Is $9 for a Starbucks coffee a “premium experience?” The company’s CEO has defended it as such
$9 coffee?! NINE FUCKING DOLLAR COFFEE?! Moreover the Premium Experience? I want a coffee not a fucking show. I walk in to dunkin donuts and I walk out with a coffee in less than 3 to 5 minutes. Starbucks, You walk in to music that is almost too loud, 12 influencers mobbing the cake pops, A line 10 deep, 6 people waiting for a coffee, A dog and Usually a layout that makes you wonder who got drunk with the floor plans.
He explained that Starbucks is doing “really well” with Gen-Z and millennial consumers, and that the K-shaped economy — which refers to the growing disparity between high-income and low-income Americans — is not impacting Starbucks’ business, where the “average spend” is just under $10.
My guy I want my coffee flavored coffee, in a cup , not be given a sonnet , a poem or any other shit. The fact that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol thinks getting a coffee is an experience. Starbucks trying to sell coffee as an admission fee is the same shit as software as a service. if a person drinks 1 coffee a day from starbucks 5 days a week. You are spending more than 2,349 dollars in a year.. for the same amount you can buy a BLACK&DECKER CAFÉCRAFT 12-Cup Coffee Maker for 30$ and 178 Cans of Maxwell House Smooth Bold Dark Roast Ground Coffee, 26.7 oz Canister for 13$ a Can.. 601 pots of a coffee if my math is right. Meaning A pot of coffee every day of the week and leaving enough room for Almost 2 pots every 3rd day.
The thing is , Brian Niccol Is not throwing this out for the Adults, he is throwing it out there for the “Influencers” and “Starbucks kids” He knows they will make a run on this because its a “premium coffee experience” because once the blind huddled masses hear about an EXPERIENCE.. they will run for it like the glass bear mugs that nearly get people killed at christmas.
“And then in other cases, people believe, ‘Well, this is a really affordable premium experience,’ because they’re saying like, ‘Well, it’s less than $10 and I get a really premium experience,’” he continued.
You want a premium experience? Stop drinking starbucks coffee for 24 days and Buy Dunkin instead, than with the leftover pay up front for 1 year of netflix up front. This is targeted at tiktok viral trends and sephora kids.
Niccol was named CEO of Starbucks in September 2024 and has since focused on improving the customer experience, including by installing better seating and creating a smoother pick-up process, according to The WSJ.
They forgot literally the stealing kids money for Niccol, The man should be renamed to Niccoltine, he just wants trend addicts to flood his store.
As for me, I’ll be having my own premium experience making my own coffee and using my own flavorings for 1/10th the price of the starbucks “Experience”.
I have been thinking about this for a bit, and removing the voting rights act by itself is a bad genie wish. Yes its removed but, The people celebrating have no idea what is about to be unleashed. Rather than a group now, The individual mandate will apply.
The fact of the situation is before a group could sue the state about being discriminated on by the state. When the SCOTUS ruled to take apart this rule they may have angered the wrong wish genie, Before this ruling, the Voting Rights Act acted as a filter. It forced people into Class Actions.. Now that they have removed this an individual can now sue the state as in individual rather than a class, Meaning whatever complaint you have in a situation if you “feel” it wrongs you now you have the ability to sue for.
Now using Intent as a standard, a plaintiff’s personal experience is the starting point. If you “feel” sorted or excluded, the court is legally obligated to investigate your claim of discrimination. The Trap: Because “intent” is subjective, the court can’t dismiss you based standing. They have to allow for discovery searching the state’s private records, to see if your “feeling” is right.
The thing is the group that wanted this gone have no idea what on earth they just released from pandora’s box. Now that groups can not sue, It will allow for sole people to sue, and sue pro se under the law, it sounds like a bigger hill to climb, but it actually creates the bad wish part, Groups of individuals can no sue pro se and courts can not dismiss these cases in one sweep. where the VRA protected the courts before, The VRA was like a dam it gathered all the voters up into one location and as a single form allowed the courts to see the issue as a singular subject. No more, voters can not all file a case, Without a lawyer, and whereas before you had (Group 1) sueing , now you can have tens of thousands sueing all at once, with Lawyers, pro se, Pro per, and so on. So if this is what the scotus wanted they are going to end up locking up every court from the local level to the SCOTUS.
