This is a thing at my university (I work there). I talked to one of the library folks about it years ago. She explained that (a) they would like to keep way more of the books but there’s not enough funding to have the space or staff for it–our school is in constant and recently much more intense financial crisis, laying off all kinds of people (except deans and provosts); (b) a lot of this stuff literally nobody wants, like 4th and 5th and 10th copies of mediocre textbooks rehashing the content done much better by other texts, and © yes, if I wanted to fill my car with books and rescue them I was welcome to do so.

Badge of honor

“I will not eat the green eggs and government cheese…”

I think that is a reasonable take. It is s huge jump, in many ways, so I believe it is much more dangerous than other capitalist “innovations”.

Reasonable take, but the last part (“faster-growing”) is huge here. The sheer scale and multipliers on the bad things caused by AI are far beyond most (all?) previous technologies used by capitalists.

IDK if any of this is what it looks like, but it’s in the context of complete diplomatic incompetence for a decade. None of these people know what they are doing on the international stage. They made their careers as US mob bosses and bullies pretending to be politicians, and don’t understand anything beyond that scope. When Trump could no longer pull world leaders off balance with stupid handshake tricks, he looked like an idiot for a while. Whenever he or his lackeys encounter someone who can’t be bribed, intimidated, or extorted they sputter like Elmer Fudd because they have no other tools.

Your explanation makes sense to me (a very non-physicist), but I remember more than one journalism piece from a decade or so ago about uncharacteristically high rates of cancer in areas in Afghanistan or Iraq that were basically carpeted with US depleted-uranium bullets. Do you think that’s a fluke? Is it possible there is poor quality control in manufacturing the bullets, resulting in some stuff with shorter half-life in there? Could the cancer rates be due to the heavy-metal properties?

(Of course it’s a correlation/causation thing, so there could be other causes, too, but I’m interested in what you think of this)

This, plus if we had any kind of political will or intelligence (as a nation; meaning the USA) we’d force AI companies to pay their extenalities: treat and sanitize every drop of water they use, and build the infrastructure to bring it back to communities; pay for their electrical infrastructure in advance and pay their electricity bills to the tune of “nobody else’s bill goes up”; some kind of massive carbon capture tax for their use (this one might not be possible to actually do; it’s too much); and of course paying royalties and copyright violation fines.

As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business. let’s say they didn’t: The cost per token would be quite high, and very few people would use it.

It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.