I think it’s very likely SVB gets absorbed by a larger bank and uninsured depositors get made whole. It’s not guaranteed but usually banks go into receivership on a Friday and by Monday a larger bank has snatched them up. SVB’s collapse looks like a traditional bank run and it’s balance sheet is apparently super conservative. You never know. They could find out something awful this weekend. But the problem (at least as I understand it) was basically that it didn’t have a diversified depositor base and because interest rates have rose, couldn’t sell their bond assets quickly, not that they had risky investments and there’s no valuable assets.

The other scenario is that they can’t find an immediate buyer for all their assets/liabilities and the bank is basically wound down over time. The uninsured depositors might even get 100% back in that scenario but it’ll take time and probably won’t be 100%. It seems very likely there will be buyers, though. It wouldn’t have been insolvent as a division of a larger bank.

I guess a third option is shenanigans. We don’t know what the FDIC is learning this weekend. Shenanigans can always be afoot but there’s no indication the bank president used deposits for NFTs or something else dumb and illegal.

Typical American using a car when he could have walked. He probably flew there instead of taking a train even though you can literally see the moon from his house.

It seems silly to only have two legs when you can add a third for stability and balance. Humanoid robots will never be as safe as Kangarooid roobots, assuming the roobots don’t have boxing gloves on, anyway. Humans are terribly designed.

Another option might be tank treads. That worked well in Basewars for NES.

Does anyone know how large these would be compared to a civilian energy reactor? When these come up, there’s always a debate about the risk of a catastrophic failure spewing radioactive material in unpredictable ways. But I’ve never been clear on what the scope of the disaster would be. Is it way more radioactive material or far less (and even that spread more thinly)? How uninhabitable is how much area for how long from a nuclear disaster on the way to space?

A worse case disaster, I mean. It sounds like for a Mars trip, we wouldn’t be using these engines until far enough in space. But let’s say this tech becomes routine. Maybe the Congressman for wherever these engines get made has a meeting with the contractor’s lobbyist and decides NASA needs to buy more engines. And then 💥kaboom💥.

Globalization largely did that but neoliberalism was the driving ideology of the era. Not every city is the same by any means but there was a time when imported products were more expensive due to protectionism. Protectionism is mostly bad for economies so there was plenty of reason to have free trade agreements. But it also meant that in the developed world, a lot of factories moved to cheaper countries and those products were then exported everywhere.

So, it was more efficient. A lot of products got cheaper and became available to people for the first time. But it also meant a place like Manhattan started to feel like the downtown of every global city. Local businesses found it harder to compete to with multinational companies with global supply chains and local stores got replaced by huge chain stores.

It also meant many places that used to have manufacturing became rust belts. Essentially, products and money could move across borders freely but workers could not (and still can’t). So, manufacturers moved plants to places where labor was cheap and/or workers had fewer rights. Unions in America severely declined. Prices also fell — in some cases by a huge amount — so for most people, it was worth it. But a lot of cities (and people in them) never recovered.

When free trade agreements are being passed, the argument in favor is usually that we’ll all be better off. But the economic theory arguing that is basically that we all can be better off if the winners from the change are basically taxed to compensate the losers. Not necessarily forever or with cash transfers but enough that there’s an easy transition. But that requires more left wing policies and neoliberalism rejected that. Bill Clinton’s whole thing was being a centrist who moved Democrats to the right (in response to Democrats losing elections in the 80’s, to be clear, but it still happened). So, instead, people in globalized industries usually just lost their jobs and were largely left to fend for themselves. People were told to “learn to code” so often without any help to do so that it’s become a meme anytime someone loses a job to say “learn to code” sarcastically.

To reiterate: free trade agreements make most people better off. If you didn’t work in a factory that moved, you got cheaper stuff. Lots of people got super rich and lots more people worked for expanding companies or in newly in-demand fields and did fine. But the downsides were real and largely dismissed and ignored by neoliberals for ideological reasons. (and most conservatives, obviously, but they were never advocates of workers the way left wing parties usually are).

Kleptocracy is basically government controlled by oligarchs where they steal and embezzle and give government contracts to friends.