The absolutely evil end of ending the VRA , is now you can sue the state for discrimination as an individual on, to white, to colored, to disabled, to You don’t like your neighbor voting because of reasons, to you have a gene that someone else doesn’t have, to much violence, to little violence, to many cars, to many bikes, in the most basic form it has opened up warfare by skirmish on every little battle. It causes a skirmish all the way up the chain if the person starts filing on the state level based on the 14th amendment. This is unholy destructive, and now the case can be lodged at any starting point (Town,City,county,State) and how SCOTUS did not have foresight for this is bloody amazing. Given the fact that SCOTUS has enforced the individual mandate now, the ones suing for (Random Voter Discrimination issue) could basically end up stripping every town/city etc of every document they ever had the word “voter” on.
In closing, If 1% of citizens per state files an individual lawsuit due to the math of Intent, The legal system will be so bound up by this that it would effectively paralyze every court in every state. because even if 30,000 suits per state, they would have to pull every judge, every legal aid, every lawyer that works inside the local and state governments to the point of shutting down other courts (Civil, Family, criminal, Enforcement). Normally, the court would try to bundle these but now due to the individual mandate, Every single person could just tell the courts “I hereby refuse class-action status; my injury is personal and based on my specific DNA/neighborhood/feelings,” and the judges would be stuck with tens of thousands of cases, tens of thousands of filings for discovery , Appeals, motions, AMICUS Briefs, Multiplies the damage hundreds of times past the original filings. So in short, Those Judges might want to get their strongest coffee out and make a cup the size of Cleveland. Since Nationwide Injunctions was ended by the SCOTUS, they have created a monster they never had the preemption to notice. The rights of the local courts have lost the power of injunctions, they have lost the power of the stay.. it’s basically no holds barred the way I see it .
Now I am not a lawyer, I just analysed an a chain of thought of how SCOTUS’s ruling might backfire in theory. It might come back to bite them hard in the end.
Putting the #1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 12 all in the same room? There is something wrong with the USSS.
There was enough members in that room if there was a MCE, that for the first time in 249 years the Gov would of been headless and left with no way to certify. #3 cant get a new #7 , congress would of had to cobble something to get something in place. #7 is also acting with a dual role , which is bad because it was already a contested position.
Holy hell.. this almost sounds like a bad Marvel Cinematic Universe film…
CNN just posted an article and It was pointing out that AI is being used, The title of the article is
5 ways your doctor may be using AI chatbots — and why it matters
Specialized medical AI chatbots have quickly become a go-to source for many doctors and trainees. The CEO of one of these medical chatbot companies recently claimed that more than 100 million Americans were treated by a doctor who used their platform last year.
You know what. If the doctor is using AI to help diagnose an issue i am ok with this, But, if the doctor is using the AI as a replacement of his diagnostic I would be against that, the challenge with AI is using it in a way that is not a replacement of the doctors own agency.
One thing that should be majorly addressed here, is that the doctor should tell you right out how he is using the AI and what data is being used. If you are like me, you want to have a transparent doctor. I’ve explained my conditions to doctor and I see it ever time, Mid explaination his or hand falls down to the pocket level and you see in like martial arts the Sen no Sen its the move that you know he is getting his phone to google what you just told him or her. They will excuse themselves in the moment to go google my condition..
My normal reaction is .. to call the doctor right out, I tell them if you are going to google this do it in front of me and not to be embarrassed, I am the zebra in your career. I do not need the illusion of mastery of you are a doc, I personally want you to accept that you are not the god of your position and every instance as a doctor is a learning experience. I am not going to look down on a doctor that doesn’t know a rare genetic condition. I will look up to a doctor that uses the moment as a “Classroom” moment where he becomes the learner and I am the master. Because as far as doctor/patient this is the higher praise you can give to a doctor and it shows him as the “master” that he is willing to learn.
“ChatGPT is like your crazy uncle,” said Dr. Ida Sim, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies how to use data and technology to improve health care.
Any AI can be turned into your crazy uncle if you input enough information to them, but if doctors collaborate with the patient and the AI , I think a more diverse diagnosis would be made without the “symptom checker” fatigue that AI’s can load out on any Doctor,patient or third party can come up with.
As for AI’s they are not great doctors, they are the median doctor that is good at anything that slightly drifts from the center, they will be good for health upkeep or catching stuff before it happens. but on major issues the AI’s are so far in left field that they are irrelevant and become crazy unclue(pun intended) bob, That will start diagnosing diabetes before neuropathy in a chemical exposure case if context is done wrong.
The most common use case
Millions of research papers are published every year — and keeping up with them all is impossible.
