I learned to touch type in high school--at a time where I had to fight the administration to allow me to take a class "for girls" to learn a "secretarial" skill. (Early 80's, but the teachers there were still stuck in the early 1960's, apparently.)

I find it incredibly useful to be able to express my thoughts and ideas without having to think about the keys or to look at where the keys are. Just sit my hands until my index fingers feel the little bumps, and away I go. And as a software developer it helps to be able to express complex code without thinking about where the keys are; in fact, I got rid of a keyboard because while I loved how it felt and how it looked, the back-tick button was moved down and to the left, and the escape key was placed to the left of the 1. And I found typing code escapes in Markdown and bitwise negation in C a pain in the ass; every time I'd think 'code' my finger would press the escape key where the backtick should have been.

At this point, I think Idiocracy should be taught in schools just like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 are.

It's an allegory of how Stupidity is just as dangerous as Totalitarianism and Cencorship.

Sorry, but having known some VCs in my own life, this feels like a significant disaster in the making as VCs who bought into the hype of AI dump a bunch of money on existing companies, fail to upgrade them, then dismantle those companies: old school 1980's corporate raider asset-stripping.

There are places where AI can definitely help--but I sincerely don't trust VCs to know where that is. I mean the whole 'vibe coding' thing came from the VC world--and in a sense, VCs don't give a shit if it works or not, so long as it maintains a high volume of churn.

Bookmarking? In 2025?? Well that's just uncivilized!

In 2025, I need all of my content links uploaded to the cloud so it can be paraphrased and narrated by an AI that sounds like Patrick Stewart complete with corresponding random vertical videos of random things getting assembled from my smart hub screen as I fall asleep at night to maximize content retention. Anything less is too much of a bother.

If it were that simple and that impactful, economists would surely have adjusted the metric.

As to why we still use them: because they're easy to capture, they're easy to understand, they've been standardized over the decades, and they're politically useful. And no economist in their right mind uses the number in isolation; it's usually used along with a broader notion of the balance of payments. And when comparing trade deficits year over year across different economic sectors, it does give insight into how the economy is evolving.

But for the purposes the Trump Administration (and prior administrations; notice trade deficits has been on the political radar for decades now), the way the metric is being used is--to put it politely--faulty.

No... none of the money Apple pays to China for the manufacturing of the device goes into Apple's pockets.

What I mean by this is that suppose you order an iPhone from Apple for $1,000. It gets drop shipped from China to your home.

The imported item, the $1,000 iPhone, is counted in our trade deficit as the full $1,000 going to China. That is, we calculate the trade deficit by looking at the declared value of the imported item as it crosses the border from China to the United States, and in the case of your iPhone, we presume we just lost $1,000 to China, never to be seen again.

But here's the thing: Foxconn, the company who assembled the iPhone and who drop shipped it to you, only gets $50 to assemble and ship the phone. Yes, that's $50 that Apple doesn't get--Apple pays $50 to Foxconn. And note that there are other costs that go to other companies: Apple pays money to TSMC to manufacture the processor, they pay to Samsung for the display, they pay to other companies around the world for the other components--including money to other Chinese manufacturers.

But at the end of the day, even though we count the full $1,000 value of the iPhone as a trade imbalance with China, the reality is companies all around the world got a small piece of that $1,000 total cost.

That is, a Taiwan company got money for the SoC, a Japanese company got some money for the camera module, a European company got money for the gyroscope technology, a South Korea company got money for the display, etc., etc., etc.

And Apple makes almost $500 in profit.

In other words, and this is my point: while we credit the full $1,000 as a trade imbalance to China--half that money actually winds up in Cupertino.

But wait! Our trade imbalance numbers are even worse than that! Many of the items that are in your $1,000 iPhone are technologies manufactured by, or designed by, other American companies who get a substantial profit from those compnents. Qualcomm (in California) licenses the modem, Corning (out of New York) provides the glass, Micron (out of Idaho) provides the DRAM/NAND memory core, etc., etc.

So while our trade imbalance credits the full value of the $1,000 phone that was just drop shipped to you from China after you ordered it from Apple, it's quite likely somewhere around 35% of the actual build cost (the $500 used to make the phone) flows back to America. Meaning that while our statistics suggest we just had a $1,000 trade imbalance with China, the reality is perhaps $700 of that stays in or flows back to America.

This means the trade imbalance statistics are **WOEFULLY** inaccurate in representing the real world.