When the Soviet Union was transitioning to capitalism, the Clinton administration sent some economic advisors like Larry Summers and Jeffrey Sachs and they pushed hard for “shock therapy,” or a rapid switch to neoliberal capitalism. It went extremely poorly and basically wrecked the Russian economy. Worse than the Great Depression. Massive rise in poverty. Everyone’s savings gone. And, since they were taking state assets and making them private all at once, a handful of well-connected men — now known as the oligarchs — were able to get control of whole industries. Corruption was rampant. Those oligarchs had obscene amounts of money and it bought them a massive amount of power in newly capitalist Russia. And they basically made Putin, a little known ex-KGB/FSB agent, the prime minister.

Then, in 1999 President Boris Yeltzin unexpectedly resigned on New Year’s Eve. Putin, as prime minister, was next in line for the Presidency. Russians were (and still are) understandably resentful of the West for fucking up their transition to capitalism. Americans usually view the end of the Cold War as a victory for freedom (and it was for parts of Europe) but Russians view it as a catastrophe that wrecked their lives. Putinism is basically a nationalist ideology that came in reaction to that era. That’s why they think it’s fine to retake Ukraine. To them, it was a part of the former strong and proud Russia that was stolen by the corrupt west.

Maybe. It’s hard to overstate how powerful America was in the 90’s and he was the president. His administration botched the former Soviet Union’s transition(s) to capitalism because they were neoliberal ideologues and thought Shock Therapy was better than gradualism (or even shock therapy but with some protections for workers and the environment). That led directly to oligarchs and Putin. His administration passed NAFTA without measures to help workers. He made the Democrats a neoliberal party. His administration allowed the Travelers and Citi merger (which basically meant the end of Glass-Steagall and all the protections that probably would have stopped the 2008 financial crisis).

Bill Clinton did a lot of good things but his administration faced a unique historical moment while the post-cold war world order was being established. He was the main neoliberal and that’s what was asked about. Neoconservatives were far worse (as the 2000s and George W Bush would show) but I think as history played out, we really learned Bill Clinton was a pretty lousy president.

I think globalization was justified but it shouldn’t have been based around neoliberalism as much as it was. Making China and the US economically dependent on each other was definitely good and made it so there’s a huge financial cost to them going to war. People now say, “But China didn’t liberalize! Wasn’t that the whole goal of engaging with them economically?” No. The goal, as it has been since WWII, was to use trade to avoid nuclear war. America wanted access to the Chinese markets to get richer. China wanted technological transfer and access to the US market to get rich. That was the deal.

The neoliberal “Washington Consensus” of the 90’s went way too far with their ideological bullshit, though. Russia became a full blown kleptocracy because of blind neoliberalism but the US and Europe have plenty of oligarchy and corruption now too. There would be pretty talk about globalization and free trade deals making everyone better off and the prosperity being shared. Spoiler alert: the prosperity was not shared. No one ever gave shit to factory workers who had their jobs outsourced but a kick in the pants.

So, we just ended up with massive inequality, multinational companies that are almost more powerful than the nation states regulating them, and all sorts of associated problems. People warned about all that at the beginning and screamed the whole time it was happening but people like Larry Summers don’t even think neoliberalism is an ideology.

So, basically, I think globalization was worth it to promote peace but we didn’t have to go with a version where oligarchs bogarted all the wealth and multinational corporations turned every global city into a shopping mall with the same stores and fast food places. We could have had shared prosperity and maybe taken it slower and protected cultural differences. But Bill Clinton was flying to pervert billionaire island to fuck 14 year olds when he was supposed to be making that part happen.

The better question is who is going to stop them? Pluto tried and look what happened. Demoted. Revealing pictures published everywhere. You think they don’t have pictures of Uranus? Think again.

I think education, creative, and social jobs will grow.

Like if AI writes basic code, you might need more educated programmers to find bugs or inefficient things in the code that the AI model made. OpenAI writes credible looking code now but it’s often got subtle mistakes a novice wouldn’t catch. So, programmers might spend more time in college to learn enough to enter the field of editing AI code. Maybe professional degrees become required (like it now for law and medicine) so more expert instructors are needed.

Another scenario where AI creates jobs is creative jobs that currently have a high cost of entry. Like camera filters and video editing software didn’t mean less jobs taking photos and producing videos. It democratized those tasks and allowed for jobs like YouTubers and influencers. Imagine AI tools make video game asset creation and coding relatively trivial and intuitive so games can be made by individuals.

