Capitalism and a Free Market also describe different things. All you need to have capitalism is private ownership of the means of production in the economy. A free market is arguably necessary to ensure capitalism doesn't devolve into a plutocracy, but it isn't a necessary component of capitalism.

It's rarely going to all be in just one category. Most of my early TV viewing was mindless entertainment, but I taught myself to read by watching Sesame Street. Most of my early computer usage was playing video games, but I also learned QBasic in 4th grade so I could create my own video games. Which ultimately led to a career that put me into the top 5% of earners (not writing video games though).

My 11 year daughter watches a lot of mindless YouTube shorts. But she also watching videos that help her learn to write better stories, and her early love of gems currently has her quite interested in Geology to learn where gems come from. I try to take the good with the bad.

I'm old enough to remember the first CDROMs, but was only a tween / teenager at the time. I remember loving that CD slop, perhaps because I was too young to recognize its low value. I also remember hating Myst and being very upset for wasting what was at the time a lot of money on that game (I think around $60, at a time when $30-50 was more common for games). It was very slow pace with little to no action, so it probably didn't give my young brain enough dopamine hits.

Now that I have tweens of my own, I see that same behavior where they disregard anything I think is valuable as boring and spend their time on content I view as mindless. But every time I am about to block all digital access, my 11 year old uses AI to help come up with ideas to get past her writer's block on the horror book she is writing (she gets her oddity from me), which reminds me of when I fit in enough time to learn Basic at her age in between all my video game playing.

I just had trouble looking at a comment on one of my posts yesterday because I can't get through the Cloudflare bot detector. I'm not sure why that is only used when looking at my comment history. It's funny that I first have that problem this morning on Slashdot just to see this story at the top of my news feed on the same site.

I have been complaining for 30 years that game companies have used AI to drive the decisions of dishonestly named "non-player characters" instead of employing real human beings to play against the people buying their games. Billions of jobs have been lost over the decades!

That is true of everything sold as protectionist in developed countries. Developing countries do have a real need to protect their fledgling growing industries, but that is only true for significantly struggling developed countries. If you are among the top 10 economies in the world, 100% of everything your politicians tell you is done for protectionist purposes is hogwash.

The second half of this quote is the most critical part. You still see some hesitancy to trust German leadership in Europe, and that country has long since accepted their fascist past. Until the US has accepted what we have done thoroughly enough that our history books label Trump a fascist, I don't see how other countries can regain the level of trust they had in the US a decade ago when Trump descending that escalator was considered a joke.

I appreciate the UK being a guinea pig and providing more concrete data for future researchers to understand just how bad protectionist acts like Brexit are. While economists could simulate how bad things would be, that would never be as good as studying the real thing.

Unfortunately now my country, the US, will be giving even more data points showing the same thing a decade from now.

Yes I do, because I believe at the heart of Trump's appeal is the fact that too many people have been ignored in our society just because they failed to be successful. I don't expect average people to be capable of voting in their own interest, but I do trust they will burn everything down if they are ignored. Democracy ensures you can't ignore too many people if you want a functioning society, no matter whose at fault for why those people are upset.

It's not the technology that's difficult to grasp, it's how difficult it is to imagine how we might weave these technologies into a functional society. Just like how it is easy to break something than to create it, it is easier for an author to break future societies than to build better ones.

Writers have a wide range of political and economic viewpoints. You see dystopian futures more often because stories require conflict to be interesting.

Trump is doing the same thing, with the biggest challenge being he needs to find the smartest people who are also morally bankrupt enough to fix the "problem" he wants fixed. Not that many smart people agree that Democracy is a problem.

He never said he doesn't value more manufacturing, just that he doesn't want more manufacturing jobs. Those aren't the same things, which is something the US electorate has been slow to learn.

Your attack surface is lower if you only have one system that has your password, instead of two dozen. It reduces password fatigue and increases the chances that users will use a single strong password instead of creating dozens of weak ones. Or worst (and commonly) one shared password across all sites. There are plenty of other benefits, the these arguments aren't the best reason to do it.

The best reason is there have been numerous studies showing that companies that enact broad SSO use see significant drops in identity-related breaches. 2023 Forrester report showed a 60% drop in these breaches.

Harvard has also become more selective in the last 20 years. The US population has grown by 16% in the last 20 years but Harvard's undergraduate enrollment has stayed the same. And the number of foreign students has increased 60% over the past two decades. These factors alone could explain most of the grade inflation simply because the student body is smarter on average today than they were 20 years ago.