scarabic

Well that was a perfectly substance-free reply.

It is, though there are more forces than that at play.

Competition is supposed to help lower prices. If one tennis racket manufacturer overcharges, then another can charge less and steal all their sales.

But if landlord #1 owns an house and overcharges while landlord #2 owns a house and does not, it’s not like landlord #2 gets all the tenants. They still just have one house. There is no way for one of them to win by benefitting tenants. They can however both win by both hurting tenants.

I guess where there is too much housing, one apartment building can keep full occupancy by charging less, while another building across the street might have 60% occupancy because they overcharge. But rarely is there too much supply anymore. And rarely are there such head-to-head commoditized situations.

TBH even as a man I’d prefer to sit not with other men. They are bigger, for one thing. And overall less considerate, though of course they have no monopoly on that.

I think it’s a stretch to call international competition “political.” But if you insist on doing that, then it’s silly to claim that they are supposed to be apolitical when every athlete competes under a flag.

It’s a great case of how tempting doubt is, and how people will automatically believe that accusations wouldn’t be made if something were not happening, so we have a 55% starting bias to believe “guilty.”

In college I was once the object of a salacious rumor that was 100% fabricated by someone and spread throughout my circles in school. By the time I heard about it, friends-of-friends and the entire faculty in my department had as well. Closer friends said things like “I never bothered to ask you about it because I figured it wasn’t true. And if it was true I didn’t care. Is it true?”

It was very frustrating how ready everyone was to believe it. People not very close to me ALL believed it. To this day I bet some people I know doubt whether I have just been lying this whole time to defend myself. But I know what I did and didn’t do, and I learned that people will absolutely get up one day and decide to manufacture something out of thin air and then spend energy spreading it around as if true.

I no longer think “well something must have happened if there’s this much hubbub about it…”

The company I work for is tireless about DEI and at least the CEO is personally a big believer. I think the instant he goes, though, the entire thing goes. We have hundreds of people working on it. And they have produced more backlash against DEI than real progress on it. So yeah, there are true believers out there, but the system as a whole doesn’t give a fuck, never did, and there’s never going to come a time when we all turn some corner and want more, more, more DEI staff at work. In my humble opinion the movement is dead already and will be remembered as an artifact of the last decade or so. The actual problem itself will continue to improve, generationally, just as it has done for a hundred years.

I do think that lab grown diamonds will eventually end the whole diamond thing, and here’s why. The allure of diamonds is about 5% based in their objective sparkly qualities and 95% a status / wealth construct which is based around their scarcity / their artificially-maintained expensiveness. Manufactured diamonds eliminate the scarcity and expensiveness. Therefore they will not be a cultural construct that holds any status, or meaning as a symbol of wealth, for much longer. Basically manufactured diamonds have a short window when they can capitalize on cultural mores about diamonds with a cheaper product. But they themselves are destroying 95% of the allure of diamonds in doing so. Not only will mined diamonds lose value, but manufactured diamonds will too - unless they can innovate to keep coming up with cool stuff like bigger gems with cool visual qualities. Eventually they will be valued only for their objective sparkle or whatever, and the rest of the status game will cease to exist. You can see that this has already taken place for many people in this thread. Surely, certain rich people are still paying a premium just to know that their diamond is mined. But eventually fraud will undermine that, and yes even some guilt about mining practices. Rich people will have to move on to some other status symbol. But it takes time. Concepts of how weddings are supposed to go do not change quickly, in part because parents have a lot of say in how their kids’ weddings go, and this bridges the generations and keeps old mores alive. To a degree. But anyway yeah kiss this whole diamond thing goodbye pretty soon here.

I believe you may have misread your own source.

For example, the world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier, draws 8 megawatts when it idles — a quantity that could simultaneously power thousands of homes

If this was the basis for your saying this…

several hundred supercomputer megaclusters and sucks more power than a thousand suburbs.

… then you misread AND misstated.

Misread: this “thousands of homes” energy use was in reference to Frontier, which is not a quantum computer but based on more conventional architecture, the kind the article goes on to say might eventually be improved upon by quantum computing. Eg:

Consequently, experts are looking to new strategies that can rein in energy use while continuing to improve computing performance. One proposed solution: quantum computing.

Misstated: “thousands of homes” != “thousands of suburbs.”

A suburb is not a home but a a collection of homes, a region of a city even. See definition:

an outlying part of a city or town. b. : a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city. c. suburbs plural : the residential area on the outskirts of a city or large town.

So in your zeal to make your point you demonized quantum computers, which could be a solution to the problem you’re ostensibly so concerned about, and in the process you misstated a metric by at least one order of magnitude.

So yeah… I don’t know what to tell you. You really messed up here. Your problem is with LLMs and big compute, not necessarily quantum computers.

Ah everything you e never actually tried to do seems easy. Especially when you’re 14.

Probably never. Not because I necessarily disagree with you in spirit. This speech is damaging and without redeeming value. My only problem is that the process of deciding what speech is and isn’t permissible is more dangerous than this speech.

Yep. Actual coup plotters don’t stand on street corners with signs yelling about it.