Straw man. Left commenters know perfectly well about the roles of Fannie and Freddy. The left critique is not just greedy banks. It's also government collision in pumping property values, as well as interest and fees banks make, via Fanny and Freddy.
If your opinion is that using government policy to enrich property owners and banks is socialist, then you have a very unorthodox view of socialism.
The narrative that the banks had no incentive to be intelligent about who they lent money to is absolutely true because good credit bad credit no credit, the banks didn't care - the bank's money was backed by the Feds, and that was it. The banks got their cut, and made off like bandits. They knew what was going on.
In many cases it wasn’t backed at all, they then bundled those garbage loans up with backed ones and sold them as solid investments out the door as fast as possible. It was fraud, plain and simple.
Because like everything else in law, the lower charge becomes irrelevant in light of a worse offense. Breaking into someones home is burglary, but do it when someone is home and it becomes home invasion. Do it with a weapon and it becomes an aggravated charge.
At that point, nobody cares if you were trying to steal the silverware.
The UK has just given up on being in any way internationally relevant. If the City of London financial district disappeared, within 10 years we'd all forget that it's still a country.
The LSE itself isn't really _that_ important; London remains huge for financial services in general (though this _may_ be somewhat in decline for various reasons; it lost a certain amount of importance as the de facto gateway to Europe after Brexit, say).
Best Breakfast Around? That's not one I've heard touted before. Expand plz. The stereotypical british breakfast in my head is undercooked bacon, beans, hard cooked eggs.
And you forgot the black pudding! Not to mention tomatoes, mushrooms (if you insist) and of course fried bread and/or toast. I won’t complain if hash browns or white pudding make an appearance either.
don't kinkshame the lovely people of the Isles, they apparently have a penchant for many things, like separate cold and hot water faucet and a bit of autoerotic asphyxiation.
This was, oddly, for regulatory reasons; the concern was that a blocked mixer unit could cause hot water (considered potentially unsafe) to be forced into the mains supply (presumed safe). This hasn't been a concern with mixer designs for a long time, but it took til the 90s to get the rule changed.
This is a weirdly persistent myth, but no, that's not the case (think about it; what would happen if you had an open hot water tank? It would cool down very quickly, and you'd have horrendous humidity problems). _Cold_ water tanks used to be like that (sometimes still are), which I suspect is where the confusion comes from.
Hot water getting into the mains would be a concern anywhere; in particular, unless all equipment is in perfect working order, there's a legionnaires disease risk, but there are many other risks.
Thanks for the details! (Completely randomly just a few hours ago I got a many-many years old Tom Scott video recommended to me on YT about this topic.)
A lot more, the Online Safety Act is just a symptom of the structural problems (Lack of de-facto governance, A hopelessly out of touch political class, Voting systems that intentionally don't represent the voting results, etc).
Argentina has had nearly 100 years of decline, Japan is onto its third lost decade. The only other party in the UK that has a chance of being elected (because of the voting system) is lead by someone who thinks sandwiches are not real [1]. It's entirely possible the UK doesn't become a serious country in our lifetimes.
> “I’m not a sandwich person, I don’t think sandwiches are a real food, it’s what you have for breakfast.” The Tory leader went on to confirm that she “will not touch bread if it’s moist.
The headline is clickbait. She didn't say that sandwiches are not real. She is saying that she doesn't believe it is a proper lunch/meal.
For all the deliberate rage-baiting that Kemi Badenoch and other present-day Tories engage in, the 'controversy' about sandwiches is entirely constructed by journalists. The Politico article that parent linked to even says as much:
"The Spectator asked the Tory leader — elected to the head of the U.K. opposition party in November — if she ever took a lunch break."
The Spectator are using their press privileges to ask party leaders about their personal lifestyle rather than asking about anything relevant to policy - and although the Spectator might be forgiven for that, it is indefensible for 'serious' newspapers such as the Guardian and the Telegraph to be giving this story front-page status.
There are lots of politicians for us to be embarrassed about, but perhaps even more journalists.
The person that I replied to tried to pretend that Kemi Badenoch had seriously disputed the existence of a sandwiches. I am not sure we deserve better politicians and journalists.
