My father was a consultant; and he always told me that there were two very different types of client: Some clients had a decision they needed to make that raised questions they didn't have the expertise to answer, other clients had a decision they had made for which they wanted additional justification. The former wanted actual analysis both of whether the questions they had were the questions they should have and the answers to the questions they should have. The latter absolutely wanted the performance of analysis, clearly shoddy work or an obviously stacked deck(metaphorical or slide) defeated the point and made the cynicism of what they were doing too overt; but they were not hiring you first and foremost to get them an answer they didn't think they could get themselves.

I am significantly less clear on how much benefit the first class of clients is getting from 'AI', allegedly there are some narrow use cases where performance actually lands in the same ballpark as hype; but the second class of clients could absolutely do as well, or better, in terms of adding prestige and second-opinions-were-obtained cred to whatever decision they already wished to arrive at; given the absolute mania for anything you can call 'AI' in management circles at the moment.

If you are basically calling in McKinsey to add gravitas to your layoffs that seems like business they are either going to lose or have to do at pitifully low margins to keep up with the 'AI' guys; I just don't know what percentage of their business is mostly about adding prestige or letting an outsider be the one you can point to when the axe starts coming down vs. actual analysis where asking the right questions and getting the right answers is important; where AI hype could still make landing gigs harder; but the bot will have to deliver or the pendulum will swing back after a bunch of embarrassing failures.

I remember events somewhat differently: they first encouraged people not to buy up n95 masks because it was more important that healthcare workers have them. That was true. Then they said homemade/cloth masks don't work, and that was also true in the sense that a mask doesn't provide the wearer with reliable protection from COVID. But then they realized that maybe it did "work" in the sense of reducing the infection rate, particularly when worn by infected persons. That is somewhat true... certainty it was a reasonable guess and a valid change in tactics even though later studies cast doubt on how worthwhile it was. You see "liars", but I see public health officials scrambling to make the best decisions (within the framework of their medical understanding) while working with a lot of unknowns in a serious, quickly changing situation. If course, it didn't help that some politicians were overzealous and/or hypocritical in applying mask mandates. Localities that closed public beaches, for instance, were clearly being absurd. It's the job of a politician to balance competing concerns (medicine vs economics, for instance), and there were many who did a shit job.

The part that I suspect they genuinely don't like is that the "MicrosoftXTA" CPU vendor code, which corresponds to a Windows ARM device(which I think at this point means 'Qualcom'; possibly a VM on a mac?) is meandering between .08% and .07% and back.

Despite those systems being genuinely well above average in terms of bringing remotely mac-like battery life to Windows; and(despite...optimistic...MSRPs) often appearing on sale at decently attractive price points; it appears that some mixture of apathy, incompatibility, and the total disaster that was the rollout of 'recall' and 'Copilot+ PC' seems to have just cratered those; at least among people who touch steam even casually.

Could be that windows-on-arm is flying off the shelf somewhere else; I don't have MS sales data; but when what was supposed to be the halo product of the win11/Glorious AI product era is under .1%, beating out those well-known Debian gamers by .01 to .02%, they can't be entirely thrilled.

What would be interesting to know(I did some poking; but didn't see CPU information breakdown by architecture or model number; just vendor, clock speed, and core count; and no computersystemproduct/other platform identifier; my apologies for asking a dumb question if I missed something) is what the percentage of linux on steam deck 'like' systems is.

The steam deck itself seems to have held up very well in terms of the semi-custom CPU's priorities, the target resolution, the peripherals included, and the overall polish and user experience; but it is definitely not getting any younger; and there are a bunch of options that ship either with the Z1/Z2 or generic newer AMD laptop APUs, plus MSI's 'Claw' with an Intel(that actually puts in really respectable numbers when the drivers aren't letting it down); but consensus on win11 as a touchscreen OS on devices either without a proper pointing device or with a teeny little one seems to be pretty solidly negative.

