Ok then the easiest way to dismiss this stupid argument is to say it boils down to 'derp income taxes good, import taxes bad derp derp derp'

Government needs revenue. It therefore has to come from somewhere. Taxes are a feature of that.

So do you incentive people to chose American products and create additional wealth at home or do you encourage them to buy the cheapest thing and send wealth abroad? Do you encourage companies to offshore everything to wherever labor is least cost or do you encourage them to hire domestically?

None of this is to say a change in economic policy like this won't be enormously disruptive and a major setback for some for some time as well, it almost certainly has to be. As to if it is a good policy choice or not, that depends on your beliefs about long term economic prospects we had under the prior policy. I don't think they were all that hot, there was not path to a balanced budget for example.

It is long past time to try something different, very different

interesting anecdote but my personal experience is I have never had more than maybe 50 or so funds in a handful of families to chose from.

It has never been possible to by an individual stock, bond, s-CD, etc.

I am not against the concept of defined contribution vs defined benefit. It solves a lot of practical problems as far as dealing with an unknowable future.

However 401k has been a disaster for our nation I think. It flooded a ton of money into markets that previously would have sat on the side lines, that has created a lot of growth yes, but also a lot of room massive capital destruction which in turn has created a need for massive interventions to prevent what would otherwise be near ruinous deflationary events, see 2k8.

Everyone wants to put the blame on something they can point at an rules they can superficially change because that is easy, but it wasnt just credit default swaps, liar loan bundling, etc. It was also that investment banks and reits using investor dollars to build giant homes most people could not really afford in the first place...

It is also not just presence of everyone retirement money in the financial market, vs a bank or some state, federal, or muni bonds. It is the fact that very few are free to manage their 401k themselves, and those that are are highly discouraged from doing so. Instead all that money goes into the hands of a few mega-brokers and fund managers. That turns them into market-makers rather than actors. They decide what sectors are hot and what are not. It isn't exactly like a command economy but it is more brittle because it the number of independent actors does not reflect investment quantity and diversity.

it poisons corporate politics because it inst Bob and Jane Smith's turning in their proxy form for their 100 shares, it is JPM voting millions of shares and/or abstaining.

This spills over into poisoning our national politics because companies are our big political donors, and commerce is a big part of everyone's life. People always talk about companies just trying to please their investors. Trouble is that used to be, us, even thought ultimately it is still us, who they are now really trying to please is BlackRock.

I believe we need to mandate 401k plans allow people a full brokerage account, where they can structure their portfolio anyway they like, from 10s of shares in individual stocks, to stuffing it all in ETFs, mutual funds, and bonds. If managers want to still default everyone into a target date fund and offer menu of growth, preservation, moderate return, etc fine; but everyone should be free to buy any publicly traded security, in their account.

I would not let it bother you. Cats are members of the family but they are not people. I am not saying that to belittle your cat or your feels for it. i myself love cats. I am saying to remind you they don't experience the world the same way we do.

A human feels shame and is embarrassed if they can't remember your name. A cat, probably not. I know at least one of my elderly cats probably had some degree of dementia. They are creatures of habit, a cat spends 16 years eating dinner at 7pm and suddenly isnt waiting by its bowl at 6:59, but will eat if shown food, has obliviously lost some faculty. He would also walk laps around the room sometimes as if he forgot how to get where he wanted to go in the house.

He would sit and stare into space too, startled easily but would always quickly calm down. He was also still doing things cats like to do , sitting in the sun, watching the wild life out the window, playing with toys, etc. At any rate I think he was still living a good life, if not as full of one as it had been. I don't regret that last year with him before renal failure set in and he could not longer eat and was clearly in pain, did not want to walk etc.

It sounds like you took care of your pet similarly and gave her all the good days she could have. I think you should feel good about that.

For good or ill all the real driver behind this is likeness rights issues. This is about if you can have Fred Astaire selling vacuum cleaners during the Super Bowl and who gets paid, for what if you do.

Really it is all pretty much settled law, unless you grant the AI some kind of agency. "What I did not make this commercial by clipping together hold content, no I asked AI-Fred if he wanted to do and he said yes" kinda nonsense.

We also know some predatory marketing companies like (probably Meta) will combine their collection of media with some public records search to detect when and estate is closed, and then immediately let marketers have your deceased mother remind you that you need to do a better job cleaning the bathroom for your families health and that new and improved ACME erasers would be a great way to do it!

Of course estates can be reopened but nobody will because of the trouble, so normal people will just have to put up with the abuse having no path to redress that does not require a lot of paper work.

It is more like likeness rights of the deceased for the estate. It is not unreasonable at all unless you think likeness rights are unreasonable. I don't but I know cases can be made for that.

AI-ified isn't like just continuing to circulate or publish old content they posted while living and therefore implicitly licensed, it is creating new content using their likeness.

Trump is the only one that has even made an attempt to purge those criminals!

