Or it's a new take on the "RTO Mandate" approach to headcount reduction leveraging a kind of reverse Dunning-Kruger.

Right now, everyone at Opendoor is thinking of their colleagues and wondering if they are in the 15% that won't get the cut. For a team of 20, that means you've got to either truly believe that you're in the top three of that group, are blissfully naive, or will be polishing your CV and getting it out to agencies this weekend, and since company morale just went to shit, there's a pretty good chance that a chunk of those who *are* confident they'll make the cut will be doing the same, because once everyone else is gone they're going to have a lot more work to do. Good luck running the company on the blissfully naive remants.

Yes, there's probably a LOT of deadwood at Opendoor but, like RTO Mandates, this isn't the best way to get rid of it, and will have the same result as RTO; a lot of the best and brightest will be deciding the door they really want is the exit door.

As long as they are license manufacturing chassis, plan to replace the software with domestic products and not buying knock down kits from China that should work out well for everybody ... except Americans, they'll be stuck with gigantic pickup trucks that start at 80.000 USD and underwhelming and overpriced ICE powered passenger cars due to protectionist import restrictions.

Unfortunately for every one of you there are at least ten others that behave the exact opposite way.

Like almost everything in the US, it's up to the state. New Jersey has annual inspections, but other states I've lived in don't.

the whole purpose of the Darwin Awards was to recognize people who, through their own stupidity, removed themselves from the gene pool.

No, that's most of the point, but definitely isn't the whole point.

Some of the point is to make fun of people for doing something stupid. They don't have to die or be prevented from reproducing, for their stupidity to provide smug entertainment.

This'll be a fun exercise, I suppose, and will generate some laughs.

Ah, you do get it.

Rich people (at the level you are implying) are generally egomanical, narcissistic, sociopaths who have no idea how to do the day to day things in life because they pay other people to do it for them. If you cream off the ~10,000 wealthiest people on the planet and put them into a community of some kind, even with robots to do the bulk of the work, I would still predict you'd rapidly find yourself back with a "1%" of around 100 mega-wealthy people, amid on-going power stuggles that soon turn ugly and gut the robot population (who else is going to do the fighting?).

With the labour pool mostly gone, the total population of meatbags will reach 0 soon after. It'd be like the Golgafrinchan B Ark, only much more so.

Come to think of it, there's probably a pretty decent dystopian short story with some very dark humour there...

Yeah but if you only used $50 in electricity to power the LLM for writing the book to get infringed, that's still $2950 profit.

I guess that depends on the volume of the aquifer and the geology. If there's a non-porous layer of rock in the ~1300ft of rock above it then, while the aquifer will inevitably start to collapse creating cracks in the higher layers of rock, it might be some time before enough salt water mingles with the fresh to exceed safe potable water limits. Besides, as long as it's still sufficiently less salty than typical sea water, then it's still going to be a lot more efficient to run it through some kinds of desalination plant than it would be to use ocean water like countries such as the UAE are doing, with a lot less waste brine produced as well.

I guess we'll need follow-up studies to be sure, but with the increasing pressure on fresh water supplies and more turbulent weather patterns making some of the current collection basins for reservoirs less reliable, search for potential alternative sources of potable, or even near-potable that can be readily purified, is probably quite a prudent thing to be doing. Dying of dehydration is not a pleasant way to go.

Republicans' rejection of Chesterton's Fence has finally made Lenin/Stalin's vision possible here in America. This is what allowed us to inaugurate Comrade Trump, by far the leftmost president in US history, making FDR look like a reactionary. But people keep forgetting this is relatively recent.

What I'm getting at, is that this extreme level of instability is to be expected, temporarily. (C'mon, you can go a mere 3-5 years without income from a job! Just ask your parents for money.)

Everyone knew it was coming, but only since November 2024, so things are just getting started. The government is now going to be forcing its way into all private businesses, to try to plan everything in accordance with the politiburo's design under Comrade Trump's brilliant leadership, but it takes time to get everyone onboard with the new reality of centralized planning.

