The first bit is just a restatement of the "paradox of thrift":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift

If every business cuts headcount and costs, then you overall get a contraction in the economy and high unemployment and a recession. Everyone's spending is someone else's salary and revenues.

Couldn't get through the rest of it because it was a bunch of overly verbose human-slop writing.

I think the bigger issue right now is also just straightforward economic pressure caused by tariffs and high energy costs and inflation. If the affluent consumer starts to buckle, businesses may get caught in a downsizing spiral where they start posting lower profits, firing actual management, stock prices decline, and the affluent consumer retracts. No AI required to fuel that.

Right now with stocks hitting record highs, the affluent consumer is not changing their behavior at all and just spending even harder, which is keeping profits pumped up, and keeping stocks at record highs. At the margins, though, fewer and fewer people are participating in the economy, which is a trend that is going to be unsustainable.

I think AI is going to be most relevant in the debt collapse that it leaves behind, and in the excuses it gives to shed employees. This economy is going to hit a wall at some point, AI or not.

Human-slop is a new one for me. How would you define it? Low quality work written by a human? Human writing that sounds like an LLM? Something else?

For me, it is writing way too much to say too little.

let me pour one out for all my homies in the marketing department...

I wouldn't trust any 'confident stochastic next-word predictor' to tell me fact. There are official sources of information for these kinds of car maintenance questions.

Better than asking your backyard mechanic buddy who believes that you don't need anything other than 10W40 or something like that. You have always had to know who to trust and what level of work you need to do in order to get to an answer which is satisfactory. And in this case, Claude cited the manufacturer's bulletin which is the actual best source of truth that you're talking about.

Right, but standard Google search doesn't find them reliably either. Instead you get answers from enthusiast forums, "quick oil change" franchise sites, SEO slop, and maybe somehing from the actual manufacturer site if you scroll down.

I notice that my allergies get worse, and a theory is that systemic low-grade inflammation and histamine response may be due to diet. I don't have a lot of other conditions, but people with autoimmune conditions (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis) might see it get better/worse with dietary changes.

When I'm eating beans+rice and a bit of protein that I cook myself, my allergies are a lot lower.

When I cheat and eat "crap" I tend to start sneezing and rubbing my eyes.

There are a lot of variables, though, and cheat foods tend to be highly processed, high in gluten, with a lot of additives and made with seed oils, and hidden sugars, and are much higher glycemic index with higher glycemic loading, amongst other things. Plus seasonal allergies are just variable day-to-day which is another confounding factor. So I don't really know what the X factor is. I get similar effects on an atkins-style high fat beef, butter and cheese kind of diet, because it also cuts out most of those things.

My theory is that the inflammation simply high-jacks your body's attention. Meaning, it has to spend more time dealing with it as opposed to handling other conditions. I don't strongly believe that chronic inflammation is the direct causal effect of many of my health symptoms, but I do strongly believe that, overall, it makes them significantly worse than they need to be.

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy"

AI is expanding to meet the needs of expanding AI. Why worry about jobs? AI will provide plenty of work. If anything, I worry we'll be working more, not less. All that AI will need someone to vouch for it and to scapegoat when it makes mistakes.

I didn't know that one. Loosely said to be Oscar Wilde.

Delivered in the voice of Lenard Lemoy to millions of GenX during their formative years.

Is that a civ 4 reference? You sir, have my upvote.

I'm not important enough for anyone in China to go out of their way to attack me. And DeepSeek has to maintain a sufficient level of trust so that users keep using their platform--they can't just act like a keylogger attacking everyone's crypto wallets or trust collapses.

If I was working on something that the Chinese government considered of strategic importance, then I would certainly be worried about it. But I don't do that.

I'm much more worried about techbros in this country using their LLMs to extensively profile me and produce something vastly more dystopian in this country than the real or imagined social credit scores in China. The people trying to convince you that the Chinese government are the people you should be worried about (as an individual in the United States) are probably the people you really need to be worried about.

This is some hopium/copium that the corporate world will trend to being naturally fair and ethical.

