Awesome, this was a huge scam for taxpayers to subsidize.
How is letting people buy stuff from other countries a scam/subsidy? Do words have no meaning to your cohort anymore?
Readit Newschurchill commented on Postal traffic to US sank 80% after low-value parcels exemption ended abcnews.go.com/Business/w... · Posted by u/rntn
I don't think Chinese support for NK has ever been a secret anymore than the the US support for South Korea has. And it's in China's backyardd so they've got way more of an excuse.
And if you think that doesn't matter, look at the Monroe Doctrine [1].
Taken further, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis should really be called the Turkey Missile Crisis. The US (through NATO) placed Jupiter nuclear MRBMs in Turkey, only hunddreds of miles from Moscow. The USSR responded by doing the exact same thing, by placing nuclear weapons in Cuba. And the US almost started World War 3 over it.
It was the USSR who stepped back from the brink and, as a result of a secret agreement, the Jupiter MRBMs were quietly removed from Turkey [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
[2]: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/jupiter-missiles-and-...
Why is this comment downvoted? You have the right to see China, USSR and NK as immoral regimes but there's nothing non-factual here.
churchill commented on Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves laist.com/news/transporta... · Posted by u/jaredwiener
Also they're not selling the gravel, they're mostly just using it to build their homes. The economics are also very different. There's this idea that you're a dummy for buying anything. Like my sister would buy fruit at the market and her neighbors would laugh at her "don't you know you can just pick fruit on the tree??"
I'm just assessing your claim logically and it still doesn't make sense. For locals who live in the countryside, surrounded by fruit trees, it doesn't make sense paying for fruit when you can just walk over to your neighbor's tree, collect as much as you want and walk away.
The tradeoff is that your neighbor can also do to the same to your tree when it's ripe. This is not an African or third-world thing. In any farming community, whether in the US, Europe, or China, some even pick fallen fruit and put them in baskets for passersby; if you don't, it decays where it fell.
Given this is a low-income, agrarian community, this makes sense. It'd be unwise to spend money buying fruits when trees are (maybe) communally owned. So, the locals are not shortsighted ghouls who believe in just taking what they want. They see your sister as a member of their community and they're telling her, "Gee! help yourself. Stop acting like an outsider, lol."
Regarding gravel: anyone (relatively) wealthy enough to embark on building a concrete home in a third-world country won't have the energy/time to break up concrete to harvest aggregate. And when you break it up, you can't extract it perfectly. This is concrete we're talking about, no? So, it'll be clumpy. Again, the effort-to-outcome ratio is insane. Doing your boring day job and buying gravel from bulk suppliers is more reasonable.
churchill commented on Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves laist.com/news/transporta... · Posted by u/jaredwiener
One problem with west africa is they desperately need better roads but whenever a foreign country/NGO comes in and builds a road the locals dig out the gravel and it collapses.
I'll need a source for that claim since it sounds blatantly made up. Aggregate/gravel costs $10/t., So, to get enough money for a snack, an addict would need to do an ungodly amount of work, digging up large stretches of highway and breaking it up hundreds of meters, or even a few kilometers.
The cost-to-benefit ratio just breaks down. You spend more calories making just $10. That's why vandals go for catalytic converters, copper, and aluminum. These are expensive metals that have an attractive labor-to-payoff ratio. Gravel is abundant in the countryside and no matter how poor or addicted a person is, the labor-to-payoff ratio makes no sense.
To me, Western ideals are things like freedom of speech, democracy, and individual rights.
I hear you though.
>freedom of speech, democracy, and individual rights
For those within the imperial core. War, death, sanctions, and dilution of wealth for everyone outside it/whoever attempts to disagree.
>Deliver growth, maintain order, forget the voting. It's spreading.
I think it's mostly this that makes me uncomfortable. I value Western ideals and am hopeful that they continue to spread.
The purpose of a thing is what it does. If Western ideals condone and actively fund atrocities like what's happening in Gaza, while failing to match the infrastructural pace of auth. regimes like China, it's only logical that people will gravitate towards the model that works.
For instance, California's Intercity High-Speed Rail Commission was created by the California legislature in 1993 (before my parents got married) to develop a plan that was to begin construction in 2000.
32 years later, it's still not done, yet China has built nearly 50,000 km of HSR in less than 20 years. The differences are as blatant as that between oranges and orangutans.
There is a certain group of people who love this narrative/propaganda for political reasons. I'm tired of it irrespective of whether it is true.
I'm ready to say "China is the greatest superpower ever and so much better than my US" so we can move on from this type of article.
You can simply ignore it, but you can't wish China and the progress they've made out of existence.
There are also Europeans who feel uncomfortable with the US having 1.5* Europe's GDP with less than half the population.
It's an extant truth and it'll become even more blatant as many Western countries struggle to do basic stuff like build out infrastructure.
Funny how much stuff you can build when you're not spending insane amounts of money bombing farmers in the Hindu Kush, achieving full-spectrum dominance over everyone, or catering to entrenched interests.
Brown University's Costs of War project estimated that by 2021, all post-9/11 wars had cost $8T. When you factor in inflation since then, it easily exceeds $10T spent murdering farmers making $2/day in the Middle East. With nothing to show for it.
That's roughly a third of America's GDP/current debt wasted on making the world a measurably worse place.
churchill commented on Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald
But they don't have to be retained frequently at great cost. Right now they are retrained frequently because everyone is frequently coming out with new models and nobody wants to fall behind. But if investment for AI were to dry up everyone would stop throwing so much money at R&D, and if everyone else isn't investing in new models you don't have to either. The models are powerful as they are, most of the knowledge in them isn't going to rapidly obsolete, and where that is a concern you can paper over it with RAG or MCP servers. If everyone runs out of money for R&D at the same time we could easily cut back to a situation where we get an updated version of the same model every 3 years instead of a bigger/better model twice a year.
And whether companies can survive in that scenario depends almost entirely on their unit economics of inference, ignoring current R&D costs
Like we've seen with Karparthy & Murati starting their own labs, it's to be expected that over the next 5 years, hundreds of engineers & researchers at the bleeding edge will quit and start competing products. They'll reliably raise $1b to $5b in weeks, too. And it's logical: for an investor, a startup founded by a Tier 1 researcher will more reliably 10-100x your capital, vs. Anthropic & OpenAI that are already at >$250b+.
This talent diffusion guarantees that OpenAI and Anthropic will have to keep sinking in ever more money to stay at the bleeding edge, or upstarts like DeepSeek and incumbents like Meta will simply outspend you/hire away all the Tier 1 talent to upstage you.
The only companies that'll reliably print money off AI are TSMC and NVIDIA because they'll get paid either way. They're selling shovels and even if the gold rush ends up being a bust, they'll still do very well.
churchill commented on Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald
The difference is the money printer right now only prints for ~6 months before it needs to be replaced with an even more expensive printer.
And if you ever stop/step off the treadmill and jack up prices to reach profitability, a new upstart without your sunk costs will immediately create a 99% solution and start competing with you. Or more like hundreds of competitors. Like we've seen with Karpathy & Murati, any engineer with pedigree working on the frontline models can easily raise billions to compete with them.
Expect the trend to pick up as the pool of engineers who can create usable LLMs from scratch increases through knowledge/talent diffusion.