> Is there an active, bloody conflict occurring due to any of those
The Congolese Civil War and the ongoing M23/Rwanda-led War [0], as well as the Myanmar Civil War [1]. Even the Russian Invasion of Ukraine has a critical minerals component [2] as does the ongoing Central African Republic Civil War [3][4] and the Oromo insurgency within the Ethiopian Civil War [5].
This does not mean that we shouldn't invest in building renewable and battery capacity (we in fact need to further enhance capacity), but we need to recognize that hard power trumps soft power in a multipolar world.
Renewable power doesn't imply pacifism. It is powered by critical minerals that all regional powers are rushing to control either with ballots [6], bribes [7], or bullets.
Renewable power will be covered in blood, but less blood than will be caused by anthropogenic climate change. If we need to make deals with devils, so be it. Such is life.
It's extremely common for people to be unable to project into the future when there is a bias in the way. Anytime you see a blatant failure to look beyond the tip of their nose by a person, it's almost always due to their own biases getting in the way (ie it's irrationality, they're giving up reason in exchange for not having to challenge their own position/s).
The other side of that irrationality coin is 2D extrapolation: a thing happened (or a context is such N), so therefore I shall extrapolate it happening again (once or many times) into the future on a smooth line, so as to fit my bias.
There will be continued hyperscale AI in the datacenter for some use cases, and AI in the smartphone (or PC) for other use cases. It is guaranteed to split that way. Apple's remarkable capabilities around custom chips will enable it to continue to stay out in front in smartphones.
Your response is over the top. Oracle isn't going to fire 30,000 employees to fund anything.
That's the story for Wall Street. Oracle went on a huge run in the market, that it did not deserve, and they're going to attempt to hold on to as much of that gain as they can. Wall Street will applaud slashing jobs if you can give them a good reason for it (and sometimes with no reason at all).
Amazon, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google are producing $700+ billion per year in op income. They have nothing else to spend it on. They will continue to fund a gigantic AI build out.
It does end well eventually, just as the dotcom era build-out ended well over the following decades. It ends with continued US dominance. Yes, the dotcom era saw a crash. The build out continued.
Browsers? The US won.
Ecommerce? The US and China won.
Search? The US won. China didn't win the search war, Baidu was supposed to be a serious global challenger to Google, that was widely hailed across tech circles as a known fact - it was inevitable. Nope. Google won. And Europe never did field a competitor at all.
China didn't win the smartphone war. Apple and Google won globally. Apple has produced trillions of dollars in profit on the back of that fact.
Cloud? China didn't even come close globally. The US won without any challenge at all. Europe never showed up. But but but Hetzner.
China didn't win the GPU war. Nvidia has the market, at least for this decade. That will produce over one trillion dollars in profit in just the next five or six years.
China didn't win the AI war. It was OpenAI's ChatGPT that shocked the world and set everything in motion. Now the US has the top three models in GPT, Gemini and Claude. Europe? Not even in the running (although they'd like to believe they are).
This all ends with the US remaining on top, with China as its only real peer.
Europe? There is no Europe in the equation, just as there wasn't for cloud or mobile apps or smartphones or personal computing.
The death merchants need a new enemy to justify their existence otherwise we might start cooperating with China where both countries could prosper with massive clean energy infrastructure.
These days Nvidia has more money than it knows what to do with. They could certainly push $5b+ into each company annually and never miss it. They're tracking toward an astounding $200b in operating income (maybe over the next four quarters if the music doesn't suddenly stop).
Why would paying dividends not be like throwing money away for Nvidia, considering the alternative is to reinvest it into Nvidia's R&D, hiring & training, etc. Investors are already happily making money on NVDA stock appreciation, so what more would they gain from paying dividends?
It did not raise $110 billion. According to their own SEC filings $35 billion of Amazon’s funding is contingent on “(i) OpenAI meeting specified milestones, and (ii) OpenAI directly or indirectly consummating an initial public offering or direct listing of equity securities in the United States”
> I can hardly believe that this is legal. They’re basically committing money that doesn’t exist just yet.
What do you mean "just yet" :-)
I don't really know how likely it is that the money being committed will actually exist when the time comes (Softbank's commitment didn't exist, they had to sell off assets and rope in other investors to meet their commitments).
Maybe it is very likely to exist, but, really, who knows?
IOW, your statement would be equally true by ending the sentence at the word "exist".
Vault cash are actual bills in vaults. It doesn't even include the bills in your wallet or under your mattress.