You're wrong, you're losing, you're pissed off about it, and you're a loser!

Stupid people like the kind of people who are bitter because they lost their government jobs, and for some reason they think the president having staff that support his agenda has fuck all to do with the motivations of the private sector; which has never been 'neutral' but always looking to suck off whoever they saw as in political ascendance because that is the best strategy for making and keeping their money..

I am sure back in 2012 Facebook (now Meta) was platforming Obama town halls in the name of neutrality right?

This is pretty common argument strategy that everyone needs to be alert to. Public officials say something kinda truth-y about one thing, IE "Trump makes having a government job a loyalty test, even when that really should not be the load star." and they pivot to quickly to some other point about like 'there is an emergent techno fascist state' and simply talk like one follows directly from the former and their argument is supported when in fact there are major steps missing in their proof.

Krebs dimwhitted loser who was ineffective and Trump hostile. His ass absolutely should have been canned. Nobody with any sense would trust any of the ex-NSA intel types. Those guys are all all a threat to democracy, remember Snowden's revelations of their extra legal no accountability shit show? love-int, spying on the senate, that is not a one admin or another thing, that is an IC run amok thing, and house cleaning is well over due. Anyone who thinks those folks are suddenly trust worthy good guys because they happen to be trying to get Trump, shows their just nakedly partisan thinkers. FUCK THE IC!

No it isnt.

The whole of Dresden wasn't worth the of one British Grenadier. - I have the quote a little off but the sentiment is correct.

The only just war is one you are fighting to win. Winning is the only thing. In choosing to fight even if you are the defender you are still killing and maiming for a cause. If you are not willing to do what it takes to secure a victory you are killing and maiming in vein. Modern wars are total wars, you are not fighting just the men on the battle field, you are fighting the industrial production of the enemy as well. That rubber plant 100miles behind the lines is making the tires that are going to be rolling over the corpse of your comrade in arms if you don't destroy it. Just because the people working there happen not have uniforms on should change NOTHING. After all its only very recent history we have had powers with all volunteer armies as combatants and only in very few examples. The guys with the uniforms on in most cases have as little choice and agency in the conflict as anyone back in that factory or even growing food on that farm. There should ONLY be 'us and them'.

Any target, let me repeat any target that somehow enables your enemy to make war, should be considered a legitimate military target. That leaves a pretty narrow band of exceptions, perhaps places of worship, primary-schools, hospitals, maybe...residential areas if they are sufficiently remote from commercial areas.

If you can't stomach that then violence was never the correct solution in the first place, yes even if you are the defender. Ukraine is a good example. We have four years of fighting now in the rear view and huge body count. The two major questions are still Donbass and Crimea, neither combat has modified their positions. Sure has killed a lot of people thought who could have gone on to live full and happy lives regardless of which side of the border they happened to find themselves. Putin was wrong to attack, he was doubly wrong to not take out the power grid, and plunge them into darkness and starvation when they failed to surrender. Zelenskyy is/was wrong to not surrender, once it became clear that NATO is not willing to risk war with Russia on his behalf. Meanwhile a lot of people are dead, a lot of people are permanently injured, a lot of property is destroyed that will mean a lifetime of poverty for many, and FUCK ALL has been accomplished. If you want to know what evil looks like you could hang Putin and Zelenskyy portraits side by side.

Orderlies are on the 'least affected' list.

I am actually kinda surprised at that one. It seems like it would be fairly easy to automate that one, not even sure you need AI.

It is just scheduling and some image processing/lidar/sonar/etc to make sure crafts are clear of, properly positioned in the lock before raising or lowering.

I don't really know, I am not lock operator and I am not belittling what they do but it seems to me it should be simpler automation problem than trying to do say, Self Driving for a car.

SE did not really simplify much. It was just Windows but they intentionally crippled / broke some stuff.

Much of the bloat, none of the value; does not a product make. Meanwhile by '21 Microsoft was all on o365 as the future anyway. If that is vision what is needed is well ChromeOS essentially a web browser with a bundled HAL.

This is the same problem with that version of Win2k8 server where you could chose not to install the desktop experience...Reality is that did not mean much more than setting the shell=cmd[.]exe in the registry in actual practice. Windows just isn't modularized and does not lend it self to stripping down. You need "a lot' of hardware/storage just to get a basic UI up.

The common Linux stack is much easier to cherry pick just what is essential to run chrome and little but have it all still work right. That is where the heterogeneity of the Linux world is a strength. Various system components and user-land software a like does not get to make so many assumptions about what else will and won't be there.

You said 'a long time ago' so you could be forgiven for the lack of NAC etc, but no dhcp/helper and snooping?

Even with access to wire closet, no DSL installer should have been able to get off the ground in the first place, not in the last 25 years anyway.

LOL - and here I have just been using an upside down can of air-duster..

You had an answer...Are you sure it was correct?