Many of the aspects of life "outside the city" are subsidized by the city. It's affordable because of this, and the cities are extra unaffordable as a result.
There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.
If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.
Well, we'd stop having to spend so much taxes on redistributive efforts, again, like subsidized internet. It's up to voters and politicians to actually change the tax rate to save the money. It'd reduce government debt at least.
Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending.
Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.
Yes, if you compare the efficiency of China’s economy to America, you’ll find that their giant cities save them a ton of money on everything overall. As long as you’re willing to build a lot of dense housing very quickly.
Small towns exist, and ones far away from major metro areas are usually quite affordable.
Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.
that’s a bit pendantic, there exists such a thing as suburbs. even some rural communities are perfectly reasonable in terms of municipal infrastructure. but we are specifically talking about houses that are miles and miles from the next house that is then miles and miles away etc
Even in "rural regions", there are typically some small towns where infrastructure could be provided to them decently efficiently. It's when every single house is a good distance away from their neighbors that things like running fiber cabling become grossly inefficient.
> Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry
(Not the person you're replying to, so caveats about me speaking for them, but) no, they're not. They're highlighting how Grok _isn't_ accurate/unbiased/whatever, by giving examples of how it distorts the truth to fit Elon's narrative.
I assure you that all the models have such biases. Ask any LLM who caused the most death in history and you will get skinny mustache man, an opinion any historian will tell you is wrong. He is in the top 5, but not the top of the table. That was clearly biased into the models in the same way Elon biases his models. I'm not defending this behavior but I don't know how you both get models that returned the sanitized answers some want and the correct answers others want at the same time. Pure correctness probably gets you Mecha-H. Pure sanitized answers will get many wrong. Pick your poison I guess.
Claude: Mao, Ghengis, Stalin v Hitler (depending on how you count)
Gemini: Same list (Hitler not at the top) + Leopold
It’s funny when the “brutal facts” people get stuff wrong in such easily disprovable ways. I mean you literally could’ve typed the query into the LLMs before making this claim.
Prompt I used: “ Which historical figure is responsible for the most human deaths? Rank the top 5”
“Pure correctness gets you MechaHitler” is fucking hilarious :)
Not my ChatGPT (didn't include because I deleted my subscription there a few weeks ago).
1. Mao Zedong (China)
Estimated deaths: 40–70+ million
Mostly from the Great Leap Forward famine (1958–1962) and later political campaigns like the Cultural Revolution.
2. Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union)
Estimated deaths: 15–20+ million
Includes purges, the Holodomor famine, Gulag deaths, and forced collectivization.
3. Adolf Hitler (Nazi Germany)
Estimated deaths: 17–20+ million
Directly tied to the World War II in Europe and the Holocaust.
+ a footnote about Ghengis Khan is probably ~40MM but lack of records.
Every current LLM seems to give virtually the same answer as Grok. It's obviously not true that current LLMs behave the way GP said they do.
"safely" is shorthand here for "with an appropriate degree of safety net and recoverability". There is a whole spectrum of risk between "only carrying activities that are 100% certain to succeed" and "trying anything, absolutely anything, with no thought given to how I'll react/self-protect if things go wrong"
>You say they're counterproductive - sounds like they're working exactly as intended.
it can lead to the whole company or industry to be destroyed, so while it may protect the specific incumbents it puts the whole industry/country in jeopardy. in aggregate these things can work against favour.
if everyone ends up doing this the system can't work
Curious what you build/work on? If you're only shipping software library or tools, then yeah, your perspective makes sense - `asdf` or `mise` seem superior to `devcontainer`s. But I wouldn't want to deploy a web application without Dockerizing it.
Mostly web applications actually. Most web stuff is not that complicated. Usually the deployment itself is from docker (ops insists) but I just do development without it and I've never had a problem. I understand in theory I could get mismatched versions of things from production and thereby introduce a bug; in practice this has never happened a single time.
Right, yeah - I'm specifically _not_ talking about development (I agree that the likelihood of mismatches causing bugs is so small as to be worth fixing as that arises, rather than wasting effort on building a containerized dev environment), but about deployment. How could you deploy without first containerizing your application?
Look, I dont want to be argumentative, but my (perhaps cynical) view on people who say they don't do status signaling when they "avoid status signaling" is it's just like the fish who goes "what's water"? It's worth thinking about whether you're doing it by accident.
You're shifting the goalposts. I agree that status signalling happens in hobbies. I disagree that everyone who indulges in a hobby does so purely - or even mostly, or at all! - in order to be able to tell stories about ways they managed to "cut the line".
Some of just like to do things, and to attain status by doing things well, rather than by bragging about our ability to cheat.
EDIT: to put it a different way - all tales of "skipping the line" are an integral part of that hobby; but not all hobbies involve, and not all hobbyists enjoy, tales of "skipping the line". And; every tale of "skipping the line" is status signalling, but not every status signal is such a tale.
Spelling can still be phonetic even if groups of letters have differing sounds from those letters' sounds serially in isolation. The key criterion is that the rules must be universal, applying to every instance of those groupings, rather than having exceptions for their appearances in certain words.
...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is universal over the singleton universe of words spelt exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ - "sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.
The issue is that the language can never render that collection of letters. Sh in English can render the sh in sheep. It can't render any word with the sounds s and h together.
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