Sounds like a recipe for recreating peak-pandemic-like car shortages, a somehow even worse housing crisis, and further stifling demand for consumer goods. Some neat features of FairTax I hadn't considered before!

Typical FairTax supporter, doesn't notice that the FairTax *is* a national sales tax with some bells and whistles tacked on to distract you from that ugly fact. Or at least pretends not to notice that. It's only a luxury tax if you consider living above the official poverty line to be a luxury.

You'd be correct, or at least entirely correct without glossing over a number of major problems, if we had some kind of Star Trek economy where everyone benefited from improvements to productivity. Unfortunately, instead we have late-stage capitalism where we've had a 50-year run of the ownership class taking all the benefit from technological advancement and everyone else playing musical chairs with the jobs that the demand from a withering middle class can still sustain. And these robots are going to take a lot more chairs out of play rather quickly.

If Japan becomes an empire through automation, it will be a dystopia straight out of '80s cyberpunk with widespread poverty and one giant neo-zaibatsu that owns everything.

Still, hedging against the risk of QE with Dutch Tulips 2.0 is like installing guard rails made of tannerite.

Without the euphemisms we call those gamblers and criminals.

Cryptocurrency is a major source of global economic risk, not a hedge against it.

This. If he wasn't hilariously wrong, we'd either have a 24-hour work week right now or most people would be making about 40% more money. Instead, workers have seen no gains from the last 50 years of productivity improvements and the ownership class collectively has 40% more money in their Scrooge McDuck vaults.

Conservatives will support this plan because it involves delaying a green energy transition until around the heat death of the universe :-P

I think "nearly every piston-engined aircraft in existence" qualifies as more than a niche application...

That's not only more than plenty of post-college internship programs, that's more than plenty of post-college full-time jobs that ask for a degree!

Haha this! It's more of a very slight warming than a roasting. It made no attempts at any of the top targets:

- Steve Ballmer throwing a chair, sweating profusely, yelling "Developers!" dozens of times in a row
- Bill Gates being in charge of peak-evil Microsoft, posing for the "sexy photo," maybe even his affairs with employees...
- Satya Nadella being in charge of wannabe-Google Surveillance Capitalism Microsoft that preloads Windows with spyware & adware like an early-2000s file sharing app. Bonus points for contrasting with Ballmer's chair-throwing hatred for Google.

It'll take a lot of brainwashing to overpower a lifetime of first-hand experience.

Yep I picked one up probably about a decade ago from ProXPN, I use it strictly for evading streaming geoblocks.

I hope per-model stats aren't considered newsworthy or this will get tiresome quickly...

How is this the "first?" I can think of 3 prior autonomous driving fatal crashes off the top of my head:

- Waymo test car hit a woman pushing a bicycle across a road at night
- Tesla crashed into the side of a trailer while the driver was watching a Harry Potter movie
- Tesla crashed into a highway barrier it had previously shown strange behavior around

Maybe the Tesla ones don't count because Teslas tend to conveniently disable self-driving functions a fraction of a second before impact, but that doesn't explain excluding the Waymo crash...