I learned to touch type in high school--at a time where I had to fight the administration to allow me to take a class "for girls" to learn a "secretarial" skill. (Early 80's, but the teachers there were still stuck in the early 1960's, apparently.)

I find it incredibly useful to be able to express my thoughts and ideas without having to think about the keys or to look at where the keys are. Just sit my hands until my index fingers feel the little bumps, and away I go. And as a software developer it helps to be able to express complex code without thinking about where the keys are; in fact, I got rid of a keyboard because while I loved how it felt and how it looked, the back-tick button was moved down and to the left, and the escape key was placed to the left of the 1. And I found typing code escapes in Markdown and bitwise negation in C a pain in the ass; every time I'd think 'code' my finger would press the escape key where the backtick should have been.

Sorry, but having known some VCs in my own life, this feels like a significant disaster in the making as VCs who bought into the hype of AI dump a bunch of money on existing companies, fail to upgrade them, then dismantle those companies: old school 1980's corporate raider asset-stripping.

There are places where AI can definitely help--but I sincerely don't trust VCs to know where that is. I mean the whole 'vibe coding' thing came from the VC world--and in a sense, VCs don't give a shit if it works or not, so long as it maintains a high volume of churn.

Right, just like it's impossible for an English speaking Canadian to communicate with people from Japan or Germany. I mean ... no one has ever solved that problem *rolls eyes*.

To me the fundamental issue at hand is the role of the government and individual freedom and liberty. My operating definition of liberty is an environment in which all interpersonal relations are consensual.

In order for two parties to communicate with each other, there must first be an intent to communicate. When that intent exists, the mechanisms will be negotiated between those parties.

For a 3rd party to enter the picture and dictate the mechanisms under threat of force is morally wrong in my opinion. There is no justification for that.

The only narrow area that I can think of is when government adopts a policy that says "For the purposes of communicating with the government, specifically, these are the languages that we promise to support."

That is no different than private individuals saying "If you want to communicate with me, these are the languages and tools that you can use to reach me."

I don't know what makes business so "special" or different that you would hold them to a standard above that of the government. Food labels? You might as well say that a company is required by law to print food labels in every single language that exists on the planet... as their may be some customer that walks into the store that doesn't speak English or French (to keep this within Canada). That would be absurd.

Government's job is not to "protect" a language. Government's job is to protect the rights of each and every individual that exists within it's operating jurisdiction. Those rights include the right to express yourself freely and to associate freely. Compelling that communication between private individuals take a specific form is to infringe upon the rights of those individuals.

There is no "middle ground" here. Either two parties are able to communicate using whatever means THEY chose, or some other 3rd party is interfering forcibly under threat of punishment. That latter scenario is not "middle ground", it's the illegitimate initiation of force against individuals who are just living their lives and going about their business. The fact that they are choosing to do so using a language or tool set that you don't like or approve of is none of your business and doesn't hurt you in any way. Go read a book or something and stop worrying so much about the private lives of others, you authoritarian nutter.

If it were that simple and that impactful, economists would surely have adjusted the metric.

As to why we still use them: because they're easy to capture, they're easy to understand, they've been standardized over the decades, and they're politically useful. And no economist in their right mind uses the number in isolation; it's usually used along with a broader notion of the balance of payments. And when comparing trade deficits year over year across different economic sectors, it does give insight into how the economy is evolving.

But for the purposes the Trump Administration (and prior administrations; notice trade deficits has been on the political radar for decades now), the way the metric is being used is--to put it politely--faulty.

No... none of the money Apple pays to China for the manufacturing of the device goes into Apple's pockets.

What I mean by this is that suppose you order an iPhone from Apple for $1,000. It gets drop shipped from China to your home.

The imported item, the $1,000 iPhone, is counted in our trade deficit as the full $1,000 going to China. That is, we calculate the trade deficit by looking at the declared value of the imported item as it crosses the border from China to the United States, and in the case of your iPhone, we presume we just lost $1,000 to China, never to be seen again.

But here's the thing: Foxconn, the company who assembled the iPhone and who drop shipped it to you, only gets $50 to assemble and ship the phone. Yes, that's $50 that Apple doesn't get--Apple pays $50 to Foxconn. And note that there are other costs that go to other companies: Apple pays money to TSMC to manufacture the processor, they pay to Samsung for the display, they pay to other companies around the world for the other components--including money to other Chinese manufacturers.

But at the end of the day, even though we count the full $1,000 value of the iPhone as a trade imbalance with China, the reality is companies all around the world got a small piece of that $1,000 total cost.

That is, a Taiwan company got money for the SoC, a Japanese company got some money for the camera module, a European company got money for the gyroscope technology, a South Korea company got money for the display, etc., etc., etc.

And Apple makes almost $500 in profit.

In other words, and this is my point: while we credit the full $1,000 as a trade imbalance to China--half that money actually winds up in Cupertino.

