I'm sorry to say you're very out of touch. This rosy picture is objectively wrong when it comes to housing.
Start with the fundamentals - construction has gotten more expensive. Unlike virtually every other industry in the US, it actually costs more to build residential housing per square foot (inflation adjusted) than it did in 1960. Construction workers in 2025 are *less efficient* than they were 50 years ago, despite all of our technological advancements.
This translates to housing construction that has not kept pace with the growth of the population. The average first time homebuyer is now over 40 years old, and the median homebuyer is 55 years old.
Everyone needs housing. If you bought your house 20 years ago, you likely did not notice that housing has become unaffordably expensive for most young people. Sure, you're having fun biking around the city, but people aren't going to enjoy life in the city if they cannot afford housing.
> Well all those things got better but what about this other thing?
This is peak "let them eat cake". A person needs to live out of their car because they can't afford rent, but hey. They can buy a flat screen TV for $200 now!
Things are inverted, and not for the better. You can make all electronics 10x more expensive if it measn we can reasonably expect rent to be 30% of average income again. That means you can actualyl save up for luxuries. Or invest and live frugally. As it is now, it's the worst of both worlds.
>Boomers aren't immortal. Eventually they will die and whatever housing constraint there is will turn to surplus.
Sadly, no. The "great wealth transfer" is not going down to the next generation.
They are either selling it off and living it up, or Healtchare is going to eat into it. Either way, don't expect the boomers dying off to magically reset the economy.
Nonsense. It's these 5 things got way better and the one thing that maybe got worse is going to get better later because it's a cyclical market.
This is what I mean by unrelentingly negative. The world is way better by almost every measure than when I was a kid and the discourse focuses on the few ways it's not.
If yes, then conceptually we're on the same page, if no, then I think this is wildly off base.
If rent is not a subscription fee, then you're probably talking about virtual goods like entertainment and games. I think consumers get a ton of value from digital entertainment and media, the problem is that literally everything else in the physical world feels like it's getting more expensive and falling apart.
Young people have virtually limitless virtual entertainment and media options. But they have almost no options when it comes to affordable housing or transportation.
The cost of housing has outpaced inflation every year for 2 decades (basically the entire lifetime of Gen-Z) and owning a home feels more and more out of reach every year. The average age of first time homebuyers is now over 40 years old, and the average age of all homebuyers is over 50.
The average cost of a new car in the US is now over $50,000. Public transit projects if they're being built at all are years behind schedule and billions over budget, and existing infrastructure is falling apart. This is in a time where wage growth has stagnated.
It's completely understandable why young people feel they're getting a raw deal, and wealthier and older people seem more out of touch every year. Actual physical needs : housing, transportation, healthcare and food feel viscerally more expensive every year.
Capitalism seems to only want to address these needs by pushing more and more substitution of virtual entertainment: Have more games, more apps, more stuff on social media, more cat videos, AI generated content in endless quantity.
It's almost like the internet is the Heroin of our age, a drug that keeps both the stock market and individual consumers high so they're less conscious of how much everything in the physical world sucks more every day.
TLDR; if you're founding a company do a hardware startup. We're maxxed out in how much our digital services can improve our lives.
Their electricity costs are $10K per month or about $120K per year. At an interest rate of 7% that's $1.7M of capital tied up in power bills.
At that rate I wonder if it makes sense to do a massive solar panel and battery installation. They're already hosting all of their compute and storage on prem, so why not bring electricity generation on prem as well?
It seems unlikely to me that they'll never have to retrain their model to account for new data. Is the assumption that their power usage drastically drops after 3 years?
Unless they go out of business in 3 years that seems unlikely to me. Is this a one-off model where they train once and it never needs to be updated?
ChatGPT would easily have passed any test in 1995 that programmers / philosophers would have set for AGI at that time. There was definitely no assumption that a computer would need to equal humans in manual dexterity tests to be considered intelligent.
We've basically redefined AGI in a human centric way so that we don't have to say ChatGPT is AGI.
Any test?? It's failing plenty of tests not of intelligence, but of... let's call it not-entirely-dumbness. Like counting letters in words. Frontier models (like Gemini 2.5 pro) are frequently producing answers where one sentence is directly contradicted by another sentence in the same response. Also check out the ARC suite of problems easily solved by most humans but difficult for LLMs.
yeah but a lot of those failures fail because of underlying architecture issues. this would be like a bee saying "ha ha a human is not intelligent" because a human would fail to perceive uv patterns on plant petals.
That's just not true. Star Trek Data was understood in the 90s to be a good science fiction example of what an AGI (known as Strong AI back then) could do. HAL was even older one. Then Skynet with it's army of terminators. The thing they all had common was the ability to manipulate the world as well or better than humans.
The holodeck also existed as a well known science fiction example, and people did not consider the holodeck computer to be a good example of AGI despite how good it was at generating 3D worlds for the Star Trek crew.
Many human beings don’t match “human intelligence” in all areas. I think any definition of AGI has to be a test that 95% of humans pass (or you admit your definition is biased and isn’t based on an objective standard).
Can you be more specific? Which politician is using this fund in a corrupt fashion, to help which friend? Please provide names.
Or are you simply expressing the same meaningless general cynicism that is so predictably and boringly parroted whenever any government tries to do anything?
Is it even valid unless it's full names, dates of birth, addresses, bank account numbers, receipts and notarized video evidence where they explicitly admit to being corrupt?
As long as it’s not your eth though. In that way, I guess yes it is good if you’re holding onto a ton of Furbies and there’s a massive Furby culling elsewhere.
For physical materials, like gold, this applies because gold is useful other than as a medium of exchange.
But ETH is a mathematical construct. It should be true in the limit up until the very last measurable quantum of ETH is erased, and the very last bit holds the entire value of the cryptocurrency.
