Agree. I live in Winnipeg, Canada, and I have visited local datacentres - anything built in the last twenty years would be very hard to physically penetrate with stealth alone.

There are older ones which might be a bit less sophisticated, but that’s not the norm.

Hi, occasional spreadsheet user here who cannot tell the difference between Excel and, say, LibreOffice Calc (which is what I use, disclosed). Why is Excel specifically better? No troll.

Those old computers you speak of: They worked. There is no comparison to be made here.

They were built in order to give us an edge on the battlefield. More accurate artillery and the like. They did math which humans could do, but which would take humans weeks or months, and the answers were required within timeframes more like 12 hours, because war.

They were so useful, so valuable, that they were worth the treasure spent. They conferred a kind of superintelligence to their users. Those with brains to understand could see this, and so yes, hobbyists found their way to building their own machines, once small CPUs became available, however janky. Anyone who had to do math, who had to do math, went into debt if they had to, and learned to use these janky beasts because the advantage was weeks or months of time they didn’t have to grind on paper.

There is nothing about AI that resembles any of that.

I’m curious what the word “capitalism” means to you.

Leaving Marx aside completely for a moment, I see it as “the use of capital” at the most grossly simplified tip of the iceberg. Which broadly means that capitalism refers to people with a lot of money already, using that money as a means of getting more money, without doing any sort of productive work themselves.

And that is exactly the problem at hand, and what MBech meant by the word.

I think you use it to broadly mean “our Western, non-communist system,” which is quite a lot to cram into a word.

The fiction of the last 30 years is revealed to those with eyes to see.

All this time the capital class and their lackeys have been saying “Russia is a our superfriend now and China wants to be democratic so we are helping them by using their slave labour and don’t you feel guilty for questioning our supremely good intentions here!”

And meanwhile it’s the same old global power struggle, but you can make SO MUCH using slave labour, it was just too tempting to send every bit of our labour - even our high tech - over to their factories.