Unofficially, it's already done. It used to be that if you were going to somewhere with a weak and mostly cash-based economy you took the bulk of your cash in USD and the rest in the local currency. For quite some time now retailers in such economies have been just as likely to take Euros or Sterling as they were USD when they are after some hard currency, and on my last couple of trips I've actually been asked for Euros or Sterling in preference to USD. My local contact for my upcoming trip to the Far East has advised me to forget the USD and just bring Sterling or Euros because I'll get a much better exchange rate.

When the hawkers on the street and small store owners don't want USD any more, it's just a matter of time before that sentiment climbs up the ladder to larger retailers, and eventually to governments.

but the tradeoff they are making for us is that everything we import could cost as much as 3X more than it did before they destroyed the value of the dollar.

Before or after you add on the tariffs? Don't forget those are on the sticker price and paid in USD, so if something costs you 3x as many dollars then you'll also need to pay 3x as much in tariffs on top as well (assuming the tariff rate doesn't change again, of course). Even at Trump's base tariff rate of 10%, that would mean something that would previously have cost $100 to get shipped to your door from AliExpress or wherever now costing $300, plus a further $30 in import taxes.

I think there would be a red line when one US Dollar no longer gets you more than one Canadian Dollar, but who knows with all the crazy at the moment? Some people probably won't think it's a problem even when it no longer gets you one Mexican Peso...

So another thing that MAGA gets butt-hurt over has been disappeared. Is anybody surprised? What Was the excuse? Purging satanic anti Trump commie moose-lamb science?

More likely they're afraid of the wheel turning again. This is how the process starts; a new factory gets spun up to take advantage of cheaper labour in another country. That leads to a general increase in skills in that country and, before you know it, a dozen copycat faciliites have been spun up based on your techniques and you've been cut out of the market.

Right now, both China and Taiwan, as well as several other countries in SE Asia, are seeing India's massive source of potential cheap labour as an existential threat to a core part of their economies, and while they are, in many cases, at least someone allied politically with each other, they're all still very much trying to stamp on the fingers on the rungs of the ladder just below them.

A better analogy would be that we've been swimming around in the same pan of water since the 1970s yet, despite being told every year since then that the dial on the hob has been turned up another notch, have still not leapt out of the pan to turn the dial back down again.

Also, Trump / DOGE have apparently pulled funding NOAA that may lead to the shutdown of some of the world's most important CO2 data collection stations, so we'll all be able to firmly stick our heads in the sand together. If there's no data, it can't be a problem, right?

10 years using Duolingo, 4 years in Diamond League, and earlier this month I just had enough of the low-quality AI bullshit.

Out. Done. Gone. Waste of my time, every damn day.

The decline in quality and accuracy was just too much. As an English speaker learning a handful of other languages and concentrating on two, it was interesting to me that the first real noticeable patterns of errors and general slop were actually on the English side. Increasingly obtuse questions or statements, ok fine, I will spit those back in French or Spanish with good accuracy. I don't have any issue whatever with the occasionally-dark humor or the gender related topics that might push others' hot buttons, and I appreciate the occasional foray into curious stories and situations. But... over the past year there has been an increasing level of nonsensical AI-generated questions, erroneous answers accepted, multiple correct answers, etc etc... and it's obvious that no actual native speaker looked at a lot of the new content -- either from the native or foreign perspective. A couple years ago there was an increasing level of having to hit the button for "You should have accepted my answer." But for the past year, it's become a daily occurrence to have to hit the button for "You shouldn't have accepted my answer." The latter is a clear indication of AI slop and drift in the language models, and lack of QA. Real human QA is not optional, and Duo has apparently dispensed with it entirely. The result is gameified garbled nonsense. Playing the game was fun for a while (seriously, still in Diamond league for more than four years straight), but the goal is language learning not to compete with other stupid little games on my device. Feh. Done. Cancelled my subscription, et je vais dépenser cet hundred bucks de mon argent pour un spritz et une charcuterie chaque après-midi pour le reste de l'été.

In a word? ... 'No'.

Only it'll be worse, because the value of the "assets" that have secured all those mortgages they sold the risk on as derivatives will almost certainly go into freefall along with everything else when the bubble pops.

"So, Mr. Jones, you secured your mortgage you're struggling to repay with £1m of... ah, crypto. And what are those holdings worth now? $500k you say? Well, if you'll just vacate the premises and hand over your house keys, I'm sure we can sort all that out to minimise our losses as far as possible. I hear there are some nice bridges and stuff to live under not too far from your neighbourhood. Next!"

I didn't mean AI makes us productive; I meant it makes this company more productive. The good news is that you don't just get one day off per week, but all five!

True, because inhaling the smoke from gasoline and diesel fires is so good for your health ... LoL.

There were 3,048 cars on that ship, 681 were hybrids and another, 70 were fully electric. The news outlets make it sound like all 3048 were electric. Some are more honest and mention the around 700 hybrids but still count these hybrids as "electric cars". I was only able to find one that actually reported the number of BEVs. Out of these the most fire prone are the Hybrids, followed by the full ICE cars and finally the BEVs which are by far the least likely to catch fire. The fire started: "in a deck carrying electric vehicles" meaning what started the fire was likely a Hybrid but we'll likely never know for sure. Not that any of this will stop Sky News and the luddites from claiming the ship was filled to the hatches with BEVs and that they all caught fire simultaneously and rendered Adak, Alaska 300 miles away uninhabitable due to toxic smoke.

Why use chrome when you can use an actually good browser with a proper ad blocker

They likely are stealing personal data and selling it to marketing companies, but the absurdly overpriced cloud storage is free money too. You could buy a 10TB HDD for $100 and use it for 5 years for an annual cost of $20/yr plus about $20 power cost, or you could pay MS for 1TB of cloud storage for $100/yr or $500 for 1/10th the storage and significantly worse performance.

It's pretty likely that if you use your storage for an encrypted container you're going to get banned too, so the cost is even higher when you realize everything is duplicated with other users.

That's why everyone needs to smoke marijuana: so that they'll get into the habit of carrying around some cash for dispensaries. Then, in a pinch, it can be temporarily diverted to groceries for emergencies.

As long as people are careful to replenish the drug fund once the power and networks come back, everything will be fine. We just don't want them blowing all their money on groceries. Feed your family responsibly!