It's a bit harder to SEO game two different algorithms that make different assumptions and use different weights. Let alone three or more. AI engines like Perplexity are interesting, and seem less likely to be susceptible to SEO manipulation, but at the same time they're also AI slop. Example: I was trying to look up something about an american teacher (didn't recall the name at the time) who got arrested in Europe over something he said about a politician, and its answer was something like "Amanda Knox was an American teacher who was arrested in Italy" ah no...she was a student, and that was over murder allegations. Then later on below it used really flimsy-assed reasoning to argue that she was a teacher, something involving like it being in a spiritual sense or some crap like that.

All search engines are crap right now IMO. Google had a good run until about 2019, then it was altavista and excite all over again, and I think that had less to do with SEO spam than Google deciding to "fix" things. For example, by putting heavier weight on newer content and making anything more than a few years old more difficult if not outright impossible to find anymore.

And you base all of this on what?

More than likely, I pay more than your total income in taxes.
More than likely, you're far more "right wing" than I am.
More than likely, you're far more sociopathic than I am...shit, this post alone is strong evidence of that.

Actually, the model of health care I'd prefer to see is that of Switzerland. Theirs has a pretty good balance of access and giving practitioners enough freedom to work as they choose. This is in stark contrast to that of e.g. Canada and the UK. The hard part is figuring out how else the bleeding edge of medical research would be funded, because very honestly speaking, the United States is very heavily subsidizing that for the rest of the world.

Actually I generally don't participate in organizing anything, and generally eschew politics in general. Unlike you, I'm not an extremist, and there are no meaningful labels that can apply to me. People who don't know me often call it Nihilism, but that doesn't fit at all. Nihilists are generally opposed to pretty much anything, including war, whereas I vehemently believe that the US should have intervened in the Ukraine war a long time ago, probably bomb the fuck out of Moscow while we're at it. I'm also pretty big on space exploration, I'm somewhat of an avvid diver, and a fair bit of a conservationist.

Nah, that's just autism.

Oh no trust me, the more you know about socialism, the more you'll hate it. That's not ignorance, that's knowledge. It's actually funny because, even here, the typical person doesn't actually know the meaning of the word. They think they do, but they really don't. I literally had to explain to Amimojo what it meant, and he was in denial at first...until I showed him a dictionary. When I explained it to drinkypoo, he said something to the effect of "you know what I mean by it" and I'm like: So is that just the thing with you guys? When you say you want something, I'm supposed to just guess what you mean? Like when you say "defund the police" I'm somehow supposed to just know that you don't actually mean it, even though several of the politicians you vote for have literally said the words "I can see a future where we have no more police"?

It's just awful. These people should really get an education and choose their words more carefully...

Nope, that's a projection on your part. You're more like a serial squatter. Nobody likes a serial squatter, but there's not much anybody can do about it once you got in and started eating all the Cheetos.

The FACT is, it doesn't do either you or me any favors when you overeat on my dime. So why do you do it?

I don't really care about mod points, in fact, it's super rare that I even use mod points even when I get them. I just had 15 and sat on them for I don't know how long, didn't spend a single one, and now they're gone, and I don't really miss them either.

That's a gross exaggeration and more or less assumes that the "bottom 50%" make the same income, which isn't remotely true. The median personal income for full-time workers sits right at about $62k as of the first quarter of this year.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bls.gov%2Fnews.relea...

There are other ways you can slice it as well, for example for all (including part-time, which might also include e.g. college students, retired people, etc) sits at about $42k. Though usually for them it's best to look at it in terms of household income, which rises to about $80k.

Unless you're in New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, that's far from leaving you starving. Though in those cities, anything less than about $120k is kind of a shit wage. Starving? No, but still shit. If you're in that situation, you'll probably be living in small apartments that don't have any appliances, which means you'll probably keep your food in a mini fridge, you'll heat it with a $100 microwave, or maybe cook it with a $100 hot plate, and you'll be washing your dishes by hand and washing your clothes at the nearest laundromat. You also make too much to qualify for food stamps or section-8 subsidized housing, meanwhile you're paying the same income taxes as everybody else who doesn't have to put up with that rut because they had the good sense to live in a city that doesn't suck ass.

There's no inherent need to do any such thing. In fact, there are multiple problems with this -- raising taxes doesn't reduce the velocity of money unless the government is just going to sit on it, otherwise it does exactly the opposite as it will increase government spending. Recall earlier I mentioned the velocity of money, read more about it here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.investopedia.com%2Ft...

Notice the mention of GDP. Riddle me this: What factors into GDP?

A far more effective way of slowing inflation is raising the interest rate, which encourages everybody to save rather than spend. And guess what? That's exactly what central banks do -- raise interest rates, not taxes.

No, it very much does not. In fact, saying that anything "needs" to be argued is just another form of begging the question, which is another way of saying that you're reaching a conclusion before the argument, which is a logical error. And as I just explained, not coincidentally, you reached a very false conclusion.

