Oh, you didn’t want to be disoriented by all the apps flying apart in every direction when ever you wanted to use the task bar? Oh you wanted a system tray not hidden behind a menu?

Oh, well you can just use a plug in … just pray we don’t update and break all the plug ins anytime soon.

Ok, but… what if the bank asks where you got the gold? Or they ask if you have proof you came by it legally, and then the IRS notices you have a bunch of outstanding loans collateralized with an asset they have no record of you obtaining or paying taxes on the income used to obtain it.

Like… with the cash, you just… spend it on stuff. If you need to pay for something not in cash, then just open a cash based business and overstate your sales.

Or you could… just… list those things as unspecified income and pay taxes on it and not worry about slipping up and going to jail.

It must remain unharmed

I don’t think these companies are worth the value of the paper that their charters are written on. I don’t think many of them are going to last much longer, but he might actually be on to something here in terms of diffusing a massive financial fraud that’s about to happen in broad daylight.

The common wisdom right now is to just “put your money in an index fund, it’s safer and outperforms actively managed portfolios.” Which is to say, a fund that just buys a little bit of everything from a given list, rather than trying to pick stocks that someone thinks will do well, it creates a very diversified portfolio that is protected from anyone company fucking up by having the value spread over as many things as possible. Because many people just put their money in index funds now, getting listed in an index kind of guarantees that lots of people will be buying the shares consistently and thus consistently causing the price to rise over time.

To get in to these lists, normally, a company has to have been public for a while, generally about a year, and show profitability for a prolonged time. These rules have recently been changed though.

A bunch of the AI companies are doing initial public offerings (IPO meaning putting their shares on the public markets for the first time) in the next few months. And stating absolutely insane valuations. Because of the rule changes, they’re basically all getting immediately listed in index funds. And since they’re all targeting insane valuations, they’re going to automatically suck up a bunch of retirement money by default.

I’m not sure about anthropic and openAI on this next part, but SpaceX (which just “bought” Xai), is only going public with about 5% of it’s shares, so theoretically they can just trickle more shares on to the market to get bought up by index funds, and because supply of actual shares is artificially constrained, it will lead to massive overvaluation of those shares, taking up a disproportionate amount of money going in to index funds.

It’s actually fucking criminal that this is being allowed to happen, but because the rules for index funds and IPOs are set by financial institutions and stock exchanges, with very limited oversight by the government, they can just do this.

If the government were to take these 50% shares, it would kind of throw a wrench in the plans, since it would give the government the ability to sell those shares on to the market and stop the over valuation that allows them to take disproportionately from the index funds.

Asahi is still getting a lot of work and development done, but since they’re reverse engineering everything without proper documentation from Apple, they basically get kicked back to square one on any component that Apple makes big changes too with each new generation of chip. They’re more focused on polishing off support on older chips and keeping what they have up to date rather than jumping on every new chip release and leaving stuff unfinished on the older ones

So right now M1 and M2 Macs are fully supported. M3s are mostly working but very much a WIP, and M4 hasn’t really gone anywhere yet.

I’d say that if you find the advantages of the M chips really compelling, but want to stay on Linux, an M2 running Asahi is still very competitive, and the work to support the M3s is chugging along.

If you want the newest hardware possible, then yah you’re probably better off with an AMD or Intel based computer. There are also some other ARM based desktops out there, and Linux on arm is a thing, I have no idea what’s going on over there though.

Most people saying that kind of thing don’t believe in electoralism at all. They don’t think voting is useful. They believe in a litany of other things as alternatives, specifics depend on the group and individual.

But I found most of the people in that camp also aren’t… doing any of the alternatives they like to suggest as meaningful. It’s more like excuses to not do anything, take a “holier than thou” position, or to avoid being associated with something that could fail.

Some anarchist groups actually do “mutual aid”, which is to say, charity work effectively. Which is commendable, but also, like, not a replacement for participating in the political system that currently exists.

They’re all moving to tokens based billing to stop the bleeding. The markets aren’t as willing to let them burn infinite cash on operating expenses anymore. A lot of the private investors see the writing on the walls, that these AI companies are not worth anywhere near the valuations, and propping them up to ensure further datacenter build out to keep Nvidia shares high is costing more than it’s worth.

A lot of the model providers are lining up for ipos to cash out their initial investors and dump the responsibility of the mess on the public markets. They have to jack their prices to pretty up their books if they want to cash out with an IPO though. The unlimited access for a flat monthly cost shtick was obviously never a viable business model. They’ve all been spending massively more on inference than they’ve been taking in subscriptions, and even with the changes to token based billing, they still will be.

Anthropic is claiming that they will have their first “profitable” month soon, but that’s actually just a magic trick of book keeping. They’re deferring some cost of compute for a few months, and accepting a bunch of pre payments from customersr. Basically pretending to have high revenue and lower cost by shifting when the payments are made. And then on top of that they’re jacking up prices and thus decreasing their demand with the shift to tokens.

Everyone is running around rearranging deck chairs on the datacenter titanic hoping they can keep their feet dry a little longer.

I know who he is because I’m a space nerd and follow congressional politics closely, and I like him, but I also know that most voters don’t pay attention to congressional politics, nor remember the kind of news stories he’s showed up in.

He would be a strong candidate… if he had a larger public profile with the average voter.

I like him, but the average voter doesn’t know about him. He doesn’t even rank in battle ground polling.

The average voter doesn’t know who mark kelly is.

They don’t know where he stands.

