I think most of us are American and in America instant coffee is pretty crappy.

If you look at the taste test they compared pretty pricey instant coffee to moderately priced drip coffee. So it's not really a surprise that drip coffee came out ahead.

I don't think it's completely an apples to oranges comparison because the price points weren't that far off but it was enough to be noticeable as somebody who has been drinking instantly and his passed up the brands they used for the taste test because of their price relative to drip Brew or cheaper instant.

But the people here are probably comparing apples to apples of cheap instant to cheap drip brew and yeah the cheap drip Brew comes out ahead.

Really simple customer service jobs and the like have gone to India for ages for the cheap labor and relatively capable English speakers (and I do stress relatively).

Those are the first jobs AI is targeting. Simple customer service jobs like password resets or reading statements to people.

It's a pretty major problem for India because so much of their economy got tied up into it as they became the world's dirt cheap call centers.

The real problem we're going to have here is that as AI takes jobs there really isn't anything on the horizon to replace them. So we are likely looking at a permanent increase in unemployment.

If that gets too high then we are going to start seeing wars. As soon as I can tell somewhere around 20 to 25% unemployment and you can expect the country to start looking for someone to invade...

But just having new Intelevision controllers that should be pretty well built given atari's track record make it a pretty good buy.

The games just don't play right without the proper controllers except for a few of the really simple ones. You really need that keypad and you need it right there so you're not reaching for it on your keyboard.

There are already old flashback consoles and last I looked you could still find them on eBay for reasonable prices. But the Atari controllers are probably going to be much much better quality. The flashback consoles weren't bad but they could have been better.

Hats aren't meant to make you feel things or make you reevaluate existing beliefs or teach you things beyond memorized science and mathematics. That is stuff art does.

It's not a question of people doing it better. AI can't do it at all because it's really just a super duper fancy search engine copying other people's work.

A I might be able to make something functional for the purposes of marketing because it's copying something that already worked for those purposes.

But the technology literally cannot do anything novel or advanced human understanding at all. Because again it's a really really fancy search engine under the hood.

I don't need to care about the emotional or intellectual impact of my hat on my bald head it just needs to block the Sun. I do need to care about what my kids are reading in school and how it affects their learning and critical thinking capabilities. It is not even a little comparable

Oh yeah we absolutely can. There was rampant collusion going on and it was being done through software so they thought they could get away with it. Multiple statistical analysis have been done because this all went through the courts and they would have been presented to judges.

To put it in the context it was bad enough that the people doing it didn't really fight it out in courts after they were called out.

That means they knew what they were doing and they knew they couldn't fool a judge and jury.

The apartments I'm stuck in are part of it and I'm waiting to see if I'll be part of a class action. It would be nice to get back some of the thousands of dollars I was cheated out of by flagrant antitrust violations but I'm not holding my breath

Is that it's much much weaker in the caffeine department at least here in America.

For the longest time I couldn't touch caffeinated coffee without getting heart palpitations. For whatever reason that's gotten a bit better and I've been able to drink some caffeinated coffee.

I bought some bagged stuff, cheap flavored hazelnut coffee that should have been pretty weak because you normally want it to be a pretty light roast so that it doesn't overwhelm the added flavoring. Why yes I am a wussy why do you ask?

Jesus fucking Christ that stuff will wire me out all day and then some. You think that was meth in that coffee. Meanwhile I can down three cups of cheap instant and still be fine.

I like the instant because I have to be careful with how much caffeine I get still and I have to put the effort into heating water and making a cup so I don't brew a whole pot and then chug the whole thing. But as an American it's definitely worse than drip brewed coffee.

I've been told that if I import fancy stuff from Europe or Japan that's not true but that stuff is crazy expensive because I'm importing it. The trade wars don't help either that's really shot up the price of coffee. I did find one instant I really liked but it was yanked from the market right after and I found another I kind of like but the price of that one really really shot up.

It just does. It's predominantly sold in America for convenience not taste. So they use lower quality coffee. But at the end of the day it's just freeze dried coffee. If you use good coffee and do a good job freeze drying it then it tastes pretty much the same as when you brewed it.

The YouTuber technology connections has a pretty good video on a expensive freeze dryer and he made his own coffee with it. He also made the point that you do not want to buy a freeze dryer because they are a huge pain in the ass and I definitely agree.

