It's a step, but trying to limit how money itself is spent will always create loopholes your opponent has better lawyers than you to exploit. Imho the better way to discipline billionaires would be to change tax code such that borrowing money against securities or anything like it (such as stock) is counted as realizing their value, which would trigger capital gains tax obligations.

It'd have somewhat similar effects to a wealth tax with way less administrative load for the state. The only exception I would grant is when you're buying a single-person/single-family residential property you're going to be living in yourself.

I'm only aware of comprehensive data for the USA, but see historical ceo-to-worker compensation. Note the extreme compensation explosion after the year 1994, which is shortly after the much more comprehensive executive compensation reporting rules were implemented (1992-1993).

Now, correlation isn't causation, but it would be a hell of a coincidence. Imho anyone who argues for salary ranges not being disclosed is trying to suppress wages. Whether deliberately or through ignorance.

Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.

People have tried and went out of business, because users predominantly do not want to pay for something they could (supposedly) get for free, doubly so if the paid version isn't even significantly better. It sounds nice, but it hasn't been true for the last 20 years or so.

The current funding model didn't come out of nowhere, it's the consequence of user behavior. Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I'm in a tiny minority with that opinion.

Eventually, yes. But many people don't like hearing that the vast majority of them, the users, didn't want to pay for the operating costs of a global search engine when the web got popular. Neither as customers of a company, nor via government spending as a public service, and definitely not through donations.

Hence, given the economic system we live in, the people running search engines had to find some means of funding, which turned out to be selling their users' data and serving them ads. Once they had gone down that path the rest became more or less inevitable.

Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.

True, but imho the last great game BioWare made was Mass Effect 2. ~16 years ago.

A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center.

We don't need them even without local inference. There was already more than enough total global compute for the most valuable use cases of LLMs (research, development, admin). The datacenter build-up is almost entirely fueled by utterly unrealistic expectations of future capabilities. Before and now the case for local inference is a matter of access, not capacity.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.

Utilitarianism like this is a disease. By the same logic, it's inefficient that we allow other species of animals to exist and consume usable energy. Hell, why stop at other species? It's inefficient to allow humans to exist - let's kill all humans!

Now, I know that's not what he said, the point was to show that when someone uses utilitarianism as a serious argument, they are no longer worth listening to.

Like you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,

The supply is only constrained because you keep hoarding more than you need. Maybe it's time for some communization? So communities where data centers are built get most if not all of the profits from it?

He never was a manager for BlackRock - nobody sane would give him operative control over anything they value. He had a "we pay you for political access, don't touch anything" cushy position as the chairmen of their supervisory board.

That part i understood but again why the pushback?

The German pushback stems imho from Merz belonging to the CDU, whose political core can be summed up as

• Almost completely blind worship of the USA and
• Class warfare against the working class.

In their mind they just need to wait out the Orange Man and then most things can just go back to how they were before. They don't want to make Him angry in the meantime, which the "associate member" label would certainly lead to.

EDIT: Ursula von der Leyen is imho actually pretty far removed from her party's stance on this.

The most effective form of protest workers have against owners requires no violence at all: It's strikes, ideally a general strike. The economic damages from even one week of half of the country's workers refusing to work would force the wealthiest permille to make concessions.

The principal problem people in the USA have is that your hyperindividualism prevents you from developing a class consciousness with your fellow workers. Most of you are not joining unions to make them strong for collective bargaining, not standing in local elections against establishment candidates, not joining/creating local mutual self-help groups, and so on.

Yes, thanks for asking. Did you?

The Budapest Memoranda do not contain "If someone else (e.g. Russia) attacks you, we will deploy our own military assets against them to defend you", which would be the requirement for the "the USA agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia in exchange for them giving up their nukes" claim.

I'm not a fan of the USA's foreign policy, but there's no need to claim they promised something they did not.

So the US agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia of they gave up their nukes

No, the USA never agreed to protect Ukraine - it was an atrocious deal for the latter.

This not being in a nuclear umbrella is the reason why Russia was willing to risk invading them.