Of all the people I know -- working class, rich, educated and non-educated, the one and only differentiator between those who fell for Qanon crap and those who didn't is the level of education they have. None of my higher-educated friends fell for it, zero, while a large percentage of the high-school-only crowd did, among other conspiracy crap too.

I'm sure there are exceptions, and one persons anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything. But the quality of thinking behind the arguments leads me to think mine is not a unique case.

"Small government" means less governing, which means less enforcement of laws, less oversight of businesses, less service, less of everything we depend on government to do. It's letting the biggest, most powerful non-governmental influencers have more power. Do you really want the billionaires, the amazons, the googles, the microsofts, etc, calling all the shots? Have you ever worked for Amazon? Ask someone who did what it was like sometime. Ask the citizens of Flint Michigan about their water.

What most people who say "smaller government" really want is a more efficient and more fair government. An overburdened system is neither efficient or doing a good job.

I used to be a smaller is better guy too, but I've been convinced that we desperately need MORE representation, not less. With less, only the biggest voices get heard. Our population has grown dramatically in the past 100 years, but the number of representatives has not. We need more representatives. Then our government will be both more fair and more efficient.

I had this problem with Netcom back in the mid 1990s.
Had to get a conference call between them and my bank to get them to stop charging my credit card. Wasted half a day just to get them to stop charging me $50/month for something I wasn't even getting.

Jack Welsh made this part of GE Culture. Paraphrasing: "Customer service is a cost center. It doesn't generate profits. Spend as little as possible on customer service and put more money into sales and marketing to maximize profits."

They all bank on the laziness of the general public.

My new solution is to stop trying. Instead, I don't bother cancelling a service. Instead I just change banks every year (I have multiple accounts -- one for "real" banking, and another for "payments" banking.) The real account is permanent. The payments account gets funded monthly and deleted annually. It's not good enough to report your card lost or stolen. Somehow some of these businesses (Amazon included) have ways of getting the new card info on their own. This is not universal, but I'm not the only one who's had this experience either. You have to switch banks for maximum control.

Yeah, it's a hassle. But it's easy and not frustrating, only once per year, and it's reliable. I had to "cancel" my FedEx daily pickup five times before they finally stopped charging me for the service I wasn't getting. And it's not worth taking legal action for a few hundred bucks. You should also keep a paper trail of any attempted cancellations in case any debt collectors call. A paper trail stops them cold.

It's not for everyone, but this is what I do.

Yes, kids need to learn to code.

I know way too many people who are utterly confident that the pixels on the screen are a true and honest representation of what's happening at the hardware level. "The light's not on, so the camera's not recording." Is not always true.

Knowing how code works will help a lot more people understand things like latency (sometimes ya gotta wait for the software to catch-up before you hit the next button), thinks like a hacked hardware's behavior, things like how much you can really trust a device, or a vendor. How to spoof a log-in screen to harvest passwords. How to make official-looking pop-up alerts. Kids need to know how to recognize these things the same way we teach them to avoid strangers and look before crossing the street.

That's the new world. Be of it, or be its prey.

Elon Musk has a solution...

(Starlink... Autonomous tractors... Tesla isn't just a car company...)

Simple. Get a non-bluetooth BP checker and a pencil. Or re-enter those two numbers into excel manually.
Be old-school cool. You can do it.

Definitely pre-programmed.

Also probably shot over several weeks, one cut at a time.
I've worked in TV before. Junkyard Wars supposedly happened in one day. In reality, it took most of a week, including the no-camera rebuild and testing day right before the competition.

In this video, every time the scene cuts from one angle to another was an opportunity to recharge and load the next sequence, or go back and correct a flaw in the previous sequence.

A few generations? It was within my own lifetime.

Law of supply and demand posits that when you double the availability of a thing, it's value will naturally go down.
We effectively doubled the number of workers starting in the late 1960s. And, wages have steadily declined since the 1970s. Coincidence?

