> likely would have otherwise been put toward stock buybacks
Stock buybacks from who? When stock gets bought the money doesn't disappear into thin air; the same cash is now in someone else's hands. Those people would then want to invest it in something and then we're back to square one.
You assert that if not for AI, wealth wouldn't have been spent on materials, land, trades, ect. But I don't think you have any reason to think this. Money is just an abstraction. People would have necessarily done something with their land, labor, and skills. It isn't like there isn't unmet demand for things like houses or train tunnels or new-fangled types of aircraft or countless other things. Instead it's being spent on GPUs.
Totally agree that the money doesn’t vanish. My point isn’t “buybacks literally destroy capital,” it’s about how that capital tends to get redeployed and by whom.
Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders, which are already disproportionately wealthy and already heavily allocated to financial assets. A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled into more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc), not into large, lumpy, real world capex that employs a bunch of electricians, heavy equipment operators, lineworkers, land surveyors, etc.
AI infra does that. Even if the ultimate economic owner is the same class of people, the path the money takes is different: it has to go through chip fabs, power projects, network buildouts, construction crews, land acquisition, permitting, and so on. That’s the “leakage” I was pointing at.
To be more precise: I’m not claiming “no one would ever build anything else”, I’m saying given the current incentive structure, the realistic counterfactual for a lot of this megacap tech cash is more financialization (buybacks, M&A, sitting on balance sheets) rather than “let’s go fund housing, transit tunnels, or new aircraft.”
I really don't think any of that is true; it's just popular rhetoric.
For example: "Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders" is obviously false: the shareholders (via the company) did have cash and now they don't. The cash is distributed to the market. The quoted statement is precisely backwards.
And do they sit on it? No, of course not. They invest it in things. Real actual things.
> buybacks
Already discussed
> M&A
If they use cash to pay for a merger, then the former owners now have cash that they will reinvest.
> balance sheets
Money on a balance sheet is actually money sitting in J.P. Morgan or whoever. Via fractional reserve lending, J.P. Morgan lends that money to businesses and home owners and real actual houses (or whatever) get built with it.
The counterfactual for AI spending really is other real actual hard spending.
Bad audio and bad foley doesn't get mentioned enough. I think it's why people are watching things with subtitles: the actors are on a blue stage that is completely silent having a quiet conversation and then the war happening around them gets added later. In noisy environments people slow down and enunciate and directors aren't helping actors know what to do.
Ideas on how to fix it:
• actors should wear tiny headphones behind their ears (or wherever is not visible) to make noise that approximates the environment they will be shown in. They'll have to act over it.
• Foley artists should not be given video of the final scene to foley. They should be given only one single continuous very wide shot. This will solve the problem where foley artists keep doing ludicrous things like adding the sound of a pin dropping and hitting the ground (since it's shown on screen) in the context of a space ship that is in the process of exploding.
>The sun in the background was sharpened via a stacked image but the image is 100% real and authentically captured in camera (see the video in the OP reply for real time view). Not a composite!
He just kept shooting the sun after the jumper cleared, and stacked up those shots. I think saying it's a 'composite' devalues the image and just makes it seem like he cut out the jumper and pasted on to the sun.
It does devalue the image indeed. He didn't cut out the jumper and paste it onto the sun but he did take images of the sun and paste them onto the jumper, using the jumper as a mask. Which seems to me like a distinction without a difference.
If his images were real they would have shown the powered paraglider too. The images are a composite of photos that he took of the sun and a frame from the video that he took of the jumper.
Is it pretty? Certainly! It's art! But it's 'photography' the same way the 'So Yummy' YouTube channel is cooking.[1]
Frame stacking and compositing is so common in astrophotography that it would be more unusual if he didn't composite additional frames. Would you say the same thing about HDR bracketing? This is a very weird take.
All photos have an exposure time; that's an inherent property of them (think film). Compositing images digitally on top one another is not an inherent property of photos.
You can double expose film, and I think that's a finer line, but I think the distinction most people care about is really analog vs digital.
So.. the owner made a mistake getting expensive menus printed and then corrected his mistake?
