If you can get a decent sauce for $1.74, you should definitely buy it. I don’t shop at Walmart, but around me, sauces tend to be $3+, even house brands, and I find that they still need to be supplemented with more herbs like garlic.

Now and then, Publix will have one of the imported tomatoes brands for 10 cans for $10. You can make a lot of sauce for $10, and a bunch of seasonings, most of which are very easy to grow.

Learning to cook for yourself is helpful, and that means not just avoiding eating out, but avoiding the purchase of prepared foods.

For instance: Instead of buying a jar of Spaghetti sauce, get a large can of crushed tomatoes, add garlic and Italian herbs, and let it simmer for several hours. It’s super easy, and tastes far better, and is much cheaper. Cook up several cans in a giant pot, and freeze the sauce in single or double containers.

Chili is another cheap, nutritious meal that freezes easily. Just ground meat, beans, a can of diced tomatoes, and herbs. Just don’t forget the Cumin, that’s the taste of Chili.

When pork shoulders are on sale, cook one up in a slow cooker, and freeze that. Cheap pulled pork available whenever you want it. Do the same with chicken breast and/or thighs, when they’re on sale.

Do one of those, and a couple more, every Sunday, and you’ll have a lot of cheap meals for the next month or two.

Looking for the silver lining, if you’ve needed to lose some weight, now is a good time. I’m looking at it this way: I’m not short on food, I’m keeping temptation out of the house.

I’m just saying it’s a huge genie, already out of the bottle. Good luck getting control of it now.

I’ve been a solar advocate for decades. You got the sun giving off free energy all the time, and all those roofs and parking lots that could be covered with panels to capture that free energy, what’s the problem?

Oh, yeah, the Free part. American Capitalism doesn’t like the sound of FREE.

It doesn’t matter. I’m NEVER buying a car from that psychopath, at least not until he’s been imprisoned, and his companies nationalized (we paid for them, after all, they’re ours), and most of the profits gone to the workers who built it, and the remainder to a government account to fund social safety nets.

Yeah, we can do hard stuff, too, and maybe we should start doing the hard stuff here.

We spent decades having to deal with other countries and our oil policies, and it’s been a nightmare of wars, embargoes, etc. Now that we can go down a completely different energy path, why shouldn’t we keep it inhouse? We need to work with other nations, but we don’t have to voluntarily line up to be totally economically enslaved to another country for the NEXT wave of energy.

I just saw a video on the first music synthesizer. It was built in 1897, and took up the entire basement of a city-black sized building. It was huge and useless, but it worked. Over the next 75 years, technology improved, until it could fit into a suitcase, and be carried around.

The concept and the tech existed in its basic form, but it wasn’t really ready for deployment yet.

I see data centers that way. Technically, they can build it, but it still has too many problems to be truly viable yet. There are too many problems with cost, the environment, the corruption, and that’s before considering the impact on society.

In 50 years, maybe we’ll have the technology and the public policy to do this right, but right now it seems like we are forcing an inferior system to accommodate something that is too advanced for it. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves.

It’s like body builder who gets on a bike for the first time, and can’t believe how fast his giant muscles can make that bike move, without realizing how out of control it will be at the same time, or how big the crash will be when it finally arrives.

Yeah, it’s creepy and weird, but we already have cameras watching and recording your every move. I don’t see how this really changes anything.

We probably can’t stop it from happening, but we can make it very socially unacceptable, and we can make some behaviors illegal.

Fun to drive? I’ve never experienced that. You drive a car. They’re all pretty much the same. I never take it above about 75. I wouldn’t call that fun. What’s fun about it?

I’ve said Fuck You, and that’s pretty close.

OR, we could build those solar panels right here in America, and not only relieve the pressure on oil reserves, but kick off a new big American industry, backed by a national energy initiative, backed by tax incentives. There would be lots of new small businesses around the country selling and installing solar, creating thousands of new jobs.

I’m a 3.

All those shithole Red states are going to get raped by data centers, while the Blue states will force them to pay their way.

Nonsense, there are Brits everywhere around here. Florida is the only part of America they actually like. Nobody is deporting perfectly good white immigrants. They could probably make a case that they need asylum from their health care system. MAGA would buy that.

Level up your oral skills.

Now, this is the point where I disagree: if it is possible with today’s tech, why is it not happening? Why is automation limited to repeatetive tasks and stuff like self checkout?

They have the tech right now. My local news even ran a little disguised Chipotle PR video showing their new robotic burrito bowl machine, as the news anchors oohed and aahed over what was essentially a propaganda ad.