It's small because few people go to the bank to withdraw a suitcase of $100 bills, it's a weird time series to pull up because it's not really indicative of anything outside of narrow interests for regulators and the mint - it's probably some conspiracy theory trope from crypto bros or something.
Most money exists purely in electronic form these days.
Monetary base [0] which includes the digital money banks have on deposit at the Fed, is over $5 trillion, and even that is tiny compared to M1 [1] which includes the kinds of things backing your money market account, which is around $19T.
When money is invested, they're going to wire it, not pull up with wheelbarrows full of bills.
GP is wrong though, vault cash is the incorrect time series for that.
GP should have used Monetary Base if they wanted to consider purely electronic cash (that is not a result of any fractional reserve stuff at all), which is over $5T disproving their point.
That's what I was referring to. They're committing money they don't have in any monetary form at all. They're just promising they'll have it when it comes due. This is kind of like MLM.
You say that like the typical 18 year old has any idea what they're doing when it comes to proper encryption and communication safety. That is never going to be the case.
It's a communication channel attached to the most popular social network for young people. Obviously they're going to use it a lot. They use it for the extreme convenience.
Nobody was desperate to invade North Korea prior to their acquisition of nukes. It's a horrific war field and combat prospect. Iraq and Afghanistan were each a cakewalk next to going into North Korea (again). North Korea was safe as they were.
The primary threat to Gaddafi over time was internal, nukes would not have protected him. What was he going to do, nuke his own territory? The same was true for Assad.
The primary threat to Iran's regime is internal. Nobody is invading Iran. It's a gigantic country with 93 million people. It can't be done and it's universally understood. Trump won't even speculate about it, even he knows it can't be done. What would nukes do to protect Iran's regime? Are they going to nuke their own people? Are they going to nuke Israel and US bases if the US bombs them?
So let me get this straight: the US bombs Iran, Iran nukes Israel and some US bases, maybe even a regional foe - then Iran gets obliterated.
That's not what would happen in reality at all. Don't take my word for it, ask Pakistan: the US threatened to bomb them [0] - despite their possession of nukes - after 9/11 if they didn't cooperate. Why would the US do that? Because the US knows that MAD doesn't work like the online armchair crowd thinks it does.
"The primary threat to Gaddafi over time was internal, nukes would not have protected him. What was he going to do, nuke his own territory? The same was true for Assad."
Have you checked, how many outside interventions both countries had and still have?
Labelling this as "internal" is pretty missleading. If both dictators would have had nuclear weapons ready to launch, no foreign bomber would have dared going in against the regime.
> That's not what would happen in reality at all. Don't take my word for it, ask Pakistan: the US threatened to bomb them [0] - despite their possession of nukes - after 9/11 if they didn't cooperate. Why would the US do that? Because the US knows that MAD doesn't work like the online armchair crowd thinks it does.
That isn't a MAD situation.
Pakistan has nukes but they can't launch them on the US.
That's an exaggeration. Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them. They grew up using Chromebooks or laptops in school, constantly interacting with the local file systems, uploading files to Instagram and TikTok from the file systems on their smartphones, browsing their phones for files constantly. They know what a file is, they use & manage files more than any other generation prior.
No other prior generation comes close.
Compare them to people growing up in the 1980s. The average person at that time was overwhelmingly oblivious to computing very broadly, their grasp of a "file" as a concept would have been close to non-existent. That was just 40 years ago.
In the mid 1980s a mere 10% of US households had home computers. And that was a high mark globally, it was drastically lower in nearly every other country (closer to zero in eg China, India at that time). The number of people routinely using office PCs was still extremely low.
Today young people have a computer in their hand for hours each day, and they knowingly manage files throughout the day.
I use lights every day, but I know way less about electricity than my grandparents, two of whom who could remember when their town was electrified as children and who therefore treated it as the marvel it truly is. And also because we've worked out a ton of bugs in electricity and it often just works.
My kids will know way less about filesystems than I do, because I had to learn DOS commands to navigate around the operating system if I wanted to play computer games, which led to a lifelong interest in how computers actually work at a level they can (and, so far, do) happily ignore.
You don’t upload a “file” in a “folder” to TikTok. You upload a “video” from your “library”. Consumers have been conditioned to stop thinking about files especially when it comes to media since iTunes and the iPod in 2001.
As a technical person, who only ever used Android, I have no idea how files really work on my phone. I even used adb a few times but still. From my PoV there are no "files", just photos, videos, screenshots, downloads, application data, applications and system data - all completely different kinds of data.
