Even if individual services like Sora are run at a loss, they can be fine with that as long as the rest of the company makes money. Amazon literally runs its entire shopping and warehousing service at a loss.

OpenAI is very much intentionally offering its service at unprofitable rates right now to spur growth, it's a tried and true strategy for tech companies. But don't mistake this for them not being able to make money if they wanted to; they've only begun to explore monetization so far.

Again, they are setting up data centers to train new model, not run existing ones. If OpenAI stopped working on GPT-6 today, they would immediately be profitable.

That's really not how it works, it doesn't cost much to run an existing model, what costs a lot is training new/bigger models.

AI is here to stay, even if the bubble bursts all that means is work on new models stops/slows down. But current models are already good enough for slop.

Go further east though (i.e. India, China), and concepts of cosmic order become prominent, though said order typically transcends mere deities.

Western and near-east polytheists tended to conceptualize deities as being simple facts of life that you had to work around because they existed and were powerful. They worshipped them for favors or to avoid their wrath, not because they embodied some cosmic order.

Oh no Japan is definitely a lot worse, respecting elders is one of their most important social rules

local rule will have better outcomes than rule by more distant powers, especially once network effects and economies of scale kick in.

Of course, the vast majority of imperialism is simply exploitation, so it is always good to be suspicious of claims to the contrary.

In the latter situation, the results can sometimes be net positive and have the support of the populace (i.e. the Roman Empire being the classic Western example).

Remember, the goals of local elites are not necessarily aligned with the general population, so it's not necessarily the case that

Broadly speaking, I think imperialism falls into two categories: exploitation vs nation-building. In the former, the imperial simply seeks to exploit foreign resources and labor to enrich their society, while in the later they seek to actually integrate the populace into their society.

It is, but it also massively improved the quality of life of the average Tibetan (who were literally serfs under the Tibetan feudal system). Likely a plurality of Tibetans supported it at the time, and certainly a vast majority do today.

More than they have a vast system of support networks, logistics, fundraising, communication, not to mention brand and name recognition that are important to running a successful political party at the federal level. It'd be much easier to take it over than to rebuild from scratch

At this point I think of the Democrats as a kind of infrastructure that would be useful to keep intact once it is in the control of more capable people as opposed to an actual functioning political party.

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Well they were named Mark I, II, III etc. which is what they tend to be referred by

Oh gosh this was such a hard game, good luck

I can't think of a more tangible and direct admission of American decline from our leaders than this.

—if Chinese products are allowed to compete fairly with them in the US.

The "national security" concern is that without these tariffs the US is going to be economically imperialized by the Chinese, which would have been unimaginable thing to suggest even just 10 years ago.