I am of the opinion that the vast majority of journalists are simply stenographers. I wouldn't expect them to do their job. Unfortunately you have do piece together the truth for yourself.
Orwell pointed this out in England your England which was written during the Blitz. Many of the problems he described have only got worse in the decades since he wrote about them in my opinion. While the essay is a bit dated now (it predates the post-war era of globalisation for example which created new axes in UK politics) I still think it's essential background reading for people who want to know what's wrong with the UK, and it's an excellent example of political writing in general.
She doesn't think sandwiches aren't real. It was just a point about not liking them.
The current actual leader of the UK decided to politicise this, in a real moist bread response:
> Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who leads a country grappling with a stagnant economy, straining public services and multiple crises abroad — in turn accused Badenoch of talking down a “Great British institution.”
Argentina is a great analog for the UK, time shifted by century. Both former first-class economies doomed to a long decline by bad policies that elites refuse to change.
Argentina was a rich country but never a rich industrialized country. At the time we were rich, we were exporting beef and importing everything that came from a factory. Later attempts at industrialization, after global protectionism and domestic infighting had already plunged us into relative poverty, were based on the flawed paradigm of import-substitution industrialization, whereas the UK was transitioning from mercantilism to Smithian liberalism when they industrialized, both of which put the highest possible priority on exports. London is the world's second biggest financial hub, a fact that accounts for a significant part of the English economy, while Buenos Aires was never a financial hub for anyone but Argentines, and even we bank in London, Omaha, or Montevideo whenever we have the choice.
Industrialization was somewhat successful; I am eating off an Argentine plate, on an Argentine table, with Argentine utensils (ironically made of stainless steel rather than, as would be appropriate for Argentina, silver) while Argentine-made buses roar by outside. A century ago, when we were rich, all those would have been imported from Europe or the US, except the table. My neighborhood today is full of machine shops and heavy machinery repair shops to support the industrial park across the street. Even the TV showing football news purports to be Argentine, but actually it's almost certainly assembled in the Tierra del Fuego duty-free zone from a Korean or Chinese kit.
As a curious occasional geoguessr player, whereabouts in Tierra del Fuego one might find industry, manufacturing and assembly? I thought it was fishing, tourism and shipping focused.
Import substitution is not an alternative to basic industrialization. It's a policy advocated as a means to achieve basic industrialization. I regret that my comment was so misleading.
The usual alternative to import substitution industrialization is export-focused industrialization. Argentina and Brazil exemplify the former; Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and now the PRC exemplify the latter. The line between them is whether the country's manufactures are widely exported.
Hard disagree. Argentina is only similar to the UK insofar as they both deindustrialized starting in the 80s. Besides that, I have no idea why it would be a "great analog".
a hundreds year ago Argentine had a population of less than 8million people and the 8º biggest territory of highly fertile land. That's not even 20% of the current population. Argentina was never a developed country.
> How much damage can they withstand before they figure out how to stop hurting themselves?
Funnily enough we wonder this about the USA and its drain-circling obsession with giving power -- and now grotesque, performative preemptive obeisance -- to Donald Trump.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. Is there demand for AI-generated images in general? No, it's just that there is a lot of demand for middling, utilitarian artwork. And as it happens, AI can generate it more quickly and cheaply than human artists.
It will work the same for porn. It's just that mainstream models are sanitized not to generate it, so the cost to enter is higher.
I'll believe it when I see it. I think it's a gimmick until I see otherwise. People don't want to expend energy figuring out what they want, and generating porn with ai sounds like a lot of work for shitty results.
Hahahahahaha… yeah no. The demand for porn tailored to a person's fetishes is a cash cow for artists looking to triple their income from
their day job.
I think you're playing a different game than the Sam Altmans of the world. The level of investment and profit they are looking for can only be justified by creating AGI.
The > 100 P/E ratios we are already seeing can't be justified by something as quotidian as the exceptionally good productivity tools you're talking about.
It seems you are missing a lot of "ifs" in that hypothetical!
Nobody knows how things like coding assistants or other AI applications will pan out. Maybe it'll be Oracle selling Meta-licenced solutions that gets the lion's share of the market. Maybe custom coding goes away for many business applications as off-the-shelf solutions get smarter.
