I notice that you didn't provide any counterexamples which is, of course, because there aren't any. No planned economy larger than a few hundred people has ever succeeded. While capitalist economies do go through cycles of expansion and recession (which a well-functioning central bank and adequate regulatory oversight can ameliorate but not eliminate), capitalism consistently makes the entire society wealthier, top to bottom. Yes, it does tend to produce inequality, and that has some negative social effects, but over time even the poorest end up better off than under any other system, assuming modest government regulation to prevent abuses.

There really isn't; definitely not compared to central planning. The results speak for themselves, but it's useful to understand why, I think. When people look at the way capitalist economies tend to produce 10 factories making similar shoes while it seems obvious that one big factory would be more efficient, the mistake they're making is in looking only at what they can see with their eyes: Buildings, machinery, people, all making shoes, redundantly. What they fail to see is the knowledge about how to make shoes efficiently that ebbs and flows through those same enterprises. This is the core flaw in the Labor Theory of Value, actually, which was the basis of Marx's understanding of economics.

The Labor Theory of Value will tell you that the value of a product is determined by the resources that went into producing it, material, energy and labor. But it omits the knowledge required to produce the product and the right knowledge can decrease the resource requirements by orders of magnitude. Capitalism works because it incentivizes the creation of knowledge that enables more efficient production, as well as the creation of better products (where "better" means "optimized to consumer desires in context").

This is why the 10 shoe factories end up being more efficient than one.

But that's not where capitalism provides the biggest efficiency boost to the economy. The biggest boost comes from the knowledge it generates about the most efficient way to allocate capital. Wall Street looks on its face like an incredible waste of money. All of those people generating massive personal incomes by "gambling" on stocks and bonds. In truth, that competitive game is the knowledge engine that no central planning board has come remotely close to matching, and certainly has never exceeded. All of the money to be made in trading incentivizes brainpower to concentrate on solving the problem of making sure that the most productive enterprises have the resources they need.

Any system that fails to replace the knowledge generation capitalism provides will ultimately be far less efficient, and will generate production shortfalls. No one has yet proposed any system that even attempts to cover that critical gap.

So far, the absolute best economic structure we've devised -- as evidenced by actual outcomes, not just theory -- is lightly-fettered capitalism overlaid with a redistributive social safety net.

The study said that they're better: 19% better. That's not nothing! It's just not the 75% better that lab testing showed.

The link you provided is the experience of one driver, one who is conscientious and focused on minimizing fuel consumption (within reason; hypermilers would do better). The study looked at the real-world results across 800,000 drivers, most of whom apparently didn't take so much care to minimize fuel usage.

Also, it's not true in general that "hybrids use generators rather than ICE". That's true of PHEVs that are strictly serial hybrids, but most are series-parallel or "power split" hybrids, meaning they can drive the wheels with the electric motor, or the combustion engine, or both. Often both the electric motor and the ICE are too small to provide the target maximum performance so must be used in parallel when you step hard on the accelerator.

One fascinating strategy for power splitting is "through the road", which has no mechanical connection at all between the ICE and the traction motor, and uses the wheel-driven traction motor as the generator. The way it works is the ICE drives one axle and the traction motor drives the other. Battery charging is done "through the road", using the road itself to transmit power from the ICE-driven axle to the electrically-driven axle. The ICE spins one pair of wheels, driving the vehicle forward, which forces the other pair of wheels to spin which turns the electric motor which charges the battery. This only makes sense in AWD drive cars but it's peak design elegance.

If 100% of jobs meet some standard, we'll pick a higher standard. For example, consider the standard that employees not be chained to their benches, fed nothing but moldy bread and be brutally whipped if the overseer feels like it. 100% of legitimate jobs in the US exceed that standard. OSHA exists to ensure that jobs meet minimum workplace safety standards and minimum wage laws ensure that jobs pay at least a certain amount, so we don't discuss whether jobs meet those standards, we take them as a given and set the quality bar higher.

If a study finds that 40% of jobs meet some standard, it means that the researchers did a reasonably good job of writing a description of the median job, then tweaked it upward just a bit. It's not like there is some universal, eternal standard for what constitutes a "quality job". It would be interesting to take the current standard and apply to historical working conditions, 50, 100, 200, 500 years ago. I'll bet the 1975 percentage would be half of the 2026 percentage and the older percentages would quickly tail off to ~0.

Of course if you get rid of capitalism then you get a different systemic problem, massive shortfalls in production, making everyone worse off. Much like democracy, capitalism is the worst system except for all of the others.

Real 'Muricans don't leave the ol' US of A. Anyone who regularly travels beyond driving range of their home town is suspicious, frankly.

(Meanwhile, I got the extra-thick passport booklet and have made a good try at filling it with stamps.)

and it's here today. No homelessness. No medical bankruptcy. No food insecurity. Affordable education. Decent places for everyone to live.

I live in Utah... I wonder what effect this will have on my power prices.

You might be right about the rest, but the Aptera is far more efficient than a Model 3. The published numbers put it at about 110 Wh/mile, while the Model 3 is at 230 Wh/mile. And, frankly, the Aptera numbers seem a little high for a vehicle with a 0.13 drag coeffiecient and with one less wheel. I think the Aptera design should be able to do better than 100 Wh/mile. Obviously, it's hard to make an accurate comparison between a real-world car and one that is basically vaporware, but something would have to be seriously screwed up for a design as light and aerodynamic as the Aptera to be barely better than a Model 3.

I'd buy one if they ever get around to making them. I've been wanting to buy one for 15 years.

I own, but do not operate, a few IT companies that manage corporations in the $600MM-$1B receivables range.

Based on our own help desk ticket software, our clients have opened 40% fewer tickets since ChatGPT was rolled out to every desk and phone. 40%. I expect another 40% drop (total 80%) by next year as end users just manage things themselves.

I won't downsize as the tickets aren't really generating revenue as much as headaches. One of my engineers had a broken PDF file that took her 6 hours to fix, and the end user spent 6 days trying to fix it themselves with Ai.

But -- the basic stuff? Reboot your computer stuff? Email rejected because you mistyped a domain name stuff?

You don't need a human, and we would probably have outsource that stuff to India anyway next year if not for ChatGPT etc.

Locally, yes, but the moisture that is accumulating previously evaporated and went somewhere else. What will the impact be there? Very hard to say.

I spend quite a bit on Discord server services, but I'm out.

GFY, Discord and governments, for mandating this bullshit nonsense.

That is essentially what happened. They didn't fire 35%, those 35% just transferred their reports to others and became ICs (Individual Contributors).

The 35% figure at Google is misleading. The vast majority of those people weren't pure managers they were software engineers who managed small teams as part of their duties while also doing productive technical work. A policy requiring a minimum of 5 direct reports for each manager was put in place, forcing all of those people to decide to either increase their management and cease doing significant technical work or cease being managers and focus entirely on technical work. Many chose the latter option, often quite happily (there is no additional pay or other concrete benefit to being a manager vs being an IC (individual contributor)). This partitioning of people who were in mixed roles into roles that were either managerial or technical provided most of the reduction in line and middle management.

Yes, I expect Alphabet would decline. I worked there for 15 years and understand the culture and motivations pretty well. Culturally, doing something like that would cut against the grain, hard. Pragmatically, they wouldn't like to oppose the administration but they'd get a lot more PR mileage out of leaking the request and publicly declaring their opposition than it would cost them.