Reasonable take, but the last part (“faster-growing”) is huge here. The sheer scale and multipliers on the bad things caused by AI are far beyond most (all?) previous technologies used by capitalists.

IDK if any of this is what it looks like, but it’s in the context of complete diplomatic incompetence for a decade. None of these people know what they are doing on the international stage. They made their careers as US mob bosses and bullies pretending to be politicians, and don’t understand anything beyond that scope. When Trump could no longer pull world leaders off balance with stupid handshake tricks, he looked like an idiot for a while. Whenever he or his lackeys encounter someone who can’t be bribed, intimidated, or extorted they sputter like Elmer Fudd because they have no other tools.

Your explanation makes sense to me (a very non-physicist), but I remember more than one journalism piece from a decade or so ago about uncharacteristically high rates of cancer in areas in Afghanistan or Iraq that were basically carpeted with US depleted-uranium bullets. Do you think that’s a fluke? Is it possible there is poor quality control in manufacturing the bullets, resulting in some stuff with shorter half-life in there? Could the cancer rates be due to the heavy-metal properties?

(Of course it’s a correlation/causation thing, so there could be other causes, too, but I’m interested in what you think of this)

This, plus if we had any kind of political will or intelligence (as a nation; meaning the USA) we’d force AI companies to pay their extenalities: treat and sanitize every drop of water they use, and build the infrastructure to bring it back to communities; pay for their electrical infrastructure in advance and pay their electricity bills to the tune of “nobody else’s bill goes up”; some kind of massive carbon capture tax for their use (this one might not be possible to actually do; it’s too much); and of course paying royalties and copyright violation fines.

As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business. let’s say they didn’t: The cost per token would be quite high, and very few people would use it.

It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.

You call it “boxing,” probably. It’s where two people get into a “ring” (which is a square) and “sock” (i.e., hit) each other a lot.

I’m just here to see if anyone has any wrong opinions about something I love.

I repaired pools one summer. Pools tend toward algae. Pools half-saturated with chlorine develop algal blooms. Pools with heat-absorbing paint on the bottom, absent or insufficient water filtering, and location in a literal semitropical swamp are a constant (very careful, with lots of water testing) battle to prevent algal blooms. Then you go dumping peroxide in… It seems unlikely this could have gone any other way.