Allah hasn't ever said shit. Read the Koran, he's so fucking other than he can only send angels to deliver shit, sort of like Amazon but without the free shipping. And he cannot respond to prayers because that would be tipping his hand into saying something just by the effect. Basically he's a Eunuch but with a posse.

I do agree that incentives (and dis-incentives) are typically superior to other forms of regulation.

For example, a higher property tax for unoccupied buildings (or a tax break based on occupancy) might help get things moving.

Though, in the case of commercial property, that might not be enough. A root cause is Bank officers handing out loans like candy and basing the value of the collateral property on "anticipated rent". The owners are now afraid lowering the rent will trigger a re-valuation and the bank demanding repayment or starting foreclosure. Meanwhile, those officers know of the situation but don't want to rock the boat until they can get promoted far enough away not to have it come back on them , or better, make it to retirement first.

In truth, forced re-valuation is most likely the only way to break that log-jam at this point. The market isn't going to grow enough to actually make those turkeys rentable at current asking.

For residential, a grace period on some of those rennovations in exchange for actual occupancy may help.

The problem is that the most-often taught English cursive style is bad. Spencerian cursive _is_ faster than block letters, because it allows you to smoothly move the pen. It's also slanted because slanted movements are faster than straight up/down lines.

18. Using the Fed. Gov. to grift for himself and his family.
19. Demonizing migrants whose only crime was to come here, work, pay taxes (including SS), and raising families, everything the White Nationalists want except their skin color, and not being able to collect any of the U.S. safety net including Medicaid, Medicare, and SS. Also migrants fight in America's wars for the boobie prize of being exported to a country in which they have never lived.
20. Creating concentration camps.
21. Sending migrants to foreign concentration camps and prisons.
22. Filling the White House with tawdry gold gewgaws.
23. Giving us an HHS moron who reads some blurb on-line and decides to make it health policy.
24. Floating a 50 year mortgage plan to fleece the gullible just a bit more.
25. Whacking science funding so that scientists decide that other countries would make better use of their skills rather than the U.S.

Damn, this could take the rest of my afternoon.

That's not the question.

The question is whether the AI-produced code is a derivative of existing code, and the answer is still not resolved.

In some cases, the answer is a clear YES, because the code is a direct copy of something written by someone else. If something like that ends up in the kernel, it will have to be removed when someone notices.

el Bunko's achievements:

1. he or his companies being convicted of fraud.
2. bankrupting a handful of casinos (that took some doing but he found a way).
3. stiffing myriad small businesses out of bill payments after service had already been rendered.
4. stacking the Supreme Court with Nazis.
5. defiling Christianity by convincing the Evangelicals they really hate migrants, people whom them deem to use the wrong restroom, minorities, etc.
6. screwing up the U.S. and the World's economy.
7. handing Ukraine over to those nice Russians.
8. blowing up boats with people in the Caribbean because they MIGHT be carrying drugs, when in fact he simply hates non-whites.
9. making the former allies hate the U.S. to the point they are refusing to share intelligence information.
10. royally pissing off the mild-mannered Canadians to the point the only thing that would make them happy about the U.S. is his death.
11. destroying health care in rural counties by taking $1 billion out of Medicaid, and that doesn't even cover trying to take away ACA subsidies.
12. backing Israel for killing over 50,000 Palestinians.
13. being Putin's bitch.
14. saddling the American people with a value-added tax int the form of tariffs.
15. destroying health and food aid for foreign countries so that he could crow about how many billions he's saved (less than $30 billion) and thus causing the deaths of at least 200,000 of those non-whites he hates.

I could go on but it is too depressing.

That is a good approach, but Walmart success shows that it's not the only approach. It is also possible to make a load of money by selling everything. (See also: Procter and Gamble).

Steve Jobs chose the right solution for Apple. It's not the right solution for every company, or all the time.

They know how to put a stop to all this evolution nonsense. If they would just get on the ball.....maybe use a few prayer seances....they could prevent evolution from happening. And they'd be so happy they'd Rapture themselves and ascend to.....errrr.....well wherever it is they ascend to. And the rest of us could all be happy for them.

Haven't you done enough damage already? Stop, just stop.

Speaking of pollution, sending up zllions of satellites with maybe several missions for one is sure to pollute the Earth's atmosphere. The scurvy little bastards that will do it to us won't care as long as it turn them into billionaires.

How does Elon make money on the swings?

> We have been hearing these same predictions about the national debt for almost 100 years ... the argument is fundamentally flawed. Mostly because it ignores things like economic growth, inflation and the value created by whatever the debt buys.

The fiat system has collapsed a few times, do you know anything about Brazil or Zimbabwe?

I don't think gold is a magic solution here, or returning to that standard would fix everything, but you do need some level of balance between the amount of currency and the things there are to buy with it and we damn near broke it during Covid with the mass inflation there. So I wouldn't be too cavalier that this could never happen, even as I don't think it's in any immediate danger.

But remember: there won't be a US dollar to peg the US dollar to if we screw it up and that's the only way Brazil got out of its mess in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, you can get $100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars for $3 USD.

Yes.

For "security' I must be forced to log in again every few hours and change my password every few weeks, but downloading random code off the Internet and then shipping it to customers... sure, that's fine.

The "cold war" phrase has been hitting the think tank and media circuits. here is another example

I'm ok with it as long as I don't have to bail it out if it fails.