Yeah you could for example point at the trans panic as the reason why Trump is President not once but twice because without that moral panic he couldn't have won but you'd also have to ignore all the voter suppression cheating and the sabotage the Republicans have done to the economy and the Republicans packing the courts allowing Trump to commit multiple crimes and get away with it and and and...

The Democrats insisting on running a woman when the country has made it crystal clear that they do not want a woman at top of ticket didn't help either.

Basically every single system had to collapse in order to make a has been game show host with 28 credible rape accusations president. Again..

So yeah you have multiple causes for a disaster a lot of times.

But take any one of those causes out and the disaster goes away. So I don't think it's unfair to say those things caused the disaster.

And in this case Iran is a relatively poor country that was trying to do a theocratic dictatorship by America in order to secure influence in the Middle East so it's not like they have a lot of say in reducing climate change. It's mostly a matter of the United states, the wealthier states of Europe and China. And you can hardly blame them for their corruption if you are an American since, well you caused it.

Of course pointing all this out is not going to endear you to Americans. We don't like to think about the consequences of our actions.

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..

> from a security, stability or usable prospective

You and me both but most people only score feature count. If they've grown accustomed to some oddball feature for a few months they feel they can never use anything else.

That they went their entire lives without it before isn't relevant.

From a market perspective, rushing more features to market makes more people with money happy than getting a good product to market.

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.

I'm fine with the repeated addition. My objection is the OR in your statement. Apparently not. The question was 5x3 and the kid wrote 5+5+5=15 and got marked wrong with no explanation because the teacher wanted 3+3+3+3+3=15. So I guess that you would have had a 50% chance of being marked wrong on a 2nd grade arithmatic worksheet as well, as absurd as that is. Correct answer notwithstanding.

BTW, that's not at all new. We covered multiplication that way in the 3rd grade back in 1975. Memorizing the table was just to make it quicker. I quickly "discovered" the commutative property while looking at the multiplication table and cut my memorization load in half. The part that confused the father was why is 5x3 = 5+5+5=15 "wrong".

As for 37+55, we decomposed that in the '70s as well, but I soon decided the easier decomposition was 37+55= 87+5 = 90+2=92. So I would say that meme was just someone wanting to complain. Of course the "old way" ends up in 30+50+10+2 anyway.

Shut up and memorize was not in practice during the education of the parents of today's students.

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.

It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?

If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.

Separately, Google seriously needs to flex against patent trolls when required. Heck, Lou Rossman is more aggressive than Google on defending the community against patent trolls.

Speaking of which USPTO intends to stop challenges to patent trolls and maybe you, dear reader, should spend five minutes to fire off an email to help EFF try to head this one off at the pass.