And y'all won't allow socialism. So what's the actual alternative?

Can't have capitalism anymore because the billionaires won't allow it and they have more than enough power and money to do away with it.

And we can't have socialism because well, that's socialism!

So what exactly is the plan?

Good point, but toiling in the fields is back-breaking work. What percentage of Japan's unemployed could physically work half a shift on a farm? In the USA, a huge portion of the unemployed are disabled. I don't think having 60 year olds or people with multiple sclerosis working the fields is a great idea. Also, you have to think long term...are the unemployed in Japan increasing or decreasing in age? Is their median age increasing or decreasing?...or more directly, even if you could find enough from the unemployed ranks to fill the need...money not withstanding, let's pretend the gov or a charity pays them to do the work so it is a viable working wage...how long would that last? 5 years? 10 years? 20? I think Japan is doing long-term thinking.

They're a notoriously racist culture. They'd rather build robots to do the work to pick their food and care for their elderly than import foreigners like the USA happily does. There are tons of nurses and workers in the Philippines as well as surrounding nations that could fill all their needs...but enough of Japan is hostile to the notion of foreigners that they'd not bother...why deal with intense racism in Japan when the USA will welcome you with far less hostility (even in today's current climate)?....and pay more too!

I've never lived in Japan, so I'll assume all I've read about and heard about from those who live there are a vocal minority. However, the fact remains that it's not an immigrant friendly place, for whatever reason...so yeah, you either have to fundamentally change your culture and ways of doing business and general life....or innovate your way out of future labor shortages. For Japan's sake, I hope they find a way to do both.

I'm more excited for Robot pruners. You only pick for a few days at harvest. Pruning is a year-round endeavor that is too expensive for most farmers, but something many gardeners do for best results. You make very good points, but this is still very exciting. As you already know and most gardeners know, there are many steps in plant care that are just too expensive for human beings, but an automated system could handle nicely. The first that comes to mind is pest and weed control. Look at Carbon Robotic's LaserWeeder. I have never used it personally, but I am excited to see lasers and machinery replace herbicides and round up. Not only will it lower the cost and increase the productivity of organic food, but it is just so much more effective. Now imagine that applied to pests.

Additionally, what if we perfect a laser pruner? Instead of using a pair of snips that can transmit bacteria, a controlled laser (with a backstop) cuts old leaves, improving airflow, stopping disease, ensuring more development goes into the fruit...allowing farmers to apply the techniques passionate gardeners do to farm-scale agriculture.

You're absolutely correct that it's nearly impossible for a machine to beat a human being for picking tomatoes on a cost basis. Human beings are well adapted for picking things and most farms have short harvest windows, so you're not paying them year round. Like most innovations, I think automation will augment existing workers, not replace them...at least for several decades. However, another thing to consider is that the USA is spoiled by cheap imported labor. Some countries don't have such luxuries. Labor costs are higher in other parts of the world, so maybe this will make sense for them much sooner.

So? Just rewind to before it was mounted and provision it. Don't you have a time machine?

Seriously though, that sounds like a rough situation. I'm not looking forward to a job we have coming up where I'm going to have to wipe and re-adopt an in-place Unifi network that includes a nanobeam where the other end is hiding in a land of mystery.

Still, don't hold your rotten time on that job against Ubiquity. They make good stuff, and it's way cheaper than Meraki. No stupid license fees. You just got screwed.

Maybe we should turn this into an onsite IT nightmare thread. I bet we have some good stories here.

Trump's trade war that he started so he could offset billionaire tax cuts with tariffs is crashing the economy. Manufacturing is down 20%.

We can't stop the trade war because the only way Trump could ram those billionaire tax cuts through is using the budget process and that required a revenue neutral approach on paper and if you're going to cut 2 trillion dollars in taxes for billionaires you can't really do revenue neutral.

So to get there he made up numbers around the tariffs. If he does away with the tariffs the economy will start to recover but the next budgetary cycle he will lose those tax cuts for billionaires.

As a direct result you need to suck at the fuck down and stop buying so much food. And if you have kids make sure one doll per Christmas.

I didn't say that as a criticism of you or your post, rather as a criticism of the "pundits" you're talking about. Though it would be safe to infer that I am also suggesting that you should know better than to fall for clickbait when you know it's clickbait.

Also, in this case I'm not quibbling about which President is worse, I'm just trying to point out that you gave an example of something a President didn't have power to do and an example of something a President does have the power to do. You probably should have picked a different Trump example if you wanted two examples of Presidents being slapped down. Like how he can't send people checks without Congressional approval, though I haven't seen evidence that he is trying to do so. If he does try to do that without Congressional action, yeah. It's also possible the Court will strike his tariffs. We'll know in a few months.

