It might not be true people can simply cross our border with NO interference... I mean, obviously we DO still have border checkpoints and some barriers to entry put in place. We do hire border patrol people and we have an immigration enforcement group.

But the point is, we're getting floods of people coming through who are NOT getting vetted, and many people who get caught trying to cross illegally are just sent back across to the other side so they can attempt it again another day.

The "MAGA agenda" of "build a wall" is kind of a simple-minded attempt at a solution. Realistically, we had previous Presidents try to ensure a continuous wall was built along our Southern border and the plan failed. They didn't realize how complicated it was going to be to try to use a lot of that privately owned land to construct a wall along it. (Eminent domain would be required and the courts would be tied up for decades fighting every farmer along the way.) Perhaps America lacked the foresight to reserve a strip of land around all of our borders as government-owned, from the very start? (Our public utilities have easements but our own borders apparently don't.)

Still, our 2 party political system forces everyone to choose between two, often lousy, options, to go with the one more closely resembling one that gets the results they want to see. Right now, that "MAGA agenda" is looking slightly superior to the status-quo to me.

I mean, when Amazon is selling its own products directly from its warehouses, as it used to do almost exclusively in the "old days"? (Remember "Amazon Auctions", anyone? That was where you went to sell on Amazon back then, in most cases. It was separate from what Amazon sold on the rest of the site.) Amazon could decide the benefits of no-questions asked returns outweighed the negatives from fraud losses. They could always just auction off palettes of of the returns and still potentially recoup a decent chunk of their initial costs. Alternately, they might even donate some of it and take the tax write-off? Who knows?

Today's resellers are expected to maintain these same standards of friendly returns for nearly any reason or excuse, and are getting hammered by the scammers. Many of them can't afford to absorb the losses. I know a few of these sellers personally. They're people like college students who made a business out of designing and making their own journals with pretty covers, or people with a small 3D printing business running out of their home, trying to cash in on some useful prints they created. If you fight back as a seller and refuse the refund? Amazon comes down on you hard, in short order, saying you can't do that and you lose your rights to sell on the platform.

I'd say it's the very definition of art! Nothing "idealistic" about stating the truth.

If "art" is being created without those motivations at the core of it, it's really not true art. Will some fools still pay money to see or own it? Absolutely. But this is the essence of what happened in America during the Cold War when the CIA invented the "modern art" concept out of thin air. You know, hype up the idea that throwing paint splatters at a wall has hidden meaning and is desirable/relevant, and nobody came up with this amazing new idea except American artists! Go Western Civilization! You can market anything and convince some people to buy into it.

As an Independent, I even see the obvious problem America has with the flood of illegal immigration across our Southern border. Mexico is a nation ruled by drug cartels. Their official President is nothing more than a figurehead, controlled by the cartels, and this has been the case since around 2007.

Allowing people to freely cross over to the U.S. means we have ZERO control over the type of people coming through. Are they all "bringing drugs, crime or rape" to America? Obviously not! But we sure can't tell who is guilty of any of this and who isn't, when we're not even following reasonable steps to process people through legally with proper background checks.

At some point, you have to ask why you even HAVE a "border" at all, if you don't enforce the concept. What makes you a "nation"? I'd say it's about people sharing a common culture and general system of beliefs about what the rules/laws should be where they live. That really disintegrates when you start letting large numbers of people pour in without vetting them to even find out their purpose for wanting to come to your country.

There's really nobody else on the planet freely letting people in to their nation to the extent America has been doing it lately. In much of the world, you'd instantly get a bullet in the head for attempting it.

All the AI stuff is over-hyped right now.

Artists are reacting to everything they see and hear in the news, including a lot of "predictions" of what AI will do in the future.

In reality? All of the "arts" have always been about humans translating emotion and feelings into a concrete form that others can appreciate and get something out of. As soon as you substitute computers simulating it -- even if it seems convincing on the surface? You strip away the purpose of it.

New art, whether it's music or a painting or a sculpture, has to come from a human who was compelled to create it for personal reasons. A computer has no emotions or "soul". It just analyzes existing works and tries to make authentic-looking mash-ups from the database of that content it has access to work with.

I'm not one to put a LOT of faith in humanity to make sensible choices... but I think people will see through AI music, or any other art, and largely reject it in favor of new creations from other people.

I noticed in just the last week or two? My Echo Dots at home are suddenly MUCH more responsive than they've been for quite some time. As soon as I give a command like, "Alexa, turn off the living room light.", I get a near instant response of "OK" as the light is turned off.

It was getting progressively more sluggish up until now, and I assumed it was a sign of Amazon cutting resources for the Alexa-enabled smart devices. (They laid off a big chunk of staff supporting them, etc.)

I'm wondering if Amazon is throwing more resources at it again, now, with the idea it's needed for AI tie-ins?

I'm pretty sure I always get more than just 4 hours of sleep a night. But I tend to be more of a "night person" who can't even get to bed before midnight, and yet I have work during the week that expects me there in the morning. So I'm definitely shaving an hour or so a night off the "ideal" amount of sleep I should really be getting each week.

I find that on a weekend when I can sleep in later, I wake up with more energy and essentially feeling a bit "younger". And as a work week rolls on, I often get to feeling worn down and "older" by the end of the week.

That said? I think quality of sleep matters as much as anything else. I can really tell it takes a toll on me if I had one of those nights where my sleep was restless and I partially woke up several times, vs a really good, solid night of sleep.

