I think suffering is relative: has there been a time in recent history of Russia that wasn’t associated with some degree of struggle for the average inhabitant? And there also wasn’t ever a timeframe long enough where any form of healthy opposition could be institutionalized to endure over longer durations.

Also I’d say that by Western standards even the pre-war living conditions of many Russians would qualify as poor. So their scale is vastly different to ours.

Tbh this actually seems like the only viable choice to me.

Without dedicated support staff and fraud prevention like commercial solutions might be able to offer, I don’t think online sales are possible in any safe way without simply trusting the other person.

So the platform is best used just for local in person sales (like on a flea market).

The fact some gets through is less relevant than the overall price that is lowered moscovia gets.

My understanding is that it isn’t just a bug that some gets through, but a feature. We do want/need at least some of the oil on the world market, we just don’t want Russia to profit from it. That’s the whole idea behind having a price cap rather than sanctions that directly target and prevent anyone buying their oil.

How do you profit of a company that hemorrhages a few billion a year?

While it runs a deficit you don’t or at least only through increased valuations, which ofc assume that you’ll eventually be able to turn a profit. Will this ever happen for OpenAI, i have no idea, but that is the bet. And for the likes of Microsoft spending a few billions on bets like this isn’t that big of a deal, just look at how much Meta burns in their VR department.

Even Amazon had AWS, which was the absurdly profitable core business at the center of a cost bleeding distribution center.

Uber was running a deficit for a long time until it turned profitable. It’s pretty normal for many new companies to burn money first before they turn a profit. The biggest cost seems to be training new models constantly, and i assume one hope is that eventually this slows down. Then they need to get operating costs down that where i think they currently roughly break even (?) or maybe run a minor loss, but that seems doable, considering the pace at which hardware is still improving.

OpenAI is doing nothing to generate economic value.

I wouldn’t say that it is nothing, but at this very moment it probably doesn’t equal the immense amount of resources poured into it. That said, if things improve both in terms of the quality of responses you can get from models as well as reduced costs to run them, then there is definitely huge economic potential.

You mean when the board of directors wanted to fire him? Considering the recent news of OpenAI transitioning towards for profit i think they got what they wanted from keeping him in charge. Seems like something Microsoft would benefit from and if they’d have gotten a different CEO at the time who knows if it had come to this point.