The sooner cities and states start negotiating adversarially with companies that want to set up infrastructure in their state, the sooner we'll all be happier with the way things work.
If you want to be a part of my community, you need to obviously be giving at least as much as you take. And none of this can be theoretical in terms of what you're offering. Theoretical == non-existent.
They already do that. It's just that things like large data centers... actually pay a lot of property taxes. A huge amount compared to their land use. While not really consuming a lot of government services.
A building that just needs you to run a transmission line to it once and then sits there unassumingly while paying a disproportionate amount of property tax is the sort of thing municipalities generally offer significant incentives to get to move in. Incentives meaning they pay millions of dollars in taxes instead of tens of millions, but then the municipality gets millions of dollars in tax revenue instead of nothing when another location offers a better deal.
You're already describing a race to the bottom there IMHO.
Cities or even countries underbid each other to get the golden goose, and then realise they've already bargained away any share of the eggs, and it turns out the goose still shits everywhere.
A competitive bidding process isn't a race to the bottom because it doesn't stop at the bottom, it stops when underbidding someone else is no longer worth it. Which happens when the benefit to the one who wins is still a positive number. It's just not a large number, because otherwise it would still be worth it for someone else to make a better offer.
Obviously it's also possible to make a poor choice and provide more in incentives than you get from having the thing, but in that case they're bidding too low and are only suffering the consequences of their own incompetence.
Your scenario there, bidding too low, is a frequent occurrence from what I see. One often exacerbated by exaggerated promises of revenues or employment from the business which then fail to materialise.
Or they come with undisclosed externalities in the form of noise or competition for energy (see for example various bitcoin mines, IIRC there’s one in Texas that is particularly hated by the locals)
The whole idea of cities bidding for these businesses stinks, IMHO.
There is a propensity for the city that gets the business to be the one that offered too much, because if anyone is offering too much then they "win" because no one competent is going to underbid them. But this is the efficient market hypothesis. The place offering too much buys themselves a lesson in not doing that, the next time they don't offer as much (as do other cities who saw what happened there), and this time the city that gets the business gets a net positive result. Then other cities see that and want it and if any of them are incompetent then they offer too much and suffer the consequences again. The average converges on a small positive return for the city that wins. Or a negative return if too many cities are incompetently governed, but your problem in that case is the incompetent governance rather than the premise that offering something that does bring a net positive return to the city would be a bad choice.
And what is the alternative supposed to be? Cities A, B and C all have different tax rates, other policies, labor force, geographical proximity, etc. Companies will build wherever it's most advantageous. Some town in rural Illinois is at an intrinsic disadvantage compared to coastal cities unless they can offer some countervailing advantage like lower tax rates. The coastal cities may not like that because they want to keep the business even if they're diverting the tax money to cronies or doing nothing to address high cost of living or otherwise governing like schmucks, which is exactly why the competition is good. It's what causes the people in those cities to ask why tax dollars are going to waste and corruption instead of ignoring that because the money is being extracted from a company which is somehow prevented from moving to a less corrupt city.
It's one of the only things that provides governments an incentive to improve efficiency.
> The average converges on a small positive return for the city that wins. Or a negative return if too many cities are incompetently governed, but your problem in that case is the incompetent governance rather than the premise that offering something that does bring a net positive return to the city would be a bad choice.
You presume two things here. One you call out, that city administrations need to be competent. The other you appear to have a blind spot for, companies need to be honest. As with many things in capitalist societies, where there is a disparity of information, markets don't function properly.
And you're still describing a race to the absolute bottom.
And you're still describing a broken market in which industries and individual businesses that can catch the attention of authorities, through press or lobbying, get preferential tax treatment over those that are less glamorous or which have less investment to throw around. This again distorts markets and picks winners.
> And what is the alternative supposed to be?
Set business rates which cover costs and give back to the administrative area in the amount the democratic authorities of that area require to provide services, infrastructure etc. Stick to them.
> It's one of the only things that provides governments an incentive to improve efficiency.
By making sure that business uses every trick it can to starve them of funds?
LOL. You're describing a corrupt dystopia and you don't seem to realise it.
LOL, it's amazing that to your mind the problem here is that cities are spending tax money on waste and corruption, not that allowing companies to come in and set up shop without paying their way is the sort of corruption of process a lot of people hate.
I'm seeing more examples of you saying you're providing evidence than of you actually providing evidence. So far I've heard a single anecdote about what you did.
That's a pretty far cry from the "evidence" you claim to have dropped on multiple comments.
The claim was this is not possible. I show it happening. That's a proof.
You're confused because the example is my own project. But I'm not merely describing it - I am giving you full access to it to confirm or reject my argument.