"The settlement would lower those fees by at least 0.04 percentage point for a minimum of three years." ?!?

Will I even really notice a .04 percentage rate cut on the fees, unless I'm buying something really expensive? And this "break" is only for a 3 year period, too?

Seeing as it's government who pursued this in the courts for so long, that means taxpayers like myself helped pay the legal costs of the whole battle. So I'd say I probably don't really come out ahead at all?

the LAN party was definitely one of those things I remember fondly from that time in my life. I guess I'm happy someone thought to preserve it by means of documenting stories about it in a book.

Some of the best LAN parties I attended were organized by a few friends of one of my best friends at the time. They'd email out sign-up notices and collect payment via PayPal as admission fees. It wasn't a lot ... maybe $5-10 a person. But it paid for them to buy a bunch of pizzas from Costco for everyone. They managed to convince a church pastor that letting us use the cafeteria on a Saturday night for the LAN gaming party was a good way to keep teenagers off the streets and out of trouble, so that was our standard location for them. The organizer's girlfriend would even bake us chocolate chip cookies using the school cafeteria's oven, and we had an official "intermission" period when everyone could stop gaming for a bit to mingle and eat the pizza, cookies, and whatever drinks they brought along.

I remember what a pain it was lugging a 21" CRT display in there as well as a full tower PC. But that was just what you did, to make sure you had a decent gaming rig to use. A few of us tried to get by with laptops but the CPU/GPU power just wasn't there (no true "gaming laptops" back then like you have today). So the laptop players were stuck playing only a small selection of things that ran well on them like Team Fortress.

I really feel like we've taken the complexity of computer systems and networks past the point where it's possible to engineer any of it without it all containing serious flaws/bugs/vulnerabilities.

When I say this to many I.T. people, they just shrug it off or make snarky comments about the field just needing to get some better-trained/educated workers.

But in recent years, we've seen this move to bake security directly into hardware that's not feasible to just swap out when bugs are found. Either that, or at least it requires vendor-specific firmware upgrades (Intel trusted-platform tech, for example) and these updates are intrusive (require hard reboots and often following extra steps to click through dialog boxes, etc). And networks are getting to the point where the hardware is treated as a disposable part of your annual maintenance agreement, with people running lots of vulnerable gear because someone stopped paying for the ability to upgrade it.

Nobody can wrap their heads around any of this stuff anymore. They just throw things out there and see what breaks in production.

IMO, it doesn't matter how things got to the point where the H1B candidate got the job. The *real* issue is often the same. A company asks too much (as in your example where the people with the skills requested didn't find the offer attractive enough to consider relocating for it). Then they "expand the search" (typically with downward modifications to the salary, since "now we're settling for someone with fewer specialized skills") -- and again, people say, "Yeah... that doesn't sound appealing." So finally, they resort to H1B candidates because those are the people willing to settle for a worse deal.

I.T. is an odd field in that you can get hired at a place and get many years of experience there working with the technologies they chose to buy into. Yet when you want the next job, people willing to pay more than what you made before are all looking for other sets of niche product experience. It's rare that an employer says, "Here's at guy who has worked with complex computer technologies for 20 years. It doesn't matter that he never used the 3 big software packages we happen to use. His job history proves he'll be able to figure them out." They always demand the guy with X years' experience using A,B,C,D,E and F. And then they can't find a good match.

I read an article written only around a year ago that made a very strong argument that this is exactly the case. Well, that and the fact that these agencies were interested in the "social experiment" aspect of it all too.

The name Satoshi is primarily a male name of Japanese origin that means Intelligent History.
"Naka" can mean "medium, inside, or relationship." "Moto" can mean "origin" or "foundation."

So it seems like a pretty clever pseudonym to refer to the "Central Intelligence Agency".

(People should realize that the CIA has a long history of "putting their thumb on the scale" to tip things towards a desired outcome. It's not that they felt a need for Bitcoin so THEY could move money without any traceability. It's about providing new tools for various groups to move money when the traditional banking system would otherwise force them to physically move cash around, which is risky and easily intercepted.)

Say you're hoping some drug lord(s) topple a dictatorship in a third world country? They might need an "edge" ....

The number of "legacy admissions" happening in any given year aren't significant enough to realistically "prevent a student from getting accepted". I mean, at least no more than complaining that the school running ads caused more applicants and hurt someone's chances of acceptance....

Ok, but with asbestos, it's not even harmful unless it's released into the air. Plenty of people have old asbestos tile floors made back in the 1950's, and/or similar tile that was glued down with asbestos-laced glue. Not a concern whatsoever, unless you go to tear them out.

There's a lot of baseless fear around the material, but the reality is a bit different. I'm just saying, there's not currently a real reason to have great fear of microplastics turning up in our bodies in trace amounts or in the soil or even the water. It still bears more investigation, obviously. But the last I heard? The majority of it found in our water supplies came from vehicle tires, as they wear out while people drive. So possibly not even the substances or sources most expected.

What I consistently see are businesses asking for a laundry list of skills/talents/specialties but at the end of the job posting? They've got a salary listed that means nobody in the field for decades will entertain it.

Except for maybe some of the "startups" run by younger people, I don't really run across a lot of "ageism" against older I.T. workers. People generally acknowledge we're the crowd with real world experience with a lot of tech that evolved into what's out there today - and that's a plus. It's more that places decided they don't want to PAY for that much skill/knowledge so they'll take the young, eager and smart candidate who will work for less.