I started to create an account at the very beginning of Facebook, because of the promise of finding and catching up with old friends and schoolmates. (I was previously on Classmates, but it didn't last for very long). The sign-up process insisted on some piece of personal info - phone number perhaps - that I wasn't willing to give. So I never completed the sign-up, and was soon glad that I hadn't.

Yes, I'll readily admit that the current administration doesn't even know what finesse is, much less have any. But I think leadership would be more important when it comes to "staying ahead of China". Sadly, leadership also is lacking in the current administration.

That's pretty much equivalent to saying "A policy that supports unrestricted deployment of AI is not beneficial long-term", because LLMs are already displacing developers. So which of your contradictory sentiments would you like us to believe?

Personally, I won't believe much of anything you have tell us. You're an obscenely rich self-interested shill; you'll say whatever you think promotes your own cause, so every word that comes out of your mouth is automatically suspect.

I'm both agreeing with you and chuckling at some of your observations.

I also remember my first airline flight, probably around 45 years ago. Indeed, I did dress up for it just a bit, though not nearly as much as might have been common a mere decade earlier. And most of the other passengers were dressed in a fashion which I think of as "business casual". (Is that still a thing)?

There's a fine line between lamenting a perceived loss of politeness and civility, and being in full-blown "get off my lawn" mode. I'm generally a pretty liberal guy, so I think I'm just pining for a time when most people took the social contract more seriously.

Set the clocks half-way between DST and Standard, then leave them the fuck alone. Getting used to the time change twice a year sucks.

If you offer phone-ahead takeout, then you're vulnerable to Door Dash and other such parasites. If you DON'T offer phone-ahead takeout, then you're vulnerable to a loss of business sufficient to bankrupt you.

I wonder if the lack of that in America is a cause, or an effect, of the political divide and the simmering hatred at its score. Possibly it's both cause and effect.

I get that, and I hope that you do it occasionally anyway. As far as I'm concerned it's good for the kids - I feel that I learned a lot and was better socialized as a result of eating out with my parents.

I think it's also worthwhile to make it an occasion - these days it's easy for kids to not experience the feeling of special events often enough. Dressing up a bit, and being on best behaviour, keeps kids mindful of a version of the 'social contract' that could use a little more promoting in this day and age. It also helps establish eating out as an exception rather than as a commonplace; I suspect that's good for their future budgetary discipline.

Perhaps it's just my age, but I remember when dining out - especially in the evening - was an event. And even in "greasy spoon" restaurants, screaming children were a relative rarity - parents back then were mindful of their kids' impact on other diners. If there was music, it was background - soft, unobtrusive, and just enough to take the edge off any silences there might be.

What constitutes good manners in public has changed a lot since then, and mostly the change hasn't been for the better IMO. Being considerate of strangers was the rule - now it seems to be an exception. I wonder - if today's restaurants were more like those I knew as a kid, would delivery still have become so popular as to represent an economic threat to them?

I remember hockey games in the mid-60's on a small black-and-white set with aluminum foil stuck to the rabbit-ears to help bring in a distant signal. Lots of snow, along with double or triple the legal number of players because of ghosting caused by multi-path reception.

Now get off my lawn! ;-)

Well, that makes sense and was probably predictable, given that Windows is quickly moving to a client / server model where a PC won't do much unless it's connected to Microsoft servers and you're up-to-date in your rental payments.

Microsoft wants to be a landlord, not a vendor, and they're well on their way to achieving that goal.

Yes, a pusher often gives you the first taste for free. Unfortunately, we're not just talking about just individuals or even a generation getting addicted to AI - we're talking about the bulk of our society and, ultimately, perhaps all of civilization. Won't that be grand!

And then when you can't retrieve it and the AI is suddenly not available, who ya gonna call? There is no Ghostbusters for this situation.

It's already embarrassing that kids behind cash registers can't make change without a calculator. How bad will it be when almost all of the knowledge required to run society resides only in LLMs because everyone else has either forgotten it or never knew it?

That's only valid if you think that current LLMs are, morally speaking, either good or neutral. I don't believe that they're either of those.

The Venn diagram describing the intersection of "libertarian" and "wants smaller government" is nowhere near to being a single circle.

It's not surprising at all. If you even skim Project 2025 and then look at the tenets of Technocracy, you'll discover that the plan is to turn Big Business into Government. Using taxpayer money to buy into - AKA 'fund' - multiple businesses in key sectors is a logical first step.

The explicit end goal is to dispense with democracy altogether and implement techno-feudalism as the universal mode of governance. When you realize that, all the shit that's been going on in the US since Trump took over makes so much more sense. Even the seeming randomness of it is a ploy to make it appear chaotic and unintentional. It isn't.

Fertility is the ability to conceive children. People may be very fertile, but may abstain from sex entirely and so never have kids. Others may fuck like rabbits and not use contraception, yet never conceive because they're infertile.

I think this is an important distinction. In the stories I've come across lately about the "infertility" problem, I haven's seen any mention of systematic fertility testing. It's possible that a significant portion of decreased birthrates is because of overall lower sperm and/or egg viability. The first possible cause that comes to mind is micro-plastics, although of course there are others.