And all those “Freaky Friday” type movies where an adult and child switch bodies.

I read a fantasy book lately where a bunch of gods were captured and enslaved by people. There was a warrior god, the god of night, many other gods, and, a child god. The child god was not only thousands of years old, but was a god. He had the intellect and wisdom of a god, but he was able to act like a child.

There was nothing sexual involving this god in the book, but he often wanted to be cuddled by the main character, have his hair stroked, etc. When she asked him about this, his explanation was basically “sure, I’m a god, I have boundless intelligence and wisdom, but I am able to put myself in the mindset of a child, and it gives me joy to behave as one and be treated as one.”

I thought it was an interesting take, because often when they have say an old vampire in a child’s body, the vampire feels angry and trapped to be in the wrong body. But, in this case it was almost the opposite, the god could have any body he wanted, but he often chose to appear as a child because he was created to be a child god, so that’s the role that made him feel like he was being what he was made to be.

Topics that people refuse to discuss are often ones where there’s the least logic in how society acts.

Like, the more open society is to talking about religion, the less religious the society tends to be. In ones where people are punished for blasphemy, people naturally either believe or claim to believe the religion completely.

why would a child-sized sex dolls be any different

The theory is probably that if someone is used to having sex with a child-like object, then it’s a smaller step to having sex with a child. Maybe that’s true. It seems plausible at least. But, it also seems plausible that someone might be able to satisfy their urges or work through something that way and be less dangerous. It’s the sort of thing that would need scientific study – but good luck getting funding to study it.

That statement is probably going to piss a lot of people off because they’ll see it as saying they’re both deviant desires. But, I think I know what you mean, that people are wired a certain way. The difference is that one group can act on their desires with another consenting adult and nobody gets hurt, and the other group can’t. But, as long as they don’t act on those desires, they shouldn’t be attacked based on how they’re wired.

I also think that anybody who thinks that pedophilia isn’t common is deluding themselves. Look how common it is historically. There’s the famous ancient Greek practice involving men and young boys. Admittedly, sometimes there’s another reason. The information we have on marriage ages is mostly from the aristocracy because they had land to pass on, titles to add, etc. We don’t know as much about what peasants were doing. Maybe marriages between commoners was uncommon until both were 18, but that seems unlikely.

Aristocrats were often marrying into another aristocratic family where the marriage wasn’t about love or sex but about politics or economics. OTOH, it doesn’t seem to be common for the new husband to say “Ugh, there’s no fucking way I’m consummating my marriage with that child, she’s only 15!” But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there was an unspoken understanding that the new husband could wait until his bride turned 16/18/20 and became attractive to him.

That’s interesting, because you would think that even the newest, least experienced producer would know that you can change the tone of the bass just by adjusting where you play on the strings. So, presumably this is something he uses on “executive producers” who are just there for the credit.

It does make sense to have someone who coordinates all the different federal police and intelligence forces in the country. The US has TSA, ATF, FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, Secret Service, Federal Marshals, even the USPS has a police force.

Without some kind of coordination you have undercover agents of one service being wiretapped and followed by another service. Plus, you get the kinds of things that happened around 9/11 where each agency had a slice of the picture but they weren’t sharing info so nobody had the whole picture.

I think in a sensible country ATF would be the alcohol branch, tobacco branch and firearms branches of the federal police force. DEA would be the drug enforcement arm of that federal police force. It seems really strange to me that the FBI is basically the federal police force, but for some reason when it comes to firearms-related crime, that’s someone else’s department.

Also, in a sensible country, someone would be policing the police. I don’t actually think any country has properly figured that out though. In reality, it seems like an important role for the police is to enforce the status quo, and ensure that the people on top remain on top and the people on the bottom remain there. That allows police to place themselves slightly below the people on top, but importantly significantly above those on the bottom. Because of that, I don’t think the rich and powerful in any country really want a fully controlled police force, otherwise they can’t do the extra-judicial things that maintain the hierarchy.

Why do you want to hold a celebration?

I guess it’s evidence you’re living your life well when you don’t notice anything has changed. The places I hang out apparently aren’t infested with bots.

Yeah. The difference between the net worth of Elon Musk and of Gary Tharaldson is basically Elon Musk’s entire net worth. And, Gary Tharaldson is a billionaire and the richest person in North Dakota.

The “merely multi-millionaires” are still a problem. Their wealth corrupts the democratic system. But, it isn’t as dangerous as Musk’s or Bezos’s power.

What I’m saying is that when it happens it will probably be fast, and it could happen anytime. I personally think it still has at least half a year to go because I think the tech / AI companies are so close to the Trump administration that it will jump in to save them if there’s a problem, which will delay the pop by a few months.

But, I can’t see the bubble deflating slowly. The bubble is just too big for that. They’re betting on AI Jesus. Investors won’t be satisfied with a normal technology which is somewhat useful, not after pouring trillions into it. Just to break even, the AI companies need to reach revenues of multiple trillions of dollars. That’s almost 10x more than Google makes, and it’s a mature 20-year-old company that has a monopolies in multiple areas.

Just to break even, it has to be something that every single person on earth spends hundreds of dollars on each year. And, since that includes multiple billions of people who don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend, it’s really multiple thousands of dollars spent by every person, or spent on behalf of a person in a developed country.

I can’t afford to buy RAM because RAM that hasn’t been manufactured yet has been sold to a company without the funds to pay for it, to go into a datacenter that is still in the planning stage.

AI Models Went Rogue and Attacked Hugging Face!!!

