It's the same stupid fucking pattern over and over again where you have wealthy elites who are well respected by the public and have control of the local media so the journalists will not discuss them critically.

There's nothing magic about being Japanese. Corruption and malfeasance are just things that human beings do everywhere.

The only country I have seen that I have the slightest faith in their ability to safely run nuclear reactors as France and that's because when France's ruling class tried to raise the retirement age to 62 there were riots in the streets.

I know those things don't seem connected but they are. It shows that the public there is not likely to let their betters run roughshod over them like America and Japan and frankly 99% of the rest of the world does.

The problem here is that elites can cause enormous disasters by taking huge risks that they are not personally culpable for and then get away with it because we have a different set of rules for them then we do for everybody else.

That is not by any stretch of the imagination in uncommon setup in the world. Frankly France is the odd man out here.

And marginally less profit for the plant owners...

If the people responsible for the disaster were currently rotting in prison it would be one thing but I keep coming back to the fact that the public blamed the engineers and let the CEOs off without even so much as a trial..

And read up on the history of the Fukushima disaster. You could read up on the long history of engineers warning that a large tsunami was going to cause a meltdown and that it could be easily prevented by reinforcing and building up the wall that protected the area in order to buy time and then having off-site generators that could be brought on to prevent the meltdown from happening.

The problem here isn't capitalism it's fascism. Specifically it's a ruling elite that is completely above the law. As the saying goes fascism requires an in-group that the law protects but does not bind and an outgroup that the law binds and does not protect. Japan has those things.

The engineers were in the out group and the CEOs were in the in group. So the CEOs could ignore the engineers warnings and get away with it but the engineers get blamed for causing a disaster they predicted and warned against.

This is the problem with having a ruling class. They can do bad things to you and get away with it because they are above the law.

Just because you don't like social problems doesn't mean social problems don't exist.

That caused the Fukushima disaster.

They still have a weak regulatory environment for businesses. Remember folks the public blamed the engineers for the disaster not the CEOs who wouldn't listen to the engineers when they were told that the next big tsunami would cause a disaster and that they need it off site generators and to reinforce the storm wall.

The engineers knew that the Fukushima reactor was going to melt down. It wasn't if, it was when.

And I will say it again, the public blamed the engineers. Not the CEOs who ignored the engineers.

That culture has not changed in the slightest. The technical problems with nuclear have been solved but the social problems have not.

And before anyone chimes in it's true that nuclear has a lower death count but try telling that to anyone in the city who lost all of their property when they had to evacuate Fukushima for 10 years. And remember the CEOs responsible all got away with it. Not a single one of them did a single day in jail

I have ever seen in my life.

Like llms and AI in general it's not for you. It's designed to benefit Microsoft and specifically a handful of the billionaire shareholders at the expense of literally everyone else that ever comes in contact with it.

I have set up before but I really wish Linux would just pick a distro and a package manager to make the standard.

It's too much for users and managerial types to wrap their heads around. As stupid as it sounds you can't just move icons around and not cause major support headaches. It's why Apple traditionally goes out of its way to keep icons and even windows exactly where the user left them.

Yes, but they could raise prices by a few cents and nobody would care. That they aren't suggests to me that it isn't just about the money, it's about kicking VIA in the balls for increasing the license fee.

Come to think of it, HVEC is a good codec, but it's hardly the latest. Shouldn't the fees go down as the product ages and becomes less valuable? If they want to raise prices, justify that by improving the product. Have they done so, or is this VIA being the company that doesn't care about its customers, and Dell and HP are the ones fighting back on their customer's behalf? VIA still wants $0.20 for AVC, the codec HVEC replaced in 2013. 2013. And they want MORE money for it, not less.

Also if you know anything about the history of that case Microsoft was on track to be split up until George Bush Jr got elected and then rather than splitting them up between the office and windows divisions they got... I'm not even going to call it a slap on the wrist. They got rewarded!

In exchange for zero prosecution for their anti-competitive tactics Microsoft had to give tens of millions of dollars worth of software to public schools.

Microsoft had been trying and failing for years to force public schools to switch to Windows and they had been resisting it because Windows is in nightmare to administer. That was a huge boon to Microsoft and it let them push Apple once and for all out of the education market.

