coffeetest

The case is hardly the most important issue. A president who can order seal team 6 to kill their political opponent is. The SC is leading the insurection.

Which will be appealed to the SC because the SC didn't set any test for what is and is not covered. So the SC will decide.

Biden had a bad debate night. But putting it in context, he's had plenty of good or excellent speeches, its just that no one notices and media doesn't care when things go well. Got to get those clicks.

I think you are right on that. That was at least part of it. Biden's mistake was expecting it to be a debate and not whatever that event was.

It wasn't a debate in that format, it was a performance and both did poorly. Media will "rate" it like a reality TV show and reasonable people should just pass on that.

This wasn't a debate in this format. You should put these two individuals' suitability for being president in the context of their speeches and acts collectively and not this single event. And by speech, not TV pre-digested and edited clips. Go watch Biden's full SOTU and then give it a thought. Go watch one of the felon's rallies and give that some thought.

It is completely crazy that businesses mainly do not have strong internship/apprenticeship programs in place. It is hard to predict who is going to be good at tech (or probably most jobs) until given a chance. Some of our most brilliant have been high school dropouts. Even those with credentials and experience will do better with time to learn the company systems and culture. "We need someone who can hit the ground running..." ug, grow up.

Collectivly, we need a major commitment to building the workforce not leeching off of disposable labor.

The great thing about the stock market compared to other investments like crypto is that stocks are based on the inherent value of the business they represent. Stocks are based on financial fundamentals. You can believe in those investments because they are based on something real and not simply rampant speculation. For example.

Tesla. Worth more than most of the rest of the car market combined because... reasons?

Paypal. Lost 80% of its value starting in July 2021 over a year and never recovered because of terrible problems? Huge losses? Nope, because it "only" grew at 8-9%.

2008 US housing rated as "AAA" investment i.e. "good as cash" based on actual trash.

You can't take the current situation out of the historical context. Not saying I agree with the idea that Israel is the same as Nazi but saying "Hamas did shoot first" is missing some crucial steps.

Q: Do you believe in DEI? A: I think we should judge people based on skills.

Except for himself, I guess. He seems clueless on a number of issues and unwilling to assess his own beliefs which is not a flattering quality in my book. I didn't think much of him before this interview and it only reinforced it. I am not sure I liked the interviewer much but he did bring up the right questions and follow-ups so I guess he did a good job.

The word gimp in disability circles once upon a time meant "generally impaired."

"But the court’s decision to keep the pretrial proceedings frozen is a blow to special counsel Jack Smith’s effort to bring Trump to trial this year. "

I hate it when the media does this. It makes it read as if Jack Smith is the one with the issue. Jack Smith represents "the people" i.e. US citizens. I suggest:

"But the court’s decision to keep the pretrial proceedings frozen is a blow to US voters who may use the trial results to determine how they will vote. Trump is accused of attempting to disenfranchise voters by inspiring a mob of his supporters to invade the capitol on January 6, 2021, attempting to hang Vice President Pence on the gallows they constructed and delay the vote count. While this type of trial will always take time to run its course, the court has now introduced additional delay in order to determine if the US has a president or a king but will likely result in no trial before the election."

I get the idea of voting not-R vs excited to vote for the Dem. But Hillary Clinton would like a word.

I'm old. In almost every election it has been the same for me. Vote for the lesser of the evils. I would vote for a very progressive candidate if I thought they would have a chance. When I was young I did vote 3rd part a few times.

Voting for the lesser of the evils isn't exciting but you know what, it has been a vastly better plan seeing a Dem, any dem in power, than the R alternatives in my life. Compare to, Reagan, Bush, Shrub, and Mr Indictment.

For this current election, it is crazily out of balance. Contrary to popular opinion (real or manufactured) I believe Biden has been a good president. The Israel situation is deeply depressing and I am not happy with how that has been handled but I guarantee the world will be a much, much worse place with vastly more severe consequences if Biden loses.

