Observations of Trump's character and behavior, plus the fact that he's set up extremely hard to trace ways for anyone to funnel arbitrary amounts of money to him.

If he'd like not to be accused of selling favors for cash, he should do what previous presidents have done, put all of his assets in a blind trust, first selling anything non-fungible (e.g. hotels and golf courses), so that no one can give him money except by dropping off a briefcase full of cash which will undoubtedly get noticed and reported.

If you set out to make it easy for people to untraceably bribe you, you have to expect everyone will assume that it's because you want to be untraceably bribed... and when you make governing decisions that generate windfall profits for some people you have to expect that people will assume it's because you've been paid off.

This is why it's important to avoid even the appearance of corruption.

It occurs to me that there's one important difference: Investment. If they won't give me a straight answer but I've invested several minutes of my time in talking to them I might give in to their crap process. If I haven't invested that time, though, just gotten a report from the AI caller that they won't answer unless I come in, I won't feel like I've wasted my time if I just give them a miss.

On the other side, businesses might find that giving the AI the runaround is ineffective, because of the lack of investment by the potential customer. Then they'll have a choice: Either just hang up on the calls and ditch those customers, or else start being clearer about their pricing and services. Ideally, they'll be clearer by just putting the info on their web site, so no one has to make or receive a call.

About as anti-social as I am. I hate talking on the phone. Given the choice between calling some business to ask about their pricing or just not using their service, I'll do the latter every time. What I really prefer is that they put their pricing on their web site. Then neither of us have to be bothered. If they don't want to do that and would like my business, though, they should appreciate the AI calls, because with that feature I just might buy from them. Without it, I almost certainly will not.

Google has customer support lines for paid services. Forcing them to provide customer support for free services would just force them to begin charging for those services.

They should respond by putting the information on the web, so people don't have to ask.

It is true in the US, looked at nationwide. There is variation, of course, and there are some areas where housing is shockingly expensive, primarily due to local building policy and state property tax policy. But on the whole each generation is doing better than the previous in income, home ownership and net wealth, though the younger generations believe the opposite and get quite confused when presented with the data. Somehow they seem to have forgotten that every generation starts out with very little and accumulates wealth over time. Instead, they want to start where their parents are.

Another data point that I think is very interesting, this from a research paper from the Federal Reserve Board: Every generation also has more student debt than the one before it, which isn't surprising, but each generation's increase in income more than offsets this debt load. This data is across a broad spectrum of people, and some obviously do much better than others, but as cohorts it appears that borrowing heavily to invest in education has proven to be a good choice.

The biggest and most important isn't so much a guardrail as a fundamental change in what money is: The shift from metal-backed currency to debt-backed currency, AKA fiat currency. Because fiat currency is backed only by contractual obligations to repay it, the money supply can expand rapidly when times are good and contract gracefully when times are bad, preventing the credit crunches that used to cause frequent crashes and the deflationary cycles that made it take long years to recover. That plus the Fed's ability to influence money supply by tightening or loosening credit have meant that we suffer only relatively mild recessions. The other guardrails you mention are important, but the change how we define money and regulate its supply is far more crucial.

This has nothing to do with "society" or the economy. It's just fools who will be parted from their money. I suspect the prices are driven up primarily by crypto-asset "whales" swapping "traditional" crypto-assets for these stock coins, with just as little understanding of the value of a stock coin as they have of the value of BTC, etc.

And yet home ownership is higher among Gen Z than Millennials at the same age, and higher among Millennials than Gen X.

We have hard numbers that show that each successive generation has higher same-age inflation-adjusted incomes, wealth and home ownership rates. Gen Z is doing particularly well. That hardly indicates "everything is harder".

Whether wages kept up with GDP growth depends on the details of how you measure wages, but it's worth pointing out that each of the succeeding generations has had higher income (inflation-adjusted) than the previous one. They mostly don't realize it unless they look at the numbers because expectations have risen with incomes, but it's true. At least in the US; I haven't seen UK numbers.

Meh. If people can't tell the difference between "music full of human spirit and culture" and "AI slop" then by definition it's a distinction without a difference. If people can tell the difference and prefer the "human" music, then there's no problem to be solved here. If they prefer the "AI slop"... I'm not sure what that means, but it doesn't mean that we need to label it so people avoid it. Let people listen to what they want to listen to.

Yes, Google is a business, not a charity.

You seem to be saying that larger sizes increase the probability of multi-disk failures. Are you saying that because larger disks have higher probability of single-disk failure, or just because large disks increase reconstruction time, increasing the probability of another failure during reconstruction?

If it's really true that the chances of more than two simultaneous disk failures is approaching one... these disks must be extremely unreliable.

No, it's not. Thinking requires understanding. Machines are incapable of doing that. They can recombine new facts, but they cannot and will never be able to think.