When you’re young you tend to think accepting money means you’re a sellout.

When you’re an adult you think accepting money means you’re taking care of your family.

Also adults are less likely to think video games are the most important thing in the world.

I think what’s happening is everyone is operating entirely for their own self interest, and after awhile those interests start syncing up. So there’s no conscious conspiracy, but people are working together towards a common goal.

It would be more comforting if it were a conscious conspiracy, at least then there would be a goal set by conscious people. But I don’t think there is actually anyone at the wheel just all of the parts of a machine working together while we drive off a cliff.

Social media is definitely used to control people and yeah making people hate is the way they’re controlling people. But it’s a mess of foreign interests and moneyed interests. Foreign interests don’t want societal cohesion in their adversaries to weaken them. Moneyed interests don’t want cohesion so we can’t get it together enough to tax them and regulate their businesses. So they promote radicalization and demonization of centrists and disgusting politics on both the far right and far left to keep everyone divided.

Sure there’s plans, maybe even some ribbon cutting with some gold shovels to “break ground” or whatever. These are things you do when running a Big Store type of scam.

I’m reminded of the episode of TNG where they trapped Moriarity in a simulation so he would think he had taken over the ship.

Maybe we can just have an internet just for billionaires where they have AI produce internet content so they can advertise useless AI products to AI bots run by other billionaires while the rest of us go on with our normal lives in the real world?

Luckily two and a half years ago I decided it was time for a new computer. I go more than a decade between new PCs so it was just really dumb luck that I got a new computer when I did. And the reason I can go so long between computers is because I always get way more RAM than I need when I get a new one.

So given the current state of things, it’s a little awkward to admit how much RAM is in my computer.

It’s because it’s a Ponzi scheme. Huge amounts of investment dollars are being dumped into AI and anything related to AI. If you build any kind of chips that are used in AI datacenters, you suddenly have a bunch of money invested in your company. What do you do with it? You make a deal with OpenAI (or one of the other ones) that you’ll invest that money into them if they agree to buy a bunch of chips from you. Now you have revenue on books and are showing a reasonable return on that investment.

If you were a chip manufacturer and actually believed that there was a big future in AI, you’d be using those investment dollars to build some more chip fabs. And some of these companies are doing that. But overall, moving money to another company so they will order chips for datacenters that aren’t built yet (and may never be built) is just bubble ponzi shenanigans.

Computer hardware depreciates in value very quickly. You don’t buy hardware today so you can install that hardware in a datacenter that won’t be online for another year.

There actually was a TV movie called Pirates of Silicon Valley. And yeah, Microsoft was the villains at the end of the movie.

There were efforts to move down the anti-trust path when Biden was President. But too many Americans voted for a billionaire convicted of fraud, and all investigations into any billionaire disappeared and those that were already convicted of crimes were pardoned.

You can think it’s my attitude that caused this but really it’s ignorance that made things this way.

Yeah and Russia shares intel with Iran.

No longer a “system of laws not people” anymore. If it ever was.

It’s owned by a corporation. Corporations have the rights of a person. But unlike actual people, you can’t arrest a corporation.

There have been periods of human history within some groups that did have no needs scarcity. Shelter, food, water, all there. Replenishing faster than they could consume it.

Which periods are these?

I’d say right now we have the necessary resources to provide for everyone’s needs in the world. Providing for basic needs isn’t a scarcity issue, it’s a resource allocation issue. We aren’t prioritizing providing for everyone’s needs before providing for people’s wants.

I’m lucky enough to live in a developed country, I have shelter, a fridge full of food, I turn a tap and I have potable water. It’s all there for me. My needs are taken care of. I still think would be awesome if I owned a private island in a nice climate, with a big house on it and a pier with my own yacht I could sail around when I feel like it. But there’s the problem, how do we determine who gets what they want? If I got the private island, yacht, etc. while you only had your basic needs met, would you consider that to be an equitable society?

Why does Picard get a vineyard in France while someone else has to be satisfied by whatever the replicator provides them?

TNG makes it clear that Picard values original artifacts. There’s a scene where he assumes an artifact someone is giving him is replicated but then is told it’s the original. He basically pisses his pants over it being a much too valuable of a gift. So no, in Star Trek people do place greater value on non-fungible items. You don’t even think of this scene as unusual because of course people think that way.

