Everything posted by Vegas64
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My 2026 Health Insurance Premium Increase
Premium's up $40 per pay period for same EPO.
- My new favorite subreddit
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Things not going well in Venezuela
Interesting tidbit about the oil situation in Venezuela as well (below), but also reports it will take $100bn’s and a decade (or more) to show value out of an investment in Venezuela’s oil reserves. About 80% of Venezuela’s oil is sold on the black market, according to Francisco J. Monaldi, the director of the Latin America energy program at Rice University. China and Russia are big customers. But it will likely devastate the Venezuelan economy.
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Things not going well in Venezuela
So rumors are that Rodriguez the Maduro VP whose Venezuelan high courts just swore in, was the one who was as the inside mole to the US and ratted him out. Funny if that is proven true over time. Best-case scenario might be a Noriega 2.0, when Panama’s genuine democratic transition soon superseded initial condemnation of Bush's intervention. Worst-case scenario could be a Gaddafi 2.0, though Venezuela doesn’t face anywhere near the same ethno-political fractures and separatism that Gaddafi’s regime papered over in Libya.
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Greenland
If you take about 10 steps back, I’m seeing a picture emerge. I don’t want to overstep and leap into conspiracy land, but the political madness lately does make sense if you consider the following: The incoming AI and automation doomsday for labor (blue collar, white collar, and minimum wage), will necessitate a social framework that will need to keep the billionaires happy AND the rest of us from the streets with pitchforks. If you look at, say Norway or the Middle East, a great way to accomplish this in the short run is a dividend paid to American citizens akin to a UBI check for most of us, the “useless eaters”, to meet basic needs (or at least feel like we are). In order for this economic framework to work, you need a) strong returning assets like oil (see: KSA) like we look to be adding with Venezuela and Greenland b) strict/tight definitions, laws and parameters on what an American citizen is and means and qualifies for the monthly stipend. Which is why nationalism is all the rage again versus open borders etc. Basically capitalism has failed and we have no exit ramp now that AI has been captured by the elite.
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Things not going well in Venezuela
Checks out. The last straw was the ego gut shot.
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Things not going well in Venezuela
It sounds to me like we (The US) just got impatient and sick of waiting. We've been in some form of negoitating Maduro's exit for 6 months+ from stepping down to an actual exile (Russia/Belarus) and my first thought is that the US got tired of waiting and got the sense that Maduro was stalling and kept changing his mind in a way that signaled he was never going to actually step down and he's just stalling like a hostage crisis who is just buying time for someone to bail him out.
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Things not going well in Venezuela
- Dallas - Even Shittier than Normal
Why would you be surprised? Dallas is heavy with narcos.- Robinhood Prediction Market
What would y'all do to maximize or optimize the end state here considering a) the two long shot bets I have are already in the money and b) they play each other next week so only one will pay out if I let it ride? ETA: I paid about $185 for the two positions and they are up ~$900 right now.- Looksmaxxing: Body Dysmorphia For Men! Now Featuring Meth, Smashing One's Own Face With A Hammer, and Intentionally Driving Your Cybertruck Over Another Person
I don't think so. I went down a rabbit hole on this stuff and apparently there are penis enlarging techniquest to lookmax and make it huge and exercises and messageboards about it.- Everything sucks now remember when things were better: Malcolm in the Middle
Glad to see Colt McCoy having an interesting and creative second act after football!- New Site Software / Theme
Am I missing something on not being able to log in to my normal account? I can't find what burner email address I used and when I click the settings it demands to be logged in first to view. Being out on holiday before the cutover did I miss my chance and have to create a new handle?- I for one welcome our new AI overlords
This. This is exactly what a sane and rational response sounds like when you are actually intellectually curious and open-minded, while simultaneously being put off and disgusted with the present bubble. Find use cases that make financial sense and actually help people and society in a variety of ways.- I for one welcome our new AI overlords
What are you offended by here exactly? That there is a *gasp* positive aspect to something that you want to mortally hate? I’m not an AI bull at all, but it IS interesting and there is a silver lining of a cool application for AI as Waymo absolutely uses LLMs and Google’s entire deep mind/brain/gemini gen AI expertise to train and run their models that power self driving. Waymo (and fully self driving generally) is 100% an AI use case.- I for one welcome our new AI overlords
For all the fun we have about how there aren’t any real or good applications of AI and it’s all fugazi, I was listening to something that startled me. self-driving à la Waymo is a slam dunk grand slam AI story from every angle you look. Self driving only took off after all the neural AI discoveries and advancements of LiDAR and sensors to feed data for foundational models to process. Most of us are familiar because we live or spend significant time in Austin (or SF), but as it starts to roll out nationally and globally the world will appreciate it. - CDC statistics cite over 40k deaths in USA a year or 120 a day due to vehicle crashes operated by people. - adjusted for city street driving, apples to apples, Waymo is 91% safer then people driving . You can understand why if you’ve driven the last 10 years with the advent of the smartphone and the epidemic of distracted driving. Heck someone on one of the AI threads posted while driving on CarPlay. - and this isnt just a small data set. Waymo has millions of miles driven. - 91% reduction in accidents is a massive cash savings. CDC put out a report on Medical costs and cost estimates of lives lost is $470bn a year (2022). 91% reduction and reducing crashes 10x is $420bn a year. That is nuts. - It was relatively cheap for an AI investment too. 15bn investment to get this to this point. $15bn is a fraction of what foundational AGI models have burned. $15bn is 1 year of Ubers profits. It’s 1 month of Google profits.- The Lost Generation essay
There is a reason people who look and talk and live like me are enjoying Mamdani in NYC.- The Lost Generation essay
I think the argument is that for some of these aggrieved white males, sure, they are lost to the other side making promisses, etc. But there are some who can be reasoned with and who can come around from the initial bloody nose with a little empathy and pep talk, who can be saved from the dark side. You seem to think there is not a messy middle ground where perhaps slighted people can feel safe in calling out a wound, maybe feeling sorry for themselves for a minute or two, but then taking a step back and weighing everything out on the balance and making a decision to move forward as non (or less) aggrieved. You seem to think all these white guys who carp about the changes they are facing are either all lost causes or actually have no right to those feelings. At least that's what it seems like based on your responses.- The Lost Generation essay
That was unintentionally funny, too, but the main call out there was showing the author, in his own words, is trying to say he and his ilk are still liberals.- The Lost Generation essay
I think the argument is, much like it does in your whole professional career, it helps people to get onboard with the new reality. Whereas if you were to take a more antagonstic tone of the just deal with it and glossing over the personal impact with a lack of implied care or empathy, it invites conflict. The point is to minimize conflict.- The Lost Generation essay
Reminds me so much of this lol Preach.- The Lost Generation essay
Have you never had to deliver tought news to someone, a child, an employee, a player, that was coming from above you? Maybe you didn't completely agree with it or maybe you could see from their perspective how it wasn't fair and there was some tough breaks and bad news, but that decisions and strategy was set and the direction was final? I think that's the posture he's saying to take. Acknowledge/address that the situation sucks for them and have some empathy but, like, there's not a lot we can do about it and it ain't going back the way it was. We can take 15 minutes to mourn it but we have to move on and build a bridge and get over it. Or as Bezos famously said, "disagree and commit".- The Lost Generation essay
- I for one welcome our new AI overlords
https://thisecommercelife.com/blogs/comics/the-story-of-ai- I for one welcome our new AI overlords
Back to AI and the bubble, read this and though it appropriate and directionally correct: - Dallas - Even Shittier than Normal
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