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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • I think in their crazy world, the north pole is at the center of the earth disk and Antarctica is actually an ice wall around the perimeter that keeps the water on the disk. Therefore, Africa and Australia are on opposite sides of the disk (like left-right not heads-tails) or are near the out perimeter and no one would build a cable going across that long of a distance.

    If that makes your brain hurt because of the stupidity, that’s because it is. Flat earthers are only good as the target of a joke because we can all agree that it’s stupid. There are some entertaining videos on YouTube of people making fun of them, or of themselves proving themselves wrong.











  • When a fraud department calls you, you don’t need to provide any more information than your name and yes/no answers. If they are asking for any additional information, tell them that you don’t trust their authenticity and that you’ll call the number on the credit card. A legitimate agent will politely end the conversation there.

    Then you better call that number on the card quickly.






  • Companies don’t have income, they have revenue and profits. Revenue minus Costs (which include salaries, investments, materials, etc) equals Profits. The costs get detailed into different buckets which tracks investments into the company itself versus expenses that the company needs to pay to continue operating. An important number is the return on investments (ROI). A high enough ROI means the company makes more from investing in itself than it would from using the money for any other purpose.

    I wasn’t talking specifically about an AI company, but companies in general. The investment in AI discussed in the original article is not about immediately developing additional AI programs, but rather about expanding the production of semiconductor manufacturing to meet the needs of chips for AI. A reasonable argument could be made that this will eventually eliminate jobs. Counter arguments would likely point out that the nature of jobs would change. Personally, I think that AI is going to become a larger part of our society and we need to think about the ways that we need to react to that. It likely means investing in better education, because some of the first jobs to go will be jobs which require low intellectual contributions. I don’t think it will replace jobs which require a great degree of physical manipulation however, because robotics are simply not at that level yet.

    Regarding your point about c-suite raises, I addressed this very point in the last paragraph of my prior comment.


  • I get the joke/point that you’re making, but usually a company’s investment into research, development, expansion, etc is tax exempt. Hopefully even the most serious critics of our current capatalist economy would agree that these types of investments should be tax exempt, because it means paying more salaries or purchasing goods and services from other companies, which again means more salaries. Generally, these aren’t c-level salaries either because usually the c-suite is not producing the goods and services required.

    If those investments then net a huge profit that goes to a few individuals, then yes, those profits should be taxed, unavoidably and fairly.


  • Ok, maybe it’s possible that they aren’t using a very focused electron beam, but usually when scientists think about using an electron beam they mean something inside of a machine like an SEM or e-beam lithograph. These only operate on small areas.

    If an unfocused beam (and therefore lower energy density) can be used, then this could likely be scaled more easily. Even if a focused beam is needed, scaling may still be possible, but will likely require additional developments to create that process.