Creating desperate people is not good for anyone.

I don't know the source, so it's hard for me to comment but logically the problem as stated is plausible. i.e. legacy debt preventing the move to more efficient methods.

However, the conclusion i.e. therefore replace humans with humanoid robots does not. And then tacking on unionization is just a different subject altogether. You can staff some aspects of a factory with robots and the human's work shifts from production to maintenance. I've talked to automation people and robots can be very problematic and something "advanced" I would imagine much more so.

Although not recent, some referred to the robots as "Bob" blind one-arm builders. If very well calibrated and designed for a specific task, they can be ok, except when they go wrong. To think some "AI" driven general purpose robot is going to substantially replace human labor any time soon... I very seriously doubt that. Especially with that kook as leadership.

I've been in the nonprofit/ngo world for decades now, tech, tech-oriented or tech-adjacent. I started my career in corporate and let me tell you I did truly hate it beyond my ability to express. I could have found a better job in for-profit but the fundamentals would be the same and I believe for me, at best I would have tolerated it. Would I go to work each day saying to myself this is all worth because I am helping others have better lives?

My transition to nonprofit was one of an accidental, happy discovery but that came at a cost of some personal dramatic, and traumatic events which I will not bore you with. I never knew you could work for a nonprofit, or even what a nonprofit was. So few things:

1. There are all kind of nonprofit, micro to huge. KaIser permanente ($100B/yr) is a nonprofit. The all volunteer org down the street that distributes sanitation packs to homeless may be a nonprofit. Some churches are nonprofits.

2. Some nonprofits are incredibly well run and others are horrendously disorganized. Generally, larger orgs are better run but more corporate in style and smaller ones less so, but that is not always true.

3. A career in the nonprofit world is entirely possible. It is usually true that pay is less than corporate but that is not always true even. If you value money over all other factors, then you are probably barking up the wrong tree. If being a happy person is higher up on your list, nonprofit is worth considering.

4. "The great thing about nonprofits is that you don't have to worry about money!" hahahahaaaa hhaa cries. Most nonprofits deal with an unending battle for funding in one way or the other. It doesn't mean they are necessarily unstable as orgs but funding comes and funding goes and most manage funding from multiple sources. For those involved with that aspect, it is a constant consideration.

As far as how to make the jump by far the best thing you can do is you have the capacity, is to volunteer at one that has a mission that appeals to you. It doesn't matter what you do as a volunteer. Go and see how it feels to you. What are the people like? What do you think of the work of the org? Caring about the org and its mission is the thing to assess first. Then see what opportunities there are. Many nonprofit are network oriented, so as you get to know them and they get to know you, doors may open that others are not even aware of.

idealist.org and workforgood.org and I am sure there are many other places to explore.

I assume this is used for this article https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-satisfaction/who-makes-the-most-reliable-cars-a7824554938/ and maybe I overlooked it but I did not see it linked.

But overall, it seems like a weird study. There is so much variation between each car I have a hard time understanding what comparing reliability by type means or what value it has.

So I tried it. And where did that image come from?

There is also the Fiat 500e. Not many of the original ones I think in the US but a new one is coming.

We have the i3. While we love it and it is by far the best car we have ever had, it is smaller, the looks are polarizing and the range is limited. So even among those it would be a good fit for, there is resistance. It was absurdly expensive new but used are reasonable'ish. And I mean the range is fine for probably almost everyone but you know people are always like, "but what if I want to spontaneously drive across the country?!" as if they will ever do that.

On the states issue, while I understand the argument and it was the only thing that made me reconsider my position, that seems to me more in the arena of how they would like it to be rather than how it is. States have the right to run their elections. The consequences of that might be problematic or inconvenient but that is how our system is designed. I mean I am no constitutional scholar, but I have been reading and listening on this and that's how I see it. As far as it being abused, every state will have some kind of due process to evaluate how legitimate the claim is and ultimately it can be brought to the SC.

