Womble

Yes, if you want a social security net and dont live in the world’s economic hegemon

FWIW the article does make sense, though the conclusion I’d draw wouldnt be the same as theirs but:

Jane is earning £60k and claiming child benefit for three children. That’s worth £3,094.

She’s now in the 42% tax band.6 Jane still pays basic rate tax for her income between £12,570 and £50,270, but now pays 42% tax for everything over that. So her total tax bill is (50270 – 12570) * 28% + (60000-50270) * 42% = £14,643 and Jane takes home £45,357.

Jane is thinking of working a few more hours to earn another £1,000. She’s in the higher tax band – so in a sane world she’d expect another £420 of tax, and a marginal rate of 42%.

But that is not the result. Once Jane’s income hits £60,200, the “High Income Child Benefit Charge” (introduced by George Osborne) starts to apply to claw back her child benefit – 1% for every £200 of earnings.

The marginal rate – the tax Jane is paying on that new £1,000. This is 56.5% – and we will have the same result for all incomes between £60k and £80k.

The solution I’d draw from that would be to raise the higher rate from 42 to 45-50% and scrap the means testing of child benefits. Makes the tax take more progressive and reduces administrative burden by not having to assess people’s income for if they are eligible for child support or not.

If this university hadnt bought this meaningless advert it would have a tiny reduction in the demand for advertising potentially leading to less always lit billboards being made. So no, they dont get a pass for it.

People make a complete mess of DIY with powertools, that doesnt mean that the powertools are the problem.

The energy usage stuff is just silly, its dwarfed by streaming and video games, never mind actually energy intensive things like heating transport and meat rearing.

You think venture capital dictates to the politburo what its priorities are in China?

Have you considered that if the worlds two superpowers are dead certain on this being an important area that they are willing to throw coutless billions of investment into, that they might know more than you do?

I think her point was that you were doing the annoying “everyone is from USA so I’ll just talk like we all are” by bringing up Trumps tarrifs when they were not the topic of conversation and are irrelevant to everyone outside the USA.

ok, but running a hairdryer for 5 minutes is well up into the hundreds of queries which is more than the vast majority of people will use in a week. The post I replied to was talking about it being 1-2% of energy usage, so that includes transport, heating and heavy industry. It just doesnt pass the smell test to me that something where a weeks worth of usage is exceeded by a person drying their hair once is comparable with such vast users of energy.

Do you have a source for that? Because given a chatgpt query takes a similar amount of energy to running a hair dryer for a few seconds i find it hard to believe.

It would make a lot more sense nowadays for Europe/NA to east Asia (or would for Europe if Russia were a reasonable country that could be trusted to fly over).

Thank you for posting this, I’ve tried to say the same thing to people quite a few times but to roughly the same reaction as this post has got. Its an entirely emotional reaction, people have convinced themself that AI is bad (arguable) therefore anything bad said about them is true (incorrect).

Unlike those lovely communists who frequently actively worked with the nazis (until '35) in order to weaken the social democrats and whos leader explicitly said “after Hitler, our turn”. Much better eh comrade?

It wont do anything of the sort. Even if you accept the premise that somehow artists are being exploited from learning from their previous works, all that will happen is the AI companies will shift out of America to a juristiction that doesnt value extracting rents from IP above all else.

It was meant to protect creators ability to earn from what they produce for a while so that they would be encouraged to create and share with the world.

I think we both agree that the current copyright regime is not doing this. But I fail to see how expanding the rights of rightsholders to dictate how you use the works that you have acquired (which is what this suite is over) doesnt just make that issue worse. I would much prefer to see copyrights drastically slashed from the absurd semi-perpetual system that the USA has pushed on the world and things move into the public realm after a decade or two, without doing that giving people who inherited or bought the rights over a work completed a centrury ago the legal power to say “you cannot read this work in a way we dont like” is abhorent.

The bit that picture leave out is that first guy is almost certainly killed, as are a good few of those in the third panel. Thats what makes it difficult.

Just so we’re clear, the problem is that people are driven to suicide because of draconian punishment of copyright infringment, not that it isnt happening to people we dont like. Right?

For all those cheering on the copyright mafia going after Anthropic, consider that some of the groups supporting anthropic against this massive overreach of “we get to decide how you use our works” include:

• Authors Alliance
• the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• American Library Association
• Association of Research Libraries
• Public Knowledge

Maybe this is not such a great thing?

You could even do district heating. Use the hot water output from the data centre and sell it cheap for piping into appartment blocks for heating.

Its an urban planning and transport issue essentially. Medium density housing (think 4-6 story blocks) allows enough people to live in an area that it becomes feasible to have trams/light rail serving that area.

You’re right that there’s orders of magnitude difference, but its the driving that’s far more! One query to a chatGPT type model uses roughly 1Wh of energy, which is about the same as is released in burning one droplet of gasoline.