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This is your reminder that for the past 40 years the price of consumer electronics underwent roughly 10% compound *deflation* year by year.
An entry level Android or iPhone is every non-shooty-bang-or-transportation James Bond gadget rolled into one for the inflation-adjusted cost of a 35mm film SLR or a Commodore 64 back in 1984.
It's also much more powerful than every supercomputer on the planet back then, in combination.
And it's in your pocket.
https://canada.masto.host/@graydon/113579152811903958
@graydon We're heading towards the buffers at the end of the track wrt. Moore's Law and the rentiers who invested in the VLSI industry still want the rate of profit they've become accustomed to, even though the cost of computation has crashed so low nobody canfigure out anything useful to do with it.
So we get compute-intensive hype bubbles designed to fleece investors: cryptocurrency, LLMs, VR/AR, quantum computing (the latter is more compute-R&D-intensive, but follows the pattern).
@Stinson_108 @whvholst @cstross "Those people look funny."
Fascism is a conscious choice to prefer as much violence as necessary—an embrace of nihilistic destruction—in preference to meaningful change. (meaningful = someone loses relative social status) You can't immigrate your way out because immigration upsets incumbency.
@Stinson_108 @whvholst @cstross The broligarchs are faced with the end of the gold rush, not being able to produce those rates of return, and the deep incumbency they don't understand and can't touch. (= where the food comes from). Everybody joining in from "are we poor now?" over the price of eggs ought to be willing to tack broligarch hide to the speaker's chair to get the gini coefficient down, but fearing their neighbours is safer and has much more social support.
@Stinson_108 @whvholst @cstross Nobody is doing quantified analysis because that tells you this is a larger crisis than has previously occurred and we need unity and a complete lack of anything that's ever heard of a profit motive to get through it, should we in fact get through it.
It's pretty easy to find something, anything, more emotionally appealing than that; it's why the main grifts are "when God kills you first it won't hurt" and "you can murder your fears".
#FBPE 