That makes me curious about whether gaming handhelds get converted to linux at a significantly different rate than other form factors. I'd assume that 'gaming' laptops are probably about the most hostile hardware flavor; since Nvidia has massive share in discrete laptop GPUs and the 'Optimus' arrangement that allows all the internal display and the video outs to be wired to the iGPU, with dGPU picking up work as needed, is massively driver dependent; desktops are probably the easiest(since you have more control over parts; and you can just shrug off "weird ACPI quirk causes BT chipset to not sleep properly" because you are on the wall and who cares; where that would potentially drain a sleeping laptop's battery pretty quickly; but desktops are also the place where win11 is as inoffensive as it is possible for it to be(still pretty obnoxious; but when you've got a large screen and a real pointing device and keyboard its complete unsuitability for handhelds doesn't matter; even if you hate copilot and the MS upsells).

Also, just to be clear:

I don't give a rat's arse which party you support.
I *do* care about what policies you support.

** uncommon

Maybe not blaming people on a self-help site would have helped them not to radicalize

They self-radicalized long before the word "incel" entered the common parlance. Which is what happens when you create an echo chamber of a bunch of angry lonely men and base post visibility on engagement.

Why do I care what the UN's preferred wording is?

You made a false claim about the origin of the terminology. You should care about being factually accurate.

The correct and proper legal term in the USA is "illegal alien"

It literally is not. That term, while it exists in the US code, is incommon. The most common term in the US code is just "alien", and when specifically discussing the undocumented, "Unauthorized Alien". I didn't include a discussion of US code just so you could pretend it didn't exist.

And I'm sorry if you don't like being called out for wanting cheap, exploitable labor to pick your damn cotton,

I'm struggling to understand what your argument is. You seem to be declaring that any job involving cotton is inherently slavery, even if the people are free to come and go as they choose and are paid for their labour. If that's not your argument, then please clarify, as otherwise, I'm baffled.

Democrats want cheap labor they can exploit.

Democrats (aka, the party that is constantly pushing for bills for higher minimum wages and mandates for better working conditions, while the Republicans do the opposite, pushing deregulation) want above all a regularized system with rules and oversight to prevent abuses. Most also want a path to citizenship for people who work for a given number of years with no criminal record (7 years is a common number suggested, though even decades would be better than "never"), though this is secondary to the primary issue. What Democrats do not want is a masked gestapo kidnapping people who want to be in the US working, from in front of their children, and throwing them into "Alligator Alcatraz".

These things are the exact same thing that the immigrants themselves want. You can't sit here and pretend to be an advocate for immigrants when arguing for policies that they are opposed to and opposing policies that they support.

In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

First, why not just admit you want slaves to pick your cotton?

I had no idea that slaves were free to go at any time. And if your concern is abusive employers, then the solution to that is regulation and oversight.

Undocumented migrants to the US go through great risk to get employment opportunities that, while terrible from the perspective of US norms, are far more than they have available at home. That's why they come in the first place. What they DON'T want is, just to pick a random example, a masked gestapo kidnapping them in front of their children and throwing them into something its creators lovingly refer to as "Alligator Alcatraz". They came to work.

Second, they are a net drain on the economy because they send more money back home than they add to GDP.

Asserting things flatly in contradiction with the research does not make it true. Once again, to repeat: the economy is not a zero-sum game. Labour creates wealth; it does not redistribute from some fixed pool. Their labor creates wealth in the US, but they are given only a tiny fraction of that. And on that they pay taxes for services that they are barred from receiving. From the pittiance they have left, the majority furthermore gets spent within the US.

Total remittances from the US amount to $98B; this is a mixture of remittances from undocumented workers and documented. Documented immigrants are vastly more common than undocumented (14,1% of the US population vs. 3,2%) and tend to earn much higher salaries (though they remit a smaller % of them), so only a relatively small fraction of that (a few tens of billions) is from undocumented workers. In terms of the share of the workforce, 6,7% of the workforce is undocumented and 18,6% are all immigrants combined. Keep these numbers in mind when you look at the next number: the US economy is 30 TRILLION dollars. E.g. the value that undocumented workers remit is in the ballpark one-thousandth of the economy, yet they're 1 in 15 workers. The value that all immigrant workers remit is in the ballpark of 1/300th of the economy, and they're one in five workers. And remember that it is work that creates wealth.

