Popular Mechanics is US-based, so they use short billions: 1bio = 1 000 000 000.

You are right, long billions (1bio = 1 000 000 000 000) would be a lot more. Though even that would still be possible, but then ~35% of the chinese population would have to be employed in planting trees.

Just a matter of scale. Every seventh person lives in China.

Or to recontextualize: The article talks about a time span of around 45 years. That’s around 1.7 billion trees. Remember, that’s an english (short) billion, 1700 million. (In other languages a billion is a million millions, and not just a thousand millions.)

If a worker can plant 20 trees a day and works 200 days a year, that means around half a million people are more than enough to do it. In a country with around 1400 million people, that’s 0.035% of the population, or roughly one in 3000 people.

Suddenly, it’s not all that crazy anymore.

Fair. We Europeans also don’t want US refugees who call themselves “ex-pats”.

A company goal, set with exact numbers? That does sound like quite a bit more coercion than a simple “Guys, look at the cool river we have here. Let’s be grateful for the good things we have.”

I see what they tried to go for, but enforcing stuff like that is not good. Because forced good feelings always just do the opposite.

Merz is a moron, but if the other bigger states in the EU and the UK align, Merz will follow too.

TLDR: Mythos is strictly worse at finding vulnerabilities than Opus 4.6, and about on par with a specific cheapo open source 2B parameters (=> tiny and super cheap) model.

It’s all marketing and no substance.

Nah, it’s quite likely in the current climate that the EU would join in the defence of Canada.

If the USA actually starts an intra-NATO war and doesn’t just talk nonsense, everyone in the EU knows we are next. So better do a nice clean proxy war on another continent than to let it spill over to the EU once Canada is down.

I’m kinda surprised nobody has done the opposite of what’s on the OP.

I figure there would be quite a few USAians who wouldn’t mind to secede to Canada.

It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.

These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.

A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.

In theory. In practice, the planet is too big for unified union action or unified political action. You can unionize on a country level and call general strikes on a country level. You can’t do that on planet scale. Globalized economy sidesteps the power of unions and the power of the people in general.

It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?

Technically, we have been living in a post-scarcity economy for the last 50-70 years already. We have a massive global food overproduction. We have more than enough resources to give everyone a pretty nice standard of living. But on the one hand we have a massively inefficient economical system, where huge parts of the population do redundant work and bullshit jobs, while another huge part of the population do tasks that just exist to prop up the system (e.g. the whole financial and marketing sectors only exists because of the capitalist system, they aren’t doing anything worthwhile at all).

We live in an artificial scarcity society, because capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work.

People sell their labour for money, which they then use to buy stuff from the capitalists, and the capitalists use (part of) the money to buy labour from people.

With AI and robots, this will soon not be necessary any more. The labour of the people will be even less relevant than it is today. So the question then becomes whether (a) the system will collapse and what will happen afterwards or (b) if we will just pump even more bullshit into our bullshit jobs to prop up the old system.

Totally this. The capitalists feared that yet another country could spiral into revolution and then communism, so they had to keep the workers happy.

The collapse of the Soviet Union combined with neoliberalism and globalism shifted the balance. Now they could always threaten their workers “If you are unhappy, we’ll move production to Singapore or Vietnam. So behave if you want to have a job.”

With AI and robots this shifts further. Let’s see where this goes.

There is one way how capitalism can work, and it did work for a while:

Worker action, from voting to unionisation, strikes up to revolution are all things that happen under the umbrella of capitalism, and as much as capitalists want to ban that, it’s all just part of the same coin.

If capitalists play nice and fair, pay good wages and make sure the workers have a decent live, then the system is stable and as a reward they get stability to make business.

If they get too greedy and squeeze the workers too hard, workers push back. They form unions, vote left, start striking, and in the worst case they destroy equipment and start a revolution. This is the kind of power that the people have.

In theory.

Due to clever manipulaton, the capitalists managed to divide the working class and pit them against each other. This worked fine for a few decades, but it’s wearing thin. It will take maybe 5-15 years until it all comes to a head and explodes.

And OP is right. Back in the day you had to get the military to shoot their own people. With automated weapon systems and AI/robots performing more and more of the productivity, this balance shifts rapidly, and it will likely lead to a total system breakdown with unforeseeable results.

Tbh, Lemmy admins and mods are hardly authorities. None of them make actual money or have actual power.

Remember: All of Lemmy combined as a bit fewer active users than the Crackberry forum. The LTT forum is quite a bit larger than all of Lemmy combined.

It’s not exactly mass media.

I like that this is posted on a site called commondreams