That’s where you’re wrong, kiddo. They don’t need to win a set piece battle like it’s a chessboard. They’ve already woken everyone up from Pax Americana. I’m not sure what’s going to happen when the GCC realizes that pumping billions into the United States economy comes with no security guarantees or real benefit at all. We’re operating from a highly leveraged position. It’s going to take a while, but with a few more years of hindsight, the depth of what a monumental strategic blunder this is will seem hard to believe. We’re not sending our best to Washington.
I’m not sure the terms of negotiation are even worth discussion. Every time this administration has negotiated with anyone on matters pertaining to Israeli interests, it’s only been a ruse to position for another attack.
My guess is that they know good and well all the marine landing craft are going to get smoked and are using a false peace to preposition the ground invasion. The ridiculous James Bond scheme they tried to pull off which resulted in us destroying a dozen of our own aircraft and, quite probably a few of our own operators was a Hail Mary inspired by too much television. That failure leaves the administration with quite the dilemma. Surrender and call it a victory, which Israel will not allow. Or repeat the Syracuse Expedition as farse.
It’s a bit depressing to think about, but my hope is that these catastrophic failures will get false allies out of the decision loop and we proceed as a more peaceful and wiser country.
You can just say Israel. I wonder how long it will still take that Netanyahu has not US (or anyone’s at this point, except himself) interest in mind. Even Trump must be able to put two and two together at this point, no?
> Even Trump must be able to put two and two together at this point, no?
How have you looked at the the last couple of decades of Trump and come to that conclusion? The man's a total idiot and that was even before his mental decline
He is an extremely prickly idiot that has very accute senses when somebody is crossing him over. So does any two-bit hustler. Or maybe he really did start a war just to bury the Epstein files for a brief moment, god only knows at this point.
Oh at this point you should probably wonder not whether he gets it, but what leverage does Israel he have over him, and if it's directly from Epstein files.
If his support from budge from him assaulting a minor sexually, Israel might have a file proving he is the antichrist, it would not matter. It’s more akin to a death cult than a political party.
There was some journalist that said he had discussed with Steve Bannon even whether it would have mattered if the now infamous “pss tape” had actually materialised. Bannon said something along the lines of that Trump would have just called it fake and it would not have mattered even slightest to his voters.
We should learn something from the Cuban heavy transformer manufacturing enterprise. I mean I get that critical theory is that easy, but the step everyone always seem to
miss is a credible explanation how a centrally managed command economy is better. There is also basically no free market mechanisms functioning in power delivery in the United States. You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
>>You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
Sure you can. To everyone you run power lines to. Or did you mean you wanted a distribution system designed to profit you instead operate efficiently for everyone else?
> You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
While the actual economics of it may have been kneecapped, selling solar power back to the grid is very much a thing in 33 states. It's in the form of a credit and not cash. I'm not trying to nitpick, but I'm not sure what you're getting at.
> There is also basically no free market mechanisms functioning in power delivery in the United States. You can’t stick a solar panel in your backyard and sell the output.
Part of that is because most of the world's power grids are extremely dumb. There's no visibility anywhere, certainly not in real time - if you're lucky, there is some sort of alert monitor for overtemperature in local transformers, but no voltage/current monitoring on an individual consumer level and no current monitoring on both sides of a transformer.
Imagine a small pole transformer plus secondary-side distribution lines rated and fused for 100 kVA. Enough for a few farms. Now farm A and B each install an 80 kVAp solar panel set - and farm C, D and E consume 50 kVA each. Without the decentralized solar, the pole transformer fuse would have been triggered - but now, there's 150 kVA of consumption going on, fed by the 160 kVA solar panels, on a distribution line only supporting 100 kVA, that's now acting as a fuse. An immediate risk of damage, if not outright fire.
That is why large scale solar/wind or large consumers all need permits, plannings and sometimes dedicated lines and transformers.
The only other way to run a system without creating tons of new infra but still able to catch such dangerous situations is a detailed (!) network map on the utility side plus realtime monitoring of the transformer and all five farms input/output currents.
Of course. But they are not visible in the Chang’e photos on the dark side either. I think in the interview of the astronauts following the first Apollo Mission, a reporter asked for a confirmation that the stars were not visible because of “the glare” (an interesting question in itself). The explanation given was that the stars were not visible with the eye, but were visible with “the optics“.