And for services: the cheapest, most efficient way to exercise isn’t group classes but lots of people prefer the communal, human led experience and pay more for it. Therapists. Spa services. Hiking guides. Probably gigolos and male strippers. AI will never replace stud muffins. Any job where old people yell at you and ask for your manager. Only a human can be dehumanized.

As a child, I dreamed of a future where we could get a blood pressure reading without the burden of using Velcro and finally, today, that future is here. And the only cost for the convenience is the drop in accuracy. And money. It costs a lot more than the Velcro way. But aside from those costs, no cost.

I used to feel that way but it’s been a decade since the last important change in consumer tech. We’re in the learned helplessness phase of the digital revolution now.

Except for printers, obviously. Those only get less intuitive and reliable over time for some reason. Or any reasonably new tech. So, I’ll always happily fix those for people but if my mom asks me for help with a laptop or smartphone this Christmas and it isn’t a real issue, she better just get used to talking to chatbots.

Edit: I’m getting feedback that’s already explained by my “I’m with stupid ➡️” t-shirt. I know people can’t see my shirt through the the internet but who knows how people offended I implied some humans are willfully ignorant think the internet works?

If Meta developed it, it’ll mostly just be features from other A.I. projects that they’ll steal and repurpose to either spread propaganda, incite genocides, or ruin Instagram’s UX/UI.

Why? I’m a developer too so I’m curious what your goal is. Why are you building all that?

If I were a multi-billionaire, I’d place a $6.1 billion order for all the robots manufactured one of those years and then just be maddeningly coy about my plans for them. “Oh, I’m just into robots.” Then wait awhile and place a separate mysterious order for a bunch of laser pointers or something. Then, one for 10,000 robot-sized red berets.

It seems expensive for a joke but lightly used robots will probably go for a decent amount on eBay. And if not, I’ll have the coolest mausoleum since the Qin dynasty.

Just think of the possibilities for this tech once they make it more lifelike and go into mass production. By 2040, more legs could be humped each year than were humped in all of human history prior to this moment.

And now that Facebook added legs to the Metaverse, we may someday even see virtual robot dogs humping legs there.

I use Firefox but I don’t think Google “sells” data in the way others sell it, do they? I mean, I wouldn’t put it past them (or any firm) but it seems like the real money is in collecting the data and then not sharing it so you (and only you) can sell ads. Like, if Google knows you regularly Google tacos, they sell ad space for the “taco affinity group” to Mexican restaurants. If they just crudely sold user data, ad buyers wouldn’t necessarily have to go to Google.

That just goes for Google and a few others, obviously. Companies that aren’t targeted ad juggernauts have different incentives and probably sell data left and right. It just seems like Google and Facebook and probably the next tier (like The NY Times Company, maybe?) have an incentive to hoard data — which is its own problem — and none to share data.

I doubt Mark Zuckerberg’s vision will become a reality because Meta is, at it’s core, more of a media company (like The NY Times) than a tech company (like Intel or Apple). Having the world’s largest publishing platform and some ad tech, however impressive, doesn’t automatically make you the type of tech company that creates the platforms of the future. It’s possible to pivot to that but it seems like it would probably require a huge cultural and philosophical shift, from management on down, and it’s not clear that Meta has the ability or people in place to pull that sort of change off.

Sometimes, new ideas in tech get mocked before they become as accepted as the iPhone. It’s not impossible that Meta is just having hiccups on the way to being a great tech company. But VR isn’t a new idea and my guess is Meta is being mocked today because their their marketing is so far ahead of their talents and we get a buggy Miiverse meets Second Life (soon with legs!) and everyone just thinks it’s funny to watch a cynical, sociopathic company fail at appealing to regular humans.

That’s actually an economic fallacy. It’s called the “Luddite fallacy” after the people who resisted the Industrial Revolution. Disruptive technologies do obviously create winners and losers and the adjustments can be painful and, if painful enough, cause political instability. But people eventually find new and more productive (often thanks to new technology) jobs and society as a whole almost always ends up better off.

Not to minimize the pain of the adjustments. If I lose my career because of some new technology, I’m gonna be pissed. But it’s happened throughout human history and we haven’t run out of jobs to do yet.