EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

The irony is that gaming revenues are strong, but in the local casinos. It’s the strip that’s suffering. People have money to go to a casino, but not for overpriced, mediocre tourism.

Las Vegas is like if enshittification were a city. The whole economic model was to make everything cheap and easy so that people would show up to gamble. Subsidize the flights, the hotels, the food, the entertainment, etc. and just make it up on the other side with people throwing money away on gambling. It worked for decades. Then a bunch of morons went “but what if we also tried to make money on all that stuff, too?” so they started getting rid of the deals and the freebies, they jacked up prices and found ways to upsell, they lowered the already-middling quality on everything, and they presumably made even more money for a few years.

But now there’s no reason to go there in the first place. Almost anything you’d want to do in Las Vegas you could do better and for less money somewhere else. Of course young people aren’t going to show up.

Should be between every layer like cake frosting.

One of the few things I appreciate about the Canadian legislative system is that they don’t name bills. There’s a prescribed numbering system and that’s it. People can characterize the bill however they want, but it’s going to be called Bill C-24 and not The Small Business and Senior Citizen Freedom and Prosperity Liberty Act.

He was never a full defund guy to begin with, afaik. By “back down” I mean full retreat to the status quo. What he’s saying today is consistent with what he was saying before, i.e. get social workers to do social work and free up police officers to do police work.

And yeah, the idea that police officers are going to improve public safety is bullshit, but increasing resources for social work, as well as stopping cops from showing up and murdering people who need mental health support, would be helpful, and within the mandate of the mayor.

Despite what others may say, my vision is not to defund the police. It is in fact to allow those officers to respond to the serious crimes that many signed up to address.

If he’s backing down entirely then boo, but I actually like where this line of reasoning is going. Reducing police budgets would be ideal, but reorienting the police from cracking down on fare evasion to, say, solving murders would represent a positive change for most people, especially if it comes with increased resources for social workers to handle stuff that would normally just get turfed to the police. “Defund the police” is a divisive concept that most people don’t seem to understand, but the idea that cops are lazy assholes who are happy to write you tickets but can’t be bothered to solve crimes is an opinion that a lot of people already have. If he’s leaning in that direction then I don’t really see that being a problem, but I’ll reserve judgment until we see what he actually does as mayor.

Ed Zitron literally calls it the “Rot Economy”, and has done great reporting on it. You’re not imagining it.

Crypto is big, but it never quite got the wide adoption its proponents were aiming for. Never mind that it has a market cap of $4T or whatever, that’s just crypto weirdos trading with one another and pretending that trading prices mean value. The amount of liquidity available to turn crypto into usable cash is minuscule.

The thing that crypto has going for it is that it was never designed to do anything useful. Its entire value is in being a store of value that is valuable because people treat it as a store of value. It has nothing else to prove to anyone for it to maintain itself. Whether it continues to maintain its value is questionable, but it’s hit a point of modest stability because it did the job of getting a bunch of retail investors to buy in and hold forever, which was the goal, and that situation can last as long as those retail investors continue to diamond hand their assets en masse.

AI isn’t in the same position. It’s not enough that lots of people are telling everyone that AI is good, or that big dollars are going into it. To be successful, AI has to eventually turn into surplus dollars. In order for it to do that, people have to pay for it, and on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. I’m not saying that won’t happen, because who knows? The market can stay irrational for a very long time. But the market does eventually demand returns, and those returns depend on a lot of factors that are currently not manifesting.

Basically, crypto is stupid, but it makes sense in that it serves the intended purpose. It’s still a bubble, but it’s a bubble that can stay inflated for a long time because of the nature of the asset. AI is a bubble that needs a lot more cash to sustain. If it is to be sustained, it’ll likely be governments writing increasingly large checks for useless technology in perpetuity, which is a real thing that could happen. It’s very, very stupid, but the alternative is that the line go down, so hard to say which is more likely to happen.

