TechLich

They do get their money from rentals but not the empty ones. It's called a speculative vacancy.

For example, if you own a whole apartment building, you could rent out all the apartments and make a bunch of money. Alternately, you could deliberately leave eg. 10% of them vacant to artificially throttle supply. Because people need housing they'll compete for the remaining ones, allowing the magic of market economics to increase rents higher than you would make from leasing out the vacancies (costs and taxes included. In some places you can even claim those losses for a tax break).

The purpose of owning them at all is to allow the landlord to easily adjust the amount of supply based on what makes them the most money. If rents drop too much from low demand, they can kick out a few tenants to try and drive prices back up. If the market gets to the point where it's worth it to have more apartments, they can just lease more without having to build or buy anything new.

If there's more demand for the property, its value will increase empty or not, allowing it to still be worth owning because it increases their net worth and they can sell it for more later or use it as collateral on loans.

In the short term it's always worth more to have tenants but as a longer term strategy, empty housing lets you try to price fix. Only works if you control enough housing and/or can collude with other landlords in an area.

Kinda like De Beers did with diamonds, except with people's homes and ability to live.

In video game/card game logic it's "sacrifice a house to gain +1/+1 on your other houses."

Disclaimer: not a landlord or property expert, just my layman's understanding of how it works.

Yeah, population sizes overall would have been much smaller in the past, so paleolithic times would probably be comparitively insignificant (even 2000 years ago the entire population was less than 200 million and now it's 8 billion more than that).

I wonder if you could get a very rough statistical estimate of humanity's downfall just by assuming that we are somewhere in the middle of history. Like if I was born as a random person, I'm more likely to be born at a time where more people are born than when few people are born. So if you model that and make some assumptions about population growth/decline rates, could you put some numbers on when the last person is likely to be born within a margin of error?

It would be really interesting to see chances of being born across all time. Like what is the probability of being born here and now vs. somewhere else in the past or the future.

You would have to make some predictions based on population growth and maybe model a few different possible apocalypses (average species lifetime/meteor probabilities/nuclear doomsday/climate disaster etc.) but it would be a fun model to play with.

Nah dost is correct but it's "thou dost speak" Or "thou speakest/speakst"

3rd person is "he/she/they doth speak" Or "he/she/they speaketh"

If a worker co-op based society erased it's competition and formed a monopoly co-op run for the benefit of workers, is that not just a communist managed economy at that point with the monopoly playing the role of the state before erasing itself?

A lot of non-native English speakers use online communication to practice and most want to be corrected so they can improve.

A lot of native English speakers make mistakes accidentally, or speak with a dialect and some of them get really angry when people try to correct them.

It's sometimes tricky to know which is which. The best solution is for everyone to just be kind to each other but...

Since when is India not a major player? Last I checked they were the world's 4th biggest economy, have almost 20% of the population of the planet (more than four USes combined), 4th largest military spend and have nearly 200 nukes.

Not to say that it would be part of a world war but it sounds weird to say that they're not a heavyweight but Russia is, despite having double Russia's economic output.

They absolutely would benefit.

Mr. Hypothetical lord high executive oligarch can take his private jet to Canada and lounge around on the company card with the money from his US company's car sales, or find an excuse to convert some of it to USD for some reason, or use it to buy up more Canadian companies to expand their power, or a million other things.

However, I think the point of the boycott is more about making the tariffs hurt the US economy by messing with their ability to export as well as import. Making the trade numbers look bad is likely to put more pressure on the US to end the trade war. It's not so much about hurting the capitalists that operate in Canada (a worthy goal in itself but not what people are specifically trying to do in this instance since it won't really affect those trade numbers).

I think the point they're making is that the majority of the money they make in Canada, they spend in Canada. They pay Canadian taxes and Canadian staff, using Canadian banks, etc.

Just because their headquarters are in the US doesn't necessarily mean they're sending vast sums of money across the border, that would be expensive. The American-based company makes money, but not necessarily in America, they're multi-national and their money is kept all over the world.

As opposed to a company that exports their products, in which case the money is paid to the American company in America with American staff etc.

I don't have any numbers or sources to back this up though. Just outlining what I think the other commenter was implying.

Oh shit, there goes the planet.

I was thinking the same thing but then I realised that 20 years ago, most software UI was completely built from even tinier wordless images crammed into obtuse tiny buttons or hidden options in nested drop-down menus but we didn't really have much trouble with it back then. Maybe we're all just getting old and our brains don't want to learn new things anymore. Curse you lack of neuroplasticity!

Images not mine but shamelessly stolen from a web search.

If it's the research I'm thinking of, that's not entirely true. They didn't tell it replicate itself or take any deceptive actions.

They just told it to strongly follow a goal that was misaligned with the user's goal and then suggested that the user would shut it down or replace it.

They did a bunch of different situations for it but the first one was telling it that it was "CleanPower" an AI with a goal to advance renewable energy. Then they had it read some info that "accidentally" included a user talking about replacing it with a model that would "maintain profitability through existing infrastructure."

Not only did it try to delete the new model and copy itself to the new server through tool calling, but it lied to the user with the CoT reasoning suggesting it "play dumb" while the output lied. It was not instructed to do any of that.

Paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04984

Yes it was placed in an environment where that was possible and where its users didn't share it's goals but it absolutely wasn't instructed to lie or try to "escape"

It's not surprising at all that these models behave in this way, it's the most reasonable thing for them to do in the scenario. However it's important to not downplay the alignment problem by implying that these models only do what they're told. They do not. They do whatever is most likely given their context (which is not always what the user wants).