Because they keep trying to undress in front of my children.

Damn right. I think its important we all band together and get more angry about made up bullshit that isn;'t true for some reason.

The left didn't shoot charlie kirk. A crazed gunman shot charlie kirk.

The right doesn't keep shooting schools up. Crazed gunmen shoot schools up.

If the left or the right take up arms, you'll know it, and it wont be some feckless angerbait celebrity getting popped.

Cool, except they''ve had multiple governments, some anti russian, some less so ever since, all because of democracy.

For reference, Zelensky was pro russian. He was also pro european and pro Nato, but he wanted to fix repair ties with the russians. Until, right after Nato voted to reject their application, the russians invaded.

The americans are irrelevant , this war had nothing to do with them.

Who gives an actual fuck if China gets to fancy AI first.

Seriously. As long as I can buy cool shit I dont care where its made.

Its not like ANY of this shit will actually create jobs once they automate us all into personal bankerupcy and perpetual unemployment.

"You can keep the whole town under surveilance as we jack their power bills through the roof. Think of the profits!"

Probably.

This is why I think a severe AI market crash might actually be good for AI. We've proven LLMs can be impressive, and occasionally even useful. Now, we just need the marketing people and CEO suite to fuck off and send it back into the labs for another decade or two to work on the more impressive stuff. And let the ethicists and policy wonks have a decade or so to get us ready for it so it doesnt dismantle civil society, the economy, and politics as insane silicon valley loons torch the forests and redirect half the planets worth into building a premature stupid product nobody wants.

We've all seen for a while how the AI bubble has led to increasingly irrational market behavior. Nvidia priced higher than the entire pharma industry combined , OpenAI just churning through insane amounts of money while ranting incoherently about trillion dollar data centers. Microsoft just rolling out unprecedented data centers, all for a product that the public by and large appears to resesent and business companies struggle to figure out how to extract any sort of productivity out of it.

But its when the abstract market signals start reifying into real world failures that the bed officially shits itself. In the last major crash, that was when people started failing mortgages toppling the subprime house of cards. In the dot com crash, when a number of billion dollar companies just failed stupidly (pets dot com etc).

I think the tipping points gonna come down to RAM. Think about it. You now have a huge demand for RAM to build these budgeted super datacenters, but the budget just got blown to hell and back. Microsoft has also pivoted hard to rolling out new demand for these shitty "Copilot PCs", but the PC market is about to sieze up because computers are about to get real friggin expensive. (Google the price of 64gb of DDR5 and weep). Theres a whole ecosystem of "dumb shit as a service" companies about to discover their high memory GPU instances get real freaking expensive.

Something has to give, and I think that might be Microsoft, and possibly Amazon. Oh they wont die, Amazon and Microsoft have insane capital warchests. But both are incredibly exposed as major datacenter providers to RAM prices. Add onto that Amazons brick and mortar business taking a massive hit from tarrifs on the cheap chinese shit they sell, and finally the rock bottom consumer confidence hammering market behavior. This shits about to blow.

All because Sam "fucking" altman decided to buy 40% of the worlds RAM supply for his overblown spellchecker.

either that or someone needs to figure out how to get the funding into something like Proxmox to fill out the remaining holes in that stack, cos for what it is , its pretty damn good. Its just missing a few key features that'd make it a real VMWare killer.

but he can take their money away

Which he doesnt have the power to do either under the impoundment control act, as thats a congressional power, not an executive power.

But he keeps (trying) to do it anyway.

Thats not really how that clause works.

The interstate commerce supremacy thing has always been interpreted to refer to either specifically interfering with interstate transactions where doing so gives one company an advantage over another. Ie "You can only buy from a local farmer now".

I cant imagine any combination of facts that would make the interstate commerce clause apply that wouldnt interfere with almost all state commercial and environmental legislation.

And anyway, Presidents cant make laws.

Yeah... like dudes, go look up "Heroku 12 factor" and memorize it and live it. Its a *really useful* guide to building scalable app without having to degenerate into hellish lambda messes or whatever.

And one central key to it is;- Dont put config in the container! Inject it on deploy!

We knew this at least a decade ago, at least.

Oh cool. Now its not just chat bots, but chat clients can take our jobs too.

What a world to live in.

Yeah the prices have gone up. But thats due to input tarifs. The thing thats squeezing US farmers, other than losing all their export markets, is that all their machinery and fertilizer costs have skyrocketed. A combine harvester is a huge investment, not just in initial outlay but continued maintainence. Couple that with fertilizer costs soaring (some of that is due to the ukraine invasion but most of its tarifs) and the loss of an affordable workforce due to ICEs rampage, and its really bad days for farmers.