There simply is no comparison: the amount that undocumented workers contribute to the economy is vastly, by orders of magnitude, more than they earn, let alone remit.

Third, the correct and legal term is "illegal alien". "Undocumented migrant" is a BS euphemism invented by left-wing reporters to support a political agenda.

"Undocumented migrant" is not modern, did not originate in the US, and has its roots in academic and international discourse. It is the preferable language of the UN since 1975, aka half a century. Alien" is a perfectly valid legal term, although "illegal alien" is rarely used in the US code (the US has a wide range of alien categories referenced in the code, including "resident and nonresident", "immigrant and nonimmigrant", "asylee and refugee", etc aliens). "Unauthorized alien" is probably the most common adjective phrase, although just "alien" is more common still (for example: 18 U.S.C. 1325, "Unauthorized Entry by Alien"). "Migrant" and "alien" are not synonyms, and require unique terminology - migrant is much more specific, and "migrant worker" more specific still. "Illegal" is malformed terminology and commonly inaccurate. For example, a large fraction of people who are in the US without authorization did not enter the country illegally, but rather overstayed visas. It is also illogical to refer to a person as illegal, rather than an act.

(This is also a good time to drop a reminder that being in the US without authorization is generally a civil, not criminal, violation)

Also, just to be clear, if you wrote your post coming from a personal perspective:

Don't define yourself relative to others. If you do, you will never be happy, in a relationship or out of one. I mean, sure, you may get the initial "sugar rush" from a new relationship, but you will be doomed to destroying it due to overdependency on the other person for your happiness and self-esteem, which is something that cannot be sustained. You need to be able to find happiness and respect for yourself on your own.

But if that's not about you, then just let this stand as an aside to anyone who needs to hear it.

Nobody means "single men" when they talk about incels. Incels - to both the general public, and to self-identified incels, refers to "...member[s] of an online subculture of mostly male and heterosexual[2] people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one [who] often blame, objectify, and denigrate women and girls as a result."

To be clear, the movement did start as a website and mailing list that was basically just for people who were chronically single, but with no connotations beyond that (it was actually a woman who started it). But it morphed beyond all recognition from its founding. To quote Alana (who started the original): "It definitely wasn't a bunch of guys blaming women for their problems. That's a pretty sad version of this phenomenon that's happening today. Things have changed in the last 20 years" and "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it".

If they would have wanted to participate as members of the society, they would have come here legally.

Oh wow, why didn't they think of that! Just "come here legally" - it's so simple! Please share with everyone your brilliant plan that nobody thought of! *eyeroll*

And FYI, "being in the US illegally" is only a civil offense. And your entire economy is built around the existence of these people, who subsidize your government paying taxes on services they're legally barred from collecting, and creating vastly more wealth than they're paid (which then goes back into your economy, because economies are not zero-sum games). They're also disinflationary, lowering the costs of goods and services. And tend to work in fields that have chronic massive labour shortages (ag, food processing, construction, etc - there's generally a huge labour deficit there).

If you want to know what happens if you slash production but don't slash consumption, simply look at what happened to inflation the world over in the years following the COVID pandemic.

the (up to) 3 million a year let in by Mr Biden's open-Democrat-voter, er, -border policy,

That conspiracy theory is (A) illegal, and (B) logistically unfounded.

Illegal immigrants cannot vote. In case that's unclear, perhaps all caps will help: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS CANNOT VOTE. Only citizens can vote. The punishment for illegally registering or voting is not a slap on the wrist. It includes fines, imprisonment, and, crucially for an immigrant, deportation and being permanently barred from ever gaining legal citizenship. The risk is immense for the "reward" of casting a single, statistically insignificant ballot - not least of which because the vast majority of the immigrant population doesn't live in swing states to begin with.

To register to vote, you must attest under penalty of perjury (felony) that you are a U.S. citizen. Most states require some form of documentation like a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number to register, which non-citizens and undocumented immigrants do not have.

