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.

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

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.)

...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.

Let's take a look at software sizes, for a moment.

UNIX started at around 8k, and the entire Linux kernel could happily sit in the lower 1 megabyte of RAM for a long time, even with capabilities that terrified Microsoft and Apple.

The original game of Elite occuped maybe three quarters of a 100k floppy disk and used swapping and extensive use of data files to create a massive universe that could be loaded into 8k of RAM.

On a 80386SX with 5 megabytes of RAM (Viglens were weird but fun) and a 20 megabyte hard drive, running Linux, I could simultaneously run 7 MMORGs, X11R4, a mail server, a list server, an FTP server, a software router, a web server, a web cache, a web search engine, a web browser, and stil have memory left over to play Netrek, without slowing anything down.

These days, that wouldn't be enough to load the FTP server, let alone anything else.

On the one hand, not everything can be coded to SEL4 standards (although SEL4, by using Haskell as an initial language to develop the core and the proofs, was able to cut the cost of formal programming to around 1% of the normal value). On the other hand, a LOT of space is gratuitously wasted.

Yes, multiple levels of abstraction are a part of the problem. Nothing wrong with abstraction, OpenLook is great, but modern abstraction is mostly there due to incompetent architecture on previous levels and truly dreadful APIs. And, yes, APIs are truly truly dreadful if OpenLook is the paragon of beauty by comparison.

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

The solution is easy. WiFi 6 is only just starting to come out in the marketplace. If TP-Link hijacks the standard development procedure, solidifies a workable WiFi 8 quickly, and manufacturers/users in Europe, Asia, and Oceana all start using WiFi 8, skipping WiFi 7 entirely, the US will be left with an inferior standard that only they have gear for, with no option to use WiFi 8 for many more years because the only manufacturers making it can't sell in the US.

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.

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

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