trump hates American women or maybe, because he is a pedophile. melana or whatever her name is obviously hates him. How about release the Epstein Files that we know show you raping childen trump?.

They don't need AI for that. Teams - and pretty much all Microsoft products - are honeypots designed to collect data.

Well, no so much "honeypots" in the case of products that employees are forced to use at their workplace: they're no honey needed to attract them and get them to give Microsoft data. If you disagree with Microsoft's privacy invasion, you lose your job.

That's the genius of Microsoft's particular brand of invasiveness: instead of convincing individual people their products are good enough to relinquish their privacy for (Facebook), or convincing a large part of the internet to let them sneak in their trackers (Google), Microsoft convinced the bean counters at most companies to install their spyware and ram it down the throats of people who need to make a living. Disgusting...

Anyway, the AI thing is just the turd on top of the shit cake.

The massive distortions in the real estate market have stemmed from the wall of money created by decades of near-zero interest rates. This has driven serious malinvestment.

Was that capitalist? Well, the money supply is indirectly controlled by the Fed, which -- due to political pressure -- attempts to iron out the business cycle by creating walls of money every time it looks like things are getting choppy.

One could argue -- and I would agree -- that this is better than the pure unfettered capitalist alternative, which would see bank failures and people's life savings wiped out for no fault of their own. However, as a consequence, we get this absurd malinvestment problem.

There's more to this. You might ask, why doesn't the Fed just set the interest rate higher, so that people really need to have a productive use for money before they go buy up a bunch of houses? That hits at the heart of the stated goal to create persistent low levels of inflation, which allows the government (and debtors everywhere) to debase their debts. Because otherwise people wouldn't borrow as much money to drive economic growth. I find this nonsensical, because we loosening capital requirements creates precisely the malinvestment we want to stop. However, it's the government likes the ability to continuously debase its debt.

So it's not capitalism, and it's absolutely the result of policy choices, and it doesn't have to be this way. But it is because it suits the needs of powerful people in society.

Communists countries found ways to incentivize people to work. It's just that people ended up doing all the wrong things (in aggregate), and the system became hopelessly byzantine and corrupt. They really needed prices as a signalling mechanism for demand and scarcity. There's a great book on this by an economist. Socialism, the failed idea that never dies. Niemietz spends most of the time talking about the history of how people talk about socialism, but there's sections of the book specifically dedicated to a clear explanation of why it always must fail, and why it always must turn authoritarian. There's a short counter-factual story at the end, where East Germany is a non-authoritarian communist state, with precisely zero human rights abuses, and how the system of socialist incentives lead to complete dysfunction.

Indeed, complete with the "lost decade" that turned out to be 30 years of no-growth, and an aging population causing deflation. Except in China the problems are larger in scope, and the gradients are steeper. I'm not saying that China is going away. I mean, Japan is still there. It's just that the narrative changed on Japan, and it will change on China too.

In this video, university professor Patrick Boyle explains how short sighted pension plans destroyed the American auto industry. Once you look at the math, it's pretty obvious.

The misallocation of resources does have some benefits. It's still a misallocation, and thus, by definition, overall a problem.

Housing prices in the USA are set by the rate of interest (which sets mortgage serviceability), and the ability to build. As interest rates go up, housing prices go down. And houses are cheaper in red states that have fewer building restrictions, but still have, nonetheless, good job markets.

People made huge amounts of money off of housing in the USA, because interest rates slowly decreased from the 1980s until just a few years ago. Every time the interest rate was cut, incumbent home owners laughed all the way to the bank.

Those days are _done_. Interest rates bounded off near 0%, and we're staring down the barrel of sustained inflation. Nobody is going to make a fortune off of sitting on real estate for several decades.

If you want to buy a house, move some place where supply meets demand, making houses a little more expensive than the cost to build. There are many such places in the USA.

This is true. It's because China has high skilled and almost-slave labour colocated. And America has labour laws. What China is doing is impressive nonetheless.

It's absurd to compare freedoms in the USA to that of China, where political prisoners are literally chopped up to sell their organs. And Chinese people aren't stupid: about 3-4 million emigrate each year.

Parts of the Chinese economy are "pretty normal capitalism". However the majority of capital is directed by state banks to state industries. This is classical socialism, where the government controls the "commanding heights" of the economy. So pretty far from capitalism which relies on price signalling in the allocation of capital.

It's a brute fact that China's economy is suffering from a lack of price signalling, and that this is causing a massive misallocation of resources. The same thing happened to the USSR and the Eastern block, which certainly succeeded in driving steel production higher than the USA. Just... there wasn't any productive use for the oversupply. In the 1980s, one economist wryly noted that East German heavy machinery was worth less than the raw materials it was made out of.

The CCP is big on selling you on the idea of the inevitable rise of China. It's all optics. The psychological warfare of fear and greed. They are sitting on unprecedented levels of capital misallocation. Great. They can fix all that. But they'd have to change the system that produced the misallocation in the first place, and I certainly don't see that happening.

China isn't going anywhere. It's still going to be here in the future. The CCP has the tools of social control to pick winners and losers, and grind the underclasses to keep the system going. What's going to change is the optics.

If you bought one of these things, you deserve it. :)

This reminds me of a story too. I was working at a place just rolling out Microsoft Office 365 and the whole 2 factor authentication thing. We started looking at the devices people had registered for MFA. Obviously, you mostly had various smartphones and a few people even used iPads or other tablets. But this one guy had a Samsung smart fridge as his device. He explained that, "I work from home and have a desk in the kitchen. So it's easy to confirm the authentication from the refrigerator screen. And this way, I know I won't just lose it someplace like I might lose my phone!"

But seriously, I really dislike this trend of making basic home appliances Internet connected and/or computerizing them needlessly. My old Black & Decker 4 slice toaster finally gave out on us last week. I was shocked by how much a new toaster costs now! I was expecting to run out and grab something for maybe $20 or so? Nope! Many of the highly rated models are well over $200! The cheapest I could find was about $45, for one at Costco that has 2 digital strips down the front. One side lights up with icons of toast, in various levels of darkness, and the other depicts all the different foods you mgiht toast; bagels, waffles, pastries, toast...

We got it home and tried it out, and guess what? When you select toast with a darkness of "3 out of 6", shown as a medium brown? It absolutely burns it! The lightest setting just ejects warm, untoasted bread. I couldn't find any point to a setting on the thing other than the second-lightest one! Highly inaccurate. All of this seems really unnecessary, when the light/dark knob on my old toaster worked just as it was supposed to.

 

Do you people really get fifty cents per post? Surely it's more than that by now.

Never seen such a panda hugger since someone pointed out that we should have responded to J6 like China did to 6/4at Tiananmen. It lacks the polish of using the A-10s to turn them into pink mist, but calling out the tanks to turn them into pink mash worked well. Just a remincer: when you want to overthrow the government, bring guns. Lots of guns.

What's gonna stop obesity among Americans isn't permanent standard time. It really, REALLY isn't that.

A good start would be making healthy food that isn't 1,000,000 calories per pound, and not made of fat and sugar mixed in unknown chemicals affordable. And taxing the living shit out of junk food. And getting people to stop eating supertanker-sized servings.