RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16hr ago
Mortgages aren't the issue in and of themselves. Besides, I'm talking about the Anglosphere generally not just America. The issue is whether credit is deployed for new builds or lending to buy existing houses at higher and higher valuations, effectively bidding up the price of land. Banks devoting so much of their lending to mortgages because it's 'safe' is the problem.
People being chained to enormous mortgages isn't ideal either, it prevents people moving around easily, locks them down in jobs with the high debt load. Yes, price to income is important actually!
What's profitable for banks is not necessarily ideal for the economy, which would be better off with more lending to industry and development. House prices could be permanently lowered by redirecting lending from buying up existing housing stock to new-builds but this would necessitate boomers losing some money and is off the cards.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16hr ago
The claim was ''house prices up only!' lending' is bad, gesturing at the idea that bidding up the price of land is bad and a poor use of credit. Not that house prices only go up. House prices occasionally fall but have been rising as a general trend since financial deregulation. House prices are higher than ever before.
The facts straightforwardly support my conclusions, whereas your claim is misleading in the extreme.
The Case-Shiller index went down (in nominal terms) from 2006-2012. It's roughly flat (again in nominal terms) now. Median sales price went down from 2006-2009, and is dropping now.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
When I go and look at a graph of US house prices vs median income, that's not exactly the conclusion that comes first to mind!
https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/
How about 'home price/median income is at its peak, higher even than the very top of the housing bubble' or 'the salary needed to buy a home doubled from 2017 to 2025'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20hr ago
The government is responsible for land use restrictions and migration, sure. It's ultimately responsible for regulating and organizing the rest of the economy. But finance is directly responsible for issuing credit, which directly contributes to house building v land appreciation. If they provide more credit, prices will rise! They are creating money when they extend loans.
If an owner lets a dog off the leash and it bites someone, who is responsible? The owner or the dog? Both, to some extent. The owner was unwise to unleash an untrained dog. And the dog's natural characteristics favour biting, that's just what it is. The financial sector pursues profit in the same way. That's fine when profits are made directing capital towards productive development, bad when rendering cities unliveable by ridiculous land appreciation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Mortgage lending is important. But there's a distinction between lending for new builds to expand supply and foster development vs fuelling property bubbles and land speculation. It's not impossible to make houses cheaply - financial resources could be directed to replicate the postwar baby boom era of cheap housing and industrial development. That's how it happened in the first place, financial repression and capital controls. Credit was directed into creating new housing stock.
This doesn't happen naturally. It is often more profitable to buy houses in desirable areas since they're not making any more land. Elastic credit, inelastic supply - prices rise. It can be a lot 'safer' than lending to industry, from the perspective of the bank. If a business fails the money can be lost, whereas you can always repossess a house.
In 17 advanced economies, the share of mortgage loans in banks' total lending portfolios roughly doubled over the past century from 30% in 1900 to about 60% in 2014. More productive industrial investment has been crowded out.
Do we actually have a financial system that directs resource allocation to prosocial ends? Are people with great ideas and potential getting capital directed to their endeavours? To some extent, yes.
But safe returns can also be found in 'house prices up only!' lending, which directly undermines the demographic sustainability of civilization and transfers wealth from young to old. Or SEO/adtech/addictive mobile games.
What about the returns of offshoring industrial capacity? Or standard MBA-tier 'cut investment, cut R&D' wrecking? This kind of sabotage can be very lucrative for well-connected individuals but is corrosive to the national interest as a whole. Or cynically favouring mass immigration to lower wages and thus stalling automation and productivity growth. Privatized gains, socialized costs.
Just because there are smart people in finance, it doesn't mean the sector as a whole is doing a good job. Very smart people can do tremendous damage, more than any idiot robber or murderer.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
The Iranians can make hypersonic missiles, they can easily make H-bombs if they want them. It's really not that hard.
Since Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, hasn't tested, it's because they judge it wouldn't be too helpful strategically. It would spur Saudi nuclearization and perhaps invite a nuclear disarming strike. That situation may change, so they want some latent nuclear capability.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
'The centerpiece of Iran’s foreign policy is gone'
The centerpiece of Iran's foreign policy is not and was not nuclear weapons. Khameini already had a fatwa against nuclear weapons. The US assassinated him, he who already promised not to acquire nuclear weapons. If the Supreme Leader's decades old religious decree can't be trusted, why should a piece of paper be trusted?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
They won’t have nukes. They won’t have missiles or drones.
????
How does this happen? The US expended a huge amount of its munitions arsenal on Iran and achieved what?
Somewhere around 30% Tomahawk, >20% JASSM, ~20% SM-3/SM-6 - more like half of THAAD, PrSM.