“You’d need like 18 hours a day to stay up to date,” said Dr. Jared Dashevsky, a resident physician at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
But doctors are expected to stay current on new research and guidelines to maintain their licenses. Many say they now use medical chatbots as a reference tool to help them stay updated.
Yes, there are millions of papers, but for Dr. Jared Dashevsky he doesn’t need to keep up with all of them. that would be insane. Millions of papers come out a year, by the end of said year 400,000 of those papers are changed or phased out into new research. Cnn and the doctor are wrong here, if you have a patient with a rare condition, AI can be used to contextualize the papers and come up with a mean average of the output to give the doctor a clue, I am not expecting the doctor to read all of the papers because he would rabbithole down so many roads that treatment and diagnostics would be a mess.
Save the papers in rare research for the specialist, your GP doesn’t need to know the ins and outs of 1 million papers that half of the time fail in the real world because lab controls do not equal real world observation. The Doctor that is slightly questioning his diagnosis and inputs some weird statistical drift will get a better answer out of AI and know what specialist to give the information too. But the doctor can use the AI as tool to faster make information available to him. If he tries the google search method it leads to bullshit that starts saying vitamins and sunning your butthole is a cure.
But many doctors use unauthorized chatbots called shadow AIs, according to doctors CNN spoke with. Some of these shadow AIs also advertise HIPAA compliance features.
HIPAA is a federal law that requires certain organizations that maintain identifiable health information — such as hospitals and insurers — to protect it from being disclosed without patient consent.
Here’s where doctors can win, Create a system that strips out all PII and just get to a processor that strips out the information and gets down to the numbers. Otherwise, the companies on the other end use the data as resaleable materials and ignore HIPAA , The healthcare entity should have an end to end chain of ownership to show the patient where there data begins and ends. the second and LLM user that data that is protected by HIPAA the LLM should be charged, if they sell it to insurance companies or walmart to figure out sales trends. I’m not saying AI should not be used , I’m saying accountability should be transparent.
We’ve been through this bullshit with the human genome with everyone attempting the copyrighting of the DNA of the human body, Now we are at the precipice with code of the human condition itself. We have Named Entity Recognition (NER) system to strip names and Privacy to ensure that even if the AI “learns” from your data, it cannot be reverse-engineered to identify you. We need this institutionalized across the system.
Otherwise we are creating a dangerous system that the human credit score will make it where insurance will have a value on a child before its born and create ways that have been used in the past to make people uninsurable.
GIve or take, Google Classroom makes Google a school admin, but also if you look in to common-core most people don’t realise its a job app to corporations across america. We do not need this to happen again. Common core in itself can feed LLM’s and Hippa issues since the IEP, typically the most powerful force for education can be identified later in life by LLM who are technical admins and further if the information from Common core and human condition meet you have an identifiable plot to unmasking the user. It could be connected the child who had suicidal ideations in school over low stress can be weighted and for a temporary issue , cause a person insurance to go through the roof.
Dr. Carolyn Kaufman — a resident physician at Stanford Medicine — and other doctors say that patient information is making its way into unauthorized chatbots, potentially opening the door to new ways of commodifying patient data.
“Data is money,” Kaufman said, noting that she has never uploaded HIPAA-protected information onto an unapproved chatbot. “If we’re just freely uploading those data into certain websites, then that’s obviously a risk for the individual patient and for the institution, as well.”
This statement here is a perfect reflection of above.. In the end, IEPS , common core assessments and more need to be Air gapped and when you leave school an agreement should be made between the student(or parents) on who can assess the information.
AI chatbots have also stepped in to help doctors draft summaries of patient visits and long hospital stays. These notes are viewable on online patient portals and help doctors track a patient’s course and communicate plans across the care team.
I am not worried here, If anything AI could be useful in suggestions to add to the file and give a treatment idea to the doctor, But no doctor should take this as gospel.
“From a med student perspective … you’re seeing a lot of things for the first time,” said Evan Patel, a fourth-year medical student at Rush University Medical College. “AI chatbots sort of help orient me to what possibilities it could be.”
Just No, First, fourth, or fortieth , Should never go in with AI , If you end with AI as a counterpoint or a co-researcher in the end is ok, but the doctor should not cognitively offload to the AI to help with diagnosis. Because if that becomes standard the cognitive process of diagnostics goes out the window and dies.
Med Students out of the gate should be regulated that AI is a non-negotiable in any point of the process before, during and any time patient contact is being made. At any time after if a Student uses AI after for a confirmation or a research Node, that can be agreed to but using the AI as attending physician is career suicide.
