Microsoft isn't likely to sell the hardware on. They probably will of course rent out the data centers but that doesn't mean you can buy the hardware to build your own Data center.

It will reduce demand on Nvidia and AMD gpus though so there is that aspect. But it won't be full on competition in the same market space. So the effect will be muted somewhat.

To get them a bunch of free publicity from right wing noodle brains freaking the fuck out. It worked because it always works.

It's a little dangerous these days if you don't back down quickly because Trump is so unhinged that he will sometimes send the Department of Justice off on people.

But that's mostly a function of how long you want to let the controversy Go versus whether or not you want to take a risk of becoming the next Bud lite.

It's not a hard line to walk though and it's an easy way to get lots of free advertising and eyeballs on whatever the hell you're trying to sell.

And they will completely ignore the collapsing American economy and how it's taking the rest of the world down with it over nonsense like this.

Remember sexy m&ms? You can always count on the American people to ignore important kitchen table and pocketbook issues for a good old-fashioned moral panic.

Whether it's the old standby of the queers or violent video games or gun control or abortion or literally anything else you can always get Americans to sell themselves down the river in exchange for panicking over nothing.

So back in the day the ruling elite in Venezuela had bought up all the land and they were literally just doing nothing with it. There was severe food shortages even though there was plenty of farmland to feed people because the people who owns the farmland decided they didn't want anything done with it because they were profiting from the scarcity of food.

The government there eventually got tired of that shit as did the people and seized the land. This did not go over well with capitalists in America and the rest is history.

As an American hearing all this triggers the fuck out of you because you've been programmed to think seizing property is the ultimate evil. Worse than anything stolen ever did to starve people and worse than anything Hitler did to the Jews.

Rationally you know starving people to death is worse than stealing a billionaire's land but emotionally if you're an American that's not how you feel even if it's how you think. It's part of a trick called 4 to 14 wear anything programmed into your brain during that time frame sticks because you have the capacity to learn information but you don't have fully developed critical thinking facilities.

Getting back to the main point imagine what they did in Venezuela but done on a global scale and backed up by an automated military of drones.

Basically you have billions starving to death in the Land of plenty just because it amuses a handful of elite psychopaths. And there's nothing those billions can do because one drone with a cache of bombs and a high-powered machine gun can decimate any revolution you care to name.

It's a permanent dystopia. The thousand Year Reich that Hitler dreamed of. And frankly I don't know any way to stop it because of how human beings function on a fundamental level. We are just too fucking stupid and we are too prone to bigotry and moral panic. It is just too easy to push our buttons.

I mean think of it everything I just said just pushed the hell out of every button in your body didn't it? You are already reaching for that mod button to mod me down.

There's a thing called deconstruction and it's what people need right now but it's beyond most people because it's incredibly painful. Talk to anyone who's been through it and it wasn't a pleasant process.

Wind and solar have been able to provide base power for at least 15 years debatably longer.

I do not understand why old nerds are so obsessed with nuclear. It's just not a very good technology. It works but only under very specific social circumstances. The technology is extremely dangerous when not properly handled and since we as a society are obsessed with quarter to quarter profitability it's basically guaranteed that we are going to eventually cut the corners needed to keep it safe.

You can see this with every single nuclear project that keeps failing. The government is still overseeing them and making them do it safely so they keep over running costs and eventually the project fizzles out because they don't get to cut the corners they want to cut.

Think of all those condos in Florida that are just waiting to collapse. That's the kind of building quality you need in a nuclear power plant to make the kind of profits that attract private investment. Basically you need to be able to set up a time bomb waiting to go off in about 20 or 30 years. Long enough for any statute of limitations to have passed.

France can do nuclear but France is a completely upside down world compared to America or most countries. I mean for fuck sakes they tried to raise the retirement age in France to 64 and there were riots in the streets.

Nuclear is a social problem not a technical one but techie nerds don't like to think about social problems.

Seriously are there any fans of nuclear power here that will address the social problems instead of just telling me statistics about deaths or something like that. Explain to me why the problems I just raised above aren't problems or are already solved. I would love to hear somebody actually try to tackle them instead of misdirecting to some other topic.

I've been pointing out that nuclear doesn't work because of social problems for a few years now at least and I have never once had anyone attack my position.

That's before we get into wind and solar being perfectly suitable for the power grid just about everywhere except maybe possibly Japan with their uniquely bizarre land arrangements (and even then again it's debatable)

Right now inflation is 3% but without Trump tariffs it would be 2% and we would be going into a strong economy because of the interest rate cuts we'd be getting.

Trump and a heritage foundation that commands him wants a national sales tax. So he wants those tariffs to replace the taxes that he and his Rich buddies can't quite get out of paying. As a percentage it's not much but it's still tens of billions of dollars that they can make us pay.

Problem with the national sales tax is it's regressive. It disproportionally hurts people that work for a living. That reduces consumer spending and it just wrecks the economy.

While all this is going on they are doing massive amounts of deregulation and opening up the 401K programs to corruption and theft.

We fucked up and we're about to find out.

We put a guy who isn't allowed to run a charity because he stole from a children's cancer charity in charge of our finances.

bad things are going to happen now and they can't be stopped. If you are meeting this and you are under 65 you are fucked. If you are over 65 congratulations you just might die before the worst of it.