But wait! Our trade imbalance numbers are even worse than that! Many of the items that are in your $1,000 iPhone are technologies manufactured by, or designed by, other American companies who get a substantial profit from those compnents. Qualcomm (in California) licenses the modem, Corning (out of New York) provides the glass, Micron (out of Idaho) provides the DRAM/NAND memory core, etc., etc.

So while our trade imbalance credits the full value of the $1,000 phone that was just drop shipped to you from China after you ordered it from Apple, it's quite likely somewhere around 35% of the actual build cost (the $500 used to make the phone) flows back to America. Meaning that while our statistics suggest we just had a $1,000 trade imbalance with China, the reality is perhaps $700 of that stays in or flows back to America.

This means the trade imbalance statistics are **WOEFULLY** inaccurate in representing the real world.

The problem I see is that the way we measure trade deficits don't account for the flow of wealth due to the value of American intellectual property.

Consider, for example, that in the trade deficit metrics, China gets full credit for the $500-ish import cost of an Apple iPhone. That, despite the fact that most of that $500 winds up in the pockets of a California company rather than in China itself.

When you take into account the value of intellectual property around the world, it explains why some of the most valuable corporations to be created in the past 50 years are American, despite supposedly persistent trade deficits for the entire period of time. Because we're surprisingly good at creating new intellectual property--thanks to a legal and cultural environment which encourages greater levels of risk-taking than does Europe or Asia.

So all this finger pointing over trade deficits, all the actions taken by the Trump Administration, all the hand-wringing over how the US is somehow being 'bled dry'--is all based on a faulty metric

And so long as we keep measuring the wrong thing, and talking about the wrong thing, we'll keep doing the wrong thing to fix the wrong problem.

If this works...

There's a lot there to hang your hat on, especially for something not slated for completion until 2030.

When a government--any government--announces they are doing something for a stated reason, I tend not to believe the stated reason. In this case, if what they wanted was to guarantee a steady flow of electricity by creating a supply of 'on-demand' energy sources that can ramp up when there are disruptions in the grid due to weather, they'd be looking at things like natural gas turbines (basically jet engines attached to power generators which can spin up and down at a moment's notice).

Not nuclear.

So I'd be looking for an underlying explanation that makes more sense than "we need an on-demand source of power, so we're going with the one energy source that does the shittiest job with on-demand energy supply."

Unless there has been a breakthrough in on-demand nuclear that I haven't seen...

[Citation Needed]

I'm Canadian. Private practice is ILLEGAL here. I don't even want to jump in to the argument about whether single-payer or multi-tier or the Canadian vs the US system is better or worse. I'm just stating the facts as I know them to be as a Canadian. At least it is in Ontario, it might differ for other provinces, there are no private options. I get to choose the public one or the public one. If I wanted to pay out of pocket to go visit a private clinic somewhere, that doesn't exist.

Stop spreading misinformation.

I mean, wasn't that the whole point of the Euro being rolled out around 1990, to allow Europe to dominate (or at least counter) US dominance in the financial markets, and unwind the effects of Bretton Woods?

And how is that going?

I agree with both of you.

I grew up below the poverty line. My brother and I were raised by a single mother who collected welfare as often, if not more, than she held low paying jobs. It's cliche to say "we stole ketchup packets from fast food restaurants and ate ketchup on crackers" but I literally have memories of that. I remember when my mother put utility bills in my brother's name because she had been delinquent on bills and owed them money and we had gotten shut off.

This poverty led to teenage "rebellion" and delinquency. I conceived my first daughter when I was 16 years-old. I married her mother, so I feel very fortunate to have found my soul mate in high school and we are still going strong almost 30 years later. But those early years when we were teenage and young adult parents was more poverty to a level that I doubt most people who are struggling today would be able to comprehend unless they are also young parents without great employment prospects.

It wasn't easy, and I would never dismiss the real struggles that people are facing. But I did manage to pull myself and my family out of poverty through intelligent decision making and hard work. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" might sound cold and callous, and gets used as a straw-man by people who think it is intended as being dismissive. But my own personal lived experiences serve as a proof of concept. Chance is a factor, but it is not one that you can control so I've always chosen to focus on what I CAN control. And it's not like I had rich parents or family. My entire family was below the poverty line and my father was absent.

I came out of those struggles not believing, but having observed empirically, that even when you are screwed six ways to Sunday, there ARE choices you can make. Some of those decisions can leave you slightly better off, and if you consistently make those you can gradually climb yourself out. It takes time and it's hard, but you can do it. Other decisions, like reaching for a credit card out of desperation, will leave you worse off. I would argue that a decision that leaves you worse off is worse than just doing nothing. Worse than not reaching for it as a last resort. I think that's where a lot of people fall into the trap. They have bills, their utilities are about to get shut off, they're going to get evicted (I've been in ALL of those positions with kids to think about!) ... and so they reach for a credit card not knowing what else to do and they justify it as "this was for emergencies anyway".