Not anecdotal. Saying it three times does not make it true.
What things have you tried that didn't go well? At this point, that's more interesting.
If you want to have a whack at a hard problem, have a try at the cryptographic puzzle in Noita if you want to see the silly failure modes of these systems. Lots of people have tried to solve it with AI and nothing's budged. If you can solve it, great.
If you'd like to change the subject I'd be happy to do so.
You're right - there are still many problems that have not been solved by AI. AI has not found a cheap and effective way to turn lead into gold, as an example.
But I sorta think that's a silly metric. There are always going to be unsolved problems for any system. The interesting metric is how many problems have been solved - and how surprising are they.
Like I said above - a decompiler that produces semantic understanding of the machine code it's looking at (this address is score; this address is how many lives are left; this address is...) would have been considered literally impossible before LLMs. Today, I was able to implement such a system in under two weeks.
That's an impressive result. If you disagree, I'd love to discuss it with you.
I'm aware of what they're good at. I got claude 4.6 to run linux as a native postgres module inside linux inside postgres inside linux inside postgres on a mac. It was impressive then and it's still impressive. IOW, I really think you're misinterpreting my comments as significantly more inflammatory than I actually mean. And you seem to be taking it personally.
But what I'm interested in is in the edges of their failure modes because those failure modes prop up frequently in pernicious ways. For a similar reason that I want to understand the edges of my own intellectual failure modes by regularly challenging myself. This conversation is an example of that.
It seems like you're just not interested in discussing the edges and failure modes. You call that a "silly metric", I call it, "understanding your tools".
My primary interest in these threads is to debunk the claims that "AI is a hoax".
Granted, that's not exactly the claim these days, the claim's goalposts shift constantly, as these things do.
But if you go back to the top of this conversation - I asked why people aren't seeing the miracles (not cute tricks - useful things that simply were impossible before) and I was largely met with the response "you're delusional if you see miracles."
But the thing is - I am not. So I am going to continue arguing that case every time I see a version of it.
So no, I'm not interested in exploring other issues. Sorry. Yours in particular I find as interesting as discussing whether Microsoft Word can be used to edit video files. Not interesting.
But if you need validation, here it is: there are many problems that AI cannot solve. Of course there are. There always will be.
HEH. Not sure why you're implying I have changed my position. I said as much above and would have said the same at any time. I don't think it's controversial in the least that there are things AI can't do.
Do you have a weird need to reframe this so you can feel like you won? You shouldn't do that. It's not healthy.
Oh hey - the timer finally kicked off. In case you didn't see my reply - here you go:
HEH. Not sure why you're implying I have changed my position. I said as much above and would have said the same at any time. I don't think it's controversial in the least that there are things AI can't do.
Do you have a weird need to reframe this so you can feel like you won? You shouldn't do that. It's not healthy.
What counter example did you provide? You said you had tried a few projects. You can just claim that without any evidence. I have no reason to believe you're not lying.
You could say "I used AI to cure cancer." This isn't a counter example, because there's no evidence for it.
My follow-up question is "What percentage of the 'totally independent' group, are parents with adult children?"
i.e. there's almost an interesting statistic here about what percentage of adults have "no option" in relying on their parents for financial help, and what percentage of the remainder still do rely on their parents.
But once I had this question, I realized that I needed to be suspicious of the % itself.
I feel like market cap valuations should have some way to factor in the supply/demand constraints. I know that float exists as a concept, but I think it's insane to call SpaceX a Trillion dollar company, when if it started selling significant stock tomorrow, it would probably be selling pennies on the dollar.
Most company's stock would fall pretty hard if all the holders decided to sell at the same time.
So although Google, say, technically has a huge float on a percentage basis, because none of the big three holders (Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin) are selling any significant amount of their shares, the practical float is much lower.
Tons of people and bots are saying insane things all the time. It is your choice to pay attention to insane things, or to ignore them and pay attention to the (presumably reputable) numbers.
> If someone generates a naked photo of you, even if it looks identical to a real photo, it's not your private data.
"You see, your honor, it's not a picture of them, it's a picture of their reflection in the mirror."
I feel like this discussion is a question of what the exact structure of the hydrogen-filled blimp should look like, and not a discussion of the fact that THE BLIMP IS FILLED WITH HYDROGEN.
Like we got so deep into the lawyered-definition of words, that we skipped right over the clearly wrong/awful intent.
What do you think my comment was responding to? Literally those are the words that I was responding to.
Saying that the provenance of a naked image of myself is relevant to the fact that it's a naked image of _me_ and I don't have ownership over my own image is exactly the kind of lawyer-brained wording I was referring to when I made the comment about the mirror. "It's not a picture of you, it's a picture of a reflection of you."
