incidents like that occurs every day, i myself stuck 3-4 month ago, by bmw caught on fire on the bridge. blocked traffic , fire trucks were not able to go through, etc.
That Gravel road is partially washed out in parts. and VERY rough. its completely unmaintained. Unless you get out and study the angles, and have a few friends guide you (and experience) your going to high-center most regular clearance vehicles, at least some parts of the year. The actual trail has spots where you have to use a rope some nice person tied to a tree to lower yourself down a cliff about 15-20 feet, etc. Especially when its wet, which is 10 months of the year.
Interesting to see this on HN - it's a few miles from my house, and was very happy to see the sale to the state.
Note that there are TWO possible paths down to Abiqua creek that are quite close to one another at the top of the (quite deep) ravine in which the falls are located. One is hard, but not impossible. The other one is the "death trail" which isn't really a trail - it's a series of broken shale rock slides covered with fallen trees and steep "waterfalls of rock" but helpfully someone has put some ropes down it to make it seem like yes, this leads somewhere. It does not. One summer evening we thought it would be a nice after-dinner hike to take the "other trail" to the falls. Yeah... my thighs were sore for two days after the up/down/sideways, and the water was too deep to even go upstream to the falls. But it was an adventure.
> Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.
My local paper on the west coast is owned now by USA Today. They often have specials (digital edition for $8 for only 6 months) sales. Takes a CC, and a few clicks. If you go past that time, you get switched to the $15/month subscription.
But to cancel the digital version of the local paper, I have to call customer service, that is based out of the east coast, that seems to be open from 9-4 east coast time. And then of course, they try to get me to change my mind, bargain with me, etc.
its bad enough, last time I used privacy.com, and set a max limit, and just ignored their emails about my card declining. and they are ALMOST as bad a cirrusXM was when our free trial with a new car was expiring.
Great to know that everyone's RAM, GPU, and SSD costs have skyrocketed over the last year, so that companies like Oracle can fill giant buildings full of RAM and SSD's (and GPU's) and then not even be able to turn them on..
That's the decentralized nature of capitalism working as intended. Distributing resources in the most efficient way possible. Thank you invisible hand.
Ironically, Adam Smith himself spent plenty of time worrying about the risk that allowing wealth to concentrate and an oligarchy to form would undermine the invisible hand. Much of what he was responding to was English society's tendency toward extremely rich people and organizations (e.g., the East India Company) hoarding resources on a mass scale, to the detriment of everyone else. So what's happening with AI right now is very much the antithesis of the free market he envisioned.
He wrote at lest one very thoughtful essay expanding on his belief that idolizing the wealthy undermines the basic principles of free and civil society. He criticized large accumulations of wealth as "a monopoly against one's countrymen." And something like half of The Wealth of Nations was committed to suggesting government policies to prevent an entrenched uber-wealthy class from forming, precisely so that capitalism could work as intended.
It's shocking to me that he was aware of it and yet considered it an unrelated defect that can be individually corrected, and not a flaw that blows the entire idea wide open. To me it seems that this outcome was unavoidable and that this is the equilibrium his system will settle into earlier or later. Opposing the concentration of power is harder than making it happen. Even strong regulations only need to spring one leak somewhere for them to get in and get the ball slowly rolling. It's a ratchet. If he knew about this, then his ideology was like boarding an already slowly sinking ship and hoping someone would just keep scooping out the water and throwing it overboard at a sufficient pace forever.
> It's shocking to me that he was aware of it and yet considered it an unrelated defect that can be individually corrected, and not a flaw that blows the entire idea wide open.
Hindsight is 20/20. He was suggesting free markets as the counter to entrenches aristocrats. It took centuries for our modern understanding of monopolies and rentier capitalism to develop.
He was arguably also right insofar as the slippery slope that he warned about is pretty much exactly the slippery slope that we slid down. And I can’t really blame him for the fact that most Adam Smith fanboys don’t seem to have read the second half of his book.
Spot on, that's the big flaw in liberalism. It's never an issue with the system, only communists reason in systems. No, it's just that the guy in charge is bad, and if we could get someone better there, everything would turn out fine.
Let's disregard that ever since Reagan, no president was ever able to slow the runaway financialisation of capitalism, or the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Capital has known no major blowbacks in many decades, and it's never been so powerful before.
Adam Smith never believed in an "invisible hand". He uses the concept to disparage the fantasy of "self-regulating" free markets. Even before capitalism did we understand that markets needed rules and regulations, it took centuries of propaganda and of demonizing the opposition as "luddites", then "communists" to convince the majority that we needed to abolish all rules for the economy to flourish.
A deregulated market is terrible for the environment, the economy and pretty much everyone and everything. It only gives more relative wealth (and power) to the oligarchs, who then lord over us unopposed.
