Scott Adams Thread (Garfield Cartoonist)

[freebeard]

So....

Whadaya think? Should the Francophone portion of Canada be part of the next State?

I still remember when there were 48.

[redpoint5]

Scott described how he was completely against the seatbelt laws when they were first implemented, and transitioned his opinion to being in complete support of it. He uses that example to explain how most of us will prefer autonomous vehicles in the future, especially when they have been demonstrated to be much more safe than a human driver. He goes on to say that we'll be uncomfortable with the idea of human drivers mixing in with our autonomous vehicles.

That sounds about right to me, though it might take the rest of my lifetime to reach that point.

I've been listening to Peter Zeihan, mostly stuff from a decade ago to see how well his predictions have held up (he got Russian invasion and Europe's energy dependency right).

In a recent slide deck, he showed that the cost of stuff has mostly stayed below overall inflation, while human labor related items have exceeded average inflation. He mostly blames a labor shortage on that; a problem that will increase over time.



He also has a slide showing things he believes will end soon.

Originally Posted by freebeard

So....

Whadaya think? Should the Francophone portion of Canada be part of the next State?

I still remember when there were 48.

50 is a nice even number. Maybe if they merge with one of our puny states.

[freebeard]

With only the two charts to go on, I wonder.

College textbooks hand crafted?

Some Ends --- Ends as goals or completion? The Republican party ends? Low carbon [nuclear] energy ends? Russian power -- political or hydrocarbons?

Maybe if they merge with one of our puny states.

That would fix the problem in the Senate but mean 54 new members in the House. Make Greenland a State and Canada a Territory?

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

College textbooks hand crafted?

Some Ends --- Ends as goals or completion? The Republican party ends? Low carbon [nuclear] energy ends? Russian power -- political or hydrocarbons?

I started [junior] college right when textbooks could be purchased online, and used bookbyte.com for used books at a steep discount compared to the school bookstore. Seemed insane to me that every student had to buy a book for a class, when those books should just stay with the class like they had in elementary school.

Anyhow, my money would have been on Bookbyte over Amazon. Luckily I didn't have any money back then, so I didn't lose any.

Regarding 'ends', I haven't completed the lecture yet. The arrows are the topics he's going to discuss though, so we might not hear the theory on the end of the Republican party. He said Biden would win POTUS and it wouldn't be close, so...

That would fix the problem in the Senate but mean 54 new members in the House. Make Greenland a State and Canada a Territory?

Territory would be fine. I'd rather let the Canadians run their own whacky experiments on their dime, not ours. They're aspects of their culture that are appealing, but then those aspects manifest by having a much smaller population that is more homogenous, not from having better institutions.

EDIT: Toward the end of the lecture, Peter says Trump will win 12 states, tops. He didn't explain the end of the Republican party, but his prediction that was off by 3x on the number of states won by Trump doesn't speak well to his US political forecasting ability.

It seems his prediction on the stagnation of EVs and renewable electricity revolves around mineral scarcity, citing that these technologies require an outsized amount of rare earth (among other) minerals that are largely mined in Russia and China.

His pessimism on technology and AI stems from chip shortages as the Chinese demographics implode their economy, and the lag time to build out that infrastructure elsewhere.

Large container ships reduce in number as the US increasingly trades in the Americas (nearshoring), where things are trucked and not shipped.

...and I was hoping I'd see a new Panama canal created in Nicaragua.

[freebeard]

I'm halfway through Episode 2713 (and I need to be outside raking leaves). So far he doesn't know that Tesla doesn't need Nvidia

Tesla Dojo
Tesla Dojo is a supercomputer designed and built by Tesla for computer vision video processing and recognition. It is used for training Tesla's machine learning models to improve its Full Self-Driving advanced driver-assistance system. According to Tesla, it went into production in July 2023. Wikipedia

and after Greenland/Canada/Panama the meme of the day is Gulf of America

CBS News

https://www.cbsnews.com › news › trump-change-gulf-of-mexico-to-gulf-of-america

Trump says he wants to change Gulf of Mexico's name to "Gulf of America ...
TodayPresident-elect Donald Trump says he plans to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America," calling the move "appropriate" and criticizing Mexico for the migrants crossing the U...

Those leaves aren't out there raking themselves.

edit: Back in the day of my IT career, I followed The Register closely. I decide to drop in and, oh my...
www.theregister.com: After China's Salt Typhoon, the reconstruction starts now
If 40 years of faulty building gets blown down, don’t rebuild with the rubble

There are now nine telcos, at least, known to have been hit by Chinese government-backed snoops whom they say accessed parts of their systems earlier this year. Millions of users have had their geolocation data taken. One compromised admin account controlled 100,000 routers. This isn’t a security incident, a few missed patches or lucky phishing, this is an entire sector in scandalous disarray.

That’s not the telco sector, that’s enterprise security as a whole. These people sold security to others, they partnered with enterprise security suppliers, moving billions of dollars around... and for what? To be taken apart by Chinese online attackers at industrial scale? If a Potemkin village had its idiots, they’d work in cyber security marketing.

Had anyone heard about Salt Typhoon elsewhere? It explains why I don't want my medical records available over HTML.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

I'm halfway through Episode 2713 (and I need to be outside raking leaves). So far he doesn't know that Tesla doesn't need Nvidia

Had anyone heard about Salt Typhoon elsewhere? It explains why I don't want my medical records available over HTML.

Scott also mentioned an Nvidia AI appliance, but did not mention Tinybox, the latest George Hotz product. I trust Geohot more since he's clearly a genius, and clearly pro-liberty. Trust the hacker.

Regarding medical records; anyone that wants mine can have it. The problem is that they aren't stored in any one place, and exist nowhere in entirety. I'm a Millennial though, so I'm used to trading personal info for convenience.

The thing that gives me shivers, especially in our materialistic culture, is GATTICA becoming non-fiction. If we're merely matter determined by nature's laws and have no intrinsic value, then our worth is only derived from our potential economic capacity, which is encoded in our DNA.

The government already took my DNA when I went to prison, so my opportunity to protect my "data" ended in 2001.

[freebeard]

If we're merely matter... then our worth is only derived...

That's thinking past some sale or other. I like Authur M. Young's formulation: Free will is sandwiched between determinism and fate.

BUY NOW FOR $15,000

Whelp, I'm out.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

That's thinking past some sale or other. I like Authur M. Young's formulation: Free will is sandwiched between determinism and fate.

Whelp, I'm out.

I won't be the one to solve that paradox, and I was using that persuasion technique because anything other than an intrinsic worth hypothesis allows all manor of horrific institutions. If I can get someone to skip straight to believing as I do that we've got intrinsic worth and avert genocide, then I consider that a positive turn.

This is early technology, let Moore's Law have its way for a few years... I just envisioned the outdoor folks of the future with their personal AI robots in the same way those folk today all have smartphones.

We will continue to expand our definition of privation, and continually fail to include purpose (or mental health for that matter), because that isn't a tangible object.