And it only makes things worse.

I don't share your pessimism.

The Achilles Heel of LLMs is that they are trained on human generated content. If that human generated content disappears, then so does the LLMs. People, in general, don't just crave "content", as if the concept is something ephemeral that exists in a vacuum. They crave specific content that meets specific requirements.

Maybe someone will be content watching entertainment, for example, that is completely artificial in every way (AI generated with nothing novel). But have you noticed how fashion, trends and subcultures tend to form around loathing cookie cutter, bland and artificial? Have you heard the term "Corporate Memphis" ? It is a recognized art style that has caught on amongst marketing teams and departments. It has it's advantages but it also has entire groups of people who deride, make fun of and hate it.

Now, even if you then argue that an AI's super power is that it can produce content in any kind of style or aesthetic... it can't do things that are truly novel or original. Of course now we open the door to a philosophical discussion about whether humans can generate *truly* novel content either. But what an AI will always lack is that "human touch." The authenticity. The culturally relevant commentary. The empathy and touching on something that people "feel" is "real." The "human touch" that most everyone, except on tech news sites :P, seems to be craving more of in the social media era.

I realize that part of your thesis is that novel content will continue to be produced by "altruists." To this I offer that the second commercial interests start to sense that their competitive advantage will come through distancing themselves from AI content and embracing branding and messaging that feels authentic and novel and is not artificial .,.. suddenly human artists are going to find themselves in big demand. And then maybe that new content will train new LLMs and we will cycle when the economy does poorly and people embrace LLMs to cut costs again.

And I give that like ... a year at most.

We need to remember that the consumers of content are human beings. And human beings are picky and judgy and finicky and trendy af. And businesses are there to sell shit to those humans.

I don't know.

I'm all for making education as accessible as possible, and something is definitely broken.

But education can never be "free" in an absolute sense. It requires educators & administrators. Someone has to put in the work of creating the curriculum and teaching the students... not to mention acquiring the skills and experience to be able to do so effectively. And if it is a physical school that we're talking about, there are a lot of maintenance costs associated with the property as well.

All of that said, something contributed to tuition costs getting absurdly out of hand, and of a cultural shift towards more and more skepticism regarding the value of a degree and the return on an individual's investment. So tuition prices definitely seem skewed.

In most areas of the economy, the path to low prices is abundance. And I don't think that an education qua education is necessarily expensive. But some specific tuition at specific universities have gotten outlandish.

My question, and I don't pretend to know all the answers, is "why"?

I'm skeptical that free tuition is an answer to any problem. To begin, at best it casts doubt on a university's ability to make common sense financial decisions. At worse it supports the suspicion that their business model is so skewed towards political favours and handouts that they believe that it won't make any difference to their bottom line. Both scenarios spell bad news to me.

Secondly, while I have been focusing on the business side of education, there is an individual element as well. I'm a firm believer that ALL education is independent. You can have the best teachers in the entire world, but if the student doesn't put in the individual effort and hard work to understand and integrate the knowledge being shared, they won't be "educated." It will just be a complete waste of time and money. I'm sure that a good amount of students benefiting from "free of charge" education will put in the work, but you also risk turning universities into the joke that is primary and secondary public education.

I don't have the answers. But my knowledge of economics tells me that if you want maximum quality education at rock bottom prices then the best route is to encourage as much competition in the space as possible. You do that by removing barriers to establishing new schools, and making sure that incentive structures are sane. Instead of trying to restrict the amount of money that can be made in the space, you reward success and punish failure by creating an environment where it is very easy to start a new school, and if you succeed you get to reap all the rewards, but you're also taking all the risks so if you fail you go out of business.

You used an operant word there: "force."

I don't have a problem with people who want to drive less. I don't have a problem with advocating for more bike-friendly and pedestrian friendly cities. I don't even have a problem if vehicles become less prevalent and people choose to use different means of transportation.

But tell someone they can't. Pass a law. Force them to change their lifestyle because you think it's better for x, y and z and now there's a conflict by necessity. It is an act of aggression. You've left someone without choice. They didn't do that. The ones doing the forcing did.

A lot of people use government as the hammer and see every single problem as a nail. We don't need to apply the strong arm of the law to every single "problem." Sometimes, it is nice to get into a car and grab a whole bunch of things in one trip so you don't have to leave the house as much and you can get those chores done faster and more efficiently. That's a valid reason to want to drive a car. We can and should have conversations about environmental impacts, noise pollution and all other problems that vehicles can and do introduce. But the second you try and force people in some way, the conversation is over. That's just the way that force works. It is the opposite of dialogue, diplomacy and consensual interaction.

It often strikes me as odd how often people frame it as some kind of morally superior or preferable way to organize society. I'm personally of the opinion that force should be reserved for retaliation and that we should try to live and let live as much as possible and not use laws and the strong arm of the government to bend people to our way of thinking as long as all relations are consensual. But that's just me.