Killing Roe and turning abortion into states rights certainly was a level of chaos the court was a-ok with. So they are fine with chaos. As far as it not being a federal issue, I guess, but not everyone has the resources to up and go to another state to get medical care.

The GOP mistake was to kill Roe. The dog caught the bus. That was their issue and they blew it up. That's not working now so they are doubling down towards theocracy. They are going to rack up a lot of horrific news by denying basic freedoms and health care. For issues, they've pivoted to the border, an issue they are artificially maintaining now. It's a re-run and I am not sure how far it will carry them given how stupid they all look.

But the shoe is on the other foot now, isn't it? I am not as cynical to think Dems will do nothing about abortion but if they do something, it will be after the election. Maybe you are right but I hope not. On the other hand, we've seen some major state-level wins on abortion post-Roe that cut across party lines and can't be ignored forever.

Maga is on a self-destruct path it is just a matter of how much damage they do before they run out of time. It could be quite a bit. Dems can be compelled to do some good.

I assume the bigger problem is the switch to a wartime economy that has no good outcome. All that production is not going toward future productivity, in fact, quite the opposite. I am no expert in this but that's my view.

SEO is of itself is not all bad. Content creators need to do certain things, which do little directly for the consumer, but help the algo understand what the content is and how the owner would prefer it be seen. For example, something simple like the title attribute of a web page tells the search engine how it should label the content in the search results. That's SEO and generaly a good thing for everyone.

As you say, the "please like, subscribe, comment and say a prayer to the algo" annoyance is just what we have to accept for free content on these platforms. It's the cost of anyone being able to upload video to YT.

Where it goes wrong imho, is filling the world with essentially meaningless machine produced content to aid in the rankings. This isn't new with AI btw. People have been using article "spinning" or outsourced garbage content creation for years or decades to do the same and potentially even better than what AI does. In the old days building thousands of links from garbage content to your content in order to have the algo see the links as "votes" for the supposed quality of the content. Those of us who ran forums saw this all the time.

Firefox or Vivaldi. I prefer Vivaldi with its built-in blocking. I also use NextDNS for DNS level blocking. Free plan is good enough for my use.

Calling LLMs, "AI" is one of the most genius marketing moves I have ever seen. It's also the reason for the problems you mention.

I am guessing that a lot of people are just thinking, "Well AI is just not that smart... yet! It will learn more and get smarter and then, ah ha! Skynet!" It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what LLMs are doing. It may be a partial emulation of intelligence. Like humans, it uses its prior memory and experiences (data) to guess what an answer to a new question would look like. But unlike human intelligence, it doesn't have any idea what it is saying, actually means.

Thanks for your observations and I won't argue them. The problem with a word like recession is that we're in what I see as, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. The middle class, what's left of it, is mainly moving toward being poor. That said, the "smart" economy people will say "we are not in a recession and in fact the economy is good." And it is good, very good in fact - for the privileged. Wealth inequality is the issue, at least in my view.

Oh, right, missed the context.

I don't know if China can afford to cut off Russia but it looks like they control enough of that income pie that it's a very effective threat. Maybe not full control “vassal state” but it's a pretty strong position for negotiations and how's that going to get weaker over time? Then again I've heard China's economy isn't that great right now.

For $20 you can buy enough stash tabs to happily play for years with nothing else. You do need more storage and the map tab is very helpful but most of the specialized tabs are not really needed. I have most of the specialized ones and I could easily live without them. So it's a $20 game in my multi-1000 hours in-game opinion. The cosmetic microtransactions are a mixed bag but some are very cool. Compared to the money I spent on D4 which didn't give me much in return, it is not in the same ballpark.

If you disagree with me, just imagine how this precedent could be used by the right against a left-leaning candidate. If democracy is limited without a conviction of insurrection, you’ll see this applied to candidates on very shaky grounds.

