I don’t know why we call having a mortgage “ownership”: it’s not. Across the western world mortgages are getting larger and longer relative to income.

More people are in more significant debt bondage than in the past, that’s not an improvement.

The proportion of owned outright homes has been declining in the western world for 30 years.

Because you legally own your property.

So long as you make your payments on time, the lienholder cannot confiscate your property to make the pie whole. The money might be theirs, but the property is yours.

Depends on the jurisdiction but they are often within their rights to call the loan especially if it goes into negative equity.

Bullshit. US residential mortgages can't be called, even if there's negative equity.

The US isn't the only country in the world

Great, now I’ll get more than two or three of these every day just because I live in a mildly dense city centre…

> GPT-4 doesn't seem profitable (if it was, would they need to throttle it?)

Maybe? Hardware supply isn’t perfectly elastic

> Curious minds wonder what you do to be able to have that kind of time for travel

In developed countries outside the US annual multi-week vacations are routine for the middle classes

yes, and in developed countries outside the US, healthcare is something covered by the state. neither of which has anything to do with the discussion at hand. you're comparing an apple to a kumquat.

Yep, it’s an international embarrassment

The doomsday clock is closer to midnight than it’s ever been https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ and now we avoid another 1929 by inflating away the gains of the middle class and siphoning value off to the 1%

I don't understand how the doomsday clock is closer to midnight now than it was during the Cuban missile crisis. It makes me think that it's not an objective measure.

Mike Judge was right!

> You jump when they say jump

Thankfully sometimes 'they' are the customers paying real money for a product or service that's valuable to them.

But as you say, larger organizations have more room for political distractions on the way to giving that customer what they want.

Couldn’t this still hit partition throughput limits though?

It's pretty opaque. My impression is that each shard (storage backend quorum) gets a roughly equal share of capacity you pay for, and items in the same partition tend to live on the same shard to keep range queries small (and local indices require one-shard partitions). They've made improvements in loaning cold shards' unused capacity to hot shards, but they still recommend avoiding hot partitions and keeping load roughly even.

Wouldn’t it be preferable if the DBMS did this for you?

would be cool if there was an dbms that does that, hm... maybe there is?