agreed. The problem is, often, when you can have "for free" something that is "good enough", you stop looking for better.

40 years ago, there was a market for:

  * newspapers

  * cameras

  * navigation tools

  * HiFi equipment

  * photographers, translators, etc

.. sure, there are still people with newspaper subscriptions, or DSLR cameras. But it's become a niche market. Those things have been replaced by your phone and a "free" service.

Same thing will happen for all the other markets that AI will gradually eat. Sure, you can find a human that can do better. But that costs 90$ / hour and requires finding someone, negotiating a contract, etc. But when people can do something good enough in 30 seconds with something they already have access to, and move on with their life, then that's what they'll do.

So just raising the floor will have a big effect on society.

Well if one would get theological about it, I do believe they were given the land and then expelled by god. The Bible is quite explicit on that point.

I don’t remember seeing the memo that god gave “back” the land, so logically speaking they are acting against the will of god.

I believe the idea is that friction and resistance is proportional to the square of the speed. After a certain speed, every 10 mph extra starts to really count in your mileage.

The idea is that some green ideologists think that when they don't need to drive a car because they don't leave their city, no one needs to drive a car. Because car driving creates CO2 which means car driving is bad. And they search for ways to implement that or make driving a car as bad as possible. Because they can't make the Deutsche Bahn better, they have to make driving your own car worse.

An EV is the superior vehicle in every aspect. Cheap fuel, reliable, nice to drive, less maintenance costs, less noisy and yes, no local emissions.

But then why not just make car driving not create CO2?

Because that doesn't play to Germany's industrial and economic strengths (precision machining, metallurgy, basically the whole ICE automobile supply chain).

EVs are just mechanically much simpler, with a shorter BOM that largely centers around Asian (particularly Chinese) battery, REE, and semiconductor supply chains, so hundreds of thousands of good jobs that supported Germany's industrial model are now economically obsolete.

That's the Kodak business model: New thing arrives that will disrupt the old thing, so don't build it. Problem is then someone else will build it anyway and instead of losing 2 jobs making ICE cars and getting 1.5 jobs making batteries and solar panels, you just lose the 2 jobs and get nothing, which is how Kodak went bankrupt.

Also, LFP batteries don't contain rare earths.

I agree with you, generally speaking. I was being descriptive, not prescriptive.

> LFP batteries don't contain rare earths.

No, but good motors do. And probably GaN FETs to handle megawatt-class charging currents.

And those that do have not yet understood what will happen when those seasoned workers retire, and there are no juniors or mid that can grow because they have been replaced by AI

While I understand why you would say that, I think the way "spy network" was meant, was in the way that their job is to spy within the US. And given the resources at their disposition, and the size of the US, "worlds biggest spy network" is not wrong.

Also, they do head up the main counterintelligence effort of the US.

How the mighty have fallen.

actually, they raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion valuation.

That would work if obesity levels increased equally across the globe. But even if obesity does increase globally, there are very wide disparities. Contrary to popular belief, there US is not the world.

There's a pattern where criminal organizations fill governance gaps rather than starting as genuine governments. The Yakuza did this opportunistically at certain historical moments. Hamas is a similar example (not a criminal organisation, but..) , allthough they are more of a institution-building than the Yakuza ever was.

Mafias generally fill the same functions of the government but for the underworld: providing "protection", extracting "taxes", enforcing rules via the use of violence, and so on.

Probably the best example of this are American mafias.

Yes, it’s a big reason why they have always tended to be based out of immigrant communities - those were excluded from mainstream culture, governance, etc.

If you were mainstream you didn’t need the mafia - you were already the gov’t, the police, etc.

my more generous interpretation of the situation is that people do not see the work / effort / complexity of operating a solution. They think that open source is free, when in reality it is cheaper (generally) but not free.

You need to pay the hosting. You need to install it, configure it, and patch it. And when stuff breaks, you have no one to call upon but yourself.

But, as you say, if you can do all of that, open source is amazing value.

Exactly this. The sticker price of open source is zero but the total cost of ownership is your team's time. I've talked to CTOs who spent more engineering hours configuring and maintaining free tools than they would have spent on a managed alternative. They just couldn't see it because the cost was buried in salary, not a line item on an invoice.

Yes. After having flattened it and occupied / denazified it for a bunch of years. The Germany after WW I was not trusted.