Like I said, Ed Zitron is a good source. His newsletter Where’s Your Ed At? is pretty thorough, and his podcast Better Offline is more of the same, but in pod format. He writes angry (which may or may not appeal) but he brings receipts and does a lot of breaking down specific arguments around the tech industry, and more recently AI specifically.

On the specific point of the AI industry needing to be bigger than smartphones and cloud combined (I think it might have been smartphones and SaaS combined, but the point is that it’s ludicrous) it’s a pretty straightforward matter of the amount of capital invested. Hundreds of billions of dollars are going into AI. For those investments to pay off, the AI industry needs to be making hundreds of billions in revenues. The smartphone industry is ~$800B in revenues last I checked. The AI industry is ~$35B with massive losses, and those revenue numbers are very suspect because of all the inside baseball nonsense between all the big tech companies.

They’re talking about investment in AI tooling a trillion dollars before the end of the decade. That simply requires that the AI industry be worth quite a bit more than that by the time the money gets spent. The specific numbers are less relevant than the fact that the broad numbers aren’t close to making sense.

Ed Zitron has some of the best takes on the AI industry, even if it does sound like it’s driving him insane. The biggest issue seems to be that the tech industry desperately needs another hyperscaling technology in order to maintain asset values. Crypto didn’t really take off, VR and the Metaverse failed, and they’re running out of ways to squeeze earnings out of enshittification. AI is the next and possibly last real kick at the can before the music stops and there’s a need for a serious correction.

A huge part of the stock market is held up by a small number of tech companies that need a new thing to juice growth. Nvidia alone is something like 8% of the S&P 500, and 90% of Nvidia’s revenues are from data centers being built to service AI. If the AI hype train stops, it will lead to a huge recession. The forcing of AI into everything is a combination of deliberately manufactured mass hysteria, monopoly capital pushing product onto people without any resistance, and a stealth industry bailout to keep the line from going down.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens. For the current investments into AI to work out, the AI industry needs to end up being larger than the smartphone market and the cloud services market combined, or something like that. It’s currently a bare fraction of either of those in revenue, and no AI company is profitable. If the industry survives, it’ll most likely be because the government writes them unlimited blank checks in the hope that someday it works out, because they can’t afford to let the market collapse.

But simply not liking a privacy conscious experience or utilization of AI at all? I’m not getting it?

I have heard zero people object to this extremely narrow definition of AI. This is an extremely fragile straw man that has no relationship with reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely anti “AI baked into my operating system and cell phone so that it can monitor me and sell me crap”

Well I’ve got bad news for you, that’s the only thing that the AI industry gives a shit about. That and pretending that they can replace human labor to justify wage depression and layoffs.

Also, you didn’t mention the excessive environmental impacts, or the fact that the industry is hemorrhaging money with no clear path to viability.

If you can’t think of at least a few reasons to be speculative about the current state of the AI industry then I’d go take a closer look at what’s actually going on.

AI-generated pictures of Marvel movie characters meeting with former presidents.

We all have that one friend who’s like “don’t worry, I think it’s just another couple blocks.”

I still miss it so much.

Every time someone asks him about the next book, he signs another TV deal out of spite.

A better question (or maybe just the logical follow up) is what is the alternative to the current government? If the “extremist government” is to blame, is there an opposition that would be dramatically different? If not, then there’s no value in blaming Netanyahu or the current government. My understanding is that the genocide is basically a non-partisan issue. You can’t blame the current government for things that the next government would support.

This is tangential, but I played Jedi: Fallen Order just before I played Control, and while I enjoyed Fallen Order for what it was, I was shocked at how much more I enjoyed Control. Control was, in many ways, the Jedi Knight power fantasy that Fallen Order wasn’t. Floating around throwing enemies into enemies and then off a balcony, tossing huge objects at people, shooting force lightning, etc. It was more Jedi than the game called Jedi and I will never forget that about it.

lmao somoene in the replies asked for a translation of what they’re chanting and it got marked “probable spam”. I’m so glad I left that godawful website and never went back.

I guess that’s why the news doesn’t publish those quotes.

I wouldn’t mind if he stayed alive for a while yet. He seems miserable.