Your misunderstanding of "private data". This is not lawyered words.
> Saying that the provenance of a naked image of myself
It is not a naked image of yourself.
An image of someone else's naked body does not become a reflection of an image of you just because your face is pasted on it. Object if you wish, but when it comes to privacy, the only possible breach is of the privacy of the body, not the face.
> is relevant to the fact that it's a naked image of _me_ and I don't have ownership over my own image
If I show you a picture of yourself that is a perfect likeness of yourself, And do not tell you how it was collected/created.
Is that an image of you?
It looks exactly like you, and you have found yourself in a similar or same situation at some point (what do you know your memory is human).
You're saying you can't say one way or another whether or not that is a picture of you without knowing where it came from, but I'm saying it doesn't matter where it came from, it is your exact likeness, it is a picture of you.
yeah, I mean, if you don't engage with the comment, then you're not going to understand. So maybe you should take your own advice and actually read what I wrote.
The giveaway was my Medical Professional father thinking that AI was really good at things outside of his area of expertise, and really bad at things inside of his area of expertise.
Which is weird, because AI being bad at things in my expertise (programming) makes me distrust it 10x harder for things outside my expertise. At this point, unless an LLM can give me a reference that I can follow back to a trustworthy primary source (and unless that source says what the LLM synthesized from it), I automatically discard anything it says. It's simply wrong too frequently for me to do otherwise.
You might be doing the same thing, if you think that your medical professional father would have any understanding of how an LLM works, an area in which he has no expertise.
To him, and most other people who don't know anything about the tech and how it works, it's probably just a magic intelligent box that can answer many things that he can't.
The marketing says it's this close to AGI and taking all our jobs, so that must be true!
I think it's reasonable for governments to signal a decision like this that parents can ultimately choose to bypass. So it's both to explain the harms and posture to reduce those harms to children, and to leave the final decision to parents.
Curious how someone with a 401k, who didn't want their retirement to be used by these companies to buy at an inflated price, would go about opting out of this.
Typically I just have my 401k in an index fund so that things have to become established before they're added. This seems like it's circumventing that, and I would be inclined to vote with my wallet. But everything around 401k index funds that I see are very opaque, so it's not totally clear to me how I would avoid this if I wanted to.
Technically I think this would be fairly straightforward. You could keep the index fund and then short the stock you believe is overvalued, to the degree it's weighted in the index fund. That would give you stock market exposure equivalent to the index without the company you don't believe in.
But I would strongly advise you to NOT DO THIS.
The above position makes it explicit that your thesis involves shorting a stock that could go through the roof in value. That emphasizes what a risk you're taking with your thesis. If your typical investment approach is to just buy index funds, then carry on just buying index funds and let the market do its work.
By the way, if SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI etc were to be excluded from the indices, then professional investors would just start a trade the inverse of the one I outlined above - i.e. they'd start shorting your index fund to the extent it was underweight in those companies, in order to profit off the exclusion of those tickers from it.
If you're in this for the long term (which I assume you are given this is your 401k), don't try to second-guess the market short-term.
If your 401k offers it you could look into an "equity income" fund. Not for the dividend income per se, but because these a are big stable companies with a track record of paying dividends.
Also, consumer staples are known for holding their ground during downturns.
But the general advice given is to accept that you probably can't beat the market so don't overthink it and just own the whole thing.
Also keep an eye on expense ratios. A lot of 401k providers gouge you on anything but the basic funds. So you'd have to beat the market by that much more.
You have to lookup what your index fund is. They all have always had different inclusion rules and they may or might not have changed theirs recent to try to include SpaceX.
I think I'm looking at general "retirement funds" which are a little more opaque. e.g. Vanguard/TD retirement funds, when I looked into them, didn't have any information on "what is in them." Just general breakdowns.
Vanguard offers a bunch of ETFs so I can't exactly give you a solid answer.
One of their specific etfs (VTI) tracks the CRSP US Total Market index [1] which has its methodology described here [2] and looking at the "CRSP INVESTABILITY SCREEN SUMMARY" it sounds to me like SpaceX would be added to VTI after 5 days ("Seasoning of New Securities - 5 days or greater if satisfying the fast-track IPO rules".
[1]: "The Fund employs an indexing investment approach designed to track the
performance of the CRSP US Total Market Index (the “Target Index”), which
represents 100% of the investable U.S. stock market," https://personal1.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/sp970.pdf
If you want to be a part of my community, you need to obviously be giving at least as much as you take. And none of this can be theoretical in terms of what you're offering. Theoretical == non-existent.