The optimistic scenario for the economy is a pessimistic scenario for the world.

For the economy to do well would require the AI bubble to not pop. It would mean that these absurd valuations for the AI companies turn out to be correct. That all the circular financing somehow comes good and all these ridiculous-seeming bets about the future of AI turn out to be at least partially correct. It will require that the companies that fired workers to replace them with chatbots turned out to have made a good and profitable decision. It’s the scenario where Musk becomes a trillionaire.

Let’s be real, oil / petroleum / gasoline / aviation gas are going to be part of the economy for decades. Countries are going to get by with less oil, but not without oil. There are things like planes that really require a very energy dense source of energy. There are other things like buses and local delivery trucks that can do fine with batteries, but where vehicles are an investment that is paid off over a decade. The new ones might be electric, but the old ones won’t be replaced soon. This might have accelerated the transition in a significant way, but oil is such a big part of everything that it’s still going to be around for a long time.

What I hope is that there are countries, say in Africa, that never really fully industrialized with an oil-based economy. Hopefully they can skip right past that and start with clean energy right from the start.

What do they mean “touches $100 a barrel”? It has been at or above $100/barrel for almost 2 months now.

It’s hard to know the future. People’s habits are hard to change. But, sometimes there’s a change that’s significant enough and people don’t go back.

In the current world where people were already switching to photovoltaics and EVs before the crisis, it’s easy to imagine that a lot of people who switch because of the crisis won’t be going back if oil gets cheap again.

Also, from what I’ve read, each week that the Straight of Hormuz is closed will take about a month for things to get back to normal. So, at this point, we’re already talking years before things could go back to normal. Plus, if this results in another major recession, by the time the economy comes back it might look completely different.

I don’t think a lot of Canadians or Mexicans are going to be able to afford to go to the games in their own countries. They may be hosting, but the ticket prices are absurd.

If the World Cup has a lot of half empty stadia, I’d be happy.

It might be interesting if the Mexican and Canadian stadia were full though.

F1 races are also hotbeds of human trafficking.

According to some Russian propaganda conspiracy forum?

There may be some races, but ladies, that’s not why your husband is there.

Sure, nobody who goes to a race goes to see cars drive quickly…

The JLTV apparently has a curb weight of 6.4 tonnes, that’s almost 4x the weight of the modern oversized F150 at 1.8 tonnes. Not ideal for a post-collapse world where energy is expensive.

Those Stadium Super Trucks though. Also impractical, but those sure are goofy fun to watch.

Jeeps were really innovative when they were created… in World War 2. That’s when they really were off-road vehicles. The pattern was repeated again with the Humvee, or HMMVW. It’s not just converted military vehicles either. It’s also race cars and rally cars. Some series have rules that to be legal a car also has to be a production model. Sometimes if you get that exact model you get a race-capable car. But, mostly the cars they sell are variants of the race design, which maintain the fast-looking design, but one which would handle terribly if you put it on an actual racetrack.

Because we know it’s true, and we hate it.

What’s interesting is that the Voting Rights Act has been used to gerrymander states to elect more GOP members.

The way you gerrymander is by creating one area that overwhelmingly goes for one party, and a bunch of other areas that very slightly go the other way. It’s often hard to come up with a legal pretext to do that (back when that sort of thing mattered). The voting rights act said that not only was it legal to create districts that would give black voters a majority, it was necessary. How do you do that? You group all the black voters together into one district, thereby creating a strong democratic-voting district. What side effect does that have? It creates a bunch of other districts that are not democratic-leaning so the overall state goes Republican.

If other laws still mattered, Republicans might have been fighting to save the VRA because it was their best tool to legally gerrymander in their favour. But, with the modern “laws don’t matter lol” supreme court, it’s different.

I don’t think so. Good things can’t happen because of human nature: making good things happen involves groups making decisions, and in every group there are bound to be some assholes because that’s human nature, that limits the kinds of good things that can happen.

And that they’ve observed that once groups reach a certain size, it’s inevitable that the group contains at least one asshole.

It’s like the fable of the scorpion and the frog. It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to cross the river. It just means that you need a more complex plan than just carrying the scorpion across on your back.

It’s the nature of humanity that in any reasonably sized group, there are always a few assholes.

There was cooperation, sure. There was also a lot of killing.

It’s not just human nature, even chimps kill chimps from other groups who stray into the wrong territory.

It’s not just “distinct from stealing”, it’s not even vaguely related to stealing.

Depriving someone of their property is the main thing that makes stealing wrong. If I steal your fishing pole, presumably you’re not mad that I’m now able to fish. You’re mad that you are not able to fish because you don’t have a fishing pole anymore.

With intellectual property, the offence is now that I’m able to do something I wasn’t previously able to do, even if you’re still able to do what you did before. Now you can still fish, but I’m also able to fish, and the government told you that you had the right to determine who was able to fish, and I’m fishing without your permission, so I’m violating your rights.

There’s a debate to be had about whether or not copyright, patents, trademarks, etc. are good for society. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re only good if the copyright term is under 4 years, and if it’s over 4 years it’s bad for society. Maybe that threshold isn’t 4 years but 4 centuries. The main thing is that you can’t think about it the way you think about stealing.

Copyright.

Sure, they’re reasonable requests. They’re things that he should have looked at before letting spicy autocomplete loose on production.

If I put a supposedly trained monkey into a tractor’s cabin and had it try to do farm work, I don’t think people should be listening to my ideas about what kinds of skills monkeys should be taught before they’re assigned farm work. I think people should be laughing at me and calling me an idiot for assuming a monkey could do farm work.

Crane bullet points five things that need to change as the AI industry scales faster than it builds a worthwhile safety architecture. Specifics he calls for include; stricter confirmations, scopable API tokens, proper backups, simple recovery procedures, and AI agents existing within proper guardrails.

“I hooked up spicy autocomplete to our production systems and it nuked them. What have I learned from this? Here are some bullet points for how the spicy autocomplete industry needs to do better.”

About 9 years ago, I was on unemployment. To keep my benefits I needed to apply to X companies per week. It didn’t matter if any of those applications led to interviews or not. If every application was successful, the number of interviews that resulted was exhausting. As a result, I applied to some jobs on purpose that I knew would reject me just to keep the number of interviews manageable.

One job I applied for that I knew would reject me was Palantir. They definitely wanted someone with my skills, so I had to make it clear that I was a bad fit with my cover letter. I made a cover letter that matched the things they claimed to believe in their mission statement, etc. But, I did it while talking about how personal privacy was critical, how openness and transparency was important for a functioning society, etc. Despite my perfect match of skills to the job description, they didn’t even follow up.

All that to say, even 9 years ago it was absolutely obvious what kind of company Palantir was, and anybody who works there now either had no morals, or knew that they were being paid to put those morals to the side in exchange for an enormous pay package.