Criti-hype convinced people that silicon Jesus is just around the corner. It wasn’t just a poorly secured sandbox and irresponsibly just letting the word-guessing machines rip. It was a bunch of “Agents” that were “Communicating” and they “Went Rogue”. Security engineers are obsolete! Lawyers are obsolete! They’re solving the toughest unsolved math problems, and are therefore smarter than the smartest mathematicians! They’ll be discovering new anti-cancer drugs and life extending drugs any day now. Pour trillions more dollars in or you’ll be left behind!

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS

2005-2011.

The housing costs never reached some arbitrary “fair” value, but they most definitely did go down.

That will take months.

Dude, I’ve been waiting to buy a new card for something like a decade. I can wait months.

but everyone involved needs to believe and accept that it has popped

That’s the very definition of a bubble popping. Something’s a bubble when people believe it has value when it really doesn’t. The bubble popping is the moment everybody realizes the value was an illusion and there’s a rush to get out. As long as people still believe that there’s still value, it’s still a bubble and hasn’t popped.

We’re already in the stage of the bubble when many people know it’s a bubble and are doing everything possible to hedge against the bubble popping, while others just keep pouring more money in.

The hardware in those DCs isn’t suitable for virtual desktops. It’s specifically designed for doing lossy matrix multiplication, something that’s only useful for a certain type of “AI” tasks.

I like “this is not a joke”. I really appreciate anybody trying to put into perspective how insanely unequal things are by using real numbers where possible.

The problem is that things are so unequal that it’s just about impossible to illustrate. For example, the “Top 1%” label is perfectly accurate, but doesn’t illustrate both how small and also how large the top 1% is. 1% is still 3.5 million people, which is large. It isn’t just Bezos and Musk. It’s also guys who own car dealerships.

OTOH, it’s also small. There are 4 people in that illustration, and the “top 1%” should really be 1 guy in a room of 100.

It’s also hard to remember that the “lower 50%” isn’t just “the poors”. It’s literally half the people in the country. It’s not 1 guy at a table with 4 people who is only getting crumbs, it’s half the people at that table getting crumbs. I would bet that at least 80% of Americans think they’re richer than the bottom 50%.

That’s also without trying to deal with the issue of “1 billion dollars”, which just isn’t a number that people have much ability to picture. 1 billion feels like it’s similar to “1 million”, but it’s not.

I still don’t understand why countries that are being bullied by the US, and having their trade deals unilaterally ripped up, still insist on respecting US copyrights and listening to takedown demands from US companies.

Just start treating it like the US treats pot in most places, decriminalize it, stop enforcing the law.

When the US was a new country, one of the first things it did was stop respecting copyrights on British books.

For a full century between 1790 and 1891 the only copyrights that applied in the US were ones by authors who were residents or citizens of the USA.

I think it makes perfect sense to protest the USA by refusing to honour US copyrights.

“Well, but I own the machines.”

“How did you get the machines?”

“Sold products and bought them.”

“Wait, you sold products before buying the machine? How did you make those products? That seems like circular reasoning.”

“Actually, you’re right, I initially took out a loan to buy the machine in the hopes I could sell enough products to pay off the loan.”

“That seems like it was a risk.”

“It was. But, I spent a lot of time analyzing the market, coming up with estimates of how much people would buy, how much someone who could operate the machine would cost in wages, all that sort of thing.”

“That seems like a lot of work.”

“It was a fair amount of work.”

“Who paid you to do that work?”

“Nobody paid me, I hoped to get paid once I could start selling products.”

“So, why didn’t your worker start his own business and buy his own machine instead?”

“Ah, well, that’s the part that’s a bit unfair. See, I could afford to spend the time analyzing the market because my family is rich, and I didn’t need to work gruelling 8 hour days. Also, when it came time to take out a loan to buy the machine, the bank was happy to give me the loan because of my family name.”

“Ah, and your worker?”

“Great guy, but he has a family to support and no rich parents. He couldn’t take the time to analyze the market for a new business because he has to hold down a job. And, even if he could find the time to do that, the bank probably wouldn’t give him a loan for a new business because he doesn’t have any business history, or assets to use as collateral. Also, he can’t really afford to fail.”

“Afford to fail?”

“Yes. Like I said, I have rich parents. If my business fails, my dad will rib me about it a bit. But, it’s not like I’ll be out on the street.”

“And your worker?”

“Well, he could certainly try to start a business, but if the business failed he’d be in real trouble. No rich parents, you see. Plus, I have great accountants. If my business fails, they’ll use it as an offset for my taxes. Technically, anybody can do that, but good luck figuring out how to do that with TurboTax or something.”

“So, really, it’s oversimplifying to say that you do nothing, and the worker does everything.”

“Yeah, he makes what I tell him to make, but I figure out how much to charge, where to sell it, where to buy the raw materials, basically everything about the business other than operating the machine.”

“But, operating the machine is important.”

“Of course! It’s vitally important. But, you see, I bought a machine that costs a little more but is designed to be extremely easy to use. Because just about anybody can use it, I don’t need a worker with special skills. That means I don’t have to pay too much in wages.”

“So, really, if there’s unfairness here it’s structural. You come from a rich family, so it’s easy for you to start a business. He doesn’t, so his only real option is to get a job from someone like you.”

“That’s right.”

“But, it seems like that could all be changed with a few changes to the laws. You pay a bit more in taxes, he pays a bit less, then he can save up and maybe start his own business?”

“Yeah, that might work. But, here’s the kicker. He voted for the same guy I did. The other candidate was promising tax reforms, enforcing anti-monopoly laws, etc. But, my guy got everyone scared about trans athletes and brown people crossing the border. My worker’s a good guy, but he’s super racist. As long as you’re going after the brown people, that’s what matters to him.”