There has been study after study after study on the notion of widespread illegal voting, and every single time, it's found to be mythical. Even the goddamn Heritage Foundation's own database (which they collect to argue for stricter voting laws) shows that it's a myth. They track every case of voter fraud in every election, and all years together from all sources of voter fraud (not simply "noncitizen votes"), there's only about 1100 cases during a timeperiod were 3 billion votes were cast, and that's overplaying it (it's not ~1100 cases of ineligible people, but includes everything from vote buying to interfering to intimidation to improper voting assistance). The Heritage Foundation itself has only 41 cases of noncitizens casting votes. A voter is more likely to be struck by lightning than to cast a fraudulent vote.

And to reiterate, this isn't some grand conspiracy, it's because it's the worst tradeoff imaginable. The benefits for casting a fraudulent ballot are tiny. You have almost zero chance of swinging the election even in a swing state, let alone a red or blue state. If you even care about the election at all. The penalties, by contrast, are extremely high, especially for a noncitizen. And it's easy to get caught (registration requires verifiable personal information that is easy to crosscheck, and indeed is *designed* for crosschecking - see ERIC for example - then onsite against poll books - plus there's a ton of other things like the "jury duty trap" (jury duty is drawn from the poll lists but then leads to cross-referencing the individual)). It's like trying to hold up a bank to get a single lotto ticket from the vault; it's just a nonsensical risk-reward tradeoff. And on top of it all, the notion that it's party based... you realize that Trump had 42% support among Latinos, right? Latino voters are on average conservative and religious compared to the US average, and have been increasingly swinging toward Republicans. If Democrats wanted any block to come to the US, it wouldn't be conservative hispanic catholic men, it'd be college-educated black atheist women (cue the "This Is The Future That Liberals Want" memes).

Lastly, the "three million per year" number is itself mythical. There's 2-3 million "border encounters" per year. This is a very different number from people who are "let in" (except, of course, nobody is being "let in", they're sneaking past border security). "Border encounters" includes people who are caught trying to enter and immediately returned (e.g. never get in - the vast majority), individuals who attempt to cross multiple times (one "encounter" per attempt), individuals who are legally allowed to enter to claim asylum, etc.

Meanwhile in reality, undocumented immigrants in the US paid an estimated $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes - over a third of that to programs including Social Security and Medicare that they are barred from using. They are subsidizing you. They aren't "eating the food in your fridge and pocketing your paycheck", they're being forced to put food in your fridge and subsidize your paycheck. You live off the sweat of THEIR brows.

As for pushing down wages, studies consistently find that's bullshit - immigration raises wages for locals:

1) First off, low-wage work faces chronic labor shortages, and labour shortages undercut the economy. For example, the construction industry in the US alone is forecast to have a half-million person labour shortage this year. That sort of thing is devastating in terms of lost potential economic growth - the absolute worst thing you can do is deliberately make that shortage worse.

2) Secondly, economies are not zero-sum games. Work creates wealth. Which then gets spent and taxed, and that creates new value; jobs don't get "consumed", they just create more. Depending on your economy, lowering the cost of production does one of two (functionally) equivalent things as a net whole: either they lower the cost of goods and services (e.g. meaning your existing wages buy more), OR the cost of goods and services remain the same but wages rise. Or to put it another way: if you grow the economy in a manner that the lower-wage jobs are being filled, then that economic growth involves shifting everyone else on net average into higher-wage positions.

Furthermore: immigrants have higher rates of entrepreneurship than the native-born. Less than 1 in 8 native-born people will start a business, but 1 in 4 immigrants will. This sort of "economic melting pot" environment has fueled America for its entire history. Immigrant-started businesses have similar rates of success as native-started businesses, but are less likely to imitate and focus more on R&D.

Yes, many employers of undocumented workers are exploitative, but they're exploitative of them. The proper response is to create a regularized legal framework for immigrant labour. The reality is that the US absolutely relies on said labour for its economy and quality of life, while at the same time providing no legal framework for said labour to arrive and exist in the country. It's a legal absurdity.

You have to understand how your economy works. Your economic success has overwhelmingly been built on two things:

1) "Brain-draining" other countries (H1B, attracting foreign college students who end up staying with their advanced degrees, etc); and
2) Low-cost labour, to keep the cost of production down.