They never did. they had the balls to resist against western governments, where it was politically adventagous to do so. They folded to China real quick, because they wanted to make sales. All "icloud storage" in china has been on another storage platform, that follows all the local laws.
Don't fall into the trap of putting our governments on the same level as China, despite the tremendous flaws and the very dangerous backsliding we still enjoy many freedoms that their citizens do not have.
The CCP would like nothing more than everyone living in a democracy saying they're just as oppressed as those living in China. Then their own citizens might abandon such foolish notions as human rights.
We should point out the hypocrisy of our governments but not by using that hypocrisy to minimize China's human rights abuses.
Multiple things can be true at the same time, there's more repression in China still than in the West at the moment, yes. At the same time it's all rather vague. There's more state control there and more corporate control here. So naturally there's more state repression there. There's also things that China does better than we do. It's not as clear cut as it should be.
If you look at the treatment of pro-Palestine movements in the West, Flock cameras, Palantir contracts, age verification mandates, encryption 'front door' requests, clamping down on whistleblowers etc. then it seems to me that we're heading where China is pretty fast and that the West definitely wants to be where China is, just without the high speed trains.
What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are i.e. China bad, West good so don't compare.
The collective West just assisted a genocide of an occupied population of people, so when is it going to be 'as bad'? My guess is never because people here want to feel superior over China without actually doing anything for it.
I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to come up with all sorts of excuses why the West is not responsible for Israeli actions in Gaza, it's not a genocide etc. without pausing for a second to realize the Chinese also have plenty to say about what you object to them doing not being authoritarian.
I think state control is felt fundamentally differently in practice if this state control actually serves the people unlike in the west where it serves exclusively capital interests.
> What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are
Once you really notice the anti-china framing literally everywhere in media, it is really hard for it all not to become meaningless propaganda. It's itself no different from state control just because it's private media because that private controls the state. We aren't allowed a clear eyed view of china, only a carefully curated antagonistic one. But they aren't our enemies at all, it's absurd how obvious that is, the west is the aggressor, not china.
In the west capital in the hands of unaccountable individuals acting in their own interests and the state acting in the interests of those with private capital. Capital in the hands of the chinese state is different because it serves the interests of everyone collectively. Including things the west describes as oppression, but that is a matter of perspective, it's things like this why you are conditioned to hate china:
Two questions:
* How many North Koreans do you know to make such a statement? And what do you personally know about North Korea?
* Do you think you are living on the most free country on earth (regardless of where you live)?
> Western governments pearl clutch about freedom and how free and open they are
That's not how to use "pearl clutch". And the UK doesn't do that, and it isn't very free or open, except in the deranged mind of Kier Starmer[0]. Classic liberalism in the UK has long given way to regulation of speech, proud conformity, state dependency, and all the other things that are hallmarks of people who treat the state as a surrogate parent.
Additionally, the humans who make all of the iPhones and iPads are Chinese people, subject to Chinese law. Apple has to do exactly what the CCP wants, at least for now. They are desperately trying to ramp up phone production in India, but there is huge expertise at Foxconn that isn’t in India as yet.
If Apple did not sell iPhones to Chinese consumers the Chinese government wouldn't make Apple provide a different icloud. They made that choice, not by manufacturing in China, but by selling there.
I have not been attributing it so much to malice, just that all the major cloud vendors seem to be running at full capacity, and can't build new datacenters fast enough. I just kind of assumed that as they got busy training newer models, that they allocated less resources to handle the existing systems, because they aren't able to get more capacity right now.
I’m not sure why this point keeps coming up — if your service/product is so popular that it’s capacity-constrained, then the answer is to raise prices, not degrade service, because the demand should be inelastic.
Raising prices also has second order effects, like consumer and business expectations around how widespread the tech can be. Valuations depend on it being reasonably affordable to roll out on a much more massive scale than today. If people get the impression that it seems too limited to very rich people (200 is affordable for a North American / Western European professional), the impression about the trajectory will change.
I had a cousin that worked private security, and for a few years (I think it was early 2000's) his main gig was to work as a team of armed security, and follow trucks from the two Intel campuses in Oregon to the airport in unmarked vehicles, get on the cargo plane with the cargo, and fly to the location where they did the packaging of the wafers (I want to say it was the Philippine Islands) and then fly back. Lots of overtime.
i think this is actually good, because there are differences between the images they found, and security settings that the company claimed.
They had not admitted before to tracking people, but their software is clearly submitting them. They had not admitted before to looking at bumper stickers, but turns out they do.
I wonder if they could find all cars with Bernie Sanders bumper stickers within X blocks of a polling place.. I can imagine that (or similar queries) might be very useful in the wrong hands.
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