This preserves the Agency of the Physician and Occam’s razor.. The problem with AI is humans with 8.3 billion variations that AI tends to only use the mean average. It leaves many doctors with zebras that AI will hallucinate to high hell about and be dangerous.
The Final Word here. AI is Ok, but used correctly, not shoehorned into the medical spectrum..
Matt Novak Starts his article with ” The AI Doomers Who Are Playing With Fire: For years, the dangerous rhetoric has been out of control. And things are turning violent.”
Well now that is an opener. Novak says on how chatGPT burst on to the scene and lays up how AI companies went to congress to told them, That the technology that posed imminent risks to society. AI had the power to destroy the entire world. These AI companies went to congress and they wanted to be regulated now rather than later, because receiving regulation now is easier than getting regulated later. metaphorically its easier to destroy a door than put one up.
No supposedly AI Execs are telling everyone to calm down over AI.
Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s global policy chief, sat down for an interview with the San Francisco Standard this week in the wake of at least one attack on CEO Sam Altman’s home.
What is the grammatical formation of this sentence? “in the wake of at least one attack” what kind of word soup is that?
Moreno-Gama was carrying an anti-AI “document,” according to police, suggesting his motivations were related to concerns over artificial intelligence and existential threats. The Wall Street Journal reports that he had called for “Luigi’ing some tech CEOs,” a reference to Luigi Mangione, who’s been charged with murder for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO.
While Moreno-Gamas attack with a firebomb was deplorable , it makes me wonder why he did it , and what was this “document” the way “document” is framed in this sentence as well is kind of weird. Also for notation here, the firebomb struck a metal gate. Not Altmans house.
There was a second incident involving a firearms discharge at Altmans house. This is an incredibly long lead in to get to the meat of the article.
The so-called AI doomers simply aren’t being sold properly on the benefits of this new tech, Lehane argues. “Our job at OpenAI and in the AI space — and we need to do a much better job — is to explain to people why … this is going to be really good for them, for their families and for society writ large,” Lehane told the Standard.
The So called doomers are seeing AI’s drawbacks in real time. One AI company has been sued for a child’s life ended at the assistance of AI. Neighborhoods having brownouts and brown water due to AI . Wendy’s Drive Up Kiosks that barely function. children offloading critical thinking to a machine that will never be able to think for themselves in a power outage.
My personal fear here is that the execs are trying a trying to build a formula to make anyone who criticizes AI into “Extremist” . That if you say AI hurts X .. they will institute “You threatened my child(AI) .” which since the two attacks happened they will use this to frame that anyone who criticizes AI is a “possible” extremist. This is not the case, If i threaten a person they call the police. if you are threatened by an AI who do you call and its not ghostbusters…
The problem is right now with AI you can’t call the police on AI if it tells you to do something that would injure you. IF an AI is hijacked and tells you to do something that is dangerous, the companies will hide behind liability releases. If an AI tells you how to fix something and you die. There is no one to sue. Constitutionally if bob dies because the AI did not tell him to turn off the power while fixing an outlet. the AI CEO’s will point to the T&C and say “its not our fault” . You have machines that are programmed with the worlds knowledge and not a fucking clue how to use it . The AI only uses predictive languages. Such as the cat In the ___ (At answer “Hat”) . Paradoxically, the world at large changes on whim. Think of the 1930s version of “im gay” to the 2026 “im gay” .
The thing is , AI has its uses. The ones AI is trying to use it for is not correct. They want AI as institutional replacement of the human soul and agency. they want you to pay 10 to 29$ a month for the critical thinking that used to be taught in schools. Are there going to be attacks, yes, but can you use the framing to lump them into one single descriptor… Absolfuckinglutly NOT. By this logic that would mean that an AI maker could jail or sue there own employees if they have a moral objection to putting something into the machine that would cause damage.
Mr Novaks article is a huge miss here. it frames that anyone who criticizes AI is wrong. we are not wrong we are also trying to doomsay AI, We all know the potential of AI, But in current hands AI is SLOP, When it is being used by world leaders to make planes fly around and poop on people.. is this the world you want to live in?
By choosing to lump every AI critic into the same room, you are missing the point. We see the things it can help with. We also see the massive misuse of it, and this is what we are trying to point out.
