Aggregator

The Knicks champ's father recalls the late-night bus rides and overtime shifts that helped get his son to the NBA.

Queens Councilwoman Vickie Paladino wants to ban giving away live goldfish as carnival prizes in NYC, citing animal cruelty concerns after teens tortured fish won at a Whitestone school fair.

Iranian and Middle East diplomats held crisis talks in Oman Saturday to respond to the US demand that Tehran issue a public pledge to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.

Twenty seven years after his tragic death, John F. Kennedy Jr.'s top aide, RoseMarie Terenzio, still wonders what life would be like if he were alive.

Former Pentagon UFO investigator Luis Elizondo claims the US government possesses unreleased photographs showing what appear to be giant monolith-like structures on the moon -- and the images may go public soon

Saturday evening’s weather forecast in Miami is partly cloudy, but the stars will be shining bright.

The biggest name in Mixed Martial Arts history is making his return on July 11, as Conor McGregor is facing off against Max Holloway at UFC 329 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As soon as Kenny Omega pinned MJF’s shoulders to the mat after a One-Winged Angel, he and Will Ospreay were put on a collision course for All In.

Without Subsidies, Is AI Unaffordable?

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Let's pull all this into an undeniable conclusion: AI is based on massively subsidizing users' costs.

What's already abundantly clear but verboten to say as it would pop the bubble of AI valuations and triumphalism is that AI is unaffordable once the direct and indirect subsidies are withdrawn. Nothing that consumes this much electricity and requires such an immense scale of costly processing and memory capacity can be low-cost, never mind free.

The major AI platforms and vendors are subsidizing corporate and individual users in the hopes that they can achieve AI sector dominance --and the pricing power that comes with it--via the network effect, the dominance generated by having the majority of users bound by habit or dependence to your platform or tools.

This battle for network effect dominance is playing out in full view:

AI Giants Are Handing Out Tons of Free Computing Power to Grab Startup Share: (wsj.com) Pitched battle for business users comes as AI companies seek lasting streams of revenue.

Hans Ibarra, a founder building an AI-voice startup, has found himself on the receiving end of a big opportunity: Top artificial-intelligence companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and others desperate to win his business are ramping up discounts.

Across Silicon Valley, startup founders like Ibarra are enjoying a wave of computing credits and fielding competing offers from AI-model makers racing to land new enterprise customers. Cursor, the AI-coding company bought by Elon Musk's SpaceX, offered a 75% discount through July 5.

"If I'm choosing between a really cheap Chinese model that I actually have to pay for, and a very expensive Anthropic model that I don't have to pay for, I'm going to pick the Anthropic model," Acker said. "I'm always going to pick the one for which I have free credits."

Meanwhile, back in the real world of costs, AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced (forbes.com)(via Tom D.)

It turns out that experienced human workers doing the work right in the first place is cheaper than having AI run a probability distribution process that needs vetting and corrections. And remember, AI isn't actually "intelligent," it's just a probability distribution using natural language.

As management guru Peter Drucker observed, enterprises don't have profits, they have costs. Purveyors of AI platforms and tools have costs, and so do their customers. Those costs are currently being funded by investors, who are in effect subsidizing the AI companies' "free" giveaways of horrendously costly "tokens" in a manic, desperate attempt to grab the brass ring of network effect dominance before their cash runs out.

This raises a question: Is this any way to run a railroad? In other words, is this actually a viable business model, burning billions of dollars in cash to lock in network effect dominance in a field that is rapidly obsoleting every iteration of an innately limited mode of computation? Is claiming that a probability distribution is "intelligent" in the same way humans are intelligent a viable business model when there is ample evidence this simply isn't true?

AI and human intelligence are drastically different--here's how (scientificamerican.com)

What happens when enterprises have to pay the unsubsidized costs of AI is they immediately curtail their AI spending because the customer-facing / financial benefits of AI are at best elusive and often negative. Peter Drucker was onto something that is currently being lost in the PR-propaganda push of those trying to cash in on the AI euphoria: enterprises don't have profits, they have costs, and the real-world costs of AI are extraordinarily high while the payoffs are ambiguous.

There are many other hidden subsidies within the AI machinery. There are corporate tax write-off subsidies, energy subsidies, tax credit subsidies for building data centers, and so on. If these were stripped out, what would the real unsubsidized costs of AI be? No one knows, but they would be higher than what's presented as the cost now.

Then there's the if it's legal, it's moral, and what's legal is for sale subsidy: AI is built on the systemic theft of copyrighted content. Last month alone, AI scrapers gorged on 246,000 pages from my Of Two Minds server, and hundreds of thousands of pages of my copyrighted works on my mirror site and other sites posting my work.

This is legal, but is it moral? Nobody asks such questions because the important thing is to avoid saddling AI users with the real costs. So if all those content creators get nothing--in effect, subsidizing both AI companies and the users of their AI platforms and tools--well, so what, because if it's legal, it's moral, and what's legal is for sale.

Well that's just peachy, but let's do a thought experiment where every creator of copyrighted work got paid for supplying AI with its database, and every user of AI had to pay us content creators. How about a penny a page / image / sound clip? so 246,000 pages per month (again, only a fraction of the total volume of my work that was scraped by AI companies for their "free" use in a single month) would be $2,460 a month paid to me by AI users benefiting directly from my copyrighted work. Wouldn't that be fair, i.e. moral?

Recall that US copyright law is explicit: all creative content is copyrighted upon completion, period.