A future where all that AI (or some hypothetical AGI) changes is work being done by humans to the same work being done by machines seems way too linear.
> you are missing a lot of "ifs" in that hypothetical
The big one being I'm not assuming AGI. Low-level coding tasks, the kind frequently outsourced, are within the realm of being competitive with offshoring with known methods. My point is we don't need to assume AGI for these valuations to make sense.
Current AI coding assistants are best at writing functions or adding minor features to an existing code base. They are not agentic systems that can develop an entire solution from scratch given a specification, which in my experience is more typcical of the work that is being outsourced. AI is a tool, whose full-cycle productivity benefit seems questionable. It is not a replacement for a human.
> they are not agentic systems that can develop an entire solution from scratch given a specification, which in my experience is more typcical of the work that is being outsourced
If there is one domain where we're seeing tangible progress from AI, it's in working towards this goal. Difficult projects aren't in scope. But most tech, especially most tech branded IT, is not difficult. Everyone doesn't need an inventory or customer-complaint system designed from scratch. Current AI is good at cutting through that cruft.
There have been off the shelf solutions for so many common software use cases, for decades now. I think the reason we still see so much custom software is that the devil is always in the details, and strict details are not an LLMs strong suit.
LLMs are in my opinion hamstrung at the starting gate in regards to replacing software teams, as they would need to be able to understand complex business requirements perfectly, which we know they cannot. Humans can't either. It takes a business requirements/integration logic/code generation pipeline and I think the industry is focused on code generation and not that integration step.
I think there needs to be a re-imaging of how software is built by and for interaction with AI if it were to ever take over from human software teams, rather than trying to get AI to reflect what humans do.
This, code is written by humans for humans. LLMs cannot compete no matter how much data you throw at them. A world in which software is written by AI will likely won't be code that will be readable by humans. And that is dangerous for anything where people's health, privacy, finances or security is involved
There are a number of agentic systems that can develop more complex solutions. Just a few off the top of my head: Pythagora, Devin, OpenHands, Fume, Tusk, Replit, Codebuff, Vly. I'm sure I've missed a bunch.
Are they good enough to replace a human yet? Questionable[0], but they are improving.
[0] You wouldn't believe how low the outsourcing contractors' quality can go. Easily surpassed by current AI systems :) That's a very low bar tho.
I don't know what's your experience with outsourcing. But people outsource full projects not the writing of a couple of methods. With LLMs still unable to fully understand relatively simple stuff, you can't expect them to deliver a project whose specification (like most software projects) contains ambiguities that only an experienced dev can detect and ask deep questions about the intention and purpose of the project. LLMs are nowhere near that. To be able to handle external uncertainty and turn it into certainty, to explain why technical decisions were made, to understand the purpose of a project and how it matches the project. To handle the overall uncertainties of writing code with other's people's code. All this is stuff outsourced teams do well. But LLMs won't be anywhere near good for at least a decade. I am calling it
if the AI business is a bit more mundane than Altman thinks and there's diminishing returns the market is going to be even more commodified than it already is and you're not going to make any margins or somehow own the entire market. That's already the case, Anthropic works about as well, there's other companies a few months behind, open source is like a year behind.
That's literally Zucc's entire play, in 5 years this stuff is going to be so abundant you'll get access to good enough models for pennies and he'll win because he can slap ads on it, and openAI sits there on its gargantuan research costs.
I'm not sure about that. NVIDIA seems to stay in a dominant position as long as the race to AI remains intact, but the path to it seems unsure. They are selling a general purpose AI-accelerator that supports the unknown path.
Once massively useful AI has been achieved, or it's been determined that LLMs are it, then it becomes a race to the bottom as GOOG/MSFT/AMZN/META/etc design/deploy more specialized accelerators to deliver this final form solution as cheaply as possible.
Yeah they're the shovel sellers of this particular goldrush.
Most other businesses trying to actually use LLMs are the riskier ones, including OpenAI, IMO (though OpenAI is perhaps the least risky due to brand recognition).
Nvidia is more likely to become CSCO or INTC but as far as I can tell, that's still a few years off - unless ofcourse there is weakness in broader economy that accelerates the pressure on investors.
