Buying groceries with a check?! Look at this rich guy. The rest of us have to fill out a credit application and take out a mortgage when we want to buy a Christmas roast.

Yea. your friend's line of reasoning is pretty common but it is a bit of a head scratcher to me. There's less transparency in private business, so there's corruption and unethical dealings that most of us never find out about. The point of having services under government control is that it's the people's money and the organization should ideally be answerable to the people.

The anti-union shift has been a bad strategy for the Dems. Unions can get their members showing up to the polls or even for political action far better than Act BLUE can by just sending upper middle class donors a panicked email begging for donations.

  Some people don't like unions because it's an extra layer of politics. It seems inefficient to have dues and voting and people getting paid just to be reps. But taking a step back: if you want to walk into a room with your boss to negotiate something, like a job or raise or working conditions. You, as the worker, are standing alone and your boss has an entire organization (and legal team) behind him/her. Without unions every person is negotiating under a serious imbalance against some of the richest and most politically connected organizations in the world.

I bought an HDTV too early and it quickly became obsolete because it didn't support 720p only 480p and 1080i. That's what happens when you buy technology, someone doesn't bother supporting it because it's too much of a pain, there is too little money to make, and ultimately they know that people are just going to buy new hardware when their old hardware stops working.

I get it when an organization outsources something when they don't have enough work to sustain a team. Like a small town government isn't going to operate their own roof repair division just to repair government roofs (rooves?), you instead would hire a local contractor that has plenty of private work to keep their crew busy.

But some things the government does all the time and it doesn't make sense to outsource, like most office work. Of course outsourcing some temp staff can be practical if one can anticipate things like seasonable demand, but hiring local students if the job and time frame fit (summer job) is better still.

At the end of the day an organization can pay an employee, work out benefits, etc. Or it can pay a for-profit business to take a cut for management, owners, etc and try to cut corners on quality or benefits for the employees. I know how the neoliberal "third way" think, and they'd rather reduce the number of government employees, even if that amounts to giving taxpayer dollars to a private owner and gutting good paying union jobs in the community. It's no wonder the working class is struggling under skyrocketing housing prices, high tuition, and low wages. It's all symptoms of an unhealthy economic system that is the direct result of our political shift in both parties in the US. (and a general trend in much of the West with neoliberalism, especially the anglosphere)

The shift toward massive trucks and SUVs in the U.S. is not a conspiracy as you stated, but it's not purely consumer preference either. It's a direct, documented, and mathematically verifiable consequence of how the U.S. government rewrote fuel efficiency regulations in 2011.

Prior to 2011, CAFE standards were simple: a car company’s entire fleet of "light trucks" had to average a certain MPG number (e.g., 24 mpg). It didn't matter how big or small the individual trucks were. The Obama administration reformed these rules to close loopholes... but they inadvertently created a new one. They switched to a "footprint-based" standard.

And the curve is very steep. If you build a truck or SUV with a small footprint (like the old Ford Ranger or Chevy S-10), the government mandates an incredibly high MPG target, often close to what a high efficiency sedan would get. As the vehicle gets bigger, the MPG target drops significantly.

This means that if a manufacturer tries to build a small pickup or SUV today (about the size of a 1990s Ranger), the CAFE formula might mandate a target of ~40-50 MPG. Achieving such a high MPG requires expensive hybrid technology and advanced lightweight materials. This adds at least $10k to the cost which makes those vehicles virtually unsellable.

Why the U.S. government didn't fix this issue 10+ years ago is a mystery to me. The result has actually been hugely increased gas consumption and CO2 emissions, rather than the desired effect of lower gas consumption and CO2 emissions.

Signed, someone who would love a small AWD SUV, but they're just not economically justifiable (in the U.S.)

Of the dozens and dozens of anti-consumer and terribly damaging mega-mergers over the last 40+ years, this is the one that people absolutely lose their shit over.

I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry.

I think I will cancel a few streaming service and Amazon prime to compensate.

Privatization was always part of the grift.

Even the 6 year old Broadcom BCM7218X supports AV1. I think we're at a stage where picking AV1 by default is viable for HD streaming, with standard def fallback for other codecs. (even if those other codecs can do 4K, maybe the older devices aren't up for doing it)

Ring wing operatives have long been trying to prove that government doesn't work.

People have been making their own substandard parts long before 3D printing. I've seen things made from wood, resin, plaster, and even papier-mâché

To clarify my own statement. I mean not going to yield results proportional to the amount put into them. You can double the investment and not get double the return. I think this is reflected in the wacky P/E ratios we see in the market for AI related stocks.

The massive amount of capital put into AI is not going to yield results. There will be mostly losers and only a few winners. This is assuming AI sticks around and is the paradigm shift that many people believe it will be.

If it's entirely fake, just a bunch of nonsense that people wasted money on, then it will pop quickly. But if it's somewhat real, like the dot-com boom. We'll see society transformed, and a lot of failed businesses, some of them very stupid, scattered along the information superhighway.

If this is a bubble like the housing bubble. Well, remember that even though a lot of people were underwater on their mortgage. Those homes never went to zero. It was worth something to someone, but there were a lot of people who lost everything in the exchange. And a handful of people who profited a great deal.

So expect that GDP will go up, even when the AI bubble pops. And that the middle class retirement accounts are going to be absorbing most of the hit. Because someone else, probably someone very rich, is going to still come out ahead. They almost always do.

Our nation is at risk during a prolong conflict or embargo as long as we remain dependent on foreign oil. Reducing the amount we use is the most obvious path out, this allows our own reserves to stretch much further.

But MAGA is not ran by smart people. Evil people sure, but not ever evil villain is an evil genius, some are just thugs.

There will be a correction. There is ALWAYS a correction.