I'm talking about convenience. With a hybrid you can get most of the benefits of a electric car without the downside. The smaller batteries don't turn into major fire hazards during a crash as much either.

So Elon thinks he can weather the loss of the subsidies because only about a quarter of his business depends on them. He is not a clever businessman. He's just somebody that blended into some huge government contracts using his father's connections and a golden parachute he got from PayPal after he was fired for incompetence.

Just because you can get a bunch of money doesn't mean you're smart. Our civilization rewards crooks and liars as long as they don't fuck with the top 1%.

Do you get paid for responding to bots?

Anyway the comment is mostly mine but I suspect there's a bit of nonsense in it I didn't say. There is a guy training his chatbot off of my comments and it mostly copies my comments but then adds a few bits of nastiness that aren't anything I would say. I think he's building a chat bot designed to mimic people so that he can either impersonate them or maybe get them caught up in automatic moderation systems.

That said the solution to our problems isn't more motherfucking cars it's public transportation. Not that our civilization is going to survive another 20 years to see that happen. Car obsessed guys like you will doom us all. Like that meme about how for one brief moment a lot of shareholder value is created.

If you're under 60 though the economy collapsing is probably going to prevent you from being able to afford a car much longer though. I don't see how we prevent the economy collapsing when we keep putting imbeciles lunatics and pedophiles in charge of everything because 47% of the country is freaked out by queer people and 4% aren't allowed to vote

Hybrids get you 95% of the value without worrying about getting stuck waiting for a charge or having to call a tow instead of AAA.

They're also substantially more expensive and because they're new you don't really see any of the benefits of lower maintenance. Stuff brakes on them and you have to fix it and it's very expensive.

Without the heavy government subsidies they are mostly a neato novelty. I'm including oil and gas subsidies in that. EVs are much more energy efficient but that hardly matters when we so heavily subsidize gasoline.

Before commenting read a little bit about our history.

There's a thing we call a segregation academy. It is a private school specifically set up to keep black kids out.

Public schools undermine segregation academies because it's very very very obvious when you are excluding black kids from a public school.

Segregation academies are currently unconstitutional. However our corrupt supreme Court will eventually get around to undoing that ruling.

In the meantime you can do them for all practical purposes using a variety of nasty little tricks that are especially effective if you have privatized schools.

This is not something someone who didn't grow up in America could even comprehend. Especially because it wasn't until 1976 that we banned those schools on paper.

So no, I wasn't getting it anything in a roundabout way I was bluntly stating something a shitload of Americans don't want to hear because we don't like to think about racism except when we're doing it.

And racism is and always will be a tool of the ultra elite to trick you into giving up your property to them in exchange for protection from some scary scary other group.

How much of your property are you going to give up to get protection from whatever passes for a minority in your country? Here in America we are on track to give up homeownership, medical care and reliable access to food

You misunderstood GDPR. It's saying that your personal data belongs to your, you get to control how it is used. There are exceptions for legitimate interest uses of that data, but beyond those it's your property and treated as such.

Gen x had a metric fuck ton of bad teachers because of the Vietnam war. You had a bunch of people going into college to get out of the draft and they just kind of hung out in college for 5 or 6 years. At the end of that time they didn't really have a specific set of skills or even classes so they had to piece together a degree out of something.

A lot of them became teachers so if you were in that age group you got stuck with a lot of bad teachers.

Don't get me wrong there are still bad teachers out there sometimes a lot of them. Especially in the wealthiest school districts. I don't play anymore but when I played 40K I knew a lot of trans girls because it was a extremely accepting community. You were there with your army to play nobody gave a rat's ass what you looked like.

One of them I got to know I remember telling me that they would get bullied by teachers. Up to an including the principal.

Columbine kind of put a stop to that. Put the fear of God in them. The funny thing is it's almost never the trans girls that pop off. It's not even really to bullied kids. It's mentally ill ones with access to lots and lots of firearms.

Texas is handing out public money to basically anyone who puts their hand out and is a scammer. This is just there the soak up some more Texas taxpayer money.

The Texas government is happy to do this because the goal is to destroy public education by any means necessary.

Ultimately the goal is re-segregation. At least of these psychopaths pushing this nonsense. It's to be able to have privatize education for the profit of a handful of psychos and to be able to segregate schools by race again.

You know those cyclists that dart in and out of traffic like crazy in major cities. That's who gets replaced by these.

These things don't move fast enough to replace an actual delivery van or have enough capacity.

The problem is as the article points out as annoying as those cyclists can be if you're in a car trying to avoid them these are worse. At walking speeds they still move really fast and they are heavier than a cyclist and even more erratic.

Remember when those electric scooters were all over the place and people were jumping on them without actually knowing how to ride an electric scooter and shooting through town at 15 to 20 mph running into people? It's like that but with a poorly written algorithm.

This is happening whether you like it or not. America gave up privacy and freedom last year. Guys like Jeff bezos and Peter thiel have decided how we are going to live and 77 million Americans let them do it in exchange for God knows what. 84 million Americans tried to stop them but a little bit of voter suppression goes a long way.

There is a microscopic chance we might get back on track in the next two elections but it's vanishingly small. Two weeks before the election your eyes are going to be blasted with propaganda specifically designed to push whatever buttons you have. Maybe you will see through it maybe you won't. A lot of your neighbors won't.