They didn't stop Iran firing missiles and drones at whatever remains of US radar and bases in the region. They didn't open the straits of Hormuz forcefully. The straits are still closed. The oil is bottled up, Iran controls the straits. US says 'oh we blew up all these missiles' but that doesn't change the facts on the ground. Iran's missiles and drone forces are going to disappear from negotiations when they're the forces that won Iran the war? These aren't US missiles, they're not ridiculously expensive and can be quickly rebuilt. The drones are cheaper than cheap.
But Iran can’t really win what they want
They just did man. USA just took a big fat L. Because America lacks the power to accomplish all these ambitious military goals against forces specifically designed to counter their techniques. America tried to bomb Iran's missile forces into submission and failed. That is why the Gulf Arabs are apparently going to pay war reparations to Iran. It's not a sign of strength when the loot flows from US allies to Iran, it's a sign of weakness. It's a sign of weakness when the sanctions campaign designed to help pressure the regime into collapse is to be withdrawn, when Trump has to return all these Iranian assets.
So far as I can see, Iran is getting things they didn't have before the war, like sanctions relief and return of assets. The US is getting nothing new. Nuclear negotiations are being put off into the future.
Dressing it up like an anime trope is just cope, a loss is a loss. Trump hates Iran and he was forced by Iranian strength to agree to things he really didn't want to do. He railed and railed against Obama returning a small fraction of Iran's assets. He's worsened America's position at vast expense.
Iran will recover some and they’ll build some rockets, but it will leave a sour taste knowing we can destroy those whenever we want and they can’t do anything about it.
So why didn't you? USAF tried and failed. Iran kept launching rockets. Iran can do something about US bombing, they can win wars, they can close the straits and impose oil pressure on America and the rest of the world. We just saw that. This is what an Iranian victory looks like. Trump was militarily strapped down on Dr Goldfinger's laser-table, watching the beam approach his gentleman's area and so he squealed. He lived to tell the tale and may yet weasel away with limited losses but that is not a win!
If Mythos was near AGI/ASI I don't think Anthropic would release it to the general public. If it's AGI then people will not be using it to make crappy 3js oneshot games on twitter, they will be using it mostly to make the next generation, with the side gig being products worth billions of dollars!
I think Fable is AGI 'in the aggregate' in that it has all the separate abilities needed to match high/peak human output. But it can't string them together quite well enough. You can't just prompt it 'write me a first rate fantasy novel' and then have it whir for 48 hours drafting and drafting and brainstorming and get 70K words output, where it's all great and would make you good money on Amazon. It'd be cliched or have plot holes even though it's legitimately quite strong as a writer. Time horizon is too short.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
True... I was editing and removed that sentence before I saw that you replied here.
But it's still a pretty big loss for the US based just on what has been reported. The primary goal of the war wasn't achieved. Attacking political leaders had nothing to do with the nuclear/missile and reopening the straits pivot later on. The initial goal was regime change. On that alone the war is a loss, decapitating leaders is no more useful than removing hydra heads one by one. Then there's the unsanctioning of Iran and war reparations...
America has lost. The goal of the war was regime change, the goal failed immediately and predictably.
Basically everything you said is wrong or unfounded. Firstly, the straits are not actually open (mines that were laid still remain there!). Shipping is not currently passing through.
https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/
https://straits.live/
There's $300 billion that the Gulf states are apparently going to provide to Iran as war reparations, plus another $24 billion in unfrozen funds. So Iran may be getting a lump sum instead of ongoing fees on the straits. Note that war reparations are not usually paid to defeated countries...
because we destroyed the nuclear facilities they would need to use it
Destroyed them twice over now, after the 2025 air raids. When are people going to develop a basic level of skepticism about US bombing and these amazing claims made by the US military? General Caine said it, so it must be true?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
That's important and I think that people thinking quantitatively about enormous payoffs might well behave this way.
But also we're all still human and I don't think that even maximum power threats really deters much. What criminal really thinks they'll be caught? It's hard to deter these kinds of gamblers who've won lots of bets in their lives, done the impossible many times and gotten away with it. Gut instinct predominates over calculation I think and the gut says to push forward even in the face of threats. It's like Lenin said:
You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw
The good effect of punishment isn't deterrence but about physically destroying their ability to cause any problems. I think steel and certainty now is what's needed, not future threats.
Fable is much more of a 'do it right the first time' model than Opus. I had three pages of instructions for a feature. It just does what I ask, gets it all right, then tests it without me asking and tells me about the balancing! Opus could've done all that too if I cut up the instructions a bit but there'd be some minor glitches and I'd have to go over and fix it.
