chairman would have gone for 10+ years but died before sentencing, Jeff Skilling did 12 years, Causey did 5 years, Fastow did 5 years.
In the current environment of DOJ corruption I don't think this sort of thing would happen... unless the executives were conveniently non-supporters of the current President.
The shareholders did not pay for the deception, even though they benefitted from it. There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
If the law was "you need to hire your own private investigators and external auditors to find deception in all the companies you invest in", then yes, shareholder liability would be reasonable.
So if I give $1000 to Boris the loan shark, and he consistently returns 50% year over year, I’m blameless because I didn’t investigate?
Shareholder liability is the only way to prevent companies from tobacco/oil style abuse of externalities. You can execute the execs and it will make no difference, because the same shareholders are there incentivizing the same behaviors with the same massive salary/stock windfalls. Someone will take the money.
Shareholder liability is not the only way, but it is A way. There are many unlimited liability companies out there that get high privacy as a tradeoff to liability. Limited liability corps encourages investment but requires public disclosure and enforcement. Society has to decide it if wants to clamp down on limited liability corps (or not). So far they've voted "or not".
> There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
Trump took the gutting to an extreme, but antitrust and investor protection agencies have been gutted for decades. The only thing that will draw actual consequences is defrauding or otherwise hurting other rich people - Liz Holmes, Madoff, Epstein or the Dieselgate scandal. But screw over the little man? You'll probably get some sort of bonus.
Eh, the tobacco companies were found very liable ($206 billion in the US alone), Meta has to pay $18 billion for the child safety liability findings, Visa+MC $38 billion, Amazon $2.5 billion over Amazon Prime, Opiod companies had a $25 billion judgement recently...
It strikes me that heavy AI agent users have an extraordinarily high risk tolerance for identity theft, privacy breaches and data loss vs. perceived productivity. Far beyond what any responsible medium to large size company would ever tolerate.
Overall the limits to AI productivity can be summarized in one word: discipline. If you're undisciplined in your security, your design constraints, your automated test coverage, your separation of the deterministic and indeterministic, you will be quite productive ... for a time. Until quite suddenly, you aren't, possibly due to catastrophe.
Similar to the early era of computers on the Internet, with lax security, we have a window where we can get away with this, but it will close quicker than many realize. Some things do seem to need to be learned the hard way.
Apple is trying to do the bare minimum here - not even introducing a new security model - and people are already freaking out. But a disciplined agent sandbox model is exactly what we need to get to.
> According to haveibeenpwnd, the email address I've used since gmail was invite-only is in at least 39 data breaches.
This is a stupid nihilistic take. Gmail hasn't been breached that many times. Your original credentials from the first breach were passed around from black market to other black market and were repackaged. They didn't get your newest password 39 different times. The black markets are a lot like middle quality data brokers -- they don't actually care if their data is the most accurate or up-to-date.
If your credit profile was completely hovered, that's another story. Credit bureaus are simply a knowledge database and are a massive liability. But my credit hasn't been similarly destroyed so there is likely another major variable between our risk profiles. Maybe your physical mailbox has been breached multiple times.
Security hygiene is a lot like physical hygiene. You just need a few rules and you are mostly good. Don't sleep around too much, choose your partners wisely, and use protection when you do find a new partner until you both trust each other enough.
As it pertains to Meta, nobody should trust this company after what they did with iOS contacts on the original Facebook app.
And nobody needs to use Muse. You aren't opting out of society on a Unabomber level if you choose not to use this one AI agent app by a less than trustworthy company.
The person you are replying to never said Gmail was breached 39 times, they said their email was in 39 different data breaches, meaning 39 different sites where they used an email login were breached.
I think the point is, even if you attempt to do everything securely, someone along the chain will mess up.
Look at the Equifax breach - most of the US SSN's, addresses, & more released, and they get a little slap on the wrist and continue doing business. I was in there, I never signed up for equifax, I signed up for companies that signed up with equifax.
That said, it is still a slippery slope argument, just because there will be more data breaches, doesn't mean we should give everything out freely and just give up.
Docker has an interesting approach lately with their sandboxes which are firewalled, proxied, and file system restricted microVMs (you can bind mount outside) with a docker daemon inside of it.
It is interesting you feel phones and OSes are stuck in the 70s when the real pioneering work of building a personal computer that wasn't designed for prefab apps but rather built for personal use in a fully programmable, reflective, extensible system was in the 70s with the Xerox Alto and Smalltalk.
The future is often rooted in the past that has been forgotten.
Many promising tech startups make these mistakes by thinking they're the first to come up with an idea, when really it was decades ago.
For entrepreneurs and explorers in this new AI age, rather than being kids again, which seems to be a way to quickly and repeatedly step on rakes, I might suggest being an old wizard. They retain playfulness and openness tempered by wisdom and experience and vast libraries of history. New things often rhyme with old things.
I have really enjoyed Arcs by Cole Wehrle as my modern Diplomacy-like asymmetrical war game - cutthroat, negotiating, area control, but also more randomness, variety and theme. And the campaign totally changes the vibe into a space opera!
Root was also very good but I think is harder to master as the factions are so different and so runaway games are common IMO.
I enjoyed my Arcs campaign playthrough, but it'll be a long time before I put it on the table again. By the third act, the energy was very low (even though we played over 3 days).
I've played the campaign a few times now (10+) and my advice is
1. it's much better/ more manageable at 3 players unless everyone is already pretty experienced.
2. Try to play the first two acts in quick succession then the third maybe a week later once the dust has settled.
