Unlike most people here I actually read your entire linked article.

1) this highlights how poorly budget bills are written and why having giant omnibus bills is insane which has been standard practice in Congress across both parties for decades so they can bury all sorts of pork and stupid shit. They = both parties. There is nothing maga or Trump specific about this practice.
2) the tax is specifically on Chinese imported parts for wind/solar, according to your article, not all green energy and not for American or any non-Chinese made parts
3) the sky is not falling, even if the line isn't removed, all this means is shitty Chinese made parts will be less likely to be used than higher quality American, Canadian and European parts. So what?

When I bought my home solar, it didn't take much research to find out the Chinese made panels and batteries were vastly inferior to the American and Canadian ones for almost the same cost. I ended up with American because of my specific local weather requirements but the Canadian stuff was perfectly good as well in other situations that didn't apply to me. Both were great. The Chinese stuff? Criminally bad. The Temu/Shein of solar tech.

So chill out, the sky isn't falling, it'll probably get removed or not enforced later and if it is they're only encouraging people to stop buying crap to save a penny up front that will cost them a lot more down the road.

No idea wtf Elon is babbling about. Maybe he has invested in Chinese equipment companies or something. I don't care what he says about anything.

and summer is ultra-messed-up too here. We've had 2 days at 64 degrees this year, but otherwise it barely goes above 50. It's really rare here to have such a long, sustained bout of cold weather around midsummer.

No. This is really shitty.

I -very- strongly object to any form of for profit prison system. The moral hazard is off the scales and we see it happening in real life in all sorts of ways.

The purpose of prison should be 3 fold:
1) removing dangerous people from the general population (because exile from the village is no longer an option)
2) punishment for bad behavior
3) rehabilitation for those capable of such. This isn't possible for all prisoners or all crimes but it is for many. Putting someone who has committed lesser crimes on to a life track of further crime is simply stupid.

The costs of these must be carried by the government directly and therefore the tax paying citizens. Enacting morally hazardous policies that involved making a profit from crime is wildly ridiculous and should make everyone squirm painfully at the thought.

Once someone is a prisoner and therefore survives completely at the whim of government as a ward of the state, certain basic things such as being able to communicate with their outside family and friends should be covered. Phone calls are zero cost and this bit about "oh we need to charge a lot to make calls secure". wtf does that even mean? Someone is going to slip a gun through the phone line? All the calls are already recorded and listened to. If that requires staff and tech then so be it. Either make it free or don't allow calls at all (which would be a bad idea. See #3 above). Completely isolating people is more likely to lead to various psychosis and further bad behavior.

I'm not at all in favor of the ridiculous no-laws-are-good-laws, anti-cop all-cops-are-bastards idiocy but the best thing to do for our justice system is to actually be just, and have goal oriented prisons that either successfully rehab prisoners for re-entry to the world as decent citizens or keep them isolated for life. Charging $10 for a 15 minute call is abusive and wild.

I sampled your mother first.

Verified ID? You think the I9 system actually does anything? You know there are SSNs in the IRS system being used by multiple people and no one does anything about it? You think a nation-state, even a horrible little dump like NK can't get something notarized? And who checks if the notary stamp is valid, anyway? The world is not this smoothly oiled machine where everything happens as required and specified. The real world is sloppy dirty and every corner possible is cut at every opportunity.

As far as the rest, it's all remote work. How does any remote worker do anything? Zoom calls and remote access, over company vpn if necessary. My buddy hired one of them last year. The NK did all his zoom calls audio only. Never once turned on the camera. It was probably a team of people not an individual but who knows?

Aside from the theft which is the norm when using contractors, I found this whole thing pretty funny.

NK spun up this whole deception so they could get jobs with western companies. Not blow shit up, not attack infrastructure, not spy as the primary purpose. But to get jobs.

A buddy of mine hired one of them last year until the FBI called his company about it. He said the guy was weird and suspicious but did good work. Their IP was nothing special and their data was equally worthless. He logged in, he did his assigned jobs, he got paid, that's it.

Maybe NK should just give up on being such a shit hole and join the western world. Everyone would be better off for it.

Most of the people that go to Vegas know they're not going to win anything. My grandparents used to go every year, and that vacation was their annual highlight. They set aside a budget, enjoyed themselves blowing it on the tables, then enjoyed the hotels and the shows. This was the early 60's, mind you, the height of the Rat Pack era when Sinatra and Dean Martin were still playing there, and there was a mobbed-up mystique about the place to the WWII generation. My grands knew they weren't going to win anything. They just enjoyed the thrill of it all. It was the "adult" Disneyland, a bit of naughty fun for people that survived the skies and fields of Europe and Asia, and as far as they were concerned, "fuck you, I'll blow my spare money as I see fit".

Most men still have a PC simply for gaming, if nothing else. Women don't give a shit about gaming. And the phone is the natural instrument for their Instagraming.

My wife has a nice laptop that she barely touches. She'll pull it out every once in a blue moon, but she and all the women she knows use two things primarily: their phones, and their tablets for reading. The smartphone was the perfect product for females. It fits the way they communicate. A lot of men would be fine with plain texting, email, and maybe some IRC. Women crave that constat, content-filled social connection.

The shrinking userbase doesnâ(TM)t have jack shit to do with 11â(TM)s requirements, and everything to do with women using their phones for everything now. It was silly to even attempt that argument.The writer went on a Windows rant when this shift has been predicted for 25+ years. There are kids with $500+ smartphones that have never touched a computer.

The tech world isn't the "intellectual" class. It's the crass profit-at-all-costs business class. That's why they market AI: they know perfectly well AI is shit and nobody but corporate bean counters want it, but corporate bean counters is where the money is.

It's becoming a selling point.

Hell, I even watched a video leaked from some OnlyFans account that had the preamble "This content creator prides herself in making her own content herself entirely: no AI bullshit involved!" If the porn industry rejects it, you know it's bad for business.

There are many theories of mind but there is currently no evidence either way to know if or to what degree any of them might be true. My _guess_ is our brains are just a big pile of mush; put enough mush together in the right way and self awareness emerges as a side effect. Darwin got us there. More and better mixed mush made smarter creatures which survived and bred and so on. Not sexy, no evidence, just my guess.

What is true and always will be true with LLM based tech is it will literally NEVER achieve what you refer to as the "conscious self". LLM do not have such a concept. They can not. It can have a sub agent to perform every conceivable task as a top level expert or better but will still not have any level of consciousness. Ever.

Maybe we will one day develop some other non-LLM tech that does but I'm not aware of anyone who has made any progress on such a thing. I welcome links if there are.

So a gay man in this 30s living under the same roof as a minor underage runaway boy is ok? Hussein Obama the Kenyan had no problem with it either, he named a Navy ship after this sick perverted MONSTER. The boy aged out of his boyhood andMilk Lost interest, as usually happens with gay male pedophile rapists and Milk kicked his adult gross hairy ass out into the streets. His heartbroken rape victim committed suicide not long after.

You are a permanent child. Living a life without responsibility just like Peter Pan. You know what you Lost Boys grew up into? Pirates. The enemies of all, especially real children. Ever wonder why normal people despise you? My guess is no. You just resent, like a child.

Far from perfect? The USA was founded in 1619 on slavery. Rah rah USA. It's always a pleasure to take a hot steaming diarrhea squirt in the mouths of you racists every year when you celebrate your insurrectionist behavior that failed on J6. Remind you of the Trail of Tears, smallpox blankets, sending ibm computers to the Nazis and letting Putin rule you through his puppet in the White House.