Diminished maybe, but not all that much.

I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.

And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.

Law and medicine are advanced degrees.

Engineering is not.

Engineering is the most lucrative bachelor's degree.

Those who continue to law school, medical school, or an MBA are most successful when their undergrad degree was engineering.

Right, Bernie will have you believe that this means that the men loading trucks by hand became more productive, yet they are the ones who will not be working at all once their jobs are automated. It is always the company that becomes more productive, the people who own the company invest in new tools and by doing it they reduce their future expenses and improve throughput, this makes *them* more productive, not the people who used to do the work that is about to be automated. The company spends its capital, becomes more efficient. For whatever reason Bernie says that now, that the company is more productive, he will take the productivity gains away from the people who risked their capital to achieve it.

When the society discourages productivity, it loses productivity, this is why Americans lost their manufacturing sector.

When the society discourages capital formation, it loses capital, that is what America will find out as well.

Oh, my goodness, so many excuses. Everyone I know, who runs their own business did it *against* odds, not because they had something given to them, like 5 day pay for 4 days of work. I know people who mortgaged their own houses, sold their cars to start their business. I know people who run multiple properties and they are doing all of the work themselves, cleaning, renovating. I know people who ran a successful business, sold it, started another business and again, it was a success. They complain about things, but they do them and nothing can stop them short of death.

Lets say you start a company and you use AI to build a bunch of code and help you to devise processes that deal with client lead generation and new client onboarding, client retention and such. You do it all by yourself, lets say it brings you 100,000USD a month (you think it's impossible? I think it's very possible today, for example you can do that with a youtube channel). Does this mean that you do not deserve something and a lid should be put on something, so that what? So that a guy from the street, who doesn't have anything to do with you can get a cut of money you generate? Why?

But that's not what most businesses are like, most businesses are people starting something on their own, eventually hiring a few more people and maybe scaling up a little bit. A few shawarma shops, a few laundromats, a few properties, maybe a delivery business, maybe a few convenience stores, that's what most people would do and that's if they are successful at running at least one of them first.

If they find a way to use AI for example to make themselves more productive by automating their phone lines, by doing some marketing with AI that they have never had a budget for anyway, Bernie thinks now they have to do what, cut the hours of all of their stuff by 4 days a week? OK, who is going to be manning the stations the 5th day, the 6th day, in some cases the 7th day? (yeah, I think it's really great if a business is open 7 days a week, over 300 days a year hopefully, very useful).

The question of 'deserve' is funny, what does it mean, who deserves what? Are you an IG girl, who dates older guys so that they would pay for her traveling and expensive shopping habits? If you talk to those girls, that have it down - they *know* they 'deserve' this and that and the other thing, they always know it. It's because it's easy for them, 'if you're done with your ex, move onto the next', etc.

Unless you are in this much of a demand, you can't have this type of a world outlook, thinking that you 'deserve' something, it's nonsense. You take what you can make, what you can get, that's the reality. If you can put up another shop and make another 5K or whatever a month, good for you, that's why you are going to be a millionaire and not a bum. There is no such thing as 'collecting money', by the way. The moment I have a few spare dollars I either buy something for myself (rare) or I put it to work, I start another project, I buy more parts, I invest into more development or marketing or think of a way to use it to lower future expenses, whatever. Money is a *tool*, it is not a thing that people collect for itself. It is a tool that allows one to build more income streams. Who taught you economics, Marx?

s/done/sometimes done/
Try attaching any monitor above 1920x1080 via HDMI. So if the cable is known to be good, the computers in question have all "HDMI 2.0 4k" in big letters in their specs, all should work, right? Mwahahaha.

The particular case on my disk right now: EDID and DDC properly report 1920x1200 (native), 1920x1080, 1600x1200, etc., yet it fails to work in the first mode. 1920x1200 needs HDMI 1.4 bandwidth, the two other HDMI 1.3. The same monitor, the same cable work with some computers, fail with others. Hrm.

My low-res monitors are DVI, which is supposed to be carried over HDMI (same protocol), but guess what? It's also random which computers they work with.

