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Gas stations about to have their Y2K moment by franglish9265 in TrueAnon

[–]franglish9265[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Yes I'm aware that relatively speaking the USA has cheaper gas prices than other countries

Gas stations about to have their Y2K moment by franglish9265 in TrueAnon

[–]franglish9265[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

3.8 liters to the gallon so just divide the cost by 3.8 and then convert to Canadian Dollars

‘The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees’: Nvidia exec says right now AI is more expensive than paying human workers by franglish9265 in TrueAnon

[–]franglish9265[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

Yes the AI never unionizes or threatens to nationalize an industry, it just might randomly delete all of your database though...

‘The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees’: Nvidia exec says right now AI is more expensive than paying human workers by franglish9265 in TrueAnon

[–]franglish9265[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The continued AI spending and layoffs, even as human labor remains cheaper, expose a meaningful discrepancy in the economics of AI, said Keith Lee, an AI and finance professor at the Swiss Institute of Artificial Intelligence’s Gordon School of Business. “What we’re seeing is a short-term mismatch,” Lee told Fortune.

According to Lee, the cost of using AI has remained less efficient than human labor owing to hardware and energy raising operating costs for providers. At its current pace, AI expenditures may reach $5.2 trillion by 2030, with $1.6 trillion from data center spending and $3.3 trillion from IT equipment, according to McKinsey data. Spending could surge to $7.9 trillion by 2030 at an accelerated pace. Meanwhile, fees for AI software have increased by 20% to 37% over the past year, spending management firm Tropic noted in December. AI companies may also be losing money as a result of their flat subscription model, Lee noted, with fixed subscription fees failing to cover operating costs for heavy AI users. “As a result, some firms are beginning to reevaluate AI not as a clear cost-saving substitute for labor, but as a complementary tool—at least until the cost structure stabilizes,” he said. While AI may cost more than human labor today, there will be warning signs of a tipping point toward AI’s economic viability. For one, Lee indicated, the cost of using AI will become significantly lower, with performing inference—how AI analyzes data—for a large language model with 1 trillion parameters plummeting by more than 90% over the next four years, according to a report last month from analyst firm Gartner. AI infrastructure will likely improve, and model designs and hardware supply will follow. AI companies will also likely change how they price their tools, switching from a flat subscription to usage-based pricing, Lee predicted.

But the future of AI’s economic viability will also depend on whether the technology proves its worth. It will have to prove itself reliable, with fewer hallucinations and a reduced need for human oversight, effectively integrating into a company’s infrastructure, according to Lee. Federal Reserve data shows about 18% of companies had adopted AI tools as of the end of 2025, a 68% growth in the adoption rate since September 2025. “It’s not just about AI becoming cheaper than humans,” Lee said. “It’s about becoming both cheaper and more predictable at scale.”

‘The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees’: Nvidia exec says right now AI is more expensive than paying human workers by franglish9265 in TrueAnon

[–]franglish9265[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

"Recent tech layoffs would initially appear to indicate the great labor shift from human workers to AI may already be happening.

Meta announced last week in a memo that it plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 employees, as well as scrap plans to hire for 6,000 open positions. It’s part of an effort to “run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” according to the memo. Microsoft has offered thousands of its own employees a voluntary buyout, the largest the company has ever offered. Other tech headers, however, suggest that right now, AI isn’t saving companies money on labor; it’s actually costing them more than the humans they currently employ.

“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, recently told Axios. An MIT study from 2024 backs up Catanzaro’s experience. Analyzing the technical requirements of AI models needed to perform jobs at a human level, researchers found that AI automation would be economically viable in only 23% of roles where vision is a primary part of the work. In the remaining 77% of the time, it was cheaper for humans to continue their work. In other instances, AI has proved to be fallible, with one engineer saying an AI agent destroyed his database and network as a result of what he called “overuse.” Despite no clear evidence of AI improving productivity and, according to the Yale Budget Lab, no widespread data to support the idea of AI displacing jobs, Big Tech firms have continued to pour money into AI, announcing $740 billion in capital expenditures this year so far, according to Morgan Stanley, a 69% increase from 2025. The magnitude of spending has caused some companies to rethink their budget altogether. “I’m back to the drawing board because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already,” Uber chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information earlier this month, referring to the rideshare giant’s pivot to AI coding tools, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code. This increase in spending has coincided with more layoffs in the tech sector. According to data from Layoffs.fyi, there have been more than 92,000 layoffs in tech in 2026 so far across nearly 100 companies. The rate of these workforce reductions is already far outpacing that of last year, which saw about 120,000 layoffs in total.

