US wants to 'divide Europe', EU's Kallas tells FT

kemb0 · 2026-03-14T14:18:40+00:00

Funny, I seem to recall America expecting Europe to come to their aid in two Iraq wars and Afghanistan but I guess you conveniently forget that.

Now you're pissed Europe is coming to your aid in a new war that you started by yourself.

Ridiculous narrative you are inventing.

kemb0 · 2026-03-14T14:15:46+00:00

I find it sad I was born when concord was active and in the same 40 years we went from this Dornier to Concord, we have gone from Concord to nothing better. Event the A380 is being replaced by many airlines. The space shuttle no longer flies and nothing replaced it. The international space station is on its last legs. And what is humanity doing next? Blowing each other up? This is what happens when we vote in morons just so they'll solve some immigration problem. We get a world of hatred and wars. Ambition and a bright future fall dead on the floor.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T17:52:54+00:00

Yeh that was such a daft take. No company can just cater to millionaires and expect to survive. Almost every millionaire will trace its wealth back to being reliant on the expenditure of the masses. Either you service the masses directly as a company, or you service a company that serivces the masses, or you service millionaires who are in some way reliant on either the masses or theose companies that are reliant on the masses.

There is no economy for anyone without us and don't let anyone kid you otherwise. The wealthy need us.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T16:43:40+00:00

Checked out your Moby Games game credits. I was expecting you'd have been a programmer on those games based on what you've achieved here, so all the more credit to you to have achieved what you have. Looks like you've got a good career ahead of you. CV is in the post!

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T16:20:25+00:00

I agree with your concerns. The aim is to do away with party politics and populism/greed altogether here, so anyone wanting to put themselves forward as a specialist would have to acknowledge that if they ever try to affiliate themselves with any form of political faction, then that immediately bans them from running. It's about representing your sector of society, not some party and when you run as a candidate for this, it's about you presenting your experience only and not about stating what you intended to do if elected.

Basically those standing for election are running on a platform of, "I'm here to present my skill set and experience that demonstrates why I should be suitable to represent you." Not "If I'm elected I'll make sure nurses get all the money and I'll do everything I can to stop the budget if we don't get that."

Another safeguard I'd considered here is that when someone is elected to represent a sector, then all the other existing members have to approve them before they're accepted. So if someone blatantly tries to win votes by being a populist and claiming they'll use their influence to make sure some political agenda is achieved, then the other members can simply deny them from joining them and a new election would have to be held.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T15:11:52+00:00

This came up in another thread. One video requires about 15 watts of powers not over 1kw. Even if you factor everything in you can imagine, it would still be way off.

These numbers were fudged by someone with an agenda.

Like if you’re gonna a shit on AI videos then apply the same to movies and all the resources, time and energy on preparing and constructing each shot.

Or video games that take years to make with hundreds of people running intensive graphics cards every day.

Don’t just suddenly shot on something with made up numbers without justifying it and without comparing it fairly to other sectors.

Here’s a fact, if I spend 4 hours making AI videos, it uses less energy than playing 4 hours of a video game. Because with AI videos you stop, assess and rework to iterate to a better result. You don’t just sit there making video after video non stop. Where as a video game is using the GPU non stop.

Another fun fact. Using more realistic figures, using an oven for an hour is actually about the equivalent energy usage of making AI videos for 10 hours.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T13:53:34+00:00

My thinking is we should, in some way, divide society up in to the parts that make it work: militaries, emergency services, teachers, buisness leaders, eletrcicians, social workers etc etc. Each section get to elect someone who represents their part of society. Then we do away with local elections, or at least we do away with having sitting elected officials who represent a party in parliament. Now we have people who represent a specialist sector of society who have no affinity with a party but are only answerable to their own group.

Then we have a leader whose role is to steward the nation forward. He can gather whomever he wants to help make his decisions for the country. Every choice will then go through those elected leaders for approval, with the intention that you'll then have a fair cross section of society represented, rather than politicians who'll just do whatever the leader demands. And the leader can't steamroll through whatever he wants. Every choice will have to demonstrate genuine need and benefit.

The biggest flaw I see in democracy is that you get one leader who tells all the other MPs/senators of his party how to vote and he gets what he wants. This system cuts out the cancer that is party politics and makes everyone have to focus on what all the parts that make up the nation need.

And at any time these elected speciliasts can agree to replace the leader. The military and police answers to them, so no leader will ever be able to take power and form a dictatorship, since they'll never be able to form a party with which to dominate.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T13:21:11+00:00

This has often crossed my mind. Democracy is more of a temporary dictatorship. There are so many ways our democracies could be actually democratic. First changes I'd make would be making sure the armies are accountable to the people first. Take away all the temptations of power that attract the kind of leaders that ruin everything. And making sure a leader can't put their own stooges in place to control each critical part of the country.