How many current users of AI are willing to pay the full unsubsidized costs for their use of AI? We can safely say far fewer than are using the tools for "free" due to subsidies both direct and indirect.

Let's pull all this into an undeniable conclusion: AI is based on massively subsidizing users' costs. Once those subsidies end, what's left are costs, not profits. Play that any way you like, but massive subsidies are not sustainable, though they generate a temporary illusion of viability that can be exploited by those selling a fantasy of future profitability to credulous investors and enterprises.

Left unsaid is a lot of money is being gambled on the illusion that subsidies are sustainable. They're not. Enterprises don't have profits, they have costs.

*  *  *

My book Investing In Revolution is available at a 10% discount ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free). Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Subscribe to my Substack for free

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/11/2026 - 12:50

Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman said he wants to use a little-known clause in the state Constitution to block NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s taxpayer-funded, $70 million city-owned grocery store plan.

It's trashy behavior.

The stunning death of South African midfielder Jayden Adams isn't the first loss his family has suffered since the World Cup began.

The "Modern Family" star shared several photos and videos from her lavish Italian getaway.

The "Modern Family" star shared several photos and videos from her lavish Italian getaway.

The future of surgery just scrubbed in.

Grab your phones, get out there and look up for a change.

SoCal residents are facing the consequences of a massive uncontrolled wildfire in northern LA County as officials issue smoke advisories for the toxic air and evacuation orders.

Maine Dems Will Pick Platner Replacement At Rushed Convention This Month

After their nominee for the 2026 Maine Senate race dropped out on Friday in the wake of sex assault allegations, Democrats will pick his successor at a convention on July 25th, the state party chair announced Friday afternoon. That's just two days before the deadline for making the change and securing a new nominees' place on the general election ballot. It's a tall order for one of the smallest state party organizations in the country, and Democrats haunted by the rushed 2024 insertion of deeply-flawed candidate Kamala Harris into Joe Biden's nominee slot are uneasy -- all the more so given how tight the race for Senate control could be.    

The crisis springs from previous nominee Graham Platner's withdrawal from the contest on Friday. He won the June 9th primary, but was done in by a Politico report in which a former girlfriend claimed a drunk Platner spontaneously showed up at her house and sexually assaulted her. Democrats who were already uneasy about Platner's profile -- which includes a history of philanderous sexts sent to multiple women, old Reddit posts self-identifying as a "communist," other posts calling cops "bastards," and a Nazi tattoo (though not a particularly obvious one). Setting aside the new rape allegation, all those black marks on his resume were public information before the primary election. 

“The voters of Maine, the Democratic primary voters of Maine, owe the rest of Mainers an apology.”

A thing that was actually said on CNN: pic.twitter.com/A8HOqYfWN7

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) July 10, 2026

The new Democratic nominee will take on five-term Republican Susan Collins, a shaky-voiced 73-year-old who's considered the GOP's most vulnerable incumbent. The Cook Political Report says the state's Senate race is one of four toss-ups this fall, along with the contests in Ohio, Michigan and Alaska. To wrest control of the Senate from the GOP, Democrats must flip four seats. 

 "The convention will be fair, representative and as transparent as possible," said Maine Democratic Party Chairman Charlie Dingman in a video statement. "In coordination with our legal counsel, we have put together a plan for this nominating convention that will allow us to choose a qualified candidate who has the energy, ideas and popular support to defeat Susan Collins." On its site, the party implied that a snap primary election was out of the question due to the tight time constraints. The Democratic State Committee "overwhelmingly" voted for the convention process after a long emergency meeting on Wednesday, according to PunchBowl's Ally Mutnick. 

Democrats searching for Platner’s replacement… pic.twitter.com/XqfKUyIrPe

— David Santa Carla 🦇 (@TheOnlyDSC) July 9, 2026

Held on the last Saturday of this month, the convention will comprise a whopping 601 delegates, 101 of whom will be members of the Democratic State Committee -- who are elected by voters -- and 500 delegates appointed by Maine's 16 counties. The proceedings will take place at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. "Voting will be conducted in rounds until one candidate reaches a majority," the party explained in an FAQ. "The five candidates receiving the highest number of votes in the first round will advance to the second round. Each subsequent round will eliminate the lowest vote-getter until one candidate is chosen." 

It appears there will be no party-organized debates or town halls before the convention. "The nominating convention will provide an opportunity for candidates to address delegates directly," said the party. "Candidates are encouraged to campaign in any way they see fit." 

A brokered convention, in late July in Maine, with control of the Senate potentially on the line — what more could the political press corps possibly ask for? pic.twitter.com/nwQa5nIbrS

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) July 10, 2026

Democratic politicians who lost bids for other offices are pouring out the woodwork to take their shot at winning the nomination in a half-month sprint to the July 25th convention, including former public health official Nirav Shah, former Maine Senate president and logger Troy Jackson, and Maine secretary of state Shenna Bellows. All three of them sought the 2026 nomination for governor. Other hopefuls include former congressional staffer (for Katie Porter) Jordan Wood and social worker Paige Loud -- who both lost in the same congressional primary this year -- and Maine Beer Company co-founder Dan Kleban, who took an initial stab at the Senate nomination last year. 

If nothing else, this could make for some great political theater. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/11/2026 - 12:15

Get $10 when you sign-up with the Dabble Fantasy promo code NYPBONUS for Saturday's Mets-Red Sox game.

The "Euphoria" actress launched her lingerie brand, Syrn, in January.