TheChurn

Well 'we' aren't actually in a recession. Economic growth in the US has been positive the last several quarters.

This would've been more believable if they left off the wheat. Oil I can imagine, but no fucking way are US troops stealing wheat of all things.

Do they think there is a mill at their base? What the fuck would they use it for? It has negative value.

One thing that the article didn't touch on, since it was focused on input costs, is the extra pollution from using EVs.

EVs are substantially heavier than ICEs of the same class, due to the battery. This leads to extra wear on the tires, break pads, and road surface -> even more micro plastics and particulate air pollution.

We need to reduce our ecological footprint, not merely change it from oil to reactive metals.

One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.

The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.

Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.

That isn't what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.

This isn't to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can't sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.

The raw spending figure isn't what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia's economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU's in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.

This isn't a 'Russia stronk, Europe bad' post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn't, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.

The terms seem agreeable?

The terms that restrict the size of the Ukrainian military, bar Ukraine from receiving foreign assistance to rebuild its military, forbid it from seeking security guarantees from any country or bloc, ... The terms that would have made it trivial for Russia to further invade at any point in the future?

Those terms seem agreeable?

A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.

The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.

A renderer in Python has to be slow AF

A good mirror reflects more than 99% of incident light, effectively increasing the amount of power the laser needs to destroy the target by a factor of 100.

This isn't the real concern, however. Fog, dust, clouds, and rain are quite common on the damp and dusty sphere we live on, and they would all strongly attenuate the beam power and greatly reduce the effective range.

Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.

That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn't much for tech.

AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all

No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn't matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.

Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.

Further, this isn't a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don't want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.

Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.