Indeed. If you suddenly have a workforce that can be 2x as productive (or whatever multiple), why would you cut them? You already have these people under your control, direct them towards profitable ventures.
One of the first bugs I found - and fixed - at my current job instantly made us an extra 200k/year. One line of code (potentially a one character fix?), causing a little bug nobody noticed, which I only saw because I like to comb through application logs, and caused by a peculiarity of the data. Would an LLM have written better code? Maybe. But I've seen a lot of bad code churned out by LLMs, even today. I'm not saying every line matters - particular for frontend code - but sometimes individual lines of code, or even individual characters, can be tremendously important, and not be written in any spec, not tested with all possible data combinations, or documented anywhere. At a previous job, I spent several days unraveling another one-line bug that was keeping a multi-million dollar project from running at all. Again, totally non-obvious unless you had a tremendous amount of context and were running a pretty complex system to figure it out, with a sort of tenacity the LLMs don't currently possess.
There's a shortage of over 500,000 tradesmen in the US right now, expected to reach a shortage of 2 million by 2030. And if you've ever tried to get somebody out for a repair: it's hard. They are expensive, and the tradesmen are often not good, and often pretty dumb, even about their own field. Add to that the regulatory gatekeeping, where it takes 5 years minimum of working under someone else to be able to work independently in some fields, and the low initial pay and poor treatment causing people to drop out... there's going to be a shortage for a long time. And even if their wasn't - the people in those fields now would be relatively easy to outcompete imo.
It's why the UN has an obsession with a tiny democracy in the middle east and ignores the multitude of brutal dictatorships which oppress and kill far more people around it and across the globe.
We allow brutal dictatorships to continue subjugating tens of millions of people and killing millions in the name of convention. Our international organizations (the UN in particular) are basically ruled by authoritarian regimes. Is there no justification for external powers to effect regime change? We just have to wait and watch as the dictator kills a ton of people? Oh, and of course there is Maduro's support for Putin via sanctions evasion. Even now, Venezuelans face a brutal security force that is likely to retain power, but hopefully that power fragments.
Imo we should have done this right after the last election which Maduro stole.
Something like 50% of the population of the world live under rulers who were not democratically elected. Should the US taxpayers fund all of their removals?
On top of that, removing a ruler without any plan for follow-up frequently makes things worse, not better. We seem to have already forgotten that removing the leadership of Iraq led to the rise of ISIS and its horrifying consequences.
> Something like 50% of the population of the world live under rulers who were not democratically elected. Should the US taxpayers fund all of their removals?
If it's in our interest, absolutely. Venezuela nationalized (which is a nice way to say they stole) American oil interests and companies decades ago, has assisted Russia in flouting US sanctions, and has in part enabled the drug cartels. Each of those things cost us money. We're also getting a ton of immigrants from Venezuela that we have to spend money dealing with. Venezuela could also be a much better trading partner for us in the future with a liberal democratic society. All of that is directly in the best interest for the US. Believe it or not, sometimes our interests lie outside our borders.
Isolationism is a failed policy by every nation that tries it, and this is something that used to be taught to every school child in America about our past policies. It's a shame those lessons seem to have been forgotten by our people.
> On top of that, removing a ruler without any plan for follow-up frequently makes things worse, not better. We seem to have already forgotten that removing the leadership of Iraq led to the rise of ISIS and its horrifying consequences.
This is absolutely true. You have to destroy the security forces as well, and support the elected democratic leadership. We may fail to do so in this case.
This is a point worth discussing imo. To what extent is the state of a nation and the conditions of its people, the responsibility of the people itself, even if they're oppressed?
The Russians were oppressed and had a revolution about it. Then they didn't like Communism anymore and broke up the USSR about it. Taiwan had a military dictatorship that was killing and jailing people in the thousands, and managed to overthrow it with absolutely zero outside intervention in the 90s, all while the PRC salivated over taking the country even back then.
I'm not sure I think "citizens should just be left to suffer under brutal regimes," but I also want to avoid a prejudice of low expectations. I also wonder, to what degree do citizens bear shared responsibility for the crimes their government commits against others? How responsible for the invasion of Ukraine are Russians for not deposing Putin? How responsible are Americans for the destabilization in southeast Asia, the middle east, south America?
There are videos of Venezuelans celebrating in the streets, singing in large groups, cheering. I saw a video of someone from a balcony and it sounded like the entire city of Caracas was cheering. You can wait a few years for a survey or throw one up yourself.
The reaction I'm seeing from second-hand and direct reddit comments from actual Venezualans seems really positive.
> more than a fifth of the entire S&P 500 market cap is now just three companies — Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple — two of which are basically big bets on AI.
These 3 companies have been heavyweights since long before AI. Before AI, you couldn't get Nvidia cards due to crypto, or gaming. Apple is barely investing in AI. Microsoft has been the most important enterprise tech company for my entire lifetime.
Nvidia market cap has increased about 10x since the crypto-shortage years. It wasn't small before, but there's a big difference between ~1% of the market and ~10% of the market in terms of systemic risk.
Also, as of last year about 80% of their revenues were from data center GPUs designed specifically for "AI", and that's undoubtedly continuing to grow as a share of their revenues.
You’re missing the point. Whether one buys it or not to one side, the author is saying those companies, whatever their history have pushed a significant amount of their … chips into a bet on AI.
I agree that his position is right wing, but is it far right? Most nations explicitly exist for the people native to the place. Very few nations allow foreign immigration on the scale that the US, UK, Canada, do. And European countries make it pretty difficult to migrate normally- unless you’re a Muslim “refugee”. Being anti-immigrant is a default position in the world.
I think the average person on the left likes to believe they have the position that “all immigration is good”. In reality, they mean all migration by nonwhite people is good (see how they talk about white or near-white people in the US, Canada, Israel). It’s this hypocrisy and obviously racist stance that bugs me.
What makes Muslim migration to Europe “good” but Jewish migration to the stateless land of Israel from 1890-1948 bad? What makes Muslims moving to the US “good” but makes all white people in the US colonizers? Either everybody gets the colonizer notation (foolish imo) or migration is a human right (like it was for the million years before the modern nation-state) and everybody needs to fucking deal with it, stop killing each other and stop condemning people for moving or for the past crimes of people who may be barely related. And if you’re going to migrate: don’t be an asshole to the people there first.
Completely absurd projection not supported by any serious sources. That would mean 1 in 3 Gazans dead, and 10 deaths per reported death, which would be completely out of line with other conflicts.
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