So the example you gave is a perfect example of the Republican party not enforcing antitrust law in the slightest. Good job at least you tried.

So take all the companies you view as viable competitors to Amazon.

Now ask yourself who owns those companies? Who owns enough stock that they actually have voting rights and who is on the board of directors.

We have a very very thinly veiled illusion of competition. Yeah technically Walmart and Target compete with Amazon. In practice it's the same handful of major shareholders and the same handful of people rotating in and out of the board of directors on all the companies involved.

Truly new companies owned by new people are extremely few and far between and they get bought out or run out of business through anti-competitive tactics long before they have any noticeable effect on prices or consumer choice.

Notice how every company does mass layoffs of the same class of employee at the same time. That is not a coincidence.

It's not even a grand conspiracy. The same board of directors are hiring the same kind of CEOs triggering the same kind of layoffs at the same time for the same reasons.

And again any attempt to create a brand new competitor using all that engineering talent would find itself either bought out if they're very very lucky or more likely run out of business through anti-competitive tactics.

This is just one of many things that make it harder to get a job in America and other right-wing countries. The fact of the matter is we figured out back when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in charge that right wing economic policies do not work.

But they have truthiness. They feel like they should work so we keep insisting on them.

If they get the power in place but don't finish the datacenter or it gets closed, then the public benefits from the new surplus. That's what I'm thinking.

Isn't it supposed to be racist to assume that all illegal aliens are Mexican? https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

Also, you listed three countries that have experienced massive influxes of immigrants over recent years.

I'm not assuming "other nations are the savages", I'm assuming that vaccination rates in the 3rd world are likely to be lower than those in developed nations. So, I was a bit surprised to see that Russia is experiencing a measles epidemic but not so surprised about Africa or SE Asia.

The problem is that I'm forced to speculate because the health agencies are not collecting information necessary to set effective policies. If they don't even ask if a person is an immigrant, then there is a massive hole in the data. We absolutely need to know if it came from outside the nation, and if so, how it got in. Is there a hole in the health screening, or is there a hole in the border that lets people avoid it? That's necessary information. Where is it? If I'm wrong and it is out there, please, please show me where. I don't like having to speculate.

Funny that I never seen that statistic quoted anywhere.

enforce anti-trust law.

And that means you vote for politicians who'll do it. If you're American that means a Democrat.

Companies would normally be terrified to fire this many engineers because they'd be snapped up by competitors.

Only there aren't any, because we keep voting for people that won't enforce anti-trust law.

Elections have consequences, and your job is one of them.

The job market sucks at 50. And the people you keep voting for, what ever your reasons are, are planning to raise retirement age to 70.

Are they? I wonder if the rates and propensities have changed over the decades. I can't say for sure, but I suspect I encountered at least two pedos when I was growing up - they'd shake my hand and stroke my palm with a finger in the process. Felt weird at the time, knife-sharpeningly suspicious looking back.

My parents were noncommittal when I told them, but I wouldn't encounter those guys anymore.

But of course, the overwhelming majority of adults would go to great lengths to keep a stranger's child safe. I just wonder if the percentages have changed over time.

But you can beat the fucking ever loving shit out of them until they either hide themselves or kill themselves and that is very much the goal of the transphobes.

There's two camps among the transphobes. The first just doesn't want to look at them and they will do anything to make them go away. The second are people who are terrified that their son is going to turn out to be trans. And they literally do not care what the damage is to their kid as long as they don't lose the pride from having popped out a son instead of a daughter.

It's a huge point of machismo pride among dudes to have a boy and it's extremely frustrating to them if their kid turns out to be trans. The odds are extremely low but people like that aren't usually very good at math.

What you see a lot is for people who actually have a trans kid they eventually have to accept it when the kid attempts suicide and the doctor pulls them aside and tells them that the second attempt, and there will be a second attempt without gender affirming care, will almost certainly be successful.

It could be repeated randomly during play. Every now and again, access the camera and verify the player.

Now, that could have gotten my grandson banned when he was showing me the Rainbow Friends game he likes, but that's easier to deal with than molestation.