This is true, but you're missing another point that I already made. Yes, you see an acute increase in prices each time the minimum wage increases, but not quite at an amount to match the wage increase. For every 10% that you raise the minimum wage, food prices see a short-term increase by 4%, and everything else is generally around 0.4%. So if you think about that in terms of food, then for every dollar extra you got from your minimum wage increase, you're now spending an extra 44 cents, meaning you effectively got a 66 cent wage increase. But remember, these increases hit everybody, not just the minimum wage earners, which brings me to my earlier point...

This is false. It's temporary at best, and only for the lowest wage earners, which is why I say it never feels like "enough". The median income varies over time, but it's generally significantly higher than minimum wage, which means most people earn more than minimum wage. In your mind, you're thinking you're taking money away from the rich and giving it to the lowest income earners, but you're really not. Those percentage figures I gave you earlier are a percentage of income increases for those AT minimum wage. The higher in incomes you go, the more meaningless that increase is, and the fewer people even pay that increase overall. In Marxian terms one might call "lower middle class" is the one bearing the brunt of this. Essentially, their collective purchasing power decreases to a higher amount relative to those at the bottom, because as you know, they didn't get a pay increase.

So suppose we had a minimum wage of $10, and you're making $11. A bill passes to raise the minimum wage to $11. Minimum wage earners, over the next year or so, see an effective 66 cent pay increase. Meanwhile, over the same period, you and a lot more people get a reduction in pay of 44 cents. Yes, this is using some incredibly oversimplified math and assumptions, but the gist of it remains.

The net effect of that is just a wash. I've had almost exactly this happens to me before, by the way, in my early 20s. I was kind of annoyed by it because I had more technical skills, hence I was paid above minimum wage, unlike most of my coworkers.

Then go argue against data.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.iza.org%2Fdp1072.pd...

Let me know how that works out for you.

It's typically due to statutory limits more than anything else.

Which is fairly typical.

This is compensatory. If negligence can be proven, punitive damages go above and beyond that. For things like car accidents, you're basically just going to get compensatory damages. If it's something like a DUI or reckless driving...oh boy...

Oh no, that's quite wrong. Civil courts can and do issue punitive rulings intended to deter future bad conduct. Including using punitive damages to plaintiffs. Punitive damages multiply the base damages awarded, often three times the original amount. Generally punitive damages are only awarded if the judge or jury believes the conduct was so egregious that the defendant needs to be taught a lesson, more or less.

Here we have a case of the defendant repeatedly ignoring the judge's orders, lying under oath, then trying to cover it all up afterwards. In light of that, why would you say punitive damages aren't warranted? Apple certainly isn't indignant or facing any kind of financial hardship, and this ruling certainly won't fundamentally break them as a company. So what argument would you produce in their favor?

I never find LLMs to be particularly useful. Because they hallucinate so god-damn much, I end up having to search for the terms they mention on a regular search engine just to make sure it's not bullshit.

As for google itself, it's so stupid how fucking hard it gets to look up anything that might be even tangentially political, especially if it involves a particular event that happened a few years ago, and end up with the top ten search results mentioning something about Trump in the fucking title, and some 80% of your keywords are just quietly ignored. My hunch is because google places WAAAAY too much weight on recent-ness of content, which was likely intended to prevent people from having to type in the current year as a keyword like you had to do back in 2019 and earlier, before google got REALLY bad. And it doesn't help that they downrank sites that hold on to older content, so now those sites have to prevent google's crawler from finding older content outright (if not straight up delete it) just to stay relevant.

What's the advantage? State owned doesn't get to cut through red tape, isn't immune to NIMBY, isn't immune to Greenpeace's bullshit, and doesn't get any reduced permitting or certification expenses. A distinct disadvantage I could see is possibly having a virtually bottomless budget even when it doesn't make any sense, with very little concern for shit like cost plus contracts, which are probably the biggest source of taxpayer waste.

Meanwhile, here you've got Google going all in on this AI crap, which may end up being a boondoggle that doesn't have shit for returns. It's either a "big win" or a "small win" proposition from the taxpayer perspective. So far, the AI "gold rush" has only yielded money for the companies making the shovels and pickaxes, where everybody else is just losing money. As long as the gold rushers are funding the development of new towns and infrastructure, let them continue rushing.

It will have basically the same problem that minimum wage has: No matter how high you raise it, it will never feel like it's enough. And each time you do, you increase the velocity of money, which further accelerates inflation, which brings you back to step 1.

It's kind of funny that because progressives have an incredibly distorted view of how Nordic countries work. Among other things, they don't realize that those countries don't have a minimum wage, and by and large their economy is far more market driven than even the US. Probably also worth mentioning that France spends more on social welfare than every other country in the world, and they don't even rank particularly high on the quality of life index (Switzerland, for example, spends relatively little compared to even the US, and consistently ranks within the top 3 on most QoL indices.)

