If we don't have a 30 style crash. In addition to basically completely deregulating Wall Street and investment in general and all the other structural economic problems we are all just kind of pretending aren't there over and over and over again we are seeing crooks let off the hook by the current administration for no discernible reason except the blisteringly obvious one.

We are basically speedrunning a repeat of the lead up to world war II only this time we have nuclear weapons. But I'm sure it'll be fine right? Right?

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..

Because at this rate, by my math, the number of AI cores Google requires will exceed the number of atoms in the visible universe within about 120 years.

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.

A Windows 11 VM that I manage went through an update cycle and, when it was finally finished, the bottom bar was missing.

Like just about all Windows issues, I had to spend a long time googling solutions and trying them, before I eventually landed on the correct solution. I tend to avoid those tiresome Youtube videos that take 10 minutes to tell you that: 1. Their solution is simple and will work, 2, don't forget to subscribe, while failing to acknowledge that there might be other causes for the failure that you have experienced.

Surprisingly, the solution came in an AI answer with the right set of search terms. In my experience, the hit rate for accuracy of AI searches is poor, but this time, it worked!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I do not believe any of what you just wrote.

I do not believe there is a school in America that is going to have a problem with you bringing a book from home. Let alone one that is going to care if the kid is reading a book from a higher grade.

Now I do believe that a teacher would tell a kid they can't use the computer if they finished their work early and yeah that would be kind of a dick move.

But you are leaving something out.

Whatever the case unless you have a lot of money to hire tutors, which in fairness you might, then your kid is pretty quickly going to start falling behind if you live in a decent School district. There are some horrifyingly underfunded school districts especially if you live in the Southern United States. But if you're in the income bracket that lives in one of those you probably can't afford the tutors you're going to need to make up for whatever deficiencies you personally have as an educator. I don't mean that as an insult, even if you know a lot of math because you're an engineer you're going to have a hard time with some of your kids math because you're going to be more specialized. You're not going to know all the little details unless you're basically following along in the book with them. And that's before we talk about teaching them things like biology and chemistry and physics. Again you probably got a reasonable grasp on those but are you going to be able to devote that much time to learning all those subjects?

You're leaving something out from your post probably because of the excitement of doing the home schooling.

Anyone else creeped out that I got modded down for the above post?