• 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2024

help-circle








  • The reason for that is that you have to look at this as if you’re some greedy corporate bastard.

    A robot butler costs money to build and if it doesn’t pan out, they’re on the hook for the cost. Firing people saves money right now, and if generative art doesn’t pan out, they can hire new employees that will work for less.

    AI is just the latest craze to justify what these greedy bastards do all the time. The way they’re fucking us is new, but the act of fucking us is as old as dirt.






  • HVAC suffers from loss over distance. Large distances like what’s between the western US deserts and the eastern seaboard would suffer large losses to heat via HVAC.

    HVDC can solve this, but that requires an investment into this kind of infrastructure. Moving the batteries is using a preexisting infrastructure because the assumption is that new infrastructure won’t be upgraded. We will build new so long as a ROI has quick turn around, another assumption here being that long term profit planning won’t happen so everything needs to be planned to have profiting within two or less years. But we won’t build new if usage of that new happens a decade later.

    We could totally send the electrons over, but sending the batteries over is adding a bunch of assumptions that people won’t want to do massive investments in basic infrastructure to facilitate that, so we’ve got run with what we have that can ensure profits in a fairly rapid pace before investors bore of it or the next election cycle tosses everything in chaos.


  • I think the two of you are focusing on either end of this and not really seeing the bigger picture.

    China absolutely (stole / acquired) all the technology they have for solar, EV, and grid based storage. They have literally innovated 0% in this particular industry. I don’t think there’s any debating this aspect.

    At the same time, China has pour billions into domestic production of solar panels, lithium and sodium batteries, vehicle production, and grid based storage solutions the likes that no other country has even remotely attempted. They recent demonstrated cheap sodium based 10MWh storage systems that can be built using seawater sodium. Something that California makes a shit ton of in their desalination plants, that they currently just shove the salt off as waste byproduct.

    Like, if we wanted to, that kind of thing that China just demonstrated, we could be building GWh level storage systems for 10% the cost of a 1 GWh nuclear facility strictly off a byproduct that California distinctly doesn’t want and is literally paying people to take away. They could literally flip a cost into a revenue stream, but we don’t because “reasons”. We could literally have large batteries charged in Utah, and then use rail to move the sodium based batteries into the Eastern sections of the US, using literally the same infrastructure that we use today to move the tons of coal we move around for the TWh of power we generate. We could be doing this today. But we don’t because many nations just buy the arguments politicians feed them, or “it’s complicated”. And then there’s China demonstrating at small scale that it’s doable. So instead we say “oh well it wouldn’t scale” or “oh well you stole all that tech” because apparently our pride is more important than climate change.

    The thing is, yes China has not committed to educating their population into novel development of these technologies. But at the same time they are deploying this stuff at rates every other developed nation has said they’d like to try and do that one day off in the future. Or can’t do right now because their hands are tied.

    For the folks pointing at China as the enemy, fine. I’m not going to debate it. But there’s still things to learn from what they are doing with that stolen technology. Do we need to cozy up to them? Nah. But they’re showing off that grid based storage at scale and cheap is a thing even though people like France and the US say that such a thing is not possible at this time. They are showing LFP is viable if you’re willing to take an initial domestic loss to invest in the infrastructure, something the US citizens know but keep saying “well oil interest are holding us back”. No, there’s only a few dozen oil execs, there over a three hundred million non-oil execs. It’s a lack of will power.

    Like most western nations keep coming up with excuses for delaying EV and green technology pushes and China keeps showing many of the excuses given to be false. And we know they’re false. We know the expectation of no less than $36k USD for an EV is some bullshit that car companies are pulling to offset all the baggage they have from leaving ICE. We know we could have charge stations every 100 miles on the Interstates, but we don’t because oil companies don’t want to lose their investments in the infrastructure they’ve got right now.

    We know the reasons being given by our political and industry leaders are all bullshit. China is over there showing IRL how bullshit they are. Yeah, they stole everything they have, but at the same time all this “oh we couldn’t possibly do that here in the US” is shown for the BS it is, that we already know it to be, in China.

    I mean, great, we’re all very smart people. Awesome. What good is that awesome smartness if we keep letting dumb fucks in politics pander off dumb excuses for why we don’t get to enjoy any of the stuff that awesome smartness provides? What good is being innovative if corporations keep handicapping that innovation to ensure they have a steady stream of revenue?

    I mean yeah, let’s call China out of the bullshit they pull. But I mean, let’s not forget all the damn windows we’ve broken ourselves in our glass house here.




  • Remember those ads long ago from Microsoft where everything was a to the edge display? And your taxi cab window was also a display? And the sidewalk was a display? And some random piece of plastic was also a display? And your fucking desk, surprise, is also a display but also one you type on! And so on…

    Good times.

    I mean all of that looked cool I’m sure at the time, but all of that would be horrible to use, structurally unsound, and require device interactions unheard of.

    Unfortunately, this patent is likely just an echo of a project that will never see the light of day

    This patent is likely a “we would love to use this to sue someone remotely trying anything that might look like this, but isn’t someone who has a legal team that could convince a judge to send us home with our tails between our legs.” This kind of shit gets pulled by Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, et al all of the time. It’s to ensure their continued ability to keep new entries in the industry away.


  • This kind of highlights how AI isn’t the issue. The reason there’s not a robot that does your laundry and dishes is because the margin for such a robot wouldn’t make anyone insanely rich, just well off. Especially in say the consumer market. Getting rid of say 50% of your employees and making the other 50% “Prompt Engineers” without any pay increase provides an instant two fold increase in profit.

    The issue is how much money can a particular tool make someone. Before Photoshop came around, the larger magazines used to have at least three dozen airbrush and cover artist on staff, not to mention the photographers, film processors, etc… Today, with Photoshop, those six to seven dozen jobs have been consolidated into maybe a dozen folks. Some head of the magazine got to keep churning out stories with 80% less staff. It wasn’t that Photoshop is good or bad, it was that someone saw dollar signs and ran with it.

    Companies pay for technology with the expectation of paying it off down the road. So if 10 licenses of Photoshop cost $X, but they save Y number of employees * $r/yr rate of pay, then the licenses pay for themselves down the road. Consumer markets aren’t like that. If a consumer has $X and something costs more than that money on-hand, there’s just not a “pay for it down the road” for consumers. At least one that doesn’t come with a lot of headache and trouble down the road as well.

    The thing is, companies are going to use any excuse they can to fire people, especially senior staff people. If the technology doesn’t work, oh well, they hire younger and newer folks back at greatly reduced pay compared to the folks who got laid off. AI is just the most recent MacGuffin in that shuffle and they’re willing to put ludicrous amounts of money into that thing because “down the road, one way or another, it’ll save us cash”. That’s why there’s no dish washing or laundry robot, there’s no serious money to be made from it. But over-hyped AI that could provide the same kind of massive layoff benefit that say Photoshop or CGI provided, these C-Staff folks can not shovel enough money into that fire.