It’s like a whole fucking genre.
What we call capitalism now is just reverting back to monarchism where the handful of rulers decide everything and we stop getting the market to be responsive to reality. Prepare for more absurd and random shortages as our betters play around with their toys
Companies that are essentially monopolies have greater income than most countries GDP, with government bailouts, with the Federal reserve printing money like crazy, the interest on government debt is greater than military spending.
This is monarchy wearing the skin of capitalism.
The drive towards monopoly, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over and under production and cyclical ever worsening crises are aspects of capitalism well studied and understood over a century ago.
Maybe OpenAI's RAM monopoly is what kills Electron.
2. Browser destroys apps
3. Browser creates apps
4. AI destroys browser apps
...
5. AI eats all memory
6. Forth inherits the Earth
Sam is betting that vibe coders are the future.
Whoever wins, we lose.
Water tomorrow
This is the natural consequence of letting individual psychos control more money than most world economies.
If the problem is that these companies are creating an externality by straining the local water supply, then maybe we should simply tax water more where appropriate? I don't think any sort of shame will be effective.
For the past decade water has been mismanaged in inefficient farming practices, like bad irrigation practices or production of alfalfa to feed foreign livestock. We also waste a ton of water on our big dumb lawns. "cooling datacenters" doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
desalination isn’t just expensive, it’s existentially costly in terms of energy consumption, and I don’t see any dyson spheres in production.
It costs approx 3kwh of energy to desalinate one cubic meter of water.