I like your username.

"Turning to a page from “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel about a 9-year-old boy whose father was killed in the 9/11 attacks, Hair began to read: “I know that you give someone a blow job by putting your penis ”

That’s as far as she made it before Board of Education Chair Wesley McCall cut her off. He reminded her of “the rules that we talked about in the beginning” of the meeting concerning the board’s policy about “profane comments.”"

Yeah. Too vulgar to read out loud in front of the adults of the school board, but not too vulgar to give to children?

Besides, if you're talking about sexual orientation, you're talking about sex. That is not appropriate for kids who aren't old enough for sex-ed, which is questionable in and of itself.

https://www.propublica.org/art...
https://13wham.com/news/nation...

I suppose so, but I just looked at Temu for the first time ever and while the first item I looked at had a $2.99 shipping fee (shipping from seller warehouse in California), while the next item had free shipping. The first item was a portable projector ($11), the second was a couch ($384). If I didn't want the couch in two days, I could save $5. I don't want it at all, but that's not important now.

That doesn't seem like a good revenue stream.

Next item, $5.03 head scarf thing, free shipping.

Oh! But that first item I looked at was also an ad. So that's revenue.

The options to pay in installments (which I assume is what installment credit means) are both interest-free through Klarna or Alterpay, so where's the revenue there? Does Klarna pay them for the opportunity to not earn interest on a loan? I don't know how that works, never used it.

I get what you're saying, I just can't see it that way. "Copilot search" says, "In U.S. law, fraud is generally defined as an intentional misrepresentation of material fact made by one person to another, with knowledge of its falsity, for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, resulting in injury or damage." The DoJ is rather unclear about it - https://www.justice.gov/archiv...

Anyhow, as I see it fraud requires the intent to deceive, not the potential for a deceptive outcome of other activities.

Oh, and here (I think this is where Bing sourced the summary) https://definitions.uslegal.co...
The last section seems to lean towards my interpretation - "To constitute fraud the misrepresentation or omission must be made knowingly and intentionally, not as a result of mistake or accident, or in negligent disregard of its truth or falsity."

And that's what it looks like when I write my response as I research it.

Doh! You got me on that one. I just can't justify the expense of an 8 port PoE switch to have a little extra visibility in my house, let alone a gateway. And I like my PfSense firewall.

The only network hardware I have that I paid for is my U6 AP. Everything else is something a client threw out. I'm pretty cheap.

I think that would require voters to radically change how they vote and who they vote for.

Even before that could happen you would have to completely remake the supreme Court to remove or dilute the six extremely corrupt judges currently running it.

Doing that would most likely require a super majority for the Democrat party in the Senate.

I just don't see voters doing that. Too many of them are concerned with nonsense like trans panic or whether the girl handing you your coffee says Merry Christmas.

Also the Republicans are consistently promising to bring back jobs and to eliminate immigration in order to make the job market better for americans. They are lying but the Democrats don't have an answer for that. Democrats are far too terrified of being called racist to reign in work visa abuses and believe too heavily in the studies showing job growth from immigration. There are alternatives of course to have immigration and a good life for citizens here already but again, voters aren't going to accept those alternatives because they involve too much redistributing of wealth for a society raised on Cold war propaganda...

I honestly cannot think of a solution because basically everyone and everything is working to destroy capitalism. Billionaires have had it with capitalism because they don't want the dependency on consumers and workers anymore. Technology is bearing down hard on capitalism too destroying jobs faster than they can be created. But we don't have any alternative to capitalism Socialism is simply not tenable.

We need to figure out some third Way for everything is going to collapse and I simply don't know of a third way...

There are ways around that. Prep a cloudkey or UDM offsite, install it onsite and let it adopt the hardware. You need one to act as an NVR anyhow. Or prep everything offsite. That's how I do it.

Seriously really think about how this headline is written and what it's trying to communicate and what it's trying to make you feel.

Of course Democrats would oppose the deal because it's a massive amount of consolidation and in general they oppose things that would raise prices for consumers. It's a core part of their party platform.

But using the word unravel here implies they're doing something bad. And it takes the focus away from the increased costs to consumers.

The news media is actively manipulating you for a specific purposes. In this case they are actively trying to undermine any attempt to prevent this merger.

As more and more media is owned by billionaires we need to start questioning it more and more often.

Oh! And that would justify what is otherwise a baffling move. Let's hope.

It would make too many court cases illegible. VS vs Vnited Something Co.