I agree this is very sane and boring. What is insane is that they have to state this in the first place.

I am not against AI coding in general. But there are too many people "contributing" AI generated code to open source projects even when they can't understand what's going on in their code just so they can say in their resumes that they contributed to a big open source project once. And when the maintainer call them out they just blame it on the AI coding tools they are using as if they are not opening PRs under their own names. I can't blame any open source maintainer for being at least a little sceptical when it comes to AI generated contributions.

Should Ryder be held responsible for the two very serious terror attacks carried out using Ryder trucks in the 90s?

> This is a recipe for creating dead retiree states.

This too is the beauty of federalism. You want to live in a dead retiree state? You can. You want to live in a bustling industrial district? You can too. As long as you do things through proper democratic channels.

> Now do this for housing

But this bill is not about housing. This response makes as much sense as responding to a new law legalizing marijuana and saying "now do this for heroin, rape and murder."

Housing was always one symptom of rabid NIMBY-ism. The underlying issue is the default NO posture towards any and all infrastructure. Even when rejecting housing, most NIMBY’s complain about more people using too much water or electricity or traffic or some such.

Go to build extra water or power capacity? The same retirees unironically show up to the meetings with environmental concerns that the EPA already regulates.

It’s all the same cancer and it needs to be excised.

Dear lord, what percentage of the Gen Z (the population mentioned in the article) do you think pay capital gain taxes???

You don't even have to be a billionaire to make people believe whatever thing you say. In the 10s you can just say the most amateurish take on a subject imaginable and get a highly educated audience to nod along if you tell them you make $200,000 a year optimizing ad delivery for google.

> Youtube charges $10 per month and doesn't produce a single video.

This is like complaining that your fridge takes money to run even though it produces none of the stuffs you put in your fridge. Serving video is enormously expensive especially if you let practically everyone use your platform as permanent storage for videos that will never be watched and will never generate ad revenue. There is a reason why no real competitor to YouTube has emerged and the alternative platforms that do exist target professional content creators even more than YouTube.

> They should quit it with the Shorts though, nobody likes those

No one on this website likes them, sure. The number of likes and comments some of those short videos get suggests that there are enough people who like them for YouTube to keep pushing them. They just don't tend to get very vocal about it on a nerd social media.

> China suffers more from these conflicts than the US.

You are missing the even bigger picture. Look back a few decades. The 1973 oil crisis was not just a temporary inflationary event, but the starting point of various technological and political investments that sought reduction in reliance on oil — engine efficiency regulations, nuclear power in France, early research into solar energy. The current war will likely have a similar effect. Suddenly you can't rely on imported fuel any more. And if you look around for alternative energy sources, Chinese solar and batteries and EVs suddenly look a lot more attractive than two months ago. And this is before you factor in the rest of the world reassessing their relation to the US and their confidence in the competence of US military and diplomacy.

You think you are describing the Bolsheviks, but your description is equally fitting for those who want to abolish human labor without providing people alternative ways to make a living.

And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.

> When Nick is not at a computer, you can find him out racing sailboats and involved with various entrepreneurial ventures.

Says the man who is going to be the feudal lord in GP's scenario…

The man who thinks he's going to be the feudal lord in GGP's scenario.

In GGP's scenario, there isn't much room at the top. :)

Nah thats petty nobility that will get wiped out for taking the wrong side in the first dick measuring war lmao.

There is not enough space for 8 billion humans to do "frontier living."

Not to even forget how unstable that sort of living is. A few bad seasons from various causes could really affect population. Just look at history of famines. It kinda works when you have industrialised agriculture in other places to fallback on, but without that it is very risky in long term.

It always intuitively felt to me like there was enough space, but I am now getting the sense that my intuition here has been wrong.

Will you define "frontier living" so I can better see the lack of space ?

One crazy thing I recently heard that put this into perspective is that Livestock makes up approximately 60% to 62% of the world's total mammal biomass. Combined with humans (approx. 34%–36%), domesticated livestock means humans and their animals constitute roughly 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, leaving wild mammals at only about 4%.

I suppose Frontier living doesn't necessitate hunting, but the amount of readily available meat and animal products would have to drop very low.

This is the small solace I take when it comes to climate change reducing arable land - almost all of our crops are grown to supply a luxury product (meat), so if we need to, presumably we could just eat the grains we grow directly, instead of turning them in to animals first.

I assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too.

I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern life (housing, transport, food - I'm not even including healthcare here) become impossible for someone on the median income to have, then what, exactly, are they supposed to do? Find a nice corner to die in?

We sorta tried a miniature version of this on a few acres in Ireland and while it was tough (and we were always reliant on the outside world, we didn't literally homestead), I'm not sure it wouldn't be an improvement for a non-trivial percentage of people at the bottom levels of society.

But, of course, land is owned (thanks to enclosure, which took a common asset and allocated it to specific individuals), and this all falls apart when you or a loved one have a serious disability or illness.

I appreciate the nuanced reply and yes, I do mean that you will not be able to produce as much food as you currently can nor will you be able to do so as reliably as we currently can.

And while you might be able to do it in Ireland — one of the only countries in the world with less people than two hundred years ago — it will likely be impossible to the billions living in far more densely populated countries.

I think maybe there is a "frontier living" fantasy that is resting on the hidden assumption that you can bring your modern tech stack with you, minus the civilization that it relies on.

If I squint my eyes and imagine really hard, I can see living off the land, supported by small fusion reactors powering powerful AGI computer clusters, highly advanced 3D printers capable of producing all the physical support structure of life.

AGI + Power + Magic 3D printing and maybe one can live "off the land" with "civilization and all of human knowledge" hiding inside this portable tech stack.

FWIW this isn't even remotely close to what I was thinking - I definitely had no notions of AGI or 3d printing involved. You can do a lot with hand tools if you have plenty of time and a forgiving environment (access to water and trees for timber).

Very true, and I worry that as the planet heats many of those billions will die

Water for one. It was very risky as things like droughts quickly killed you. It was also very risky as someone moving upstream of you and shitting could see you dying from dysentery very quickly. Water is in far worse shape now because of how deeply we've pumped out aquifers and how poor we've left soil conditions in many places.

Next is amount of people. Current human density is supported by antibiotics. Take away them and we quickly fall back to around 1900 population density (1.6 billion roughly). And not even internal antibiotics, external antibiotics like chlorine for cleaning and water purification.

So those are the setups for population collapse. When population starts collapsing this way it generally overshoots the numbers pruned because of war/disease. We won't fall to 1.6 billion, it's likely to fall well below 1 billion.

Sure, but there might not be enough jobs for them to command the economic power that allows something better.

Even so for someone who's been crushed in the gears enough they might give it a try.

They can manage it. Cheap drugs, distributed by the government, can handle you from suffering and ensure you will not participate in any kind of anti government protests. Also they can add birth control additives and reduce the population significantly.