Even if he didn't have to adjust prices due to inflation, surely restaurants adjust the items on their menus frequently. I have been to a restaurant that printed new menus daily because it changed daily. It's like 10 sheets of paper or cardstock. It's not that expensive.
You're better off guesstimating yourself than trusting contractors. The contractors are incentivized to severely oversize any AC units they install or else people leave bad reviews on their pages/listings when the installed unit can't keep up the one day every two years that the temperature gets abnormally hot.
I did this myself and insisted on a unit half the capacity that the contractors wanted. Several flat-out refused. But it works perfectly! Approximately one day ever two years it can't keep up. Which means that all the other time it doesn't short-cycle. Perfect.
I had to replace my home HVAC system this year and went with a variable speed system. It was eye-wateringly expensive, but it works much much much better than the system that was in here before, and completely obviated my concerns about sizing (the old system was an oversized single-stage unit, and the house always stayed cooled, but something or other was regularly breaking, probably due to the short-cycling).
With the new system, electricity consumption on a hot summer day is about a third of the prior system, it’s virtually silent and the comfort of the house (due to more granular temperature control and near-constant dehumidification) is substantially better.
The discover and fix phase is over. In August 2025, the FAA announced Part 108 which codifies the rules. Up until now, companies have been operating under waivers. The comment period for Part 108 ends on October 6th. After that the rules may be changed slightly and then will be finalized.
You can select a few comments at random and quickly find a pattern: people are concerned that the drones everywhere except in the densest of areas do not have to see where they are going. If they hit a manned aircraft it's the manned aircraft's fault and the drone operator has no legal liability. Does that sound like something FAA employees wrote themselves? How much motivation will be there to "iteratively refine" when they have no legal liability and even admitting that a possible improvement exists would create legal liability?
What do you mean “the discover and fix phase is over”? That implies that safety critical systems stop trying to discover problems and fix them? In what world is that true? You are always learning from mistakes and fixing them. Forever.
It's true in this one. Companies will design drones that comply with the very detailed regulations and go no further the same way car companies don't put seatbelts, airbags, or auto-brake devices into cars unless forced. The drone regulations are nearly done. Any further changes may take an act of congress.
If a drone crashes, obviously no other drones should fly there until a human determines what went wrong and presses the 'resume' button. The fact that that system did not exist is a systemic problem.
The systemic problem is that they didn't spend the engineer-week on it. It's only an engineer week. That pays for itself after avoiding a single drone crash to say nothing of avoiding a second lawsuit.
Video games weren't as widespread, personalized, or diverse than they are now. That people who played video games in 2010 said that those were better is immaterial. This graph goes up through 2022: https://i.redd.it/tnrs4wl1ibkb1.png
Same with smartphones. Smartphone apps existed but weren't as personalized and didn't serve nearly as diverse of content as they do now. It's night and day. Surely I don't need to pull up a graph of smartphone usage per day.
The data shows the big drop in sex happened in the 2010's. Your graph shows the big spike in gaming happened 2021 & 2022. That's during the pandemic. Of course gaming rose during the pandemic when people were forced to stay home.
May I ask how religious (or woowoo) your partner is?
The number of people who care about having an objectively true understanding of as much of reality as possible is disappointingly small and I suspect that these photo trends are just making that fact more obvious.
You'll see the big deal when you realize that you don't trust absolutely any photos or videos of current events unless the photos are provided by a news source that you trust. You'll see the big deal when you take a picture of something real and show it to a friend who isn't interested because they don't think the thing in the photo actually exists.
Stock buybacks from who? When stock gets bought the money doesn't disappear into thin air; the same cash is now in someone else's hands. Those people would then want to invest it in something and then we're back to square one.
You assert that if not for AI, wealth wouldn't have been spent on materials, land, trades, ect. But I don't think you have any reason to think this. Money is just an abstraction. People would have necessarily done something with their land, labor, and skills. It isn't like there isn't unmet demand for things like houses or train tunnels or new-fangled types of aircraft or countless other things. Instead it's being spent on GPUs.
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