What you want to do is kill off your entire economic success model. It's utterly insane self-foot-shooting on your part. These things flood money into your economy and into your government coffers. And you want to turn off the spigot. You have every right to be mad about the low end of this being structured around an undocumented economy, but the way to fix that is to make it into a documented economy. You accurately identify a problem, but have an entirely backwards "solution" to it.

I'm not holding my breath about this actually happening; but for the problem the author experimented with self-hosting to get away from(quote just below) something more in line with the cultural and regulatory functions that libraries serve than actual datacenter operations seems like it would be more valuable.

"I started my self-hosting journey to escape our growing cultural acceptance that buying and owning are two different things. I wanted to take back control over my digital life."

Libraries are great; but fairly specifically because they aren't trying to be better bookstores. They're great because they are committed to the accessibility of information and crazy notions that would never fly if it weren't for how long they've been in place like "it's legal, actually, to loan a copy of a copyrighted work; first sale off, asshole!".

There are some cases where self-hosting has specific benefits on boring "Cloud or on-prem IT system cost and risk assessment" ops nerd stuff metrics; but the not-really-secret is that a lot of the benefits are based on you playing a totally different game:

Your Jellyfin or other media streaming server, say, isn't better because Netflix's CDN people are bad at their jobs or trying to command some usurious rate for their bit-shoveling services(it obviously doesn't hurt that same-building means that 1GbE or recent-ish wifi are basically free so you can basically ignore all the hard parts of CDNing; though your small scale means that the amount of redundancy you need to ensure storage availability and integrity as a percentage of overall storeage will kind of suck): it's better because you aren't playing the "you can stream, with ads, to devices we authorize from whatever catalog we currently offer and can change at any time" game. You are playing the "It's DVD so of course I can back it up to the NAS and watch it whenever I want on whatever I want" game(or...perhaps not all...of your disk rips are actually from your disks, and then you are playing an even more favorable game.)

Self-hosted is probably the best place to do that; since, both in terms of legal rationalization(standards for issuing warrants are often pretty shoddy, and evidence from raids conducted without warrants isn't always excluded as rigorously as it ought to be; but in theory the 4th amendment is still on the books if they need to grab a server from your basement; while in 'the cloud' either the provide ToS includes their option to cooperate whenever or you can just pull 'Third-party doctrine") and in terms of practical impact(cops shoving their way in or a tactical team with a ram are a...high touch...operation, even if justified; while just sending a polite request to the guy/department at AWS whose job it is to field polite requests for the contents of whatever S3 bucket just involves a silent copy in the background that you never even need to know about and no risk of your toddler getting flashbanged while cameras roll); but the fundamental problem is that you basically need to exist in a legal grey area to get non-awful media access terms; and do a bunch of fiddly server hassle or use one of the relatively hardcore, if-you-lose-your-keys-we-can't-help-you-really end-to-end encrypted providers to maintain the level of privacy in your digital papers and effects that you get by default if the server is onsite.

At least as long as you avoid some of the features that are much more clearly about vendor-specific implementations and reduced portability the 'cloud' guys are pretty competent at what they do if you just want a VM or some blob storage, or a key value store or database or something; and for those relatively 'basic' services essentially all the cloud guys have something very, very, similar; and your more classic, not necessarily as ruthlessly polished but probably hungrier, VPS providers are also an option; so it's not clear that you necessarily need a public option to save you at the "I need a computer or some REST API endpoints on the internet" level; It's more the "DVDs, and to a much more limited extent Blu-rays, were basically the last digital format that didn't de-facto destroy first sale" and "at least for consumer services; if it's in the cloud it is probably surveilled" problems where you'd need cultural and regulatory backup.

It's not like Amazon is being an asshole about Kindle file downloads because S3 buckets are now usuriously expensive(especially when they still allow more or less as many downlownloads to 'blessed' clients as you have the patience for); they just stopped that because they can and presumably doing so either made negotiating with publishers easier or the competitive position of their hardware vs. 3rd party ebook readers better. That's a problem; but it's not an infrastructure problem.