While I can't speak for the 1%, those of us who pay taxes loathe that you're hopelessly dependent on us. We loathe that, in most countries, people who are more valuable than you have to go hungry, while our money gives you enough food to get fat for doing absolutely nothing.

And we'd have even more choices if companies like Apple wouldn't lie under oath and break the law.

First, there is a key part of the Heinlein quote in "contrary to public interest". There is very much a public interest in food being affordable, particularly when that affordability is targeted at those who most need it. That is separate from the question of propping up farm land value. A proposition I have not espoused or supported.

To whit, US farm land IS overpriced. But that is largely because of the fuel ethanol mandate and related subsidies. I remember when the Bush administration pushed through the ethanol mandate and subsidies and land prices doubled within a few years, and then doubled again a few years after that. This is what drives up land prices. Converting corn into fuel. Not giving families more to buy more carrots and cabbage. And to be clear, I agree that these should absolutely be revoked. However, this is different from SNAP. Where fuel ethanol related subsidies exist to create a market where one would not otherwise exist, SNAP does no such thing. There already is a market for human food, and it instead addresses the affordability question on one side, while also supporting farmers. Where fuel ethanol is largely one sided ($ for the largest farms possible, with little value to the rest of the nation) SNAP is more of a compromise ($ for produce farmers, and Food for those that need it.).

Starting a discussion of food affordability by trotting out Averages completely misses the point when it comes to a means tested benefit such as SNAP. The Average American is legally ineligible for SNAP benefits. It is intended for only those with less than a certain amount of income. In NJ, where I live, that is a gross monthly income of $4.8k for a family of 4. That may seem like a lot, but the median household income in my town is $12k/month and the average cost of a 2 bedroom apartment is over $2.6k or over half of the income eligibility threshold. And SNAP eligibility is determined by the state, so in most states the threshold for eligibility will be lower than a wealthy state with a high cost of living like NJ.

As for "we need a major decline of employment in the sector" it is sentiments like that which toss large tracts of the US into the Republican arms. Farmers don't want to be sacrificed for the sake of progress or anything else like that, and farmers vote. Ignoring that reality while proposing cutting programs that literally feed hungry kids and families is as myopic as farmers voting to support trumps attack on government programs. Gutting SNAP will not impact fuel ethanol related pricing, and as such will not impact midwestern land prices. What it will do is cause a lot of people to go hungry. Mostly children and pregnant/nursing moms. A better policy would be to end ethanol subsidies, and then incentivize conversion of export focused farms into producing for domestic consumption. Which would require converting at least some of the commodity crop fields (corn, soy, etc.) to produce.

This is overly simplistic

The government and citizens both have a vested interest in keeping food affordable. Ag subsidies began as a means to keep farmers from having their farms repossessed, AND to feed those who couldn't afford enough to eat. Both still desirable goals. There is certainly unnecessary subsidies in the US which pervert the market. As a nutritionists, I believe there should be fewer dollars for commodity crops like corn, soy and sugar, and more for things like vegetables. There should also be caps on how much subsidy an operation can receive to limit dollars flowing to the biggest corporate farms (though I can see lots of ways to game that through shell companies).

Raising farm incomes is not, per se, a problem. Lots of small family farms need those subsidies to stay afloat, even with one or two of the family members having jobs off of the farm to provide supplemental income. The issue is that our industry has figured out how to funnel most of the value of those subsidies away from their recipients, and up to the large companies that they sell their products to. Cargill, Smithfield, etc. Cutting off the flow to smaller farmers will just accelerate the consolidation of the industry into larger farms with less interest in the communities those farm lands are part of. making the big ag lobby even more powerful than it is today.

If Doge has taught us anything, is that the superficially attractive idea of just taking a hatchet to those programs that are having unintended consequences does not work. It requires a nuanced assessment of how these programs are being abused, and finding solutions to those abuses, while preserving the things these programs do to help every day folks.

As to your screed about the "ignorant myths" of small farmers, you need to go outside and touch grass. They do very much exist, as I've worked on small farms in 3 states. Even large ag conglomerates like Tyson or Smithfield don't actually own a lot of the crop land or animals that they control. They use supply agreements to lock up small farmers, and include them in the count of animals they control, but those small farms still exist at the mercy of the market and those integrators they are forced to serve like feudal serfs. When market prices drop, these integrators find ways to push a lot of the losses onto those contract growers. and when prices are good, they share only a fraction of the benefit down the line. Rules to limit the negotiating power of large integrators or large commodity grain buyers could be used to limit how much of the subsidy money they can pick from small farms pockets, keeping those farms owned by families in the communities.

They're much worse than Google. The lengths Apple has gone to fuck over customers and developers, and then worse, try to cover it up and lie about it, is absurd. It's no wonder that, even though Google's ecosystem is far more open, they got hit the hardest: Apple's been hiding shit AND lying about it in court, probably to lawmakers as well.