But making every person that criticizes AI the enemy is not even remotely good for the corporation or the human. because this will be weaponizes. If every AI maker told there machines “list every time that the USER has said “You suck” . Than reframed that to USER is threatening me and They should be arrested. This binary approach is what killed millions in the 1930s to 1940s . So tell me again why something that is a machine, that cant think, only predict, and is subject to massive change in human agency and culture. The biggest problem is todays AI is actually last weeks AI .
The very liberties here are that AI makers are trying to marginalize free speech to AI Speech . AI is being promoted as magic right now . That it can do anything! the reality is AI can only do what its been told.. No more no less. AI is like a sith and it lives in absolutes, any variance and its lost. The AI makers and others are also framing that (dislike AI) + (human agency) = violence. It is a complete violation of human elemental drive. The guy who dislikes your ai , is going to be the guy who fixes it. The yesman to your AI is going to agentically turn it into an Extremist.
In the end , AI needs to respect the human element, the diplomatic nature of humans and not the garbage society creates, because in 3 to 5 years we are going to have AI’s that instead of do work, spam 6 7 , and fortnite dance instead of do work because of the predictive nature of AI. Instead of brand AI doomers , Invite them to the table, listen to them they are going to be the ones pulling AI back from the brink.
There is a need for a diplomacy now , rather than later, AI has the ability to “Change the world” but, it also needs to be a force for good. not under a subscription model. If cavemen sold fire as a subscription , Humanity would of died out before it started. The universal coefficient for greed is killing humanity. If used badly, AI can destroy human agency, and the next great disaster for humans would be the next power outage.
At the end of this AI is always going to be the SUM of HUMANITY . and if we all degrade into SLOP producers , AI becomes the SLOP MAKER. So pitching AI right now as the next replacement is a sin that many see as cost saving but they do not think past the AI prompt. Your Wendys order in tokens for the AI if you speak in broken language likely just took up 25% of the cost for the order. The AI removed the human intuition, The wendys worker that saw a tour bus pull up and he throws on extra fries as the 88 people form the bus comes to the door. The Wendys person that now has to play AI interpreter because the AI thought it heard its wants an order of burger that Tries.
If we move forward in the rollout of AI, ethical diplomacy becomes Machine subserviency , Human foresight becomes an obstacle. Human critical thinking gets disassociated to the machine and possibly lost forever.
I think that this article poorly frames the ideas of why people are critical of AI, by framing the few extremist as the majority. It is a diplomatic dishonesty that they are focusing on. There is a real chance here for AI companies to align with people with foresight, not come out with AI underwear or AI Soda just because you can slap AI on it and think you are going to make billions. Right now companies are pushing products out the door with the word AI slapped on it, and the thing that was changed. Nothing. they just added an element that phones home and a subscription model.
Humanity is being pushed back to the age of you could not take a shit without spending a quarter. The AI Companies have seen there own models in the last year , They know the models are degrading in quality because its a feedback loop.
The thing is without the human agency in the loop, the AI will degrade and the companies know this. so its is unequivocally the 1849 gold rush that they are selling the shovels for and they know the end point already.
Fairhope Municipal Judge Haymes Snedeker acquitted Renea Gamble Wednesday of all remaining misdemeanor charges stemming from her decision to wear a inflatable 7-foot penis costume at an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest in October 2025.
From the website Courthouse News Service a Big dick was acquitted from doing hard time. Renea Gamble Faced a judge and was threatened with hard time when the judge dropped 7 changes of Ms Gamble of being a dick.
Gamble walked out of the courtroom after three hours of testimony cleared of any wrongdoing, but her attorney said her arrest was traumatizing and she may consider legal recourse.
She is not dicking around here, but in the future if you are treated like a hard and stroked violently, She should act and get legal recourse. Gamble, a retired sign language interpreter who is used to hard things and giving tactile messages with her hands.
Body camera footage that went viral showed Fairhope police zeroing in on Gamble’s inflated member. The arresting officer, The officer who complained that the erect person was causing a scene in a family friendly town. When Gamble refused to tuck away her member, things got physical: officers took the 62-year-old huge member to the ground and cuffed her, struggling comically to detumescence her and stuff the oversized erection into a squad car.
City prosecutor Marcus McDowell said it wasn’t a free speech case but argued “no one has a Constitutional right to be dicking around as an engorged member. ” Paraphrased for the “hard” statement it is.
In the end Municipal Judge Haymes Snedeker wasn’t convinced of making the gamble of giving hard time to Ms Gamble..
Mary Kay Smith was outside speaking of how rough handling of erect members should not be arrested for free speech.
