And it's absolutely not a process ripe for abuse by a malcontent handing the President of the United States something for executive signature, that the President of the United States doesn't even look at or read - he just accepts at face value that his aide would never lie and signs it.

TL;DR: what's the difference between an "autopen" and an old asshole so far into cognitive decline that he just signs anything put in front of him?

For that to be even remotely true, all of the following would also have to be true, which immediately disproves your hypothesis by observing easily seen reality:

1. somehow the public at-large became "informed" in the recent past with ever-diminishing quality of signal coming from reputable news sources, because "reputable" news sources are too busy chasing outrage for dollars

2. somehow the public at-large has completely disconnected from the propaganda networks such as Fox News, NewsMax, OAN, etc. that actively lie to their audience in order to get fact-based information from people that actually care about facts in their reporting, and nobody noticed.

3. government economic data was unreliable - you have not proven this central premise of your argument. You just threw it out there as if it's God's written gospel without warranting it with any evidence. Yes, there are corrections to past months, but there have ALWAYS been corrections to past reporting periods, and has been for decades. That is all factored in - you don't trust the absolute newest measurement period without padding the margin because it WILL be corrected.

4. government economic data is still unreliable - without proving it was unreliable to begin with, you cannot assert that it is still unreliable. There is an argument to be made that it is being highly politicized through the firing of bureau chiefs for presenting unfavorable data, but without disproving the data you're pissing in the wind on that too.

Economists the world over have always held that the data coming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the gold standard in economic reporting, emulated by national governments across the globe. I think I'm more likely to believe the career experts - some with Nobel prizes in economics - over "hsthompson69" on a little-known internet backwater like Slashdot who can't even bother to back up their asserted opinions with anything based in fact.

How much shit are you taking with you to a meeting?

You're not living there, you're discussing things with people and taking some notes. Maybe presenting something on a shared screen with the equipment already in the room.

Why do you need 3+ USB ports for that, assuming any wireless technology is in use whatsoever?

Stop bringing half your god damn desk to a 30 minute meeting.

spin them up with an angle grinder arbor and let them go and watch them flyyyyy!

Let's face it - if you're spending $1.5B for AOL, you're paying $1.5B for a list of email addresses owned by people too thick to figure out how to create a different email account somewhere else.

That's a captive audience that you can spam the shit out of forever... or at least until they keel over from old age; better consult with the actuarials on what single-digit number of years the mean is for that customer base because you know they're all old AF.

I'll just ignore your non-performant software until it's either fixed, or hardware advances sufficiently to make it work as expected.

In the meantime, he won't see a cent of my money, and by the time either of those two conditions are met, it will be at a discount anyway because it will be months / years old.

Fuck that guy. Instead of calling your customers names and bitching about their totally legitimate performance complaints, try making software that meets customer expectations. It's like these people learned nothing from the Cyberpunk fiasco.

This page claims over 400,000 recordings but links to a listing of only 187,034 audio files. I'm guessing the discrepancy is the girth of the suit: IA agreed to take down the files that the plaintiffs could prove were theirs and no money changed hands.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

something something stopped clocks...

So you're good with lugging around the following:

laptop
keyboard
mouse
headset
power adapter

but a USB hub is a bridge too far?

What the fuck?

Then you aren't looking very hard. Any set of headphones that supports being a headset for calls which has a USB-C connector on it quite possibly has a USB-C DAC in it as well if it isn't a completely cheap piece of shit. I had some Sennheiser cans from like 4 years ago that did that, so it's not like it's a brand new thing.

Oh look those wireless headphones just turned into wired headphones by you plugging a C-to-C cable into them, without having to bitch and moan about an analog 3.5mm TRS plug. How about that?

How much do you think a USB hub weights when you are saying you have to "lug" it around?

Hint: it weighs less than the wired mouse, keyboard, and headset you're "lugging" with you and not saying a single peep about.

For fucks' sake.

Now only if there was a class of devices specifically designed to fixing that problem. We could call them a keyboard-video-mouse switch, or "KVM" for short, where your console equipment is shifted between hosts at the push of a button!

Wouldn't that be epic?!

So he wants to buy a device with insufficient connectivity for the intended usage, so he can bitch about the insufficient connectivity.

And then when someone points out a cheap and very available solution to the insufficient connectivity problem of the device, he wants to bitch about having to adapt the chosen insufficient device to be sufficient through adding a cheap and very available solution that has existed for about 3 decades.

Sounds like they just want to bitch, which means there is no new problem to solve here. Pick equipment that is sufficient to the required task, and you don't have a problem to begin with.