With a president who solves an existential threat by finding the best expert he can find, and using his own formidable political skills and charisma to run interference for that expert.

Seriously, Comacho was a meathead, but Iâ(TM)d vote for him.

You post this over and over and it's just not true. Lots of people who don't work continue to eat. Anyone can give anybody else food, parents, children, friends, charity donors. Nobody is stopping you or anyone else from giving food to anybody you want to.

But what you want is the ability to force other people to provide you with food (and presumably clothing and shelter and entertainment) without compensation. Essentially you want slaves who will provide you what you want without any obligation on your part to provide anything they want.

What if the people who produce the food decide they don't want to work? I've worked in food service. They were generally unpleasant jobs. I did them because people were paying for the food and that money was in turn used to pay me. If the people who were consuming the food weren't paying for it I certainly wouldn't continued to provide it.

Tell me honestly, if you were guaranteed 2000 calories per day of rice and beans for the rest of your life would you drop this "if you don't work you don't eat" nonsense? Or do you want a variety of fresh and tasty foods prepared and delivered, if not to your door, at least to a place close to your home?

Do you expect a labor force to grow, harvest, clean, package and ship the food to a convenient place for you to get it? If so, why do you think those people should have to do that work but don't think you should have to do any work at all? Are you ok with just raw vegetables or do you also expect factories and machinery to fill aisle after aisle of supermarket shelves? Do you think all those people should be forced to work to feed you without expecting anything in return from you?

You forgot to multiply by the number of widgets.

But yes, the value of your work is the portion of the revenue (not profit) that your work produces. Sometimes this number is easy to calculate other times it's extremely hard or impossible to calculate so it gets estimated with a very, very rough guess.

And if the amount of revenue is less than the cost of all the materials and labor, why even produce the widgets at all? If the company is not making a profit, why would the owners of the company not change the business or shut it down. Running a business that keeps losing money just doesn't make sense. And there do exist non-profit businesses, but they still try to make a bit of money and are at risk of going out of business if they lose money for a while and didn't have enough profit saved up to cover the losses.

Similarly, if you want more money to assemble widgets than what anyone is willing to pay for those widgets, why are you assembling them?

Every single person in the world routinely makes choices to not buy things they think are too expensive. Why should labor be any different? The people running companies choose not to hire people, or to lay people off, if the work those people would do is worth less than the paycheck those people require in order to do the work. This is no different than you walking into a store and choosing not to buy an item off the shelf because you think the price is too high. You could buy it, but then you'd have less money to spend on other things that you'd prefer to spend it on. The buyer decides how much they want to pay and if it's less than the seller will sell for, the buyer walks away. That's all layoffs are, the buyer (company) deciding they would rather spend money else because the price the seller (employee) is asking is higher than the buyer thinks it's worth.

It's not just companies. Everybody wants to get more stuff for less. That's why you want more pay for less work and it's why you buy less expensive stuff when you could pay more for the same thing. You just view it differently when it's you wanting more for less than when your employer wants the same thing.

Are you under the impression that there are no nuclear power plants in America?

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs...

Of the 54 nuclear power plants in America I can't think of a single one that caused a city to be evacuated for 10 years. Did I miss some news? Which cities have been evacuated for 10 years?

These nuclear power plants have been operating for a LOT longer than one quarter. Your claim is just entirely contrary to objective fact. There are 54 nuclear power plants that have been operating in the US for many quarters and exactly zero of them have resulted in a city being evacuated. It's not impossible, but it's also not impossible that an asteroid could hit the earth and wipe out all life. Your assessment of probability is out of sync with observed fact.

Sure, that means this story is false. Obviously coal use did not hit a record high in 2024. How could it have with solar, wind and batteries being so cheap? Why would anybody burn coal when there's a limitless supply of cheap solar, wind and battery power available?

Unless maybe solar, wind and battery are not limitless and need to be supplemented with something else. But I'm going to trust you. Climate change is a solved issue because there's enough solar, wind and battery power available to replace all other power generation and keep up with new demand and not only that, but it's cheaper too.

Right, but as I just said obeying a disallow directive isn't legally mandatory, so it doesn't mean much.

The difference depends on context, of course.

Generally speaking there are several cases to consider:

(1) Site requires agreeing on terms of service before browser can access content. In this case, scraping is a clear violation.