They know where AOC stands.

Of the commonly proposed candidates for 2028, she routinely preforms best in polling in battleground states.

She’s the only federal level Democrat with any sort of broad public support.

No one else is note worthy or generally liked.

She is literally the only option. Anyone else is risking mass voter apathy and a voter turn out flop in an election that should be a slam dunk.

If you’re going to vote in the dem primaries, don’t fucking vote based on who “is most electable”, vote for who you want to win. Choosing the candidate that “is the most electable” keeps losing elections, because that crown keeps getting chosen by corporate owned media who just anoint that tittle to the most corporate friendly candidate, and voters don’t like corporate friendly candidates.

The most electable candidate is one who excites people, no one else even considered for running excites anyone except for corporate lobbyists.

Bush, Clinton, bush, Regan, Ford, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge, Wilson, McKinley.

The majority of US presidents between 1900 and 2000 never spent time as senators, most in no foreign policy position what so ever. Most didn’t even serve time in an elected federal office. Even less exposure to foreign policy in a governor position than a house rep.

Why is it different here? Who would you suggest, who has been “in the senate” or some other role more exposed to foreign policy? The other potential candidates that have even close to her level of public support have even less foreign policy experience.

This is absurd, it is nonsense, any excuse to discredit the only candidate who has real public support, not just a bunch of corporate funded think pieces.

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Tax unrealized gains

“Oh, but that’s not real money, they’d have to sell their assets to get the cash to pay those taxes, thus diminishing the value of the assets.”

Oh, so the value of the assets is over valued then? So them taking out loans with those assets as the collateral is fundamentally allowing them to take out more money from the financial system than they are realistically due? Damn, tax their fucking loans against their assets as well.

“NOOO! That’s not fair! Then they’re paying a higher tax rate than specified by the law!”

Crazy how that works, crazy how tax rates actually payed can be different from those specified in the laws. Hey did you know that Warren Buffet pays effectively a lower tax rate than his laundry lady, being stated as unjust by himself. Crazy how right now people working for wages get taxed way more than people working for asset valuations.

… shut!

the leadership at a lot of companies have a very poor read on public sentiment, kind of strange given how much data they collect and how much they like to talk about how good they are at using that data.

And a lot of high level leadership at collages run in the same circles are executives at big companies. These speech events are sort of a benefit for both sides, the leadership at the collage gets to advertise what a good job they’re doing that they were able to get someone so influential to speak, and the speaker gets a sudo-academic platform to state their ideas and an ego boost from the huge in person captive audience.

A lot of them just kind of write off the discontent they see as “a vocal minority”, so when mass confronted with actual public sentiment, i do think it kind of blind sides them.

I think, she has a very small set of sincerely held beliefs, one of them being that the US should completely disengage from all foreign entanglements.

I think that she tried to seek opportunities to gain influence and power in the Democratic Party to enforce those goals, she was disillusioned and saw no route for her self there, so she pivoted to maga because it looked easier to advance to a position of power within. She was willing to say and do anything to get that position where she could pursue her deeply held belief, and she got there, and found that by the very nature of the easy power, she had completely given up any autonomy to act upon her beliefs.

Now, it’s pretty clear that this is not the beginning of a political movement she can harness, but the death of one that used her, she’s stepping away to not be associated with the worse to come. Maybe she’ll be able to salvage a career of some sort, but really, the best she can hope for is not be noted in history text books as a key player in the clusterfuck coming.

So, it’s not just benzene but a whole cocktail of aromatics (carbon molecules with rings in them) in addition to the ethane which is used to make poly ethylene plastic.

To answer your question, no, they never alter production for the sake of making more plastic, rather changes in production are driven by the availability of certain types of crude oil (heavy vs light, sweet vs sour) and demand for certain types of fuel. These changes result In more or less production of plastic precursors as a side effect.

Demand for plastic is almost entirely driven by the availability of the precursors, more supply means a lower price, means more uses for plastic become cost effective and displace other materials. They make far more money selling fuels than they do selling plastics. The margins on fuels are much higher as plastic requires additional inputs, additional manufacturing/processing, and additional marketing to be sold.

The fuel sales are effectively subsidizing the cost of plastic, as it would not be cost effective to produce on its own. Other, cheaper, and easier to manufacture materials would displace its uses if it wasn’t already being produced as a byproduct of fuel.

Actually it was a response to local governments attempting to ban plastic packaging. You know, because they were the ones who had to pay for disposing of it.

Glass bottles of milk or soda got picked up and re-used by the companies that sold stuff in them, metal cans got bought up for use as scrap metal. Municipal garbage only had to deal with stuff like wood, paper, cardboard, and food scraps; stuff that rotted and broke down over time. Plastic though, well, it didn’t break down, it filled up the dumps, and suddenly towns had to constantly be digging new dumps. This was expensive and a bunch of local governments started banning the use of single use plastic packaging. Oil/plastic lobbyists went to state governments and got them to ban the local bans.

Of course this was going to be unpopular, so they also spent a bunch of money funding PR blitz’s to convince everyone plastic recycling was viable, and that it was actually the responsibility of average consumers and municipalities to implement it. And now local governments are burdened with the cost of dealing with all the waste generated by oil and plastic companies.

And in real life, the shredder is plastic packaging and junk that everyone else has to dispose of when they’re done with it. Not the oil companies problem, now it’s the responsibility of local municipal governments. Your tax dollars subsidizing the disposal of oil company byproducts.