Better planner too. I was planning out a project with Opus 4.6 a few months ago, never really started it. Tried the same prompt with Fable and it come up with a few strokes of brilliance Opus never found. When making the initial demonstrator, Opus made a crap sandbox that needed a couple of rounds of debugging to even work and it wasn't very satisfactory. So I tried with Fable. Fable made a much nicer, prettier sandbox with more content that worked the first time and had all these things already set up to test. it puts in more care and effort as well as being smarter.
Better writer too. It is to Opus as Opus is to Sonnet.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Putting anyone into the torment nexus is crossing a line. Is that not the last thing to normalize? With bad people, just shoot them. That's good enough, no need to worry about them being taken out of the torment nexus by some future authority, less need to worry about Perillos/Brazen Bull style turnaround.
this is significantly less likely now that frontier models are going to be stuck in Uncle Sam's basement
I think that Anthropic is being targeted, not AI generally. The Trump administration does not like Anthropic for obvious cultural reasons and a reasonable suspicion that if Anthropic got hard power via AI, they'd use it to crush Trump and gang. Trump faction wouldn't treat Google, Microsoft or Amazon this way, there are lots of cozy interrelations there. The employees might not like Trump but they'll still help fund his ballroom. Recall the OpenAI, Facebook, Palantir executives getting sworn in as lieutenant colonels in the US military. Or Nvidia getting away with far more grievous harm to US interests via looking the other way with smuggling of their chips to China, lobbying against export controls, failing to track where their chips go. But Jensen knows how to court Trump and Anthropic doesn't. Jensen also has stocks (the biggest and the best!), so it's be costly for the avaricious elements of the US government to harm Nvidia's interests no matter how strategically obvious it is. You just don't sell high tech capital goods to strategic rivals, nevermind if it's 2 years behind or not! Anthropic stock is owned by VCs, not senators and elites or anyone who enjoys an index fund. Anthropic have no such financial pull factor.
But also, I'm reminded of how the big players in nuclear research stopped publishing openly in the 1940s...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Meta's LLM offerings have been pretty crap but they're still making lots of money off AI in extremely unsexy algorithmic improvements, using the offshoots of LLM tech, using all those GPUs.
So they have something to show for all they've spent. Ad revenue grew about 22% in 2025, in large part due to AI improvements. Though it's kind of diffuse and hard to assign revenue growth to a certain piece of tech when it's all backend, under the hood stuff.
AI is existential for software/ad companies like Facebook or Google, I don't think they have a choice here.
Largely (though Mythos approaches white collar wages in terms of dollars per hour at API rates). But it's not like all tokens go straight to code written. Tokens are more like measuring thought.
When I give Mythos/Fable instructions it first goes 'I'll explore the codebase' and so it searches for relevant things (those search commands are output tokens). Then it reads files which have the relevant data, more input tokens. Then it thinks for a while (that's output tokens). Then it makes its to do list. Then it reads some more, thinks some more. There are pages and pages of just reading and thinking before it goes 'i have a full picture'. Then it starts editing code!
Then it'll try and test if it actually works, often writing some test cases, so that's more code. Then it tells me everything it did in summary and adds stuff to its memory files.
So a lot of thought is happening even if it only adds a few pieces here and there for a new feature.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Why didn't they set a spend limit? Can't get tinier or more amateurish than my projects. I have a spend limit set up for precisely this situation, or if I get my API keys stolen. I'm pretty sure spend limits are on by default!
I guess there's just a huge gulf in discipline between businesses of similar sizes, the small companies I work with take pains to track all the dollars in their accounting.
Company Blew $500M On Claude AI In One Month Due To No Usage Limit On Licenses For Employees
How do you even do that, are we supposed to believe that some company with $500 million to spend didn't know how to use cost tracking? Cost tracking comes with the pleb-tier management tools I get!
And if they were trying to goose the valuation then why would they admit it was unintentional, it makes Anthropic sound expensive? (They are expensive). It sounds more like an anti-Anthropic story to me.
The story sounds greatly exaggerated or misleading IMO. Who is this mystery company too, what are the details on this? More likely some company just consciously spent a lot of money on Claude AI and then some reporter fluffed it up into a narrative we all hear instead of a boring article that goes nowhere.
Regarding energy, even though the US is a major producer and isn't as badly affected as other countries like Australia, Europe or poor countries, the world economy is global. Problems in Asia will spread to America. The US is busily exporting oil, including the strategic reserve releases, to take advantage of price gaps and stabilize markets. But this is a temporary fix. The price gaps will narrow. The invisible hand of the market will slowly but surely squeeze the US economy if this price pressure remains. Even if oil producers profit, much more of the US economy relies on truck transport, plastics, feedstock, jet fuel, lubricants and all the other chemicals which support industrial civilization.