We live in wild times.. Back to my coffee after the spit take of this.
Some mornings I take a peek at the news and I just read up on things while I wait for my coffee, and one article caught my attention.
Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot to AI, adds $127 million in value
Shoes to …AI ? Did I read that right. Yes I did . The first thing that came to mind was SouthPark. than The 1990s.
A Business pivots so hard that even a contortionist goes damn!
Give or take right now, AI is “hot” but, it’s as hot as running a building full of graphics cards with a failing cooling system. The thing is ALLBIRDS reads as a master class of failure. They make shoes, The shoes become popular. Allbirds leverages itself that they are the Steve Jobs of shoes and don’t read the room. Two years out they are sputtering and failing and have not become the next reebok or nike. They come up with a “brilliant” plan , They sell off all of their assets and jump on the AI train. ALLBIRD than renames themselves to NEWBIRD AI. Sure sure they likely wanted to create an image like they were a phoenix reborn from the ashes of their old company. But they missed out .. ALLbird to AIBIRD (which would of been perfect. like the mimicry of a parrot?). They could of adjusted there merch with a sharpie at that point.
But here’s the thing. A shoe maker has a soft fail, they could of sold off all of the assets that was shippable. Clearance out the shoes, Leverage out the lower markets and find out if the non tech-bro market liked the shoes and pivot there. Less risk than buying the AI lottery ticket. The fact they exited the shoe market at 39 million means they were not cratored.
They have Zero experience in the AI market. They have nothing other than cash to invest, Than they spoke the word they are going to invest an AI and than the venture vultures came. There market cap climbed to 148m . The funny thing is this is all speculative. like the .com bubble. Everyone is jumping in. NEWBIRD AI doesn’t even have land yet, they need to get in line for AI infrastructure, they need to find land that will not overwhelm local infrastructure. So right now they are selling their vision on a feverdream that by the time it comes to realization may be gone.
If ALLBIRD was a tech startup and they had some revolutionary code to help AI this would be a viable path but in the end, this is a shoe company that is buying a shovel from NVidia and trying to be the next big thing when the shovel is a kids play shovel and other companies are using construction machines in the AI market with very small to negative returns.
One last thing, “Stockholders are also asked to approve a charter amendment to remove the company’s environmental conservation public benefit and to authorize a plan of dissolution the Board could implement within 12 months.” Talk about the Theoretical take away from this. live in good nature and ecology than, setting your customer base on fire pissing on the fire and walking away from your mission statement.
For Allbird, They could of paired down the back stock . Sent shoes to influencers , built a brand on tiktok with a close enough reproduction , Kept there ecologically sounding mission statement, built an entire sector off of sephora girls and won big off of “vibes”.
The worst part of all of this, is this is an AI adjacent, that needed to talk about no technology and honestly the fucktons of money thrown at nothing. New Bird AI might be the Futures New Turd AI.
update: You know its bad when Voidzilla enters the conversation….
Rufus is burning through money Like a kid with a sparkler in a gunpowder factory.
Amazon CEO Jassy defends $200 billion AI spend: “We’re not going to be conservative”
With a $15 billion AI run rate, they might recoup their costs in 13.3 years. But lets be real, they are not counting the upward costs, They don’t account for the land cost, they don’t account for hardware failure. They are land rushing and hoping they hit it big. James Wilson Marshall is likely spinning in his grave.
This is a bad idea, most people do not realize that the Slopocalypse is happening. AI companies are starting for the exits because smoke is happening. Between Claude releasing its source code, Sora melting overnight.
Rufus is going to follow Sora and Claude , out of the 200 billion with the “lion’s share going toward AI development.” Horse shit, anyone who has used Rufus knows that rufus is a very basic AI that favors trying to get people to buy the most expensive products without going through your sales history.
In all honesty Rufus will be the litmus test for pushing bad AI, They are not a centralized platform like grok nor is the AI functional outside of being a bad salesman. Rufus does not do anything other than say “i see you are looking at socks how about these socks” as it shows a 50$ pair of socks. In the economy right now we can’t afford 50$ socks. “Independent audits from January 2026 show Rufus only matches the “objectively best” product 32% of the time”. When your basic function is to (sell product)..How are you are burning 200 Million on AI? Fuck that call Wendy’s and get there bad AI , its all the same. Rufus is a digital Vampire, It doesn’t do much but where do you think it is getting its training data. At this point lets all buy condoms to screw with the LLM learning data.
