The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

I do agree that incentives (and dis-incentives) are typically superior to other forms of regulation.

For example, a higher property tax for unoccupied buildings (or a tax break based on occupancy) might help get things moving.

Though, in the case of commercial property, that might not be enough. A root cause is Bank officers handing out loans like candy and basing the value of the collateral property on "anticipated rent". The owners are now afraid lowering the rent will trigger a re-valuation and the bank demanding repayment or starting foreclosure. Meanwhile, those officers know of the situation but don't want to rock the boat until they can get promoted far enough away not to have it come back on them , or better, make it to retirement first.

In truth, forced re-valuation is most likely the only way to break that log-jam at this point. The market isn't going to grow enough to actually make those turkeys rentable at current asking.

For residential, a grace period on some of those rennovations in exchange for actual occupancy may help.

But for what values of "Trump"? Here, I believe it still holds true if Trump=0, though maybe it loses a exclamation point or two?

Guess I also overlooked the use case - pro use, traveling, concerts... I was thinking just a static home setup.

Dunno if I agree on the micro-sd card issue. There's loads of ways around that (boot from microsd, data elsewhere; or just boot from a USB hard drive), and I wouldn't trust the storage in a cheap android tablet over good microsd cards. Also, you could actually carry spares of the microsd card with everything loaded and ready to go on it, whereas the tablet option may mean carrying extra tablets... or using the exact same sort of external storage options that are available on the RPi.

But whatever... if you're happy with what you've got and it's working for you, great!

Regarding the picture frame... in my ideal world, it would be pulling the pics from my NAS. I'd be a lot more concerned about the storage on an Android tablet going bad than whatever I boot a Raspberry Pi from (the latter I'd have fully backed up and mirrored; The Android will likely have an out of date OS by the time I get it and no means of replacing the storage). Not to mention screen size restraints - very easy to get a much bigger (optionally portable) monitor for cheap than to get a very large android tablet near the same cost.

my son's teacher told us that it helped with developing fine motor control, particularly in children that had below average motor control.

For one, is this based on research or speculation? Second there are different kinds of motor control. Following an existing pattern or shape is one type, while cursive is another because one tends to develop patterns based on personal preferences.

Are the loops male, female, or something else? (ducks head in FL)

In 5th grade my teacher wanted to wring my neck because I was growing quite skillful in drawing and art, yet my cursive writing was worse than a drunk doctor's. I didn't see them as connected, but it was in the teacher's mind. I had a semi-impressionistic art style such that stroke precision mattered less.

100% this! How is that one option sooooooo much work, but enabling all the agentic AI hooks and integration points (that said group doesn't want in the first place) is somehow no big deal and we shouldn't worry about it?!?! You can even see by that very point that they damned well want to remove that option too.

CursiveGPT

By definition, conservatives prefer much of the past

Right!?!?! It's like when they forked KHTML to WebKit, and later WebKit into Chromium, killing off KHTML and thus themselves... er... wait... they lived on!

Moral: Don't be a scared of forks.

People do stuff. WTF, are we supposed to have a world-wide committee meeting every time some hacker starts a random project?

Sam Altman can have his own "AI," with blackjack and hookers. If you don't want yours to have that, then write it differently. If his project is affecting yours, it's because he's on the sharp end, running into scaling issues and regulators first. Let him bear the brunt of that, so you don't have to.

The only thing that can really go wrong, is if he uses his financial influence to get a government-granted monopoly. (And you'll have my support in opposing that.) Until then, though, how much is he shaping things? You can do something other than what he is doing right now. He isn't in charge of your project, is he?

I'm glad Oracle is keeping the async pollution out of Java. Java is more of a business or admin domain language, and less for systems software. You don't really need that for biz/admin coding, and there are ways to still implement for the rare cases.

I guess I'm not working on "typical CRUD apps" then?

Based on your description, no, you are not, other than maybe "data stores". Sounds like systems programming. And it's rare to need such for app-level database access (unless you did something wrong or bad).

other than async and await keywords here and there.

It tends to force the need to parts that have nothing to do with asynchronous programming other than being referenced by parts that do. It pollutes and spreads like prions in a brain.

Elon likes his rocket toys, and thus needs money.