In my files app i see "downloads" "images", "videos", "apps", "starred", "safe folder". In "images" i see pictures tagged "downloads", "camera", "DCIM", "screenshots" and one odd "2024-12-03_description_here" that I clearly names myself but don't remember doing that.
I have no clue how that maps to a physical phone filesystem, even though I know it's there. I'm sure teenagers don't know that too.
The Files app cannot access images in the Photos app or music in the Music app. The only way to add music to the Music app is to copy the files onto the iPhone from a computer. You can however install VLC player and copy the files into the VLC folder. I guess VLC player is more trustworthy than Apple Music considering it's less isolated. Or Apple really wants you to pay the Music subscription, who knows. Want to give another app access to these files? You'll have to duplicate them, using up more storage space.
I get that it's supposedly about security, but this is not the only secure way. It is however the most convenient secure way for Apple, as now the only simple method of backing up and syncing files through all those isolated containers is iCloud.
Is that typical? I've seen complaints about lack of root access, and complaints that apps don't work with files in folders, but I haven't really seem them conflated the way you're describing.
> They grew up using Chromebooks … in school, constantly interacting with the local file systems
While it is possible to interact with the local file system on a school Chromebook, it’s certainly not the default. School interactions with Chromebooks seem to consist of logging with highly secure passwords like “strawberry” and using Google Docs. And playing games with heavy PvP components and paid DLC (paid by parents whose kids beg for it, not by schools) that call themselves “educational” because they interject math problems needed to use those juicy spells, make no effort whatsoever to teach anything, but produce a nicely formatted report correlating scores to numbered elements of the Common Core standards.
There may be some demographic groups located between people who were young during the 1980s and people who are young during the 2020s, time periods which are 40 years apart.
Maybe they do more intuitively think of things as virtual objects, but it seems like the issue is they don't have a deeper understanding of how the mechanisms behind the abstractions work and can easily get fooled into accepting terms they wouldn't if they properly understood.
> easily get fooled into accepting terms they wouldn't if they properly understood.
And easily get sold add-on services. How many people hit the 5GB iCloud limit for backups and just pay without stopping to think that it might be possible to do local backups to your computer and you don't really have to pay for extra storage?
Just hit them with the scary language "You are at risk of losing your photos forever if you don't pay!" because that concept of "Oh, photos are just files in a directory and I can copy those anywhere I want" doesn't exist. To many, those photos are part of the gallery app, not a separate file from it and since that app only runs on the phone, surely it must not be possible to copy them anywhere unless I pay for the storage.
> Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them. They grew up using Chromebooks or laptops in school, constantly interacting with the local file systems, uploading files to Instagram and TikTok from the file systems on their smartphones, browsing their phones for files constantly. They know what a file is, they use & manage files more than any other generation prior.
This argument is like saying you understand nutrition because you eat food every day and haven't died yet.
> They know what a file is, they use & manage files more than any other generation prior.
Unfortunately, they don't.
They might have had a computer in their hand for hours each day, but they barely know anything about it. The ones who do tend to be those who grew up playing on PC, as opposed to console or mobile, because the latter - despite falling under the "digital natives" aegis - are really shockingly ignorant of even basic concepts.
> drastically greater understanding of what a file
No, they do not. First, simply using something does not mean you understand it at all. Secondly, because the devices they've become the most accustomed to work very hard to hide all those details from the user.
And yet, it's the generation that struggles the most with managing files on their work laptops and on SMB shares.
They know app silos, not file system hierarchy. Ask a teenager where a file is on their phone and the will tell you the name of an app. Ask them how to copy it somewhere else, and they'll use the share sheet and send it to another app.
To be fair, at least Android and presumably iOS grant apps by default no access to your files in modern versions.
The only way to get, e. G., an attachment downloaded via Thunderbird to a PC or another app is the share dialogue. A user does not access to the isolated app storage by default on an unrooted Android phone. For better or worse the young user is actually making the right choice here for their platform.
(This is also why making a backup of an Android phone is a nightmare when you aren't using a first party option. ADB is sometimes able to bypass it)
True, it's all abstracted away and you don't even get access, but that's part of the problem. We (the industry) are teaching people that proprietary formats inside of app silos are the only way to store your data, making the default state being no control over your own stuff.
Note taking apps are a prime example of this, using a proprietary localdb for notes, inside of app storage you can't access, forcing you to transact with your own data exclusively through the app (and whatever subscriptions or upcharges that come with it). We've trained out the idea that these could just be local text files in a directory you can access and do with what you want.
I've watched discussions around open file formats fade away into obscurity along with the rise of mobile, and now we have to fight on whether we should be so graciously allowed to install software on the devices we own or not.
