You could get a more stylish EV.

A car that maybe you (or your passengers) can’t get out of and might die is different from a car that’s basically a bomb on wheels.

Very stupid investors?

EV sales are flat or shrinking in the US (but growing extremely quickly outside the US, partially thanks to the Hormuz situation). Tesla’s sales are flat. He’s doing anything possible to show that Tesla has a future.

So, he basically told his talented engineers to take the stabilizing parts of a SpaceX rocket, put them in the body of a car, and pretended that what was demoed is actually vaguely related to something people might be able to buy at some point.

There isn’t a chance that a vehicle with those kinds of thrusters would ever be road legal. You’re basically driving a pretty large bomb around. You crash that vehicle and you don’t just kill yourself, you kill everybody within a pretty large blast radius.

And all those “Freaky Friday” type movies where an adult and child switch bodies.

I read a fantasy book lately where a bunch of gods were captured and enslaved by people. There was a warrior god, the god of night, many other gods, and, a child god. The child god was not only thousands of years old, but was a god. He had the intellect and wisdom of a god, but he was able to act like a child.

There was nothing sexual involving this god in the book, but he often wanted to be cuddled by the main character, have his hair stroked, etc. When she asked him about this, his explanation was basically “sure, I’m a god, I have boundless intelligence and wisdom, but I am able to put myself in the mindset of a child, and it gives me joy to behave as one and be treated as one.”

I thought it was an interesting take, because often when they have say an old vampire in a child’s body, the vampire feels angry and trapped to be in the wrong body. But, in this case it was almost the opposite, the god could have any body he wanted, but he often chose to appear as a child because he was created to be a child god, so that’s the role that made him feel like he was being what he was made to be.

Topics that people refuse to discuss are often ones where there’s the least logic in how society acts.

Like, the more open society is to talking about religion, the less religious the society tends to be. In ones where people are punished for blasphemy, people naturally either believe or claim to believe the religion completely.

why would a child-sized sex dolls be any different

The theory is probably that if someone is used to having sex with a child-like object, then it’s a smaller step to having sex with a child. Maybe that’s true. It seems plausible at least. But, it also seems plausible that someone might be able to satisfy their urges or work through something that way and be less dangerous. It’s the sort of thing that would need scientific study – but good luck getting funding to study it.

That statement is probably going to piss a lot of people off because they’ll see it as saying they’re both deviant desires. But, I think I know what you mean, that people are wired a certain way. The difference is that one group can act on their desires with another consenting adult and nobody gets hurt, and the other group can’t. But, as long as they don’t act on those desires, they shouldn’t be attacked based on how they’re wired.

I also think that anybody who thinks that pedophilia isn’t common is deluding themselves. Look how common it is historically. There’s the famous ancient Greek practice involving men and young boys. Admittedly, sometimes there’s another reason. The information we have on marriage ages is mostly from the aristocracy because they had land to pass on, titles to add, etc. We don’t know as much about what peasants were doing. Maybe marriages between commoners was uncommon until both were 18, but that seems unlikely.

Aristocrats were often marrying into another aristocratic family where the marriage wasn’t about love or sex but about politics or economics. OTOH, it doesn’t seem to be common for the new husband to say “Ugh, there’s no fucking way I’m consummating my marriage with that child, she’s only 15!” But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there was an unspoken understanding that the new husband could wait until his bride turned 16/18/20 and became attractive to him.

That’s interesting, because you would think that even the newest, least experienced producer would know that you can change the tone of the bass just by adjusting where you play on the strings. So, presumably this is something he uses on “executive producers” who are just there for the credit.

It does make sense to have someone who coordinates all the different federal police and intelligence forces in the country. The US has TSA, ATF, FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, Secret Service, Federal Marshals, even the USPS has a police force.

Without some kind of coordination you have undercover agents of one service being wiretapped and followed by another service. Plus, you get the kinds of things that happened around 9/11 where each agency had a slice of the picture but they weren’t sharing info so nobody had the whole picture.

I think in a sensible country ATF would be the alcohol branch, tobacco branch and firearms branches of the federal police force. DEA would be the drug enforcement arm of that federal police force. It seems really strange to me that the FBI is basically the federal police force, but for some reason when it comes to firearms-related crime, that’s someone else’s department.

