No organization of scale works their finances like a checking account. Businesses spend money on credit, and make back it + a bit off of the results. This lets them leapfrog a business cycle and do more things now. Credit has allowed big organizations to do some really impressive things.

So, lying a little bit, the government can get credit to do stuff now, and promise a chunk of tax revenue to the people who give it money. The US government does this with treasury bonds. Treasury bonds are sold today, with the promise that the government will pay more money later (from taxes and such). The government does stuff with this money, like maintain roads, build bridges, and improve tax collection - some of these things result in more tax money collected, so the treasury bonds were a good deal for the government. More money now has lead to more tax money later. Because the US government has been extremely good about paying back treasury bonds, treasury bonds are sold at nearly the amount they pay out. (Because of bad policy and covid, they are doing a little worse right now.)

Why do we do this? Many alternatives would have very bad consequences. The government does so many things in the US. If they couldn’t get credit, we would get a shutdown every time the government account emptied. Because the people spending the money (executive branch employees) are not the people deciding what to buy (congress), spending and income often do not match up.

It is also certainly more efficient than having huge organizations hoard money until they can pay for things all at once. If everyone in the market did this, we would get wild swings in the amount of dollars available (sometimes several companies would be hoarding at the same time, other times they might be spending out on new buildings all at once).

It is very interesting to me that we don’t make this requirement for all large power users - factories, big suburbs, etc. Because we give power companies a monopoly (but don’t put them under state control), we often let big building projects force them to expand infrastructure (and then sell access as they do). So this is a whole weird thing with capitalism meeting very regulated monopolies, in a thousand different systems cause every local has different rules.

The thing that’s breaking our systems here isn’t that datacenters are big power users. It is that they can be built so quickly.

I’m surprised we didn’t make ‘bring your own power’ a rule before; I guess it’s infrastructure that generally is useful for many people to timeshare, and often isn’t fully used by just one party? Factories turn off some nights, for eg. And maybe it would be bad to have multiple power providers independently pumping power out?

If you read the article, it’s because power companies are monopolies and so we’ve regulated them rather harshly. They are often compelled to build infrastructure to meet demand, for example. We don’t make the provider of a steel mill, housing builder, etc pay (generally).

And that’s weird, right? It’s one area of the market where we do a planned economy, and all states manage it differently. Now it’s being stress tested in a new way.

Seems plausible this is something to pester instagram support about?

Recovery will likely be invasive, if they provide it at all. But this shouldn’t be an unheard of situation.

Though you might could ask a lawyer to send a threatening letter, since all you want is information deleted.

It’s interesting to me that we don’t do this for all industries. Like, if a big auto manufacturer or textile company sets up shop, the local power company is compelled to build more power plants for them (sometimes the power company eats the cost, sometimes a deal with the provider, etc. See the article). Monopolies are weird.

Oh that’s interesting. I hadn’t realized the energy sector saw a C-suite pay spike too. Looking around, it seems like they were at or above pay for CEOs elsewhere. Crazy.

We’ve really seen deregulation under all the administrations, eh?

A funny application of the law. Seems a little silly as an answer here.

(Made my day that somebody read the article! I feel like these technical pieces flounder in obscurity.)

I find the different ways places answer this question really interesting. By this, I mean the systems we’ve had in place, the committees and applications and rules, for power providing the whole time.

It is interesting because power is a privately owned monopoly that we regulate to the extreme; so we get all sorts of weird relationships and arrangements. Now we see them all getting stress tested.

Fascinating. I see some psych studies correlating it with intelligence, but haven’t found any discussing it in a cross cultural setting. I’ll note that good irony requires sufficient context (the test stories psych studies use to evaluate this seem to be at least a paragraph). Do you know a good summary on the effect?

Regardless, I’m pretty sure the OP is not only a play with proportional distribution, it also makes a basic math error. There’s nowhere near enough money in the US economy to make everyone a billionaire. Total assets of all us sectors are around 150 trillion = 150 000 000 000 000 (yes freedom units are weird). Redistributed to 350 million= 350 000 000 folks leaves us with less than a million per person. Fed data

even if we correct for demographics (babies don’t need this cash quite yet), assume serious reporting errors, and I’m misreading a couple 0s somewhere in your favor, there’s still not that much money.

We playing currency games?

cloaked Link very interesting! Thanks.

they are less explicit about what information they have/associate to your account? At least, they seem to advertise protection against certain sim swap attacks, not government action.

?? Which are improved by using ChatGPT because?

I think this might partially be a case of different uses of the word ‘burner’ - what they describe is not strong opsec, but it is a way to reduce how much you provide for free (which is often more work for the company to get). By this, I mean not providing so many photos to track your every social visit and movement, not immediately providing life updates (ie, relationships, purchases).

Will meta find out most of this? yes. But I suspect it will be slower, more error prone, and sometimes more costly. Which don’t seem like a bad thing. Is there a good technical term for this? Hardening?

Also, I’ll note that the point of the suggestions is to reduce noise in a persons life, not to go off the grid. I think the blog is trying to be more about curtailing and removing sources of distraction.

As I read it, data must be available according to swiss copyright law, not personal, available using the open web. Further, they retroactively respect opt-out requests.

As you write up the alternatives (especially RSS and adblockers! These can be low barrier to entry), it would be great to link them from this part 1! I feel like the ask and text for part 1 is roughly the right size, but the action feels very big and scary to folks (and giving a reassurance early in the text that you can replace stuff and meet your needs might be helpful).

The topic is important, the timing is good (just in time for some new-years resolutions), and the writing is effective. Thank you for taking on the project.

I had hoped that the first suggestion in part 1 would be more accessible than ‘delete the accounts and create burner accounts’ - we’ve chosen the most effective but biggest ask, and I don’t think this post quite provides the infrastructure required for many people to make the change. FB is used by many folks as social media; the keeping track of friends, events, and family can’t really be done from a burner account (your messages alone will identify you entirely to meta).

And I have a personal pet peeve on this topic that’s triggered by the last section: I believe that mindfulness is a good way to improve internet use, but I think we’ve proven as a society that most people can’t implement this sort of self-reflection and intentionality without more structure. Where’s the tooling to remove dark patterns, automatically ask these questions after an app use, etc. ?

Let’s include the whole paragraph at least.

Apertus was developed with due consideration to Swiss data protection laws, Swiss copyright laws, and the transparency obligations under the EU AI Act. Particular attention has been paid to data integrity and ethical standards: the training corpus builds only on data which is publicly available. It is filtered to respect machine-readable opt-out requests from websites, even retroactively, and to remove personal data, and other undesired content before training begins.

This is wonderful! Less of everything depending just on Microsoft goodwill please.

I think the estimate I’ve seen that tries to compute this out has people showering once every 3 weeks and using the internet for ~1 hour a week. Is this the post-scarcity lifestyle you had in mind, am I confused, or have we tipped past the point of being able to do much better?