(2) Site terms of service forbid scraping content, but human visitors can view content and ...
(2a) site takes technical measures to exclude bots. In this case scraping is a no-no, but for a different reason: it violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
(2b) site takes no technical measures to exclude bots. In this case, the answer is unclear, and may depend on the specific jurisdiction (e.g. circuit court).

(3) Site has a robots.txt file and ...
(3a) robots.txt allows scraping. In this case, even if the terms of service forbid scraping, the permission given here helps the scraper's defense.
(3b) robots.txt forbids scraping. In this case obeying robots.txt isn't in itself legally mandatory, but it may affect your case if the site takes other anti-scraping measures.

Not *explicitly*. Offering such a database would be an invitation for people to look at the whole data broker industry. So what you, as a databroker who tracks and piegeonholes every human being who uses the Internet to a fare-the-well, do to tap into the market for lists of gullible yokels? You offer your customer, literally anyone with money, the ability to zero in on the gullible by choosing appropriate proxies.

For example, you can get a list of everyone who has searched for "purchasing real estate with no money down". Sad people who buy colloidal silver and herbal male enhancement products. People who buy terrible crypto assets like NFTs and memecoins. Nutters who spend a lot of time on conspiracy theory sites.

It's kind of like doxxing someone. You might not be able to find out directly that John Doe lives on Maple St and works for ACME services, but you can piece it together by the traces he leaves online. Only you do it to populations wholesale.

Only if during that hour those customers make the decision that they really didn't want what you were selling. If they buy it later today or tomorrow or next week, you didn't lose anything. If a container ship carrying your product across the ocean sank, that's a loss. The item you didn't sell during your e-commerce website outage is still in a warehouse waiting to be sold. When it sells, you'll collect the money that you didn't collect when your website was down.

And if the outage did allow them to realize that buying the item from you would have been a poor choice and a regrettable use of their money, that's probably a net benefit.

No money is lost just because a transaction doesn't take place. The seller still has whatever they were selling, the buyer still has the money they would have spent. If a delay allows the buyer to reassess and determine that their money is better spent on something else, then different sellers make sales they wouldn't have.

If billions were truly lost by some, most of those billions were gained by others. But I suspect that at the end of the week the net losses were negligible. The vast majority of money that would have been spent during the AWS outage probably was still spent. The vast majority of work that would have been done during the AWS outage probably still got done.

A few people were busier than usual, other people got a bit more time to slack off. But most of the people who slacked off, probably made up what they missed a bit later.

Are you claiming that people went hungry because of this AWS outage? I find that hard to believe. But even if some people did skip some unhealthy delivered meals, the money they would have spent is still in their pocket waiting to be spent on something else. You could just as well claim that billions were gained as a result of the AWS outage because people who couldn't order food delivered bought something later with the money they didn't spend on food delivery.

And I seriously doubt AWS or other companies spent any additional money fixing this outage that they wouldn't have spent otherwise. Some people had a busier day than expected, others had a less busy day waiting around and reading slashdot or other non-AWS-dependent entertainment of choice. But at the end of the week it is very unlikely that very many people accomplished less than they would have if the AWS outage hadn't happened.

Are you claiming that bakers couldn't bake without AWS? Or that people went hungry?

Even if a bakery did shut down due to an AWS outage, which I doubt, the people who would have bought the baked goods almost certainly bought something else. No money was lost, it was just spent somewhere else.

When things are destroyed value is lost. The broken window fallacy is a fallacy because the work that went into replacing a broken window could have gone into installing a window in a new location. Two windows is more than one, so replacing a broken window is a loss compared to installing a new window while still having the unbroken old window.

Shifting money from one place to another is not a loss.

If some companies lost billions due to a few hours of AWS outage, it's likely that other companies gained billions from customers who went elsewhere. But more likely, in most cases the customers just waited and spent the same money later.

Or, perhaps the customers just saved money. Maybe they would have spent money, but when the AWS outage prevented them from spending it they had a bit of time to think and realized that they didn't actually need to buy the thing they would have bought. Perhaps in some cases the AWS outage was a net benefit, preventing people from wasting money on something they didn't really want/need.

wait a week or two and the details will change completely.

Trump is nothing if not mercurial. His fans will tell you he's playing 11 dimensional chess... I have my doubts, but let's say that's true. The problem is that when it comes to the economy it's not chess. It's more like basketball, and the President is the point guard calling plays, except the play being called keeps changing before the players can execute the last call. It's a tough time to be running a business, you can't plan out more than a couple of weeks.

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.

That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.