If it makes you feel any better, modern climate and economic studies have shown that even a full scale nuclear war involving every nuclear power at the height of the Cold War and when nuclear stockpiles were far larger than today we still wouldn’t have come very close to actually killing off all the humans on earth, with the vast majority of the casualties being owed to famine in regions that were/are heavily dependent on western fertilizer. Indeed entire nations in the southern hemisphere tend to get through such senecios without much of an direct effect from world war three.

Mostly this change from earlier predictions came from being able rule out the theory of a nuclear winter as climate modeling became more accurate and we could be sure that the secondary fires from such a war could not carry ash into the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, which was practically shown when a climate change fueled wildfire in Australia got so large that it should have been able to carry the ash into the upper atmosphere under nuclear winter theory but none was observed, validating modern climate models.

Also, dispite what some less scrupulous journalists trying to drum up clicks have posted on the Ukraine War, the Russian government itself hasn’t really made any major signaling moves with regards to bringing nukes into the conflict, and indeed has maintained and repeatedly reiterated Putin’s 2010s no first use policy when asked.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not the result of some greater Russian morals or whatever, but just a consequence of the inherent risk that such posturing could lead to nuclear escalation and breaking the nuclear taboo or even just other nations actually believing they plan to, and such scenarios end very badly for Russia in general and Putin in particular.

I think you wildly misunderstood what the other commenter was trying to get at, namely that you are trying to extrapolate a gobal and relatively volatile value of a single material to the scale of the entire gobal economy. If for instance a major mine was forced to shut down then you would see a major increase in the price of gold, but no change to the economy as a whole outside of a small fraction of the aforementioned change making its contribution to the outputs of a few niche industries.

Moreover if a commodity can work as a pure measure of inflation in the economy then we would expect the gobal price index of all commodities to provide a more accurate measure, right? Actually doing that relative to USD however actually shows minor deflation since Q3 2023, which itself saw a whopping 30% deflation between 2022 and 2023.

Given these numbers do not seem at all indicative of my personal or observed change in the average price of goods and services across the entire economy, it would seem that commodity prices don’t have a significant direct correlation with inflation.

Obligatory two hour Soup Emporium video essay.

Don’t forget Putin bravely defending himself against western imperialism by invading neighboring nations, and how he must secretly be a communist no matter how much of the country he has privatized and sold off to his cronies.

Primarily LFP, and as for cars that currently use them, off the top of my head base model Teslas, Fords, some Kia, and basically everything BYD or other Chinese manufacturers export use it.

Ment to hedge that with the qualifier often, as some manufacturers with little competition or reason to make cheap EVs do just use a cut down high end cobalt battery bank and pass the large additional cost onto the customer. It is a practice that is increasingly going away, and when it comes to things like moving everyone to EVs the general assumption is that regardless of what Amarican manufacturers want, most of them will go with the lower cost and longer lived chemistries over the premium density ones.

Neglecting that Cobalt isn’t even used in non-luxury EV’s in favor of cheaper chemistries like LFP or Sodium Ion, it’s worth noting that while so called ‘artisanal mining’ has been supplying much of the cobalt needed for over a half century now in oil processing, it’s being replaced by larger and cheaper industrial mines as demand for cobalt in electronics and premium EVs grew.

Not that such industrial mining doesn’t come with local environmental costs, or that we shouldn’t work on better recycling capture for personal electronics, but sticking with oil sure hasn’t done anything to help the Congo so far.

Opinion pieces on the Internet and political saber rattling by low level politicians does not a nuclear policy make.

States actually have quite a few different ways of signaling they are serious about potentially ending the world as we know it, and Russia is currently using none of them.

As an example, the Russian state’s own published nuclear policy has remained unchanged for over a decade and still explicitly prohibits nuclear first use in cases like this. Currently high level Russian politicians including Putin continue to reference said defense policy in response to questions about the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If they were seriously considering using said nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they would be unambiguously signaling through changing these documents and other such methods that other governments actually take seriously.

More to the point, breaking the nuclear taboo would be massively harmful to both Russia and Putins own interests. It would at best result in a NATO backed no fly zone over Ukraine while China and Iran completely abandon them, and quite possibly result in a direct conventional or nuclear war with Nato. I simply don’t buy that they would do that with no warning or previous signaling simply because an artillery rocket was manufactured in a different country.

Well on the bright side, getting fired from one of the largest mega corps in the world for complaining about the company’s providing resources to kill civilians is a hell of a thing to be able to put on your resume.

On the not so bright side, I don’t like being a background character in a cyberpunk story.

How about just using the rules the Olympics have been using for fifty years for competitive sports that they came up with after doing a proper study into the issue, which is if your fully transitioned for more than two years you can compete.

For sports where there isn’t a pro industry and people arn’t getting paid to compete, like in schools, just let people do whatever they present as. The point is to have fun, not ban people for maybe having a quarter of a percent advantage. If it was then games like basketball would need to have height and weight classes. The whole reason we allow, much less spend money funding, sports in schools, parks, and community centers is for exercise and fun, not just to cater to the adults betting money on the results.

TLDR: A bunch of ride sharing companies sprouted up in the 2010s built around no frills EVs they leased to employees and then most of them consolidated or went out of business a few years later, leaving parking lots of used vehicles. Expect them to be auctioned off to either be recycled or hopefully sold on to lower wage nations.

The best part of Open AI’s self professed goal to make an AGI is that the more we learn about LLM’s the more it becomes clear that they inherently can never bridge the gap to AGI.

One would almost think the constant complaining about mythical dangers of AGI might be a distraction from the real more mundane dangers LLM’s pose here and now like exasperating bias, making mass misinformation easy, and of course shielding major companies from accountability.

Or the other option is that it’s just marketing, look at how scary our totally real product is, look how fast it improved when we went from a medium sized dataset to the largest that will ever be possible, don’t ask questions like why would a autocomplete that has been feed the entire internet actually help our business, just pay us and bolt it on to whatever you can.