To put it another way when does “deleting eth is good for eth” cease to be a valid argument?
When I really think about ETH and well others. I question is there really some market cap. Or is the value actually more so the coins in active circulation, with some lowering factor for big reserves. That is that market cap is in sense a lie, and amount of circulating tokens is what really indicate the value. As thus removing tokens from circulation actually would remove value. Just that calculating market cap is really hard. Unlike say redeemable stocks for say ETF.
the founder of Bitcoin literally said lost btc is a gift for everyone else. there is likely some optimal about of burning that increases value of other tokens vs. destroys the network.
Canada would not buy anymore F-35. Their replacement parts can be shutdown any moment as the current US President stated publicly at least six times, they should become a US state.
A change of administration in the next few years, will not mitigate the taboo that has been broken.
> In general it’s not like war is about who’s right or moral. It’s more about who can bring more and better weapons to the fight.
I suspect, though I'm not sure, that the point was more that a nation that rejects science in favor of a different kind of ideological purity (lack of virtue signaling as its own kind of virtue signaling) is a nation whose weapons are no longer likely to be the better ones.
I think the point is that the US is no longer a reliable ally, so people will no longer want to buy weapons systems for which the US might withdraw support at any moment.
That seems to be a premature assessment. Trump paused a weapons shipment to Ukraine, then allowed to it to continue. No other shipments have been held up at all. Our allies continue to receive the output of the American arms industry just like they did six months ago.
In fact, the latest news is that Trump is expanding our circle of friends when it comes to advanced weapons, offering India the opportunity to purchase F-35s.
It's a long-term shift. European militaries are built on the assumption of US support via NATO in the event of an attack on a member state. That assumption is looking very shaky now, and it will affect future planning.
They are built on the assumption will subsidise their defence almost entirely. They are rapidly realising that the US defending them will be conditional on them defending themselves. This is not a serious threat, it is just pressure. But it has resulted in increased investment in defence in Europe which is really important for global security.
>They are built on the assumption will subsidise their defence almost entirely.
This is an exaggeration. The larger European military powers spent enough on defence to be able to operate without US assistance in a range of circumstances (e.g. the Falklands war). But Europe did not anticipate having to defend itself against Soviet aggression without US assistance.
In fairness, it would have seemed crazy, not so long ago, to think that the POTUS would be on friendlier terms with the leader of a Russian dictatorship than with the democratically elected leaders of France and Germany. But here we are.
The Falklands conflict was almost half a century ago. It is doubtful that the UK could respond today like they did in 1982.
The video "The Navy With More Admirals Than Warships"[1] addresses that exact scenario, and talks about the current woeful state of the British Navy today.
I think that’s somewhat unclear. In principle, the new carriers with F-35s should have a much bigger advantage over the Argentinian navy and air force than the tiny carriers we sent to the Falkland’s with Harrier jump jets. But of course it is impossible to know until such a thing actually happens. (Even in the case of a far more antecedently plausible conflict such as Russia/Ukraine, expert predictions were all over the place, and mostly wrong.)
Given the rejection of science and extreme virtue signaling the US has had for the last 20 years, I’m a bit skeptical that a slight turning back from that would make any difference to our allies.
This is a general objection to AI responding to real world events in general : "What if something unexpected happens?" It comes up in self driving as well. Things like "What if something suddenly appears in the middle of the road" or "Can it drive in snow conditions with zero visibility?
My question is, how do you know that in general human beings respond better to unexpected or very complex / difficult situations than an automated system would? Yes, human beings can improvise, but automated systems can have reaction times more than an order of magnitude faster than that of even the quickest humans.
I'd like to see some statistics on the opposing hypothesis : How good are humans, really, when encountering unexpected situations? Do they compare better with automated systems in general?
Here's a competing hypothesis: An automated system can incorporate training data based on every recorded incident that has ever happened. Unless a situation is so unexpected that it has literally never happened in the history of aviation, an AI system can have an example of how to handle that scenario. Is it really true that the average human operator would beat this system in safety and reliability? How many humans know how to respond to every rare situation that has ever happened? It's at least possible that the AI does better on average.
In theory, everything works. In practice, we can't even master automated driving, on two dimensional streets with painted lanes, relatively slow speeds, and cars that can just stop in case a decision could not be made. If we can't make this happen, how do you expecct the same with higher speeds, an additional dimension, planes with radio-only (no additional telemetry) and pilots with heavy accents?
>Unless a situation is so unexpected that it has literally never happened in the history of aviation,
I would say this is actually the most likely scenario for an edge case. The sheer number of variables make it unlikely that the same unexpected event would happen twice.
In an emergency situation the combination of, the emergency, ground conditions, weather, visibility, instrumentation functionality, and surrounding aircraft is most frequently going to be unique.
> I'd like to see some statistics on the opposing hypothesis : How good are humans, really, when encountering unexpected situations? Do they compare better with automated systems in general?
This is already out there. You can go research how Airbus and their automation works in practice.
You can also listen to air traffic control recordings to get an idea of what types of emergencies exist and how often they happen. I'm sure the FAA has records you can look at. :)
Now that apply that to something 3 orders of magnitude more complex.
Start with the fundamentals - construction has gotten more expensive. Unlike virtually every other industry in the US, it actually costs more to build residential housing per square foot (inflation adjusted) than it did in 1960. Construction workers in 2025 are *less efficient* than they were 50 years ago, despite all of our technological advancements.
This translates to housing construction that has not kept pace with the growth of the population. The average first time homebuyer is now over 40 years old, and the median homebuyer is 55 years old.
Everyone needs housing. If you bought your house 20 years ago, you likely did not notice that housing has become unaffordably expensive for most young people. Sure, you're having fun biking around the city, but people aren't going to enjoy life in the city if they cannot afford housing.