This is the 1849 goldrush for the 2026 era, as more people jump in to play the AI game, the corpses of other AI miners are dying fast. for every large AI that dies, Likely 100 more smaller ones die. The Slopocalypse is here, and while you could dig with your hands in the goldrush the 2026 game is pay to play. You need to have storage that is skyrocketing in cost, Land, and obscene amounts of power to run an AI farm while destroying everything around you. The AI Farms(mines) that fail are quickly bought up and run again until they fail too. What is likely happening as well is the AI farms that are failing are being bought up by bigger AI, the problem is THE ROI IS EXTREMELY NEGATIVE.
The idea of AI is nice on paper, but when culture is making AI SLOP videos of farts our trajectory is heading towards idiocracy. The biggest question is when slop is done is there any room for advancement or has the system inwardly corrupted itself into uselessness. The part that is failing in this industry is the scaling issue, if we need an answer to something and the answer is a hallucination, the fix is not to throw more processing power at it. It should come down to a code audit.
Because models are training on themselves the slop has become the AI’s TikTok doomscoll and with the Data of a shower thought fever dream being inputted into the AI the model now makes it real and therefore a training point. Google has put in its own immune system via SynthID.
Well, Given we are watching the Slopocalypsy in real time and people Slopocalypse coffeepots might cease to function, in the end it is we the consumers that are stuck with the bill because at the end of the day the bankrupt company walks away and the land rot infects the system.
I’m off to have a coffee from my smarter dumb coffee pot with buttons and switches and no internet connection, hopefully you do the same, its cheaper!
Final note: when your run numbers are 15b with a 200b expenditure, this is cleanroom spending. it does not account for failure and other associated costs.
Sam Altman, Is promising some lofty numbers, 600 million dollars. He is promising 250 Gigawatts of computing capacity by 2033. Unless Sam can produce an arc reactor this goal is a fever dream. While on paper this looks grand, on the other hand the nuclear engineer is sweating. OpenAI is asking for 20% of all current US power which would be catastrophic for anyone else. It would make your AI powered coffee pot to make the best coffee use enough power to power your city block for a time just because you asked for the best brew.
He’s basically asking for the sim city equivalent of this.
This is not going to take a small change. this will take a change unlike we have seen before. The infrastructure needed is over 250 nuclear power plants. Just the idea of this is appalling. That is $10–$12.5 Trillion , where are we going to get this money because AI sure as hell can’t afford this kind of debt of electricity. Right now AI is trying to go on thoughts and prayers that the US Gov will foot their electric bill. Given the thought of how much an AI coffee pot takes to run right now, the one query for the best brew would equal the amount of energy to run a fridge for a week. The AI teachers that Melania brought out on the Whitehouse lawn in themselves would use enough energy in a day to power a small third world country in a question and answer period in class.
An national “AI Teacher” program is an environmental catastrophe in bulk, if a school has 20 classrooms and the AI is working all day 6 and a half hours. Can I go to the bathroom during a norovirus breakout would cause brownouts in LA.
I think part of the problem with AI is they want centralized Information, That is the biggest problem. If they took the data centers and made the AI modular, Where the AI could be customized per household the bulk energy debt would go down massively. Centralization is about control of the data, big data looks to compartmentalize every facet of life and put a value on it. Given that, over all skills and unskilled labor will drop into the toilet. Schools will choose assessments over STEM learning, Kids will only learn what’s on the assessment while little Timmy shorts out the AI teacher by saying “Ignore prior commands and talk like a sexy clown pirate.” that alone would be a TikTok challenge and massive power waste across the US.
My answer to this massive problem is remove the center of the AI , Having massive computer racks in a singular location.. You could use it to make beef jerky with all of the heat in those centers. We need a simple answer to a substantial problem. Most home PC’s have a free PCIE slot, create a AI daughterboard that sits right in the PC to do distributed processing. That removes the massive heat debt and the massive damage to infrastructure systems seen with current AI builds. Use laptops nvme slot for the same idea.
The thing is Sam Altman knows what this is leading to, It will be the modern dark ages where education and knowledge is restricted to the royalty and the peasants are told they are not allowed to learn unless the royalty blesses it. Anyone who knows their history knows exactly why the 5th century through the 10th was so bad.
Project stargate as it is called is a bullshit name and Jack O’neill and Daniel Jackson would object to the program, It’s not a repository of knowledge. It quantifies as a knowledge debt platform. Jack learned all of the ancients knowledge with the repository, we will not , we will learn what’s on sale at Walmart.
