You can get a certain portion of the population to pay $20/mo. but I think it's a very small population who's paying enough to actually cover frontier models in agentic workflows right now.
Either I've fallen in with a unique group of non-techy people willing to pay for an LLM subscription, or you just not giving enough credit to it. I guess time will tell
> Only about 3% of households were paying for AI in February, using the most recent numbers available from the Bank of America Institute, which researches consumer trends based on the bank's customer transactions.
But even among these people I doubt most spring for the $100 plans, let alone are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per user the way corporate users do.
The funniest part of all of this is that, I as a techy dev type person, pay $0 for any LLM account. No, I'm not cheating with a paid by employer account. I just don't use it. So I guess my little group is breaking all of the stereotypes
Well Biden increased the IRS budget a lot, when the idiot was re-elected one of the first things he did was cut the IRS budget, took out Biden's increase plus some.
This was done to ensure the IRS cannot audit the very rich. That works because the auditing the rich is very expensive and you need highly skilled Auditors for that.
> That works because the auditing the rich is very expensive
But it is "profitable".
It is one of the very few things the government does that generates short-term "profits" - every dollar spent auditing the rich and collecting from them generates more money than is spent, and we have never been close to break-even.
If you truly want to run the government like a business, increasing funding to IRS audits and collections is one of the hallmarks of what you would do.
EDIT: a lot of what the government does, and it should be everything the government does, is profitable, but it's more like "we spend this money, it increases GDP on some timescale, and then we get more taxes from it". This is short-term because it is more direct. The IRS audits bring in more tax revenue quite directly.
Started in the second half of Biden's presidency. The republicans argued that the IRS was already overfunded in the first half and refused to allocate additional budget for them.
This isn't just a Trump thing, it's a Republican party thing.
The ultra wealthy were already safe; it's much cheaper for the IRS accuse a middle class household with a couple W2s and a Doordash 1098 of inadequately tracking their mileage and fuel receipts than it is to review the reams of paperwork they'd receive when auditing any of the ultra-rich.
Meanwhile, even in an alternate reality where IRS was occasionally seizing some billionaire's entire life savings for cause, the proceeds would fund the federal government's operations for just a few hours. Hours! No amount of collected taxes make a difference when congress spends 2-3x what they collect!
> Meanwhile, even in an alternate reality where IRS was occasionally seizing some billionaire's entire life savings for cause, the proceeds would fund the federal government's operations for just a few hours.
Do you imagine that when the government spends, it feeds money into a furnace and it's gone forever? That's not how it works.
It pays people and companies. That money comes back as more taxes.
lost+found is still used on OpenBSD, seems it is created when needed. Only /home has that directory on my system. IIRC, it was created when a kernel panic happened a few releases ago. Plus some files were placed in it when fsck executed on /home
Same, it's only in /home on my system also. Also /home is pretty much the only directory where I see fsck needing to do a lot of recovery after a power failure. Makes sense I guess, because that's where processes such as web browsers are likely to have lots of files open in RW mode.
All this proves to me is the current US admin. is intent on turning China into the number 1 scientific research country.
At this rate, English could be replaced by Mandarin as the main international language of commerce. The only thing that could hold it back is the writing system.
If China could convert its writing to use the Latin alphabet I think that could happen with the US now on the path of destroying its research institutions.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
--Charles Babbage
Blind trust in the machine for a certain type of user seems to be endemic since the beginning.
People taking ‘usually right’ as ‘100% true fact’ sounds like a pretty big issue to me. Of course, it’s the people who must learn to know and mind the distinction, first and foremost.
I have to say I think the author makes a good point.
It will be interesting to see how the current US War on education changes the country in 20 years. Will a similar but opposite article be written about the US in a few decades ?
Good luck, but define "cheaper" ? If you have to pay, no individual will pay, just corporations.
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