Please hold your tongue for a moment -- the last thing we need is to subjugate 50% of the population again. There are other ways:
1. Reduce the work week to 3 days and go back to a 6 day work week. Two shifts, staggered, perhaps. Slightly more working hours for "productivity", reduced hours working for everyone.
2. Pay the "stay at home" parent to actually stay at home. It's a family-based UBI. As long as one married parent shows no income (regardless of gender or orientation), they get a monthly check from the government. Hey, if we can subsidize farms, corporations and the banking industry, we should be able to subsidize families too. It'll be good for the kids. And healthier, happier kids is better for the country.
3. Allow people to register as "non-combatants" in capitalism. Give them a UBI that forbids them from taking a corporate job and covers their bases but also requires them to participate in scientific research, arts and entertainment, and government services. There are a lot of research studies that have never been duplicated or verified by independent researchers. A lot of people would jump at the chance to be life-long students of science. Others would love to be life-long artists. Yes, the world can use more original art. (Think how boring most of Television has become. Youtube's broader quality would light-up with this.)
4. Ideas are welcome. Something needs to change. Help me figure it out. I'm working on a collection that I will compile into book form later this year. Tell me your ideas.

There's a much bigger problem than illegal aliens that no one is talking about.

The "supply and demand" part is accurate. Too many workers means each worker is less valuable. But illegal immigrants are a small fraction of the workforce when compared to the two-earner households.

This is a delicate subject, but hear me out for a minute. In the 1960s and before, there were no two-earner households, homes were more "homey" and kids had a more complete upbringing. The downside was that we had to subjugate have the population (the female half, for those keeping score).

The very last thing I want to suggest is to go back to that idea (the one of subjugating women). There's no reason a man can't be the homemaker. There's no reason a woman can't be the breadwinner.

All I'm saying is that before we persecute immigrants who we *need* (it's an economics problem with a declining population. Immigrants are basically our only growth) we should look at incentivizing people, somehow (I don't have the answer) to eschew the two-earner family and go back to a sole breadwinner arrangement.

I knew a gay couple who did this. They had a great relationship and made a beautiful and happy home for themselves and their daughter. It made me jealous.

If we voluntarily remove half the workforce and rely on each other (two can live as cheap as one), the dried-up labor pool will start to pay more for those who have elected to remain.

Disclaimer -- I am not an economist, not a politician and not interested in argument. This is just food for thought. I make no promises, claims or warranties. Your mileage may vary. For entertainment purposes only. Excess parenthetical statements included for effect only. Please don't skewer me.

The vast majority of those profits come from services, not from sales.

One of the biggest selling points of EVs is how maintenance-free they are.

There's no mystery why a dealership would opt to close their doors rather than have to rely on relatively meager sales profits and virtually no service business.

Don't get me wrong -- I wholly support the transition to EVs. I drive an EV myself (Home-made conversion. Huge effort. Totally worth it!) But this transition won't happen without some hardships along the way. Like this one.

Flat out impossible.

IKE would be crucified as a communist by today's conservatives.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Dwight D. Eisenhower April 16 1953

I'm sure we all support the idea of free speech in principle. But giving everyone a bullhorn only gives power to the most egregious loudmouths while the more civil and reserved are drowned out of the conversation.

Equality of voice is a challenging problem to solve.

Yahoo is basically hitting the pause button until something better comes along. Let's hope something better comes along.

So true.

I once drove from Alaska to California in July.

Have you ever seen that old TV commercial for Off brand mosquito repellent where the man puts his arm inside a container filled with mosquitoes, and it is instantly covered with dozens of them? That's what it was like in the Yukon.

We'd stop to make penut butter and jelly sandwiches. The mosquitoes would land and get stuck in the peanut butter faster than we could pick them out. So we gave up and ate as fast as we could, mosquitoes and all.

We tried to keep the speed above 20 mph at all costs. Any slower and the bugs found their way in somehow.

Oh, I haven't mentioned the horseflies yet.

And even though it was July, we still saw patches of snow in the shady parts of the landscape. Lots of shade, because the Sun was so low in the sky. Also lots of mountains. The photos were gorgeous.

I never want to go back again.

"America canned slavery..."

That's more accurate than you probably intended. Mike Wallace did a documentary about migrant farm workers back in the 1960s. Farmers openly joked, "We don't own slaves anymore. Now we just rent them."

Migrant farm worker is still a thing too. But that's a whole lotta nut to crack.

Sorry, but you are wrong.

That's just like saying there's no such thing as Mickey Mouse, or Superman, or Harry Potter.

They are very real. They exist in books, in movies and in the living minds of people who hold those things dear, and as such, they have power.

However, beware the people who pull the strings, draw the action and write the dialog. For they are even more real.