Nobody said communism would be easy!

(And this isn't even real communism; it's just an attempt to adopt all the best aspects of Soviet-style communism, but where the means of production will still technically be "owned" by private parties. The catch is just that regardless of whether or not you "own" a business, you need to run it exactly how your government wants you to, so you'll have about all the capitalism that a 1938 USSR business has.)

Anyway, we and our fellow comrades will adjust to the new rules of Soviet America, and eventually the instability will diminish. When Republicans sing Stalin's praises, you need to remember Stalin had difficulty too (we'll have our own version(s) of 1922) and it took a while for the Soviet Union to become the shining example of an economic powerhouse that you knew by 1990. Think long-term.

America will eventually be the economic envy of the world, on par with today's Russia, clearly the strongest nation on the planet and worthy for all Americans to emulate. Listen to the Republicans. They can bring about this change. Communism may not be easy, but it can win if Republicans can unite us to turn away from the excesses of America's past. Vote Republican and I promise you, by 2032 the average American will be as filthy rich as today's average Russian!

Don't listen to conservatives like AOC! Those idiots will ruin everything with their attachment to stability, tradition, old America, and free markets. Dems just don't offer the same level of prosperity that that left offers.

I don't remember anyone telling me that.

Indeed, all I remember is about a century's worth of science fiction telling me that it will happen.

That's kinda the unspoken point behind doing this that I alluded to. There is a correlation between those who are poorer in money and in health, e.g. those are are most likely to be the net drain on the social services budgets, so by getting them to pay a bit more income tax and be a bit less of a drainon funds after their retirement because they die sooner, the end result is a disproportionate net reduction in the required funding of state pensions and healthcare.

YMMV on what all that is, probably depending on how much of a utilitarian you are, but it's absolutely some combination of deeply cynical and elitist, yet also a gain for the greater good of the population as a whole through the potential for lower taxation to provide the additional support that would be needed otherwise.

Several countries in Europe are taking this tack; a gradual rise in the retirement age before you qualify for the state pension. You could have a private pension and retire earlier on that, but many people are too cash-strapped to make any meaningful payments into a private scheme, and especially so when they are young enough for the plan to hopefully accrue a good deal of compounded investment returns.

In theory, it should help maintain the size of the labour pool, ensure older - and typically higher earning - workers pay more taxes to fund social security and healthcare, and (the unspoken bit) physically wear themselves out a bit more so they don't spend as long drawing down on those social security & heathcare funds once they do retire. Get the numbers right, and it should smooth out difference between the the taxable income from the labour pool against the need to raise taxes by eye watering amounts to cover all the state's post-retirement support costs. In practice the UK's reality at least is that a lot of the higher earners (boomers) actually do have a decent enough private pension pot and already checked out of the labour pool during Covid to the extent there are on-going efforts to try and get them (and their experience) back into work, so it seems further "corrections" will necessary to improve the balance. Especially so of the political right get their way and we follow the US' route and start blanket deportations of immigrants and reducing work visas rather than letting them fill in the gaps in the native labour pool that the natives generally don't want to do.

A bit too early to tell, although I have my suspicions, but under previous administrations (including Trump 1.0) doing this a few times with each sender was a *very* effective unsubscribe function.

Yeah, similar in the various anti-spam systems we run. Including PACs etc, the numbers are pretty clear, and the pecentages of spams are noticably higher for the GOP (not that the DEMs get a clean sheet either) in all of the following:

Emails that fail Bayes for spaminess.
Emails sent to spam traps.
Emails sent to non-US citizens (which, BTW, is against US campaign law if they're soliciting funds, so we forward all those to the FEC.
Emails sent to compromised email addresses (e.g. Company X gets their customer list hacked, spams start arriving shortly thereafter).
Emails sent from known spam-friendly ISPs.
Emails sent from eyeball network ranges (e.g. most likely a botnet).

If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's going to get called a duck. Spam is no different.