I’ve been pretty disappointed in the seeks applications ability to identify vegetation or insects. It seemed like it was really good a year or two ago and now I just seem to get so many bad predictions.
I don’t know. I find him pretty hard to listen to. He has admitted that his show prep is AI produced, and I think the gaps in his understanding come across in conversation. I also find his child-like irreverence and familiar tone with his guests to be very distasteful. He also can’t drink a pint of Guinness and you just can’t trust people like that.
Did you listen to his interview with Amodei? The guy goes on about, “well don’t you know about such and such” or “yeah but an AI can’t learn like an intern…” like he’s trying to argue with him. Look, this is coming from a guy who hasn’t really done anything with his life other than be friends with people in San Francisco, talking to the head of a company that’s changing the way an entire industry operates. I think Dwarkesh just needs to shut up and listen. The total lack of respect puts me off.
Help me out, I don’t understand the scorched earth perspective. You want to eliminate the playing field even for the people playing fairly, just because there are some bad actors? Would destroying all SaaS actually cause the cheaters to sell used cars & life insurance?
Until AI isn’t trained on all open source code ever written, regardless of license, which I doubt will ever happen, isn’t SaaS-writing AI in some sense building a larger scale & more concentrated version of what you’re hoping to destroy?
Personally, I hope and want everyone selling used cars and life insurance to be honest and upstanding. some of them are.
I hear what you're saying but I still think I'd prefer LLM-orchestrated software (using third-party dependencies) to closed source SaaS made by developers who can't even adhere to software licenses. It's a level of Junior Dev Energy that's unforgivable.
Good luck, you are now a site operator of a non-core business function. I prefer the SaaS but just do some vendor DD.
If you absolutely can't trust any SaaS it is equivalent to you cannot trust any vendor to do anything as they may fuck it up. You can solve that with DD.
The choice I was offering myself there was specifically between a bad developer abusing open source software and something vibed together to replace that specific function that uses the open source app within its licence. The assumption being those are the only two options.
Obviously a false dichotomy for most real life scenarios but the point being that I'd rather do it myself (any which way) than trust a bad developer, doubly so for customer-facing operations.
If there's another provider offering that function, sure, but let's talk rupees.
FYI, used car salesmen > new car salesmen because the affiliated dealers have a monopoly from the manufacturer and laws to prevent competition, whereas used car lots don't have these advantages and have to survive in a much more competitive environment. I know honest used car salesmen and have dealt with them. It's also more about the sales manager than the salesman working the floor, who actually has very little power with respect to pricing and mostly just follows a script and does logistics.
Also, the used car market is much more efficient than the new car market. You are a lot less likely to get ripped off, believe it or not, when you buy used. It is also three times as large as the new car market, with much lower barriers to entry and no manufacturers carving up sales regions and limiting dealer franchises in each region, and penalizing vendors that sell outside their region, e.g. creating little local monopolies. Every used car dealer has to compete with carmax and carvana and hundreds of other used car dealers that have access to the same pool of buyers and sellers. They have to fight for those buyers and sellers. That's a very different situation than the four Toyota dealers in your metro. In fact the reason why Toyota dealers are especially bad in terms of ripping people off is because the Toyota product is so good and you have to go to them to get a new Toyota. But if you want a used Toyota, suddenly have 10x the options, and not one of them has a monopoly from the manufacturer.
Not saying there aren't bad apples in used car sales, but it's a lot harder to survive long term on shady practices than if you are backed by a major manufacturer, have exclusive access to sell their cars, and also exclusive access to do recall and warranty repair. Those types of monopolies can prop up all sorts of bad practices.
I completely agree with all the points made. It is 100% less likely for one to get ripped off buying used cars - mostly because I think you can skip the dealers in this process. The problem is the dealers and their insane markups. Maybe bad salesmanship is just a consequence of that.
My fantasy: After the salesman says (for the 4th time), "Sorry, the manager won't approve that price, but if you could add X hundred dollars, I'm sure I can convince them!", I wait until they are through high-fiving each other and then tell the salesman "Sorry, my trust manager didn't approve that price. I'm sure I can convince him if you lower the price by X hundred dollars".
My reality: I use my bank's car-buying service and pay the bank's negotiated price.
Honestly, I think if anything, we need an app to replace the dealers. Every other problem might evaporate (albeit not completely) if this is addressed. Dealerships are the largest extortionist racket in the car market IMO.
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