Yes, but bikes don’t need as much infrastructure, because bikes are typically used for shorter trips, and they are much smaller and lighter. Buses transport many more people than passenger cars, so they can transport more people using the same, or less, infrastructure.

I don’t expect every house to have its own train stop, I expect people to live much more closely together. Cars really are a necessity when everyone is very spread out, but, again, the more spread out everyone is, the more infrastructure must be built and maintained. You think it would be ridiculous for every house to have its own train stop, but you don’t think it’s ridiculous for every house to have a road built to connect it to everything else, regardless of where that house is. The truth is, neither is cost effective or efficient.

Reading through these comments I’m realizing a lot of the people who are advocating for cars, because they offer greater flexibility and autonomy, aren’t taking one critical thing into consideration: cars are useless without roads, and other necessary car infrastructure. You can’t use a car to get from your home to your work without someone first paving a road between them. So, if we’re going to have to build and maintain transportation infrastructure regardless, why not build infrastructure that will facilitate moving as many people from one place to another as efficiently as possible?

I did it just to piss you off. Looks like it worked.

Just one Great Man to another. You see, we “normals” need to just shut up and get out of the way of these great men. They’ll figure out what’s best for us all, like a caring father. They are superior to us, after all. They’re like Mr. Incredible, and we’re just some nameless civilian in need of rescue.

/s

One theory is that a global shift to cleaner shipping fuels in 2020 accelerated warming by reducing sulphur emissions that make clouds more mirror-like and reflective of sunlight.

Paradoxically, we might be accelerating warming by burning less sulphur emitting fuels. Clean the air, heat up faster. It’s still a matter of debate, however, now much the reduction in sulphur emissions is causing the current accelerated warming. It’s entirely possible there are other factors at play, as well. That’s not going to stop people from advocating for geoengineering, though. Pump more sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, cool the planet. I don’t know, I suppose.

Too much oil lowers prices and burns up profitability, even though it might make consumers happy. American shale firms are already pumping historic amounts of oil. And there’s a supply glut in the global market.

Exactly, and I’m betting that glut is a result of one of two factors (or a combination of the two): either oil producers thought there would be a higher demand than there actually is and/or they were incentivized to over produce, probably through government subsidies, of one kind or another.

Musk - who frequently champions his commitment to free speech - shared a post on X containing the comments, and stated: “they have broken the law”.

Yeah, he doesn’t give a rats ass about the law. Or, more specifically, he only cares about the laws that protect him, but he doesn’t give a rats ass about the laws that are meant to protect others, often from people like him.

A lot of Americans voted for Trump because they were hoping he would be able to bring prices down. Cheaper oil could help with that. Who doesn’t want to pay less at the pump? But, also, because petroleum based fuels and other products are ubiquitous along essentially every supply chain, it could help bring down other prices, as well. I don’t think it would help that much, though. It might bring down costs for producers a little (or maybe a lot, depending on the industry), but there’s no guarantee those cost savings are going to be passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices. Most producers would just pocket the savings. And why shouldn’t they? Businesses exist to make the highest possible profit for their owners.

To even get cheaper oil, though, oil producers would need to over produce. They’d need to drive down the price of their own product. Why would they do that? Why would oil producers choose to reduce their own profits? That doesn’t make any sense. Plus, as more and more oil is pumped out of the ground, what remains is harder and more costly to extract. So, it costs more to extract a barrel of oil than it used to, and that means that oil producers have to sell each barrel of oil for a higher price to cover the higher costs of extraction. Drop the price of a barrel of oil too much, and it no longer becomes cost effective for oil producers to extract oil from the ground. The price of oil has to stay over a certain threshold for continued oil extraction to even be financially viable.

For prices to come down, demand would have to come down, and that would likely lead to a recession. For prices to come down significantly, it would probably require a significant recession. That’s it, that’s how you bring prices down. So, pick your poison: higher prices or recession.

A recent claim that DeepSeek trained its latest model for just $6 million has fueled much of the hype. However, this figure refers only to a portion of the total training cost— specifically, the GPU time required for pre-training.

How much have other companies spent just on pre-training? If that figure is just for pre-training, it would be useful to know what current industry leaders have spent, to make an apples to apples comparison.

It does not account for research, model refinement, data processing, or overall infrastructure expenses. In reality, DeepSeek has spent well over $500 million on AI development since its inception.

But later in the article they quote Elon Musk, saying “if you want to be competitive in AI, you have to spend billions per year,” but $500 million is significantly less than “billions.” And that’s since its inception, which was about 18 months ago. So, that’s less than half a billion dollars, per year. That’s much, much less than “billions per year.”

Also, the title says that DeepSeek spent “$1.6 billion,” but further on in the article they say “well over $500 million.” $1.6 billion is “well over $500 million,” but conventionally you wouldn’t phrase it like that if the amount was that much higher (over 3x) than $500 million. That leads me to believe the amount DeepSeek spent on AI development is much closer to $500 million than $1.6 billion. Apparently, that $1.6 billion figure includes costs not associated with AI development.

Very true.

[S]o far markets have shrugged Trump’s tariff threat off, apparently in the belief that he won’t follow through.

I believe that the only thing that might dissuade him from destructive policies would be a severely adverse market reaction which means that the lack of such a reaction, based on the belief that he won’t really do it, greatly increases the probability that he really will.

He’s doing it, and investors don’t seem to care, at least not that much. I certainly don’t think their reaction could be considered “severely adverse,” at least not so far. This seems to contradict Krugman’s assertion that the lack of severe market reaction to Trump’s tariffs, thus far, is a result of investors believing Trump won’t follow through. He’s following through, they’re not overly concerned about it.

Ok, so why aren’t they more concerned? My guess is it’s because they don’t necessarily believe, as Krugman does, that Trump’s tariffs will cause “major damage.” Are they right, or is Krugman right? Only time will tell, but I’m guessing investors will have to actually see this major damage before they believe it. I don’t think we’re going to see a severe market reaction in anticipation of the major damage Trump’s tariffs are supposed to cause, we will get a severe reaction from investors only when there is major damage for them to react to.

My fellow Americans: you wanted this shit. Wallow in it, you fucking idiots.

Nvidia doesn’t give a shit about gamers anymore…Their bread and butter now is AI, and large scale machine learning. Where businesses are buying thousands of cards at a time.

I’m just quoting this for emphasis.

I don’t think that’s accurate. Science does rely on repeatable experimentation, but if an experiment fails to verify your hypothesis, you either change the experiment or change your hypothesis.

At least not from the Federal government.

How does that saying go? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results?

but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways.

In what ways? I have a feeling his idea of what would be incredible for this country, and mine, are very, very different.

Their argument seems to come down to: bubbles aren’t always so bad because at least some of what comes out of the chaotic mania can have value for society, perhaps even greater value than the amount of money lost by investors when the bubble pops.

Is there no possible way to innovate and create value other than for greedy people who want to get rich quick to throw a lot of money into a speculative frenzy blender and hope that something useful comes out of it?

Do the Trump dipshits realize they’re just renaming it after the continent? The continent that Mexico is also on? There is no country named ‘America.’ There are the United States of America: a federation of semi autonomous states that are almost exclusively located on the North American continent.