Venezuelan oil is low quality and requires years of patient investment and capable administration to realize much net gains from. Crude oil production there is barely half of what it was in 2016 and shows no signs of making up for the current supply loss. Nobody is a bigger fan of nuclear than me but nuclear energy is not going to lower fuel prices in a matter of months.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/crude-oil-production
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
If there's a crash, I predict it'll be due to energy prices and the war in Iran, not AI.
Anthropic is nearly profitable, or supposed to have been profitable in Q2. Some say that's phoney accounting and Anthropic says profits may not be maintained. But it seems that major investments are paying off. Furthermore, AI models are getting continually better as with Fable most recently. This trend will continue, bigger and better models working for longer need more compute to run them and so justify further intensifying investment. I guess that argument is forbidden by your post. But if it is The Singularity, if it is a New Paradigm then presumably that's good for stocks!
Anyway, energy is more important to the economy than AI right now. You can't just shut off a huge amount of oil and gas production without ramifications! The 1973 oil shock is a useful precedent. The market seems to have been expecting peace talks to advance more smoothly than they actually have been. Bombing has just resumed. Iran has announced they're re-closing the straits and possibly the other straits in the Red Sea too.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
I was also thinking about this with regard to 'how AGI could win the Iran war for the US'. A more obvious application is eliminating pilot loss by having the AI fly the planes. But maybe you could also get the ground crew to be replaced by random Arabs with headsets who're told what to do/supervised by the AI.
It doesn't seem very practical though. Surely the cost of supervising a person is higher than the cost of getting a robot to do things tirelessly, precisely, with full feedback and sensors. Homo sapiens main strength has always been intellectual, not physical!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
I don't believe in surrendering to sadness, but it's a sign of health to be distraught about a future where a small number of capital-owners live like kings while the rest of us are relegated to the saddest jobs in existence
There is still time to get on the train? I'm not the most well-off guy in the world. But I have my AI stocks, if 'capital' means anything in the future I should be fine. People are still talking about the AI bubble and such. Lots of people are investing in property or value stocks. The singularity is not priced in.
Alternately if we get a 'fuck the shareholders, liquidate everyone who doesn't have a killbot swarm' scenario then you and I won't need to worry about doing sad jobs.
But you said that Roy's scenario was a fantasy? Can Clavicular make arbitrary women have sex with him on demand? Probably not. Does he slay mad puss? Yes. Would he be capable of this if he hadn't looksmaxxed, famemaxxed? No.
SV startups often give equity that can be worth a lot of money, they are different from Walmart or McDonalds. The tingles are a real thing in both cases. People worked for Elon Musk very hard even when they could've been lazy and useless at Lockheed because he gave them the tingles.
The problem is that Israel thinks they're a lot stronger and smarter than they actually are.
They think they can get away with 5D chess gambits like Netanyahu facilitating payments to Hamas so as to divide the Palestinians and so further pursue their divide and conquer/settle policy.
What a retard! Same with their overt and obnoxious propaganda campaign, how Israel has 'the most moral army'. It's been counterproductive.
They think they're a military superpower, yet they can't seem to handle Lebanon. The Lebanese army isn't even fighting them, just Hezbollah. They fought Hamas for a couple of years and didn't manage to destroy a small force, totally encircled, without air power or any heavy weapons. Somehow Hamas got the drop on them in October 7th, so much for all-knowing Mossad!
But they think they can take on Iran?
The Israeli military is not that capable, it can't perform the (challenging) offensive tasks their politicians have in mind. They can do standoff attacks and elaborate assassination stunts. They can shoot and shell and scorch the earth but can't seem to hold much ground. Unfortunately for them, ground wars are won by holding ground and destroying armies.
The solution is to puncture their delusions of strength. The US should cut off military support until Israel complies with commands. F-35s can't fly without spare parts. Israel relies heavily on US satellites and aerial refuelling and the actual munitions themselves. Israel's military-industrial base is weak and top heavy, just like the military itself. They design drones and high-tech weapons. But they can't produce the myriad precursors in steel and chemicals needed for those weapons. No country of 10 million can. It makes no sense to be selling or transferring (the US has these stocks of weapons 'pre-deployed' in Israel that Israel sometimes taps) munitions and parts to a country harming one's national interests, while America also faces a shortage of munitions.
Israel is a small country and needs to start acting like it. Less bombing, more peace treaties and a bit of sincerity in actually adhering to ceasefires and accepting limits on territorial aspirations. Israel has never even officially defined the permanent territory in its borders, they're incredibly opportunistic and aggressive.
More options
Context Copy link