Not everyone needs to be a computer science student, but some basic level of curiosity or education around how tech works should be required in school, at the very least a warning message of "Your data isn't safe if it's not under your control."
> We've trained out the idea that these could just be local text files in a directory you can access and do with what you want.
But have you considered that a meaningful number of users actually want functionality that plain text simply can’t provide?
I understand files and file systems, I’ve worked in IT for decades, mostly in open source. I still choose a non plaintext note solution because it delivers capabilities that plain text cannot, especially across devices.
As long as the data can be exported to open formats, why would I voluntarily limit the value and functionality my tools can provide?
That's exactly the problem. Digital natives have, by and large, grown up with computing devices which try their best to be the opposite of general-purpose: their skills are siloed to the few apps they rely on, and e.g. files, keyboard shortcuts, the command prompt are not part of the "API" they learned.
I mean on iOS you do have a raw home storage path you can save arbitrary binary data stuff to, although Apple generally just has the option of "Save to Files"--but you have at least some basic folder structure there you can use and have full access to.
It's just not commonly used for the reason the other person mentioned (share buttons between apps that are file type aware)
That's also a stereotype. Gen Z (born 1997 to 2012) is roughly 2 billion people. Among them are the technorati, and the tech literate. The influencers and the influenced. It's fair to compare what was available to them growing up, vs yourself (I learned to program before there was Google), but it's hard to say things that are going to be universally true across that many humans that are interesting. Most of them will have two arms and two legs but will most be able to navigate /etc/systemd/user/? Can't say.
> Young people on average have grown up with drastically greater understanding of what a file is than any other generation that has come before them.
I totally disagree!!!
Yes, everyone works with computer, phone, tablet, whatever, nowdays!
But does generation z "knows" about what a computer is?
Absolutely not!!!
While tech has advanced and graduated IT personal know more than previous generations (obviously!), all the rest, while they do know how to do their jobs, they know nothing about computers!!! They are pretty much like everyone else that didn't know what a computer was in generations x and previous!!!
However, contrary to previous generations, because they do interact with the tech, they represent a higher security risc for them and for others!
... Because they know nothing about it!!!
It's like giving a box of matches to a neanderthal in the middle of the woods...
Almost everyone in the "Gen x and previous" that interacted with the tech, did know what they were doing (past the initial learning phase)!!!
I agree, but I'd push that to anyone after millennials rather than gen x. I was born in '87 (Millennial) and our generation was the last one to bridge the analog->digital divide, having grew up in both worlds, I think it gave us a kind of unique understanding and relationship with tech that younger folks don't have.
It's people born after 1995 that are completely unprepared! Worst: they almost all tend to think they are prepared and that they even know more about it than previous gens (and because tech has evolved they actually accomplish more, but unfortunately they understand a LOT LESS about the underlyings of it!!! Naturally, there are exceptions! Few, however!)
I was in kind of a hurry and messed it up!!! (however, I do tend to think of Y as a transitional generation where late borns - think 92 or after - won't actually remember much of theirs "last analog generation")
So, I do agree with you!
I've tried to edit it but I'm no longer allowed to!
Thank you for pointing out my mistake!
Also, I'm kind of amazed you do remember the analog days! Being born in 87 makes you aware of it around 92 or 93! Past 95 things start to flip and after 00 all hell broke loose (what's analog again?!)!
Most people don't old up much to their 13yo memories! Keep that up! It really makes a difference "today"!
Still it does depend where you live in! This "generations" timeline work well in US cities! But if you change country or if you don't live in a city that timeline doesn't hold up that well! Tech arrives latter and the ways of life get altered later!
That's why many people tend to identify more with the previous generations! Specially if you're born on a generation edge!
Yeah... scientists try to put all in one simple bag but the truth ain't that simple!
> Yeah, I have a particular rant about this with respect to older generations believing "kids these days know computers." [...] they mistake confidence for competence, and the younger consumers are more confident poking around because they grew up with superior idiot-proofing. The better results are because they dare to fiddle until it works, not because they know what's wrong.
Nothing has changed in decades regarding this. People just like to pretend something new is happening, because they're extremely desperate to proclaim a fundamental turning / ending of the US (which is why every single event brings out those claims: this time is different! America will never recover from this! etc).
US tech companies were previously forced into compliance with PRISM or threatened with destruction (see: escalating fines to infinity against Yahoo, forcing their eventual compliance).
You know what's new? This administration is doing out in the open what used to go on quietly.
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