I have nifty tech, yes, but I also have vaccination deniers, Nazis, and my fourth “once in a lifetime” economic crises. I’m never going to buy a house. I’m never going to retire. I’ll probably never even pay off my student loans.

I personally think that, largely speaking, if imports are cheaper than local production, that’s a good thing!

I’m hardly an economist, right? But I agree with you, broadly speaking. But first covid, and now Trump round two is showing is the weakness of global integration. As long as everything goes smoothly, it’s jam for everyone. But let something screw up the logistics, or someone duck up the balance of trade, and everything can go to shit really fast. There are lots of things we can’t make here, but we rely on them. That is less than ideal.

I don’t know that tariffs are the way to address that issue, or even if it needs to be addressed at all. O do know that the way Trump is doing it is all wrong.

I’d go with “deshittification,” myself. It’s not important how or why they are shit, just that they are, and the laws in question prevent us from fixing it.

The airport tried that shit on me today. I was able to make it print me a boarding pass, though.

I’m becoming a luddite in my middle age.

I think that’s a feature, not a bug.

I’m old enough to remember them promising, repeatedly, that the nude scanners didn’t, couldn’t save images.

Joke’s on them though. They can’t delete my pictures fast enough to avoid the trauma.

If there was a viable non-genocide candidate, o wolf have voted for him.

Most of us are not getting richer, nor working shorter hours, nor living better than our parents. We’re past “services” and on into “parasites.”

In principal, tariffs can prop up domestic industry that is having trouble competing with cheaper imported products. In practice, this winds up being really complicated, because the world is a lot more interdependent than it was 80 years ago.

And explained that he was using AI to do a part of the job that needs to be done by humans, because it helps them figure is the solution.

AI slop can be bad but this Bradley doesn’t understand that businesses exist to make money.

This is generally done by making a quality product, not a pile of shit.

You can get awry with selling people shit, if you charge shit prices. But the kind of assholes described in the article are gonna try to sell shit at AAA prices. Then they are gonna blame their team for not AIing hard enough.

In general, no, you will not be provided services at no cost. If you want to go back to the post office, they will require you to buy stamps.

If you won’t pay cash, then you have to pay data.

Thanks for the link.

This covers my thoughts about damn near every “helpful” feature this side of auto-complete email addresses.

What is it that you’re concerned about? Assume that I have no idea what either the new or old Mozilla privacy policy is, please. I tend to assume that all such are a pack of lies and everything is spying on me.

Larry Niven is not up everyone’s taste, but I find that his Laws, such as they are, stand up reasonably well. On writing, he said this:

f you’ve nothing to say, say it any way you like. Stylistic innovations, contorted story lines or none, exotic or genderless pronouns, internal inconsistencies, the recipe for preparing your lover as a cannibal banquet: feel free. If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn’t get it, then let it not be your fault.

I wish this was taught in schools.

I suspect that they are just going to be instructing the companies on which speech they should be censoring, and which amplified.

I find it hard to believe the NSA would even let him in the door.

You know, I might be a little more ok with this, if it actually stopped school shootings.

But I doubt it will.

I would be suspicious of any big company trying to set up a manufacturing facility. Jobs, yes. We need jobs. But the company is not here to provide jobs, they are here for cheap labor. They area here because they hope the desire for good jobs will blind people to the environmental risks of the project.

And I would expect a Chinese company operating in America to be more of a risk then any other combination I’m aware of. The American people don’t trust regulations. The American government doesn’t enforce regulations. And the Chinese culture, as far as I can tell, believes that regulations exist to be broken. Three groups that have no use for anything that will protect the environment is a recipe for toxic waste releases.

I’m relented reminded of the joke about the medical students.