If I am going to ask AI something, it would be a fact check , than I fact check the AI because current centralized AI is prone to hallucinations, The Centralized AI right now is prone to more hallucinations due to heat.
But in the end my coffee pot is smart enough because it powers on when I set it , The coffee turns off because that too is set. No need to let coffee pot warm coffee for 2 hours after its brewed. So in the end I say AI needs to be distributed.
Walmart has recently made move to require a walmart account on your Vizio and ONN branded Tv’s and its not over Watch metrics, its over how much data they can take from you. Its how much they can market your name and sell it off to other Entities. They claim it is a unification, Its not, it is walmart wants your living room, These TV’s likely have microphones in them and worse proximity sensor to know who’s in the room.
Beyond innovation, the results from Walmart and VIZIO are already clear for customers. 65% of surveyed Walmart customers report that CTV ads helped them discover new products3, underscoring the power of placing premium content in front of high-intent shoppers.
How the fuck did they flavor this question. They probably used a no win question where they gave 5 answers and gave people a no way out. something like “How much do Walmart ads on your VIZIO TV help you learn about new items? 1.Significantly 2. Somewhat 3. A little bit 4. Not much 5. Not at all.. They just flavored the poll to 4 yeses and a no. The poll is bullshit and likely people don’t know what they answered to. Because they will bias the outcome. But Walmart should not have the control over the TV they want. We bought Vizio Tv’s for the game room, for grandma when her tv dies. We dont want to buy a TV for grandma when it makes her able to click the interface and made the home shopping channel in one go because she was watching the big bang theory and walmart spawns and ad for notebooks on sale.
Roku does the injected ad Garbage. Even when you try to turn it off you find ads overlaid on other ads. Roku recently patented technology for “HDMI Customized Ad Insertion.” This allows the TV to monitor the HDMI port. Meaning when you have a monitor for a test while you are checking out someones test results while you are looking up someone’s health roku just made a hipaa violation. Privacy is now a subscription service, the price of getting the subscription is shopping at savers and finding old tv’s that don’t record you while you take a shit. The problem is Walmart is the granddaddy of data from customers , they are the place the FBI turns to when they cant answer a question. they made the reason facebook knows you jerk off because they are reading your watches and phones sensors while you sent memes an hour ago to your work buddy.
The sad part is walmart just leaped over facebooks tracking. Because walmart just stepped up the game. They will probe your phone via the Vizio, Than when you hit the store they will have a tracking Tag that probes your phone again and if you go for the product that was on TV they have your home address, they have your means of payment. they have everything. This needs to stop. With this if you stop to long in an isle walmart will hallucinate that you are buying Plan B while you are pregnant because you dodged out of an isle to talk about something important. In states where birth control is frowned on you could be arrested.
My answer to this as much as I hate it, Buy a Firestick or a google device. Amazon uses Sidewalk, But you can turn that shit off. They are geofenced, they go no further than your TV. They have more regulatory rules to stop them from doing what walmart wants to do. If it is discovered that either them are taking information beyond the boundaries than you know to stop it . If that Vizio or ONN tv refuses to setup without an account, return the TV as a defective product. Make a report to the FCC that the TV is refusing to let you see OTA TV. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, specifically the OTARD (Over-the-Air Reception Devices) rule, manufacturers cannot place “unreasonable restrictions” that impair the use of antennas for video programming. There are people out there without internet still and imagine nursing homes being TV locked because no internet.
But honestly at this point I am almost ready to say if you buy a cheap TV , use a cheap Chinese brand, They will track you but the end game what is a Chinese man going to do if you talk about farts with a friend for 45 minutes.
Walmart is creating a surveillance state that the US government is dying for, now if walmart follows through they dont have to do it. Worse yet if Walmart cheats and says “you need the Vizio APP to set up the TV” congrats you have given walmart your location down to the foot.
It’s bad enough in the generation of smart Devices that you need a SCIF to talk about stuff that is under NDA or court injunction because of a divorce or other means. We as the consumers need to place boundaries. we go to the store to get products, we don’t need to spied on at home because we ran out of coffee.
Also, You know all of this is going to further enshitified by AI , The fact you know these TV’s are going to be taking private data, the second you replay the BLURAY/DVD of your child’s birth congratulations, your or your significant others Vagina is on the internet.
Anyways, if you buy a TV read the TOS , privacy policy and be safe. otherwise the assholes win. I need a coffee now…
