You can get quite good models running on a Mac Studio, but these will not rival a frontier model.
$3,699.00
M4 Max 16c/40c, 128GB of RAM, 1TB SSD.
LM Studio is free and can act as a LLM server or as a chat interface, and it provides GUI management of your models and such. It's a nice easy and cheap setup.
Of course, alternatively, the AI companies could go bust before finding profitability. Then, there’d be a ton of supply, prices would crash, and one or two of the current memory suppliers would go out of business. After that, the new Chinese memory companies might be producing at volume, and Renesas could be up and running.
At the moment, nothing is certain. Could this last? Sure. Could it not last? Yup.
This should actually allow for a balanced budget and still affording everything. The problem is, the USA has the best government money can buy and it wasn’t bought by the people.
It’s a technical distinction. The last true “budget” was FY1997. Otherwise, CRs are used until some kind appropriations bill can be passed. The problem is, that appropriations bill isn’t a true budget as money was already spent via CR.
Except that America is not, and never has been, capitalist. Much like socialism or communism, capitalism has never been achieved. The closest I know any society to have come is the USA between the late 1860s and 1913. Yet, that still wasn’t a capitalist society. Half of the country was under military occupation, people were forced to segregate by law, and the USA was conquering people militarily and committing genocide in the Philippines. For capitalism to exist, people would be sacrificing in the present for investment in the future in a free market. There are no free markets, and the world operates under financialism where the future is sacrificed for the present via debt based currency and debt based capital markets. The most free market of the last 70 years has been information technology, and that is slowly changing. As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete.
To this day, capitalist leaning societies outcompete socialist leaning societies. Just don’t go saying that either has ever truly existed. Socialism and capitalism are utopian fantasies. People are messy and our systems are too.
Good? Things like crypto and the current usa administration should have thought us that completely free markets are ripe for corruption and insider trading. None of that produces anything, and merely concentrates and ties together power and capital.
> As it becomes regulated, the monopolies become entrenched, innovation slows, homogenization is enforced, and products undergo a diminution in quality as monopolies needn’t compete
All of that happens because we let the monopolies do the regulation, and limit and block any antitrust action.
When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair".
When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated".
I don’t think you have contradicted his point here. Purely “free markets” are just as much of an illusion as “capitalism.” At the same time, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t valuable ideas.
“Freer” markets (for some definition of free) are certainly possible. Deng liberalized China’s markets, and despite persistent and heavy state influence, it has much freer markets today than under Mao. This has been great for the Chinese economy and raised a billion people out of poverty. One could argue that this wouldn’t have happened without state direction, but you can’t ignore the effect of liberalization.
In the US, we have been gradually restricting the freedom of the productive parts of the economy, often by subsidizing scams that put legitimate competitors out of business, or allowing monopolies or private equity to destroy them despite rules intended to protect fair competition. At the same time, we have let scam industries off the leash, and they are free to basically commit open fraud with no controls. It’s a kind of freedom, I guess.
> When people talk about a "free" market, they mean "free as in fair".
> When billionaires talk about "free" market they actually mean "free as in deregulated".
> You don't get "fair" without regulation.
Correct in theory, but you have another definitional problem here.
When people talk about “regulation”, they mean protecting people and businesses against predatory behavior through fair legislation.
When modern politicians talk about “regulation” they mean handouts to friends, government guaranteed monopolies through regulatory moats, and rules designed to harm perceived opponents.
We have a real problem here and it’s going to take some serious effort to fix it before it becomes an issue of “who and whom.”
As a Spaniards, I'd say that it depends on the service. Public healthcare it's golden, private healthcare for minor stuff it's oka-ish but for hearth strokes, you are just a number, run away. Public healthcare will cover that and far more.
OTOH, the state monopoly on telecomms since elder times (Telefónica) had scam level prices for most calls and long distance calls were a ripoff; and OFC no flat rates for internet in late 90's. Then the market opened for tons of telecos/ISP's and the prices plummetted down.
Powerful people like to wield power over others. They want the masses to exist specifically so that they can feel superior and exercise their authority over others. They simply want the masses to be forever below them.
This is actually an argument I find convincing. The powerful need the less powerful to exist, because otherwise in relation to whom would they be powerful? Who would show them they are powerful?
But even then, how many of the others would they need to exist?
Hyper-individualism goes a long way in eroding racism and sexism though, urging people to view others as individuals rather than members of some larger group. I’d rather hyper-individualism than hyper-collectivism. Once you consider someone first as a member of some other group, the marginalization and then erasure of that other becomes easier.
The USA has the best government that money can buy.
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