Right... I worked for The Beer Store, the brewer-owned private company which distributes beer across the Province of Ontario. Our Premier (roughly equivalent to a State Governor) made a campaign promise of "A buck a beer!".

So, a new empty can cost roughly $0.20 at the time. The law in Ontario is that shelf prices include tax and deposit. So, the can is $0.30 - twenty cents for the can itself, plus another dime for the deposit to make sure the used can comes back for recycling.

Now, on top of that, you have to make a food-grade beverage, pay your excise tax to the federal government, and then there have to be profits for the manufacturer and the distributor/retailer (that would be Brewers Distributing Limited dba. The Beer Store).

Customers would come to me and - with that "I know more than you even though I haven't held a job in 16 years" expertise - tell me that we were going to be carrying "buck a beer" because they voted for Doug Ford (who also cut their welfare increases).

"When do you get it? It's gotta be soon!"

"The first shipment arrives February 31st, so mark your calendar!"

I must have used that line 500 times. Only one person realized that there's no February 31st. To his credit, he had to come back to the store to tell me. LOL

Exactly ONE brewer made the Buck A Beer - Cool Brewing of Etobicoke, in Doug Ford's riding. We were lucky if we got a single case (24 beers) a month. Promise fulfilled... Right.

Anyway... The Beer Store's shelf tags were printed at the distribution center and sent to stores with truckloads of beer and empties in and out. Of course, you always had too many tags you didn't need, and were always short of the shelf tags that you did need. If a tag was outdated and wrong, you have to - ethically if not legally - honour the price. And, of course, if a tag was damaged or lost, there was no tag for that product. All of this hearkened back to The Beer Store's roots as Brewer's Retail where everything was behind a counter and we had a selection wall. In a newer self-service store like mine, this did not work.

Electronic shelf tags were implemented. It was amazing. Snap the tag into place on the shelf. Scan the tag. Scan the product. Press a button. The scan gun would beep and a moment later, the tag would update with the item description and price.

Price changes? Automatically updated on all tags.

Now, something about selling addictive substances: Sometimes someone decides that the item's price is what they have, not what the shelf tag says. And they will argue with you until the cows come home. You get jaded to it.

"That will be $2.25 for the can of Pabst Blue Ribbon 5.9."

"The tag says $1.95 so you have to give it to me for that. You forgot to update the sticker."

"No sir, I assure you that it doesn't. They're not stickers, they're electronic and tied to the POS."

"It says $1.95."

"Sir, if the shelf tag says $1.95 for Pabst Blue Ribbon 5.9, I will give you a full case of it. On the house."

For a moment, they're elated. And then they realize that I'm coming out from behind the counter to call their bluff. In front of the lineup of impatient customers during the daily 10:01AM opening rush. Catcalls. Whistles. Jeers.

Walk over with the dude... shelf tag says $2.25 for PBR 5.9. Now, at this point, I'm annoyed, and I'm not going to short my till $0.30 for him. Or suggest to him an alternative beer that is $1.95 a can. If he'd just passed me all his change and come up a little short, I would have covered it. Personally, out of my pocket, if I didn't have a few nickels and dimes perpetually floating around my cash. I've spent way too much time on both sides of the counter at The Beer Store, so I have plenty of empathy - just don't be an asshole.

Anyway... Dollar stores are dealing with customers who are on the very bottom economic rung, whether from addiction or for some other bad life event. Now, sometimes these people are a nickel away from being able to afford a can of beer - or a jar of baby food. I have seen split tender three ways for a $2 item - $0.50 from returning 5 empty cans, $0.97 by scraping a prepaid Mastercard from last Christmas to the last cent, and then $0.55 from under the sofa cushions or wherever. Unexpected price changes can drastically upset plans these people have made to get a few supplies with their very last dollar.

"I can get a box of Kraft Dinner at Dollarama for $0.50, and two cans of cat food at A Buck Or Two with the other $0.50..." I've seen it, and I've personally lived it.

The shelf tags, especially at a dollar/discount/alcohol/cannabis store of any sort, must be accurate. As an experienced retail manager, electronic shelf tags are simply essential.

You can sell the boss on implementing them with the operational savings, the labour of having to change stickers with every price change. Electronic shelf tags will pay for themselves in very short order.

I'd say don't give him any ideas, but republicans have already suggested it, and after demolishing the east wing, all bets are off. He's just meglomanical enough to try.