Ever since Covid stopped people from 'reusing' the reuseable groceries bag delivered by Fresh Direct, EVERY bag I see in NY is a Fresh Direct bag.

It's short sighted of a special kind, even.

2-3 decades ago, it was car manufacturing. Every car maker by then knew that the Chinese would steal the tech. There's a famous example of a Mercedes Benz factory making busses which for the first year or two sold like hot cakes. Then demand suddenly vanished. Research found that the chinese joint venture partner (you had to joint venture in those days, not sure about now) had copied the entire factory, brick by brick, one city away. An exact copy making the exact same busses, just without Mercedes Benz in the loop. And, of course, slightly cheaper.

Everyone knew that.

And yet everyone went to China. They figured that it was still profitable to accept that risk.

Of course, the fact that CEOs these days change every few years and get a severance package large enough that they can immediately retire doesn't exactly make them long-term thinkers.

Heck, stop getting any food that is available locally. It's insane that I can buy some food that was grown in South America, shipped to Asia for processing and packaging and then shipped to Europe for less than the same food grown in Europe.

There's quite a bit of utter insanity there.

Yes, but this cuts both ways. These days, a LOT of essential day-by-day supplies are manufactured in China. If China and the G7 stopped all trade tomorrow, the damage to the G7 would be bigger and more immediate than that on China.

True. Germany is learning that lesson now that cheap energy from Russia is no longer available and its export business can't compete anymore.

Used to be called a "Kid's Travel Bag" and all good mothers carried one for their children when on a long car ride.

Crayons, paper, stuffed animal, fidget toy, Juice box, animal crackers, piece of fruit, jacks, rubik's cube, sippy cups for the kid.
Water bottle, band-aids, napkins, ziplock bags, wet wipes, maybe some spare underwear, Sunglasses, Hair Ties, tide stick, chapstick, suntan lotion, tampons.

How can anyone think this arrogant dictator that wants to have the government literally take over entire business categories is a capitalist.

He has literally enacted the definition of Mercantalism (balance of trade via Tariffs ) and wants to control every business.

Seems like they've been doing it since 2008. Is there a ten year statute of limitations or something?

Used to be called a "Kid's Travel Bag" and all good mothers carried one for their children when on a long car ride.

The quite truth of the matter is the power curve did not change when AI become popular - it was already skyrocketing.

Computers have been using more and more power for a very long time, AI is merely the current buzzword we use for wanting more computing done.

But more importantly, what AI we do have can easily be time shifted. The AI corporations should scatter their processors around the world. Do not send all your processing to one AI cluster in the middle of your country. Instead have a simple routing machine that tracks the current cost of power in 20 different clusters scattered around the North America, South America, Europe, Asia, etc. When you get a request, send it to the processing where power is cheapest at the current time.

Yes this will slow things down a bit. That is the secret weapon in this methodology.

If someone wants to skip the line, they can buy premium service, which goes to the closest AI cluster rather than the cheapest one. So their picture of (celebrity) having a shockingly god time while (verb that absolutely does not HAVE to be sexual) with (celebrity/you/your ex-girlfriend) can be created much faster than everyone elses.

Would not surprise me if it were really easy to tell the difference between AI slop and excellently researched / well written books.

But it could also be really hard to tell the difference between AI slop and the poorly written ramblings of idiots.

Replacing Consultants that tell businesses how to stop being morons.

There are a lot of businesses that came up with a profitable method, grew to gigantic size and never fixed the stupid lazy crap they accumulated.

Whether it is the founders ex girlfriend they never fired, or the petty cash fund that grew to 20 million sitting in an aluminum safe.

They got impressed with the new guys, so they bought them out.

Their old employees were almost certainly good employees. Otherwise they would have fired them BEFORE the take over.

But after they bought out the new guys they thought that it would be stupid to buy new cow if old cow was good cow. So old cow must be bad cow. Sell old cow.

The truth is most likely that all the people involved EXCEPT the management are probably extremely competent. The management thought to save money in the place they were trying to spend money. That has to be the stupidest idea ever. If it was worth it to buy the company, then they needed all the smart people, including the old employees.

Why? Because there is the myth of the singular genius that invents the product. Science is not engineering. Engineering is not science. The AI 'inventors' are hiring engineers, not scientists. They are figuring out how to do something the scientists already have theorized is possible.

Any AI improvements will be done by a whole team of very qualified engineers doing the hard work of bringing the scientific ideas to reality. No one man - or group of men - is going to be that much better than other people. More smart people will however speed up the process.

Management was stupid. If hiring them was smart, then keeping their old employees was also smart.

I was explicitly talking about what would happen if Russia launched nuclear weapons specifically at the United States, not an arbitrary non-nuclear NATO country.

NATO would still be obligated to retaliate in an attack on other NATO countries, whether nuclear or otherwise, and Russia's military would still almost certainly lose very badly and very quickly, given their current levels of force depletion, but I do agree that it would probably not involve a nuclear response. It wouldn't need to.

The reality is that if Russia launched nuclear missiles at the U.S., the U.S. would wipe them off the map. If you honestly think otherwise, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you're really that detached from reality, you're right. There's no point in this discussion.

On the one hand, the idea of an iPad with two large-ish screens sounds tempting. Lots of people I know use 12.9-inch iPad Pro displays for reading music, but it is challenging if you can only see one page at a time. It's a lot better if you can show two.

On the other hand, 18 inches arguably isn't *quite* big enough. Two iPad Pros would be a little over 20 inches, and those are really on the small side.

And knowing Apple, it would be a $3500 tablet. Meanwhile, I'm doing it with a 24-inch wall-mount Android tablet that cost me something like $450.