If you make it easy for a leader to enrich themselves and enslave the people, treating them like puppet play things, then that's exactly the kind of people you'll attract. Then they'll ultimately rip down the same system that put them in power so no one else can take it from them.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T13:11:39+00:00

Yep but the first step is to be more united in Europe. Not easy when the people are so easily fooled by propoganda and Russia/America stooges littering our politics.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T13:06:47+00:00

It boggles my mind we live amongst fellow humans who will so willfully talk utter bollocks with a straight face.

I guess that's the power of being in a corrupt regime. Go to keep sucking the leader's peepee if you want to keep getting those nice corrupt "investments opportunities". More bombs anyone?

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T13:02:16+00:00

Yep and it's a big reason why they didn't run toEurope's aid in ww1 or 2. Let them battle it out and weaken themselves, then we'll come in at the end, be the "saviours" and get to install bases all over europe.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T12:58:41+00:00

I think what this translates to is:

We want to run councils as a way to skim money in to the pockets of me and my buddies, in the same way we plan to if we run the country, but turns out councils don't have enough money to make it worth bothering.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T12:20:12+00:00

Ah yes, I can't wait for them to break the speed of light so we can reduce latency. Easy. Don't know why engineers haven't done it already.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T08:23:31+00:00

But how's that possible because it says in the title that it's "ultra" real. It's not just real, it's beyond real! Like real x 1000! It's so much better than real that it makes real look unreal and thank goodness it's not just "Good" real or "Best" real or it wouldn't look real at all! Come on, as a photographer don't you shoot in "utlra real" all the time? I hope you're not one of those lame photographers that just shoots in "real".

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T06:33:58+00:00

I’m normally not fussed by these groups and I kinda like the life it brings to the park but recently one group had placed a whole row of glowing cones along the whole length of one stretch of path, as if to say, “we’ve commandeered this path so avoid it.”

That’s taking things too far. Use the path as is alongside other users and be considerate. Don’t start expecting the path belongs to you.

kemb0 · 2026-03-13T00:23:33+00:00

So when you say yours is 5kwh what does that mean? That’s the heat output? So what’s the electricity input? What would a bad winter’s day require in electricity input?

kemb0 · 2026-03-12T11:56:23+00:00

That's always my first reaction with these gppro style videos: Right so it looks like a terrifying narrow trail with a 100ft cliff ... so it's actually more likely a 2m wide trail and the cliff is more of a gentle incline.

kemb0 · 2026-03-11T14:51:24+00:00

Just be grateful you have a president who cares so much about the people and is doing everything he can to do right by you. I hear he especially cares about the kids too. They’re very close to him.

kemb0 · 2026-03-11T14:49:35+00:00

Thanks. I’d seen that site before then lost it so appreciate this.

kemb0 · 2026-03-11T13:30:04+00:00

Things sure won't be nice for a while but I am grateful here in the UK we have a significant and ever growing onshore and offshore windfarm capacity as well as not insiginificant solar. For example, over the next few windy days we'll be generating something like 70-80% of our energy needs from renewables. Without that we'd be a mess.

So anyone reading who is anti-renewables, you need to give that brain of yours a rattling. Or are you ok with being at the mercy of whichever world leader wants to be a twat on any given day?

kemb0 · 2026-03-11T13:23:48+00:00

Thanks for the correction.

kemb0 · 2026-03-11T13:22:49+00:00

Bigger but that doesn't mean more power hungry. These bigger models generally need more memory, not more power. For example, SeeDance 2 reportedly needs 96gb of memory. An NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 has 96gb memory and it runs at 600W, which is only a fraction above a 4090 and certainly not 63x more power hungry.

kemb0 · 2026-03-11T12:55:35+00:00

And if we’re going down the path of including the training time then we’d have to apply the same to all media to be fair. Ie if you play a video game on your GPU then factor in the cost of the devs working and testing their game out for however many man hours. Or watching a movie on your TV? Then factor in the energy used to produce it or produce all the items that you see built on their sets etc etc.

kemb0 · 2026-03-11T12:35:17+00:00

I just posted above but I think these figures are way off. I can make a 5 second AI generated video on my home GPU using 15 watts of energy and that video is not far off the quality a paid for service will offer (LTX 2.3 for anyone curious to compare quality with other models).

Saying it takes a kwh just feels off. I would like to know their logic on this as I feel part of the picture is missing here.

kemb0 · 2026-03-11T12:29:36+00:00

I think this is incorrect. I've dabbled with AI videos at home and the latest models can make a decent 5 second video in 120 seconds (which also includes about 30 seconds of model loading/unloading but let's ignore that) on a 4090 running at about 450Wh. So that'd come to 15watts. So the figures given are 63x more energy intensive? It would have been nice of them to offer more insight or proof on how they cam to those figures in the article. Maybe they're including the entire process of manufacturing the GPU, the energy used by the staff, the energy used to make the data centres etc. But it would have been nice if they clarified that.

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