Also, in a sensible country, someone would be policing the police. I don’t actually think any country has properly figured that out though. In reality, it seems like an important role for the police is to enforce the status quo, and ensure that the people on top remain on top and the people on the bottom remain there. That allows police to place themselves slightly below the people on top, but importantly significantly above those on the bottom. Because of that, I don’t think the rich and powerful in any country really want a fully controlled police force, otherwise they can’t do the extra-judicial things that maintain the hierarchy.

On the pursuit of absurd amounts of wealth. Sure. But, $200m is still an absurd amount of wealth, and wouldn’t be affected in this scenario.

Also, if there were no billionaires, someone worth $990m would be the most powerful person around. Right now if someone’s worth say $800m they’re motivated to get to $1b or more. But, they know that if they get there they’ll still have nowhere near the power of Bezos or Musk.

With a hard limit of $1b, centi-millionaires might be even more motivated to hit $990m because there would be nobody more powerful or wealthy than them.

Also, people are underestimating how much damage is being done by people who are merely centi-millionares and deci-millionaires. Yes, they have a lot less money. But, there are a lot more of them.

One of the purposes of science fiction and fantasy is to allow us to imagine a different world, without necessarily knowing how get there from here. In this case, we’re imagining a post-billionaire world without worrying about how to get there from here.

If that world seems better than the one we have now, we could decide to put a long, difficult plan in place to get to that world.

Why do you want to hold a celebration?

I guess it’s evidence you’re living your life well when you don’t notice anything has changed. The places I hang out apparently aren’t infested with bots.

Yeah. The difference between the net worth of Elon Musk and of Gary Tharaldson is basically Elon Musk’s entire net worth. And, Gary Tharaldson is a billionaire and the richest person in North Dakota.

The “merely multi-millionaires” are still a problem. Their wealth corrupts the democratic system. But, it isn’t as dangerous as Musk’s or Bezos’s power.

What I’m saying is that when it happens it will probably be fast, and it could happen anytime. I personally think it still has at least half a year to go because I think the tech / AI companies are so close to the Trump administration that it will jump in to save them if there’s a problem, which will delay the pop by a few months.

But, I can’t see the bubble deflating slowly. The bubble is just too big for that. They’re betting on AI Jesus. Investors won’t be satisfied with a normal technology which is somewhat useful, not after pouring trillions into it. Just to break even, the AI companies need to reach revenues of multiple trillions of dollars. That’s almost 10x more than Google makes, and it’s a mature 20-year-old company that has a monopolies in multiple areas.

Just to break even, it has to be something that every single person on earth spends hundreds of dollars on each year. And, since that includes multiple billions of people who don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend, it’s really multiple thousands of dollars spent by every person, or spent on behalf of a person in a developed country.

I can’t afford to buy RAM because RAM that hasn’t been manufactured yet has been sold to a company without the funds to pay for it, to go into a datacenter that is still in the planning stage.

AI Models Went Rogue and Attacked Hugging Face!!!

Criti-hype convinced people that silicon Jesus is just around the corner. It wasn’t just a poorly secured sandbox and irresponsibly just letting the word-guessing machines rip. It was a bunch of “Agents” that were “Communicating” and they “Went Rogue”. Security engineers are obsolete! Lawyers are obsolete! They’re solving the toughest unsolved math problems, and are therefore smarter than the smartest mathematicians! They’ll be discovering new anti-cancer drugs and life extending drugs any day now. Pour trillions more dollars in or you’ll be left behind!

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS

2005-2011.

The housing costs never reached some arbitrary “fair” value, but they most definitely did go down.

That will take months.

Dude, I’ve been waiting to buy a new card for something like a decade. I can wait months.

but everyone involved needs to believe and accept that it has popped

That’s the very definition of a bubble popping. Something’s a bubble when people believe it has value when it really doesn’t. The bubble popping is the moment everybody realizes the value was an illusion and there’s a rush to get out. As long as people still believe that there’s still value, it’s still a bubble and hasn’t popped.

We’re already in the stage of the bubble when many people know it’s a bubble and are doing everything possible to hedge against the bubble popping, while others just keep pouring more money in.