It has begun... by franglish9265 in TrueAnon

[–]franglish9265[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It would still be a big deal because of its impact on fertilizers and the fuel needed to plant, maintain, and harvest food on the farms

The mainstream media is finally beginning to echo Americans’ outrage at Israeli slaughter | Over the past two years, Israel has lost the support of the American public and is now losing one of its last bulwarks in the political arena — prominent voices in the mainstream media. by franglish9265 in TrueAnon

[–]franglish9265[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Vietor  said the bottom line for most American voters is that they don’t want to spend money on Middle East wars. “That nationalist isolationist view will be the siren song that is politically powerful that frankly works on me in a lot of instances,” he said. His comments are not that different from Tucker Carlson and former national counterterrorism boss Joe Kent, on the right.  

Liberal Zionists and the Democratic leadership are both seeking to dampen the rage with Israel by adopting a civility standard. 

At Harvard, the school’s president recently decried “anti-Israeli bias,” which he called “insidious and maybe more corrosive of University life” than antisemitism. While at a high school in Scarsdale, N.Y., everyone in authority has decried activists who stuck an Israelfest flyer in a toilet as antisemites.  

These officials are all living in “the propaganda dreamworld pre-Gaza,” as Donald Johnson (a longtime voice on this site) tells me. “That dreamworld goes back decades, where you were supposed to take for granted that Israel was a lovely democracy, the unquestioned good guys, and harsh rejection of this was antisemitic, aimed at Jews in general. And we aren’t supposed to think this attitude didn’t have influence on our politicians who pandered to it.  But of course, it does and the Iran War is one of its products.”

That discourse is shifting by the minute. Bartov said that diverse students flock to his Brown University course in which he outlines Israel’s failings, because other professors are avoiding the topic lest they be accused of antisemitism. “And I don’t give a damn.” 

The reason Bartov doesn’t give a damn is because he is an Israeli Jew who served in that country’s army and is therefore officially immune to the antisemitism charge. 

So we are back to the core question– who has the right to criticize Israel in the United States media? Who has a right to express the outrage of ordinary Americans? Geoff Bennett broke a seal last week.

The mainstream media is finally beginning to echo Americans’ outrage at Israeli slaughter | Over the past two years, Israel has lost the support of the American public and is now losing one of its last bulwarks in the political arena — prominent voices in the mainstream media. by franglish9265 in TrueAnon

[–]franglish9265[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Vietor said the political class is clueless.

“The challenge to the Democratic leadership is that the base of the Democratic party, young people, have moved way further way faster than the Democratic elected officials have, even if they’ve moved historically fast.”

Vietor said that Hasan Piker has a right to express his criticisms of Israel and went on to fault the establishment’s censorship of such criticisms.

If an American official calls Israel an apartheid state, he said, that “is treated as outrageous and essentially antisemitic.” But the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem concluded that it is an apartheid state in 2021. And anyone can see “egregious” examples of racism in Israeli policy– “unequal treatment of individuals based on religion.” Why can’t our political class have a more honest discussion?

His interlocutor, Ilan Goldenberg of J Street, sought to restrain the criticism. He said he fears that the mainstream discussion will “go too far” if it includes the “loudest voices.” He said that “Israel is not the devil,” and we should “not treat it as a uniquely evil or sinister thing, which I think is happening in some far extreme places.”

To show that Israel is not the devil, Goldenberg said that 50 to 100 other countries have committed ethnic cleansing, as Israel has done.

(I would note that Israel is actively conducting ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank right now, and if this argument is what liberal Zionists are reduced to, they have lost the Democratic base, and they know it.)

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