I thought Constitutional rights in the US were eternal and self-evident, not historically determined, aka, the 9th Amendment's "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

When did the US legal tradition transition from jusnaturalism, that is, recognizing rights as having always existed irrespective of previous government having been aware of their existence or not, to juspositivism, in which rights are arbitrarily granted by the government, and thus can also be arbitrarily revoked?

Your point? That would be most people by a huge margin.

OneDrive offers
- protection against local hardware failure.
- protection gainst loss in a laptop theft or loss situation
- protection against loss in a fire/flood, catastrophe situation unless you have remote offsite backups (*)
- protection against ransomware
- protection against accidental data overwrite and other common user errors
- simplified data migration to a new device (especially good for people without IT... but its handy for IT too if, people can just sign into a freshly imaged laptop and go)

vs...
- increases risk of disclosure in a cloud breach or phishing attack

(* and if you DO have current remote offsite backups you are probably using the cloud to facilitate that anyway.)

That's not to minimize the risk of a cloud breach... but you need to properly assess your risk profile. Data stored locally can also be targeted and ex-filtrated, the risk is generally smaller, but it remains, especially if its valuable enough to target.)

And I know plenty of people who have had devices break or get stolen many times and lost valuable data, or lost data in an automated low effort ransomware attack (and targeted high effort attacks too)...Point is: for a lot of people, probably even the large majority of people, cloud storage is very much a net positive.

Are "reality denial" and "hate against truth" core libertarian traits?

Regarding lifetimes, I once got a VPN subscription for their lifetime plan which wasn't really, but they at least were explicit by showing prominently on the payment page that by that word they meant 7 years.

Yep. Influential Libertarians gave full support to Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile back in the day; show a lot of support for Monarchism; ranged from indifferent to outright hostile towards the Civil Rights movement, and so on.

Once that level is achieved, YouTube and other platforms will start promoting mostly their own AI-slop over 3rd party content producers. This way they'll keep 100% of the ad and subscription revenues generated. No need to share revenue with creators if there are no creators.

Evidently, this transition will be slow enough for most people, both those watching as well as creators, whose revenues will start slowly stagnating, then decreasing, not to notice.

Networking effects prevent that. It's possible, but unlikely.

Really, if that's the way you want to live, I say have at it. Other people having the option to live differently isn't going to stop you. It'll be decades before it starts getting hard to find gas stations, and by then EVs will have more range than you can handle.

It is pretty hard not to respond to the pure BS that anti-EV types spout. I know it rubs you the wrong way, but the alternative is to let people who don't know what they're talking about dominate public perceptions.

I wouldn't claim EVs are for everyone, but for many of us they are extremely convenient and economical to run. The corner cases where ICE is clearly more convenient are not a concern for everyone, and not a concern for a multi-car household considering making one of their cars an EV. We have an EV and a plug-in hybrid that runs as an EV probably 80% of the time. We hit the gas station with the plug-in about once every six weeks.

There is almost no scenario where the initial cost to put things into orbit, and the increased cost to build them to exist there, maintain and support them there, and replace them when they fail is ever paid back by the efficiency gain in having it there though.

Unless you've got essentially unlimited free energy to put things into orbit ... but if you have that you probably don't need space solar panels in the first place.

I heard an economist pose this question once. Why do companies have employees at all? Why not use contractors? Then you could hire just as much labor as you need, when you need it, then not pay for labor when you didn't need it.

His reason was the costs involved with finding contractors then negotiating agreements with them. I think there are other reasons, but for sure that's part of it.

But I think technology is pushing us into an intermediate position between the semi-permanent, often lifelong employment of a generation ago, and a world of contracting for everything. I think this is evidenced by a pattern I have seen where companies who are currently successful lay people off. It's not just in the tech world, this is happening in the service industry too.

When technology allows you to monitor the financial performance and cost of every department in an enterprise down to a fare-thee-well, it's easy to identify people you don't need so much in the upcoming quarters and let them go. Then with Internet hiring and automated application screening it's easy to hire those positions back in a year.

Now there's a lot of holes in this rosy (for management) scenario. Automated application screening is dog shit, for example. But you can do it, and you will find people; probably not the *best* people, but then you'll never know, in fact *nobody* will ever know. People will never get to know their jobs well, but again you won't ever know what you're missing. Most of all you will never have anything resembling loyalty from the people you hire; young people these days look at every job as transient. But you can't *measure* loyalty and in most cases, job competence with any precision. But you can track costs down to the penny.

EDIT: president as during in the then -> president during the then

R&D became extremely expensive since Trump 1's elimination of same-year tax exemption for R&D expenses went into effect.

He had timed it, and the mass layoffs it'd cause, for the next president after him, assuming he'd be reelected. His sucessor, likely a democrat, would have taken the blunt, with the GOP then pointing at the horrible state of employment under that future president as during in the then distant 2026 mid-terms.

Things didn't go as planned though. Trump lost the reelection, Biden was elected, and Trump himself became the target of his original time bomb. So at least in this case the thing backfired Dick Dastardly-style.

In this case this wasn't about AI underperforming what was promised, but AI performance being exaggerated to cover the company's tracks as it offshored jobs to India. The intent was to use AI as an excuse to let Australian workers go, then to quietly replace them with Indian ones.

I don't think AI promises are "empty", but there is a lot of irrational enthusiasm out there getting ahead of the technology. I think for sure there are plenty of technical failures arising from technlogical hubris and naivite. And I think more instances where the technology is blamed for company failures or unpopular policies -- that practice goes back to the very early era of "computerizing" things like invoicing, so I don't see why this round of technological change would be any different.

But for sure, AI is coming for a lot of jobs. Past forms of automation haven't ended employment; they were just ways of increasing worker productivity. Companies still hired workers until the next marginal dollar spent wouldn't bring in a marginal dollar of revenue. But this time may be different. AI is replacing human thinking. It may be mediocre at thinking, but so are most humans. It may be an opportunity for companies to leverage a small number of humans with advanced cognitive skills, but I think for many companies the siren call of mediocre but really cheap will be too hard to resist.

Well look at it this way, your taxes mostly go towards keeping someone else from taking the rest of what you've earned. Whether the potential taker could be some other country or another American who feels like they drew the short straw in life.

That's what the Sicilian gentlemen with the double-breasted suits and no necks said, but they were taking a somewhat smaller cut.