wait a week or two and the details will change completely.

Trump is nothing if not mercurial. His fans will tell you he's playing 11 dimensional chess... I have my doubts, but let's say that's true. The problem is that when it comes to the economy it's not chess. It's more like basketball, and the President is the point guard calling plays, except the play being called keeps changing before the players can execute the last call. It's a tough time to be running a business, you can't plan out more than a couple of weeks.

If you're afraid of spreadsheets in the financial industry, you should probably just keep your eyes closed. The entire industry is built on them to a very large degree. I've been in IT for almost 30 years, and over most of that, I've seen Excel spreadsheets used throughout the various accounting departments of companies ranging from small operations of a couple of dozen people up to multinationals with tens of thousands of employees, with some banks in there. Some of those spreadsheets are enormous and are doing complex calculations across sometimes a couple dozen worksheets, where changing one number can take several seconds to recalculate everything even on a reasonably modern computer.

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

According to Star Trek lore Earth was unified after a nuclear war in the 21st century. The way things are going you might get your wish, just not on the stardate you'd like.

That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

That's just begging for a "yo momma" joke...

It wouldn't be cost-effective in China either were it not for state support.

There is no doubt that global free trade in commodities, in the absence of any government support, would be the most economically efficient thing to have. But China -- probably correctly -- identifies dependency on foreign supply chains for critical materials as a *security* issue. So they have indirect and direct subsidies, as well as state owned enterprises that operate on thin or even negative profit margins.

Since China does this kind of support on a scale nobody else does, China produces more rare earths than any other country, even though it is not particularly well endowed with deposits. This solves China's security problem with the reliability of the supply, but creates a security problem for other countries.

China thinks like Japan did before WW2, like empire building European countries did in the 1800s. Control over resources is a national security weapon, both for defense and offense.

The behavioral model you have isn't supported by data. When you raise the standard of living and food security of population, the fertility rate goes down. When you have nothing, children are economic assets whose labor can support the family. It's not a great option, but some people live in conditions where there are no good options.

I don't know what what means?

...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.