Many businesses - including Amazon, Walmart, and pretty much any big-box retail website - have a huge hunk of their 'product line' that is just an obscured link to a Chinese supplier with a huge markup.

The biggest tell is when you try to order it, and it's online only and it has a lead time of several weeks.

Just go to Aliexpress and order it directly. With a little bit of patience you get the same product for much less. Yeah, you're paying some Chinese vendor. The difference is you're not paying an American billionaire to do nothing other than take a cut.

... is the hiring of people with fucking pathetic skills. Now the question is did this spy try to emulate a clueless uneducated US citizen with an inflated ego and a padded CV, or was he really incompetent. Because the second does not sound like professional spycraft to me at all, but the first one would just be an attempt to fit in.

Incidentally, I do not think anybody noticed anything except his email being on that list....

Agree to that.

Indeed. Probably one of the largest cults in history ...

Including the remark that the markup may make things unsellable and make the situation even worse. Tariffs are ecconomically massively problematic. Anybody with basic (but real) knowledge how trade works knows this.

At that rate they could also simply wait until the bot-net operators die of old age...

Obviously, this stuff is still not taken seriously at all.

There are actually numbers from sociology on this: About 10-15% of all people are "independent thinkers", which essentially means they do fact-checking by themselves. And about 20% (including the independent thinkers) can be convinced by rational argument, which essentially means they can fact check when being prompted to do it. No idea whether there is any connection to introverts or not.

I disagree that LLMs become an "intelligence multiplier". LLMs can only find very shallow things with any reasonable degree of reliability. Hence they can aid in looking up stuff, but for actual acts of intelligence, i.e. generating insight when that insight is new, they are worthless or counter-productive.

And I'm not sure if it is much of a joke.

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

Maybe an organization that didn't burn 40b of its 60b budget on trash would've been helpful. USAID failed at its primary mission and in many cases actively worked against US interests in favor of anti-western global powers. Not to help poor people anywhere.

So, the agency was deleted and the rest of its proper role was moved under the state department so adults can watch over where the money goes.

I am not at all opposed to helping the world's downtrodden but let's actually help them and not fuck around misusing an NGO for other purposes.

Apparently, this.

The law of unintended consequences strikes hard. Kids dead. Nothing is as simple as "Bill is curing malaria and aids".

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

Apparently, yes.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

The difference is, I think, people that use AI with restraint and only as a minor tool and those that fawn over it and are under the delusion that LLMs are actually intelligent, for example. For the latter, I propose the term "AIND-user" (Artifically Intelligent Naturally Dumb user).

Indeed. Although the general idea will not work for the rich. Rich people and businesses are not audited at random, but are subjected to it regularly, for the very rich every year. At least that is how it is done in Europe.

I am not sure it has ever been any other way. The difference is that today, actual fact-checking is easier and faster than it has ever been. But most people still do not do it. The wole idea to not fact-check but instead use "belief" is completely alien to me and I can only observe this bizarre behaviour from the outside and accept that it seem to be how most people stumble through life.

Hence I think we are not post-truth. We are in an age were we finally realize that the average person understands nothing, regardless of how much information and education is available to them. In a sense, we find that the the Enlightenment has failed because too many people are too fucking dumb.