Amazon was always an asshole-driven company which did topgrading layoffs annually at the start of every year. It has never suffered because of that.

Ask them what they think about cameras run by private companies being used to spy on them and their neighbors and see what the poll results look like.

Just because people want policing doesn't mean they want the kind of policing that we seem to be getting.

And that article you cite is a pretty good example of this.

The title is: Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence

The bottom half is: Black Americans Lack Assurance Police Encounters Will Go Well

Let me introduce you to Ring security cameras...

Police cameras are actually very popular, as is private security. I've even heard rich people voluntarily pay private security with guns (!) to protect them.

You're living in fantasy land my friend. No one outside of your bubble thinks about things this way. People are trying to live their lives and raise their kids. People don't like this chaos and have very little empathy for the few percent of people that terrorize their neighborhoods.

> The bottom half is: Black Americans Lack Assurance Police Encounters Will Go Well

My "bubble" is that I read past the headline and got more than halfway through that article that you cited.

Biden inherited COVID, which required a very accommodating policy response, but then had the AI/LLM spending/hiring boom surprise sort of overlap that, which turned out to be highly inflationary, but nobody was predicting that back in 2021. There really was no winning move to play without precise knowledge of future events. And Pandemic-era stimulus started under Trump (including Trump putting his name on the checks), and the Federal Reserve were the ones controlling monetary policy and financial sector support through the pandemic.

I don't see how you can say that he deserves "immense blame" for the inflation that we suffered. He was a passenger for most of it, and lacked a crystal ball to see the events of 2023 with the release of ChatGPT.

Unlike the current inflationary spike which is entirely due to an energy shock caused by a President starting a war of choice.

Maybe I need to go back and read some more there but my understanding was that the American Rescue Plan, in tandem with some of the stuff that you mentioned that I probably should’ve emphasized more, really drove inflation to new heights and arguably wasn’t necessary as Covid was winding down. Also a ton of spending on top of that.

You’re right though that I should emphasize Trump engaged a lot of the same behaviors. It’s certainly unambiguous that the current situation is entirely his fault.

Yeah, I probably grossly oversimplified that and forgot about a bunch of other factors. Stimulus was split about 50/50 between Trump and Biden. The ARP probably was a bit too large and contributed something like 1.5% to the eventual inflation spike. A lot of the inflation spike, though, was due to supply shocks, then energy shocks from Ukraine, then "revenge spending" demand shocks as society reopened with not enough goods and a lot of excess savings. Then we had the nascent AI tech hiring boom which was pushing up costs and housing in places like SF and Seattle. By 2024 we were well on our way into the current K-shaped economy with the hypersclar buildout driving inflation due to private sector spending (even in the face of the Fed hiking rates like crazy). Really it is likely that only about ~20% or less of the inflation under Biden was due to government spending.

It is true in 2024 that there was a hell of a lot of gaslighting going on that the economy was great for everyone and that we were having a "vibecession" and praising "Bidenomics" when the K-shaped economy was already appearing, and this DNC messaging effort clearly failed. But it also didn't have a lot to do with Biden, and arguably pushing the message that implicitly accepted that Biden was entirely responsible for the economic conditions of the previous 4 years was flawed and factually inaccurate messaging. Maybe it wouldn't have been possible to argue otherwise, but I do remember a lot of Democrats who argued that Trump's economy had relatively little to do with any of his policies in his first term. I similarly think that Biden had relatively little control over the economy in his term.

Currently, though, Trump pretty well owns this economy due to what his war with Iran is doing. He doesn't own the background of what is going on with AI and hyperscalar spending and the likely bubble and the inflationary pressure and K-shaped economy (although Republican tax cuts over the past 45+ years are cumulatively responsible for the K-shaped economy and Trump owns some of that), but Trump is doing his best to just pour gas over the economy and light it all on fire.

I think this is the first nuanced conversation about Biden and Trump I’ve had in years and I greatly appreciate it

Turns out I'm already paying for that but not using it, so I guess it is time to get locked into the Proton ecosystem even more...