Starfleet needed more starships to defend themselves from the Dominion. Do you consider that a need or a want? They don’t have an infinite number of starships. Apparently building starships involved some kind of scarce resources.

Because they didn’t have enough starships, a lot of people died. If we consider not being vaporized by a phaser to be a need, the Federation was not able to provide everyone’s needs because of a scarcity of resources limited the number of starships they could produce.

Like I say, Star Trek is incredibly inconsistent about this. If an episode requires scarcity of resources so Nog can trade different things to different people in a fun episode, then those resources are scarce. If they need to use gold pressed latinum, they use currency. If someone asks “how does your economy work?” then suddenly “they don’t use money, they don’t need it because they have everything they want.” And this is fine, if someone 300 years ago were to write some fiction about our time, it would probably be about people more Scrooge McDuck (who had a giant vault of shiny coins) rather than Elon Musk (who has no need for that because that’s not how the economy works). Star Trek can’t have a realistic economy, and it doesn’t need it. We’re just meant to assume it’s broadly equitable, everything is fuzzy beyond that.

This is the case where if I were to replicate it, what would be the difference?

You can’t replicate an infinite amount of land in France. You can’t replicate an infinite number of private islands. People will value these things and they will be scarce. Why would Picard live on a vineyard in France instead of in a holodeck version of a vineyard if there was no value to the real thing?

Post-scarcity isn’t actually possible. Not even in Star Trek this is true. Picard’s family owns a vineyard in France filled with artifacts and antiques. Not everything is fungible. People will desire these non-fungible things. Not everyone that desires these things will be able to have them, because they aren’t fungible. You can’t have a billion people all owning vineyards in France. Some people won’t get everything they want. There will always be scarcity.

Star Trek was made in the 1960’s at the height of the cold war. They didn’t want the show to be about how capitalism was superior to communism, or vice versa. So they side stepped the issue by saying in the future there’s no scarcity, no money, and they live under some ideal future economic model. The show writers don’t know what that ideal economic model is, so it’s deliberately vague and inconsistent. And that’s fine because the show isn’t about economics.

It was wise of the writers of Star Trek to avoid trying to make predictions of that nature. 300 years ago, Wealth of Nations wasn’t yet written, the field of economics didn’t really exist. They believed shiny rocks had intrinsic value. They had some vibes about things like currency devaluation and inflation, but economics was still mostly about acquiring shiney rocks 300 years in the past. So what will economics be like 300 years in the future? None of us know, and certainly writers of a TV show don’t know.

The writers of a TV show saying there will be no scarcity in the future just means they didn’t want to discuss economics. It’s not any kind of prediction about the future. There will always be scarcity.

Yup, the idea is good. How this this idea is being implemented… not so much.

A decade ago, if someone asked someone working on an Open Source project if they’d be ok with an AI reading their code and learning from it, they’d most likely say “yeah that sounds really cool!”

Somehow the tech-bros have fucked up AI so much that something that should be really cool seems creepy, lame, and nefarious all at once.

Because the American people were stupid enough to vote for them.

Yeah, and you could rent VCRs long before that.

Only silly Americans think geopolitics has anything to do with “liberals”. This is realpolitk, son. Trump has made the US an unreliable ally. It will take time, but the rest of the world will detach from the US. We aren’t going to build a military industrial complex in a day, but it’s going to happen.

In the first Trump term people thought it was a blip. Americans got scammed into voting for that clown. But after Jan. 6 he revealed to the world who he really was. Then y’all voted him in again. You proved it wasn’t a blip, Trump represents who you really are.

The US can’t be the arsenal of democracy when it doesn’t really believe in democracy anymore. The arsenal of democracy will be elsewhere in the future.

Yeah, so everyone is moving away from dependencies on the US. Not likely anyone will want their comms dependent on a system a US President (or Elon Musk) can shut down for leverage in a trade deal.

Who is going to pay the money for there to be a reasonable return on that value? I don’t have Starlink, I have no need for it, since there’s a cable coming into where I live. Sure there’s people that live in remote places that it’s useful for. But that’s not a lot of people.

There are military applications, but Musk is a flake not military wants to be dependent on him. Every country in the world is spending a lot of money to end their dependence on the US defense industrial complex, so there will be alternatives for military purposes.

Maybe it can work in vehicles? But if the price is too high people will just use 5G or just go without access for a while.

Starlink is just a product to fill in some edge cases. It will probably make a steady profit, but there will be competition from Europe and China before too long.