So the CIA doesn't really work anymore. After 70 years people have gotten wise to their tricks. There were multiple efforts to depose South American heads of state that were less than perfect for the CIA and American interests (and by American interests I mean American corporate interests, not your interests). Those attempts failed.

That's why we're getting ready to go to war with Venezuela so we can take the oil and so Trump can distract from the Epstein files. In the old days we could easily depose a weak dictator like Maduro. The fact that we can't and that we have failed after two or three attempts is a sign of massive changes in foreign policy and what works and what doesn't.

Well I bet they were, they were probably just subjected to a doctor's handwriting.

To be fair typing is a skill you can sort of pickup. I never took lessons. I never was taught. Yet I can type comfortably 85wpm. Kids will learn the medium used and typing is simple to learn based on simply putting hands somewhere and going ham.

Cursive on the other hand is a fine motor skill. You can't just magically pick it up like typing. You need to know what you're looking at and go out of your way to do it since you're not exposed to it automatically outside of education, a doctor's visit or reading a Christmas card from grandma.

Typing isn't part of the curriculum at my wife's school, yet nearly all her kids can touch type.

Everything reeks of something when you don't put effort into understanding it. Cursive writing has practical benefits for improving the speed of note taking, improving reading comprehension (a lot of stuff is written in cursive), and improving fine motor skills.

I'm honestly shocked that it's not taught in Florida right now... explains quite a bit actually. There's lots of useless things to be upset about, but this isn't one of them. Rather than saying it reeks of something, why not research what benefits it may bring? Or do you reek of ignorance?

World record for sustained typing speed is 170-220wpm depending on duration. Also the type of buffers which can't keep up with this speed are also the kind of buffers that fill up with as little as 50 characters and then start beeping at you. No the buffer was never spitting out words for a minute after you're done and every kid could type fast enough to outrun the buffer on their PC and cause it to beep. That's not impressive.

Anyway leaving your completely made up bullshit, you also ignored context switching. Pen in hand for note taking it is far faster to be able to draw a quick picture in a notepad than a PC. Combine that with cursive and you quickly outdo anything you can play with on your keyboard.

You know what is absolutely faster than typing? Shorthand-cursive. Those guys can do 300wpm which is only slightly behind using a stenographer's keyboard which you definitely aren't using.

Correct, but not all electricity input conversion is equal from your point of view. Here's a question, would you rather a) a radiative heater operating at 100% efficiency silently, or b) sit in a room with multiple mining rigs running with their fans flat out at 100%. There's more to heating than just efficiency.

You do. The problem is your are an inefficient pipsqueak in a mining pool that now in 2025 has reached an insane complexity. Your credit will be 0.0000fuck-all-of-nothing bitcoin for your effort. Unless your mining rig costs less than a $50 heater you're not going to be paying it off, and have a far less pleasant solution to deal with. I mean you may as well just heat your house by leaving the fridge door open at that point. I think the constant buzz of your fridge compressor is at least quieter than having a mining rig in your house.

Every private transfer / trade of any asset that appreciates in value is subject to capital gains.

Completely and utterly false.

Who said they are the best customers? You're looking at this from the customer perspective, to understand this you need to switch it around. The best customer is the one you can separate from their money from the highest sum they are willing to pay. If you had a customer book something for $300, and then they turn around and cancel then rebook for $200, they aren't your best customers. Your best customer is the one that can be milked the most. This is usually those who book the day before and pay $700 for the last room in the building.

The "best" customers are not the one who shop around. They are the ones that just book, show up, and pay.

I’m not angry. I’m pointing out you were pompous, and I feel no compunction to be polite about it. And you’ve now said that the reason you complained about me talking about my situation instead of talking systemically is because of your personal situation, which you bang on and on about, proving that you have absolutely no problem with talking about EVs in relation to personal situations so long as it’s *your* personal situation, which you want to whine about. So now I’m calling you a steaming great hypocrite too.

Also, your reading comprehension sucks. I said “70% of UK cars are parked off-street overnight”. Off-street means on a driveway or in a garage. It’s the literal exact opposite of being parked “out in the street”.

I don’t know how you can struggle so much with basic stuff: you said “A majority of people can not charge at 'home'.” That is the fake fact. A majority of people can, in fact, charge at home, in both the UK and the US. *You* are in the minority, not me.

As for what was pompous, I told you up above, and I’ll repeat it here: “Perhaps you should take that into consideration when you are doing evaluations on other people's actions” absolutely reeks of pomposity, from the “Perhaps” to the “take that into consideration” to the “doing evaluations [sic] on other people’s [sic] actions”.

It’s the last bit that’s the chef’s kiss of pompous misreading for me, because, my reply was not an “evaluation” of the OP’s “actions”, it was a question to try to understand what they meant by “4 hour turn around”, with a couple of examples of how I charge so that they could see if that was the same or different from what they meant by that phrase.

This isn't like when the buggy whip workers could go work for the car companies. There's nothing replacing the jobs being eliminated. Sit down and try to make a list of them. You can't. This is pure automation. It's causing raw technological unemployment.

And we better figure out something because 25% is the magic number.

That's the unemployment rate that preceded both world wars.

While also getting that sweet sweet 30% like Valve does.

I kind of see gaming rapidly becoming unaffordable though. Back in the day it was affordable in America because you would see steep steep discounts on last generation hardware but I'm not really seeing that the same way anymore. I guess games do still get discounted so there is that but when you're looking at having to drop anywhere from $700 to $1,000 for a game console that you're expected to buy again every 5 years that gets tough.

The developers behind the outer worlds complained the sales were well below expectations but the game launched for $80.

We paid more for games back in the day if we bought them at lunch but the economy was a hell of a lot better back then.

Literally every hotel I've booked in both Marriott or Hilton chains has a cancellation policy including night before. Literally. Every. Single. One. I only have about 500 nights in a hotel since 2018 including plenty in several states in America. Is this some hyper localised trend where the writer lives or something?

They are fascist dictatorships with state-owned capitalist systems. That's kind of the problem. Any attempts to transition to socialism gets sabotaged by a combination of capitalists and violent psychopaths passing themselves off as socialist reformers.

I don't think anyone has actually tried socialism. The problem is the capitalists use violence to prevent a transition to socialism and then the socialists respond in kind and then it becomes a fight to see who's the best at violence.

The problem is people who are good at violence aren't good at running a country. They're just really good at violence.

Furthermore you need a strong command structure to win with violence and that lends itself to right-wing extremism which in turn gets you fascism and a dictatorship.

We watched that play out multiple times. Russia and China the most notable examples where the most violent psychopath ended up in charge.

I think some of the South American nations made a real go at proper socialism but America heavily interfered.

That said I live in the real world and I can't pretend that interference doesn't exist. That's why I'm not a socialist. You can't have that kind of system when you have people with this much money and power in the world. They won't allow it. And they will sabotage any attempt to do it.

So many stupid things in America need regulations, but you're going to go for the tools that companies use for protectionist activities?

What next? Ban photoshop and force photographers to use a dark room?
Let's ban pizza ovens that use a conveyor belt, after all some poor kid is out of a job on account of Pizza Hut being able to make pizzas faster that way.
Maybe let's ban those tubes that they use to speed up the picking up of tennis balls after training.

I'm against AI slop as much as anyone, and in general a fan of regulation, but this really is something that should be solved by the market. If people don't want AI slop, let them not buy it. Go put regulations on how you produce food, and maybe get some real road safety again instead of this pointless bullshit.