Technology connections enters the room.

It's not about training we need to fundamentally change the purpose of our police force. We need a police force that is not hostile to our citizens and that exists for something other than ensuring the smooth operation of commerce.

Basically we need to fundamentally reform key aspects of our culture and society and that's way more than changing up a little bit of training.

Also American here, believe it or not very few of us actually pack heat. When you see those crazy stats for how many guns there are most of them are owned by a handful of people. It's got a name among musicians, gear acquisition syndrome. Hobbyists get obsessed with buying lots and lots of new toys to play with and gun nuts are no different.

Being a police officer is actually not even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs here. We teach our police they are in a war zone because we are actively trying to militarize them so that they can be used against our citizens in the event our ruling elites want to crack down on us.

What you can't do is collude using software. That's what this is banning. It's got nothing to do with ai.

Several big conglomerates that own apartments were colluding illegally behind software. Sort of like how Uber illegally violated labor law and just threw up their hands and said we're technology company!

I think they would have got away with it but they got a little too greedy and rent prices shot up a little bit too much too fast and it became a major political issue for obvious reasons.

What they should have done was getting a position to buy off and bribe politicians while slowly jacking up prices and then once they were secured and have the courts on their side that's when you really turn the screws on everyone.

Keep in mind even if you own a house you are paying for those high rent prices because that money is just gone from the economy. If you're a small business owner I should think it's obvious that you lose out on sales. If you're working for somebody else the problem is your company is losing out on business as more and more money gets shunted to the top and that eventually means your company starts thinking about pay cuts and layoffs.

In the economy shit always rolls downhill and it lands on you.

It's tough to stand out with android. Back in the day I remember my kid wanting an Android but it helped that Samsung had somehow very briefly made them cool by putting out a expensive model. That was of course the model the kid wanted.

I have a OnePlus 13r and it's got some extra features to just to me get in the way and annoying me. It also has a custom version of Android so I've been waiting for a few months for the new version of Android while my old Motorola phone that I still use as a sort of mini tablet got the new Android weeks ago.

On the other hand the Snapdragon processor with the modem it has works a heck of a lot better than my Motorola. But that's just not something I've ever seen anyone but me care about. Maybe truckers? I remember a trucker buddy of mine used to have two or three phones he carried with him on Long hauls because at least one of them would always work wherever he was.

Still I don't know how you stand out and that's reflected in how few manufacturers there are left. It was actually pretty tough for me to find a sub $1,000 phone with one of the newer Qualcomm modems. I still ended up spending $500.

They will have plenty of Saudi money to prevent that. Instead what you're going to see is more embrace, extend and extinguish.

You're going to get more buyouts and more small struggling studios snapped up and crushed.

You should learn a little bit about current politics. Our supreme Court overturned the decades-long president Roe v Wade citing a literal witchfinder general from the 1800s because they had absolutely no other case law to make it possible.

Our highest courts have been compromised and are now a fully owned subsidiary of the Republican party. They will rubber stamp using whatever bullshit they need to come up with

Let me guess you probably think America was founded as a Christian Nation or some bullshit?

When I point out that AI is a fundamentally antisocial technology because of its excessive water and electric use while destroying jobs in a society where you don't work you don't eat inevitably a shitload of people come out of the woodwork to tell me I'm being a Luddite and then start using the good old buggy whip thought terminating cliche.

Then along comes crap like this to remind us that we are rapidly descending into a techno feudal post-capitalist hellscape.

The socialists and the Communists have always said capitalism what eventually fall to whatever their preferred system was.

But what if there's a third option? An option that doesn't include you and me? Where we are relegated to the kind of lives native Americans had on the worst of the reservations before the casinos?

There's about 2,000 people in America with virtually unlimited money and power working towards that goal and automated policing and military is a big part of that.

Because he saw how much good it did for Bush Jr and he thinks that it can cinch his third term election. Honestly he's probably right.

Americans have very little understanding of politics. Last year right before the election the number one search on Google was "is Joe Biden running for president" . Biden had dropped out months ago...

I don't think the average American is going to understand just how bad a deal it's going to be when Trump runs for a third term. So it's not going to occur to them they shouldn't vote for trump. I mean for Christ's sake's Trump has 28 credible right accusations eight of which are against children. Americans are clearly not paying attention.