To both UK and Canada because as an American I cost a minimum of $15,000 a year or more because of our private health insurance and every year that goes up. Every year I get a shit raise and it's because my health insurance costs went up 15 or 20% and my employer instead of giving me a raise absorbs those costs. This year it finally got to the point where they raised my costs by 5%.

It is extremely hard to compete with countries that have a single pair of healthcare system because per the Congressional budget office the American healthcare system costs an extra $500 billion dollars a year for worse outcomes. Half a trillion dollars a year that we could be using for literally anything else. If you don't like the national debt do single-payer healthcare and use the savings to pay it off.

And there is absolutely nothing communist about china. For fucks sakes they have a American style Private health insurance system. They are a fascist state-run and state-owned oligarchy. I can call myself the king of England but I don't get to take over Buckingham Palace.

So well that's true I have more or less written off actual maga because there's no getting through to those people. Every time you start to they just go back to whatever right wing propaganda media source they find the most entertaining and it undoes all the work you just did.

If you have family I guess yeah chip away at it but you need to get them away from right wing media which is almost impossible because the billionaires have bought everything. Last year I watched dozens of journalists some of who had been in the industry for decades fired for daring the question Trump's competency and brilliance.

What bugs me isn't those twats since I'm fortunate not to have any in my family, what bothers me is the vast swath of independent voters who for some inexplicable reason believe the Republican party is better for the economy even though every time they get in charge they immediately crash it and the Democrats have to try to clean up the mess.

I would really like my party to point that out more but they have a rough time because again those voters for some inexplicable reason believe nonsensical things and in this case they think Democrats have to reach across the aisle but Republicans can stab everyone in the back and it's somehow okay. So Democrats that aren't viewed as being sufficiently bipartisan are relentlessly punished by those voters...

It's like the old joke, I don't belong to an organized political party I'm a Democrat.

The Republican party is basically made up of corporate fascists and Christian fascists.

The Democrat party is the big tent for literally everybody else so it's a huge mess.

Microsoft gets to own the word visual so why not automatic?

You wouldn't think so but yes, it's still so common we have a medal for it: Fell for it Again Award

of course there's no singularity, singularities are nonphysical. they just tell us we don't know what's going on.

Indeed. Mental food for the dumb.

Clearly. This is deeply malicious and society-destroying.

And in actual reality, the Republicans have all the power except for this tiny bit and it is really ALL their fault. If you have no ability to compromise, you have no business leading anything.

Also a nice occasion to identify zero-insight fuckups. Hint: You are one.

If you make a really determined effort, you may even get rid of your air travel system completely!

An ILLEGAL monopoly (in the USA) requires a person/organization to use anti-competitive measures to attain and/or retain monopolistic control over an industry. This can include predatory pricing, predatory mergers, intentionally driving competitors out of business, and the refusal to deal in normal circumstances.

Steam is a LEGAL monopoly that gained its market share by getting in early and being consistently foresightful, considerate of their customers' needs, and competitive in the industry.

So why is an article at all? Because of the distribution fees. You pay two ways to distribute a game on Steam. First, you pay a one-time $100, but you get that back after $1,000 in sales. Second, You pay a 30% commission on all sales, but that drops to 25% after you bring in $10 million and 20% after $50 million.

Is that unfair? Probably not. Consider how much it would cost to print a bunch of CDs/DVDs, boxes, get stores to carry your game, etc. And if you don't want to do that (no one does), compare it to the cost to distribute your game elsewhere and what features that system has (or more likely, doesn't have).

GOG, Microsoft, XBox, Playstation, Nintendo, has no one-time fee, but has a similar revenue share at 30%.

EPIC Games has a $100 listing fee but has the lowest revenue share I could find at 12%.

So Steam is comparably priced, has a MASSIVE marketshare, isn't attempting to absorb smaller competitors, and they provide a great, stable product.

So is there a problem?

With all the "China bad!" mind-set, China has managed to leave the west behind in many things. Not that I think this is a good thing, but it is a fact and ignoring facts does NOT make things better, even if many people seem to believe that.

Everyone talks about the poor when they bring up Obamacare subsidies but there are millions of middle class small business owners using those subsidies who are going to pay a small fortune if they can even pay at all.

There are almost certainly some people here who do contract gig work that depend on the Obamacare subsidies. Many of them voted for Trump and are very frightened and confused because they cannot comprehend why the great man that is Donald Trump would do this to them.

If you go to the Reddit forum leopards eating faces you will find reams and reams of Republican voters who are about to lose access to healthcare that they need to live doing social media posts directly to Trump expecting a direct response from Trump himself as if he's reading their social media posts.

It goes Way beyond parasocial into the realm of madness. It's not just that they think Trump thinks about them is a group they think Trump knows and cares about them personally and individually. And they are so confused and frightened right now because they are being betrayed by someone who loves them.

True, the Republicans are planning on cheating in the midterms in order to hold on to the House of Representatives and then cheating in the 2028 general election in order to prevent Democrats from winning then.

If Johnson can hold the Democrats off until then and if the cheating works then they win. The Epstein files never get released and Trump and all the Republicans in there are safe.

Nobody's going to care about any of the Democrat names in the Epstein files because those people have won since retired. The problem with the Republicans in the Epstein files especially Trump is that they are active members of the party holding office today.

The current Republican party is filled with pedophiles not just the Republican party from the 90s.

Their government builds up local industries and squeezes out foreign industries. They're not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts or because they care about their workers, the Chinese government could not care less about anyone or anything except themselves and power they are fascists.

A century or two ago European countries and America engaged in heavy duty colonialism using military force. After the world wars we stopped using military force and switched to economic Force. China does that now projecting power with economic power instead of military power. What the cool kids call "soft" power.

The problem with America doing what China does is the people in America who claim to want to do it don't really want to do it they just want to use populism to seize power and loot the country.

Furthermore if you're an American the only reason you're enjoying the relatively decent quality of life you might be, might be the operative word here given the state of the economy today, is because we use a complex series of economic tricks in the form of our country's national debt to artificially inflate the value of the dollar in order to bring in trillions of cheap imports that traditionally have kept costs low by effectively extracting tribute from other countries...

So it's not really practical for us to go all hypernationalistic unless we are either going to do drastic changes to our entire economic system designed to benefit working americans, which let's face it we're not going to do that, or unless we're going to accept extremely low qualities of life like the Russians outside of Moscow and St Petersburg do.

It's a cultural problem where the sort of fixes that would be needed if we didn't want to be dependent on a bizarre economic colonial system that leaves us tied into other countries economies can't be done because culturally we won't accept those fixes.

We are not for example going to spend trillions on infrastructure that benefits working Americans or institute universal Health Care so that we can compete with countries that either have it or that have a enough of a population that they can dispose of anyone that gets sick or restore our higher education funding so that young people can get advanced degrees or any of that.

All of that would be the s word and we can't have that here in the land of the free. We should all be plumbers or something.

So China is going to keep running rings around us because we aren't capable of adapting to the current situation.

Well, no .. that's not what he meant, even if those are some of the outcomes of the spread of AI.

Huang is clearly trying to boost Nvidia's, and his own, fortunes, by appealing to this supposed AI race with China, to get US policy changed to his own benefit.

He's obviously positioning winning of this "race" by the US as a desirable outcome, so going to be focusing on whatever aspects are seen as a positive by the US lawmakers he is trying to influence.