So Chipotle already has it, and every other fast food outlet is either working on it, or has it - and has for a long time. They’ve been salivating for this moment for decades. There are only two things holding it up:

1. The tech isn’t quite ready: It is, but it it isn’t. It’s ready to be fully tested on the public, and that’s when it will finally get fully perfected. They’ve gone as far as they can without actually installing it. Now they need real world scenarios.

2. It will be a PR nightmare. The first fast food chain to announce a fully robotic store is going to get savaged, including a massive national boycott, one that I will happily join. But once one company does it, and the dust settles a bit, the others will do it, too.

The next stage will be when someone announces that their entire company will be mostly automated, probably a fast food operation again. That will result in an even stronger boycott that may even bankrupt the company. It will certainly take a serious hit, but someone will make the calculation that the short-term PR risk is worth the long-term profits.

We are in the calm before the storm. We can see it on the horizon, and we can see how big and ferocious it will be. The job environment after the full implementation of AI, is going to get really bad. Saying that it won’t be so bad, that the approaching maelstrom won’t kill EVERYBODY, isn’t comforting.

I forgot that the US is a dystopian hellscape where many people work what would have been a college summer job a couple of decades ago just to get by, my bad.

Sarcasm aside

That was supposed to be sarcastic? Because that’s the reality for MANY people in America. If you don’t see it happening around you in your life, good for you, things are going well for you. But we are in a K-shaped economy, and a lot of people are on that lower rung, and those are the people that are going to get hit worst by AI.

Great, so in your scenario, things will still be great because people can always clean up busted milk jigs, and watch for shoplifters (both of which could be easily automated, by the way)? And that sounds like a reasonable job environment to you? Don’t worry about AI taking your job, you can always get a minimum wage job guarding the rich guy’s stuff, at least until they perfect the Slaughterbots to replace you. Nice career, you should get those $120k student loans for your software development degree paid off in no time.

And they’ll use the pizza vending machine, if they want a pizza, or any other fast food, because they’ll ALL be fully automated. The building itself will be the vending machine. Autonomous trucks will be loaded by robots at a robotic warehouse, driven to the locations and unloaded by robots, then cooked and served by robots. The entire process from end to end can be done without a single human touching it, with the technology they have RIGHT NOW.

It’s only a matter of time before it’s perfected and launched. Dismissing an obvious societal trend because it is inconvenient is a very American trait, and it has gotten us to where we are now. How about we start seeing the actual future that is looming in front of us, and stop pretending it’s not there? AI is coming, and the manner in which businesses are already deploying it is already losing jobs, just in anticipation of losing even more jobs.

Replacing as many human-powered the is the express purpose of AI by nearly every corporate entity. Stop pretending that it isn’t.

Of course industrial robots have always existed, but technology is much better now, and we have AI to power them now. These aren’t your grandpappy’s robots.

The combination of automation and AI is going to lead to the elimination of entire human powered industries. The technology currently exists to automate EVERY fast food outlet in the country, and every one of those companies already has a system ready to roll out. The only reason they haven’t is because nobody wants to deal with the backlash when it happens. But once it does, the rest are going to follow, quickly. A lot of these jobs are first jobs, second household incomes, retirement supplements, etc. The loss of those jobs will be felt deeply.

How many people are supplementing their income with driving a ride share? How many older workers are doing that after losing their jobs? Both Uber and Lyft make it very clear on their website that they intend to replace their ENTIRE fleets with autonomous vehicles, which are nothing more than AI powered robots. These are people who aren’t on the unemployment rolls because they have managed to scrape together driving to work. Without this, they go right back to being on the unemployment rolls.

I just saw a report on autonomous trucks, predicting 170,000 on the roads with a few years. That’s 170,000 lost truck driving jobs. What are those professional drivers going to pivot to?

AI/ Automation won’t replace every job, but we will eventually have to live with a permanent unemployment rate over 50%, and if they could figure out to replace EVERY job, they would, enthusiastically.

The overall problem with humanity is that we think we’re as smart as humans can be, so we are at the pinnacle of human achievement.

I just saw a video about the first synthesizer. It was built in 1897, and it took up the basement of a building the size of an entire city block. They had the technology to do it, but not to do it well. But they didn’t see it that way. To them, it was the pinnacle of technology. But 75 years later, and we can put that same instrument in a suitcase.

Data Centers may be something that will be useful in the future, but our tech isn’t good enough yet. Right now it takes an enormous building, and mind-boggling amounts of resources, and does incredible damage to the environment, as well as the damage to the economy and the job market.

It’s like realizing that you can talk with two tin cans and a string, and then running out and installing a giant international system of tin cans & string, instead of waiting for the tech to advance to a point where we can do it properly.

Maybe in 50 years, the tech, regulations, and policy will be caught up to the ambition, but right now, we aren’t ready for it at this level of technology.