I disagree with the notion that, if we do it, it gives them permission to do it too. The GOP clown car will do anything, they do not need permission or any excuses or anything. For example, the Biden impeachment... zero evidence, no specific crime identified. Or say when you are being nominated to the SC you are asked if you will respect precedent i.e. Roe... and guess what, nope. Or creating a rule that no one can nominate a SC Justice too soon before an election. And they followed their own rule, um, nope. Or the respect they pay to the principle of a peaceful transfer of power.

What's the media going to report on? Outrage click bait or someone average saying average things? Not to say extremist are not real but extremists are disproportionately reported compared to majority views which skews our perceptions. How much is done on purpose or as a result of the news business, I can't judge but biased sources pick up on the parts they like and amplify them or even manipulate them to tell the story that want to tell.

I do truly believe that for the vast majority of people, we are closer in that the things we collectively believe than we do not. But it doesn't take many devoted people to whip up a mindless mob.

"I will never give up!" "I have a responsibility to my constituents!" "I will never surrender!" Oh, you are leaving now? Ok bye.

Oh yeah guns, forgot about that and you are right. But abortion was the big one and they blew it up. Immigration for most is too abstract so I don't think it is that strong. It isn't nothing but it's mainly down to propaganda. Guns as an issue are a bit more real but very polarized. Women's health and family planning ultimately affect everyone and have proven to be not nearly as party line as believed.

Nazi scientist probably made some advances, but that doesn't make it a good way to go.

I'm not disagreeing at all but maybe my point is a little to the side of yours.

The main problem with people's perception is that people don't really know what they are talking about and conflate cryptocurrency with blockchain rather than knowing that cryptocurrency is a use-case for blockchain. For people who do know some about it, they may say that blockchain can't do anything that other pre-existing solutions can and do better.

But as I see it blockchain is a unique technology and that does make it a good solution for some sorts of problems. Not every problem and maybe not even many problems but some. The power usage argument is mainly a red herring at this point because most chains that people would use for something functional do not/no longer use proof-of-work (which is what was eating the power) and now use proof-of-stake which is as power efficient as any old server.

NFTs as a form of digital authenticity seem pretty interesting and blockchain in general in a logistics/tracking contact makes sense to me. In the context of web3, which I admittedly know little about, rather than a money grab play-to-earn or whatever it is called, seems like blockchain could be used for transferability of assets and decentralization. How about a creative game where you create things and their ownership is maintained via NFT. Build a contraption or costume in one game and bring it into another. Maybe something that benefits all like a "folding at home" where new solutions/tech is created via crowd-sourced activity and shares of the product are authenticated via blockchain storage.

I assume one day we will be past the new tech -> apply old scams cycle.

I didn't make my point clear. My question wasn't really where the image was sourced, it was more about the value of what Google is doing matching an essentially random image next to the text it scraped from a website. Why did it choose that image? Adding a random image like that seems like what a low-grade SEO would do to tick the needed boxes not a high-quality product from a multi-billion dollar company. The image in no way enhances the meaning of what I asked. In fact, it does the opposite. It is a bit of Google becoming what it mocked.

Last global recession generally considered 2020 I believe i.e. covid. Before that 2008/9 sub-prime housing. I don't see either of those events happening now. Could you be more specific?

I am not sure about Smith's motivation being about how they will rule but rather because that is where it will end up one way or the other. This just gets it there faster, and time is of the essence.

Well, I'm not sure what you make of crypto (or what I make of it) but there was a crypto project that was intended to be a decentralized wireless network. Participants were (are?) incentivized to maintain a wireless repeater of some sort. But the premise sounded semi-plausible to me at the time. I won't name the p[project since I don't know how people feel about crypto, but it's easy enough to search for if you are interested.

You are right no one would invest in that. To be a real start-up plan, you need future projections built in. No one is going to invest in a static gold-pooping rate. If you can scale that production year over year, now you have an investable project.

Nice, you are well on your way to forming a unicorn valuation start-up!