Meanwhile, in the DP land, I have yet to see my first failure. But sometimes I need HDMI for $REASON. :/

Somehow Bernie thinks that businesses owe to hire people and pay them for the sake of hiring people and paying them. Businesses are started to make the money for the people who start them, wow, a huge revelation. Have you ever started a business, tried running anything, a proverbial lemonade stand? If you have, have you hired people to sit there and do nothing? What if you started a lemonade stand, made some money, bought a juicer, used that to make more money, started another stand, hired a person. Would you pay them above the market rate? What is a market rate, you may ask? It is the rate that people in the area would be willing to show up for and to interview for your new lemonade stand position. You would have a few different people, mostly without any experience, you probably wouldn't have to pay much to man your point of sale. Would you pay them the same for being at work for 4 days as for 5 days?

Bernie can point out whatever he likes, you cannot escape a simple fact - if running a lemonade stand brought in money, there would be competition and people would be willing to find ways to automate as much as possible and to reduce prices in order to gain market share. Keeping prices low enough for people actually to buy your product while paying people for 5 days of work while they are only working 4 days is an incompatibilities in goals, you can do it until competition comes in and shows you what true efficiencies may look like. Ideas like that of Bernie is what moved production out of the Western world (USA in this case) and to places like China (and now Vietnam and others). Trying to put a lid on this development at this point is not going to work.

Years ago on this very site I noted that a country that loses manufacturing due to its socialist policies will inevitably lose engineering and will then lose education system as well. America is about half way there, there is still engineering, but it sure lost manufacturing. Try to go down the road and find a company that can make a tool that you need to make tools that you need to make products that you want. Even if you find some old guy somewhere, making dies and casts, the prices are still not going to be anywhere near close. AI is nothing without manufacturing.

I work for myself, I have 3 companies to run, who is going to give me a 4 day work week and what would that look like? Also if I could have a 4 day work week today, I would start another company and would run out of the week days anyway. Actually I have people working for me 4 days a week, this is because we run around the clock, 24x7x52 and some shifts are less attractive to the hires, especially the weekends, so we have to compensate with flexibility, but everyone is on the clock anyway, it is up to the person to decide if he or she wants to work more hours. I am always amazed at people just coming up with broad statements like that: everyone must have a 4 day work week! What does that mean? Silly simple solutions to real world problems don't work.

It's a lot less dangerous to ship them mostly discharged, like maybe at 30%.

Actually, they last for 30 years at 80% capacity or better.

At least in America, it is illegal to install cost-effective solar panels.

Biden and Trump both agreed on high tariffs on solar, and American manufacturers have no incentive to be more efficient.

That's an obvious market opportunity for fake AI friends to keep people company.

I've recently started looking at my power consumption on a 15-minute graph, and it turns out that power usage isn't all that much less during the night. In fact, at times it is higher because all the lights are turned up. But even at night, there's the fridge and freezer, the house electronics, security cameras, etc.

Turns out the stuff I need for work - a notebook and an external screen - barely register.

Yes, and different inverters. I've got a very small solar array, and the micro-inverter on it doesn't even work if it can't find the main power grid to sync to.

A battery will get you over some power grid outage, but not totally off-grid.

You are totally wrong.

I've installed a really small solar array and on sunny days I produce more electricity than I use. I'm sure it'll be a lot less in winter. BUT - I have a wood-burning heater which needs only a bit of electrical power for its control system. I'm pretty sure I can produce enough of that even in winter. So in theory, with the addition of a battery to cover the night, I could survive even if the power grid went down for an extended time.

Solar as a provider of independence doesn't mean everything needs to run on solar. Sometimes, it's just an enabler for another system.

So, in a nutshell, AI runs the risk of creating unrealistic relationship expectations and simulate perfection? No way. That's a completely new thing in the world. Romance novels, movies, gold diggers or marriage swindlers or just, frankly, a whole lot of ordinary people into "presenting themselves" in order to "score" a good catch, rather than being authentic and looking for a good match - I'm sure all of these things are hypothetical, don't already do essentially the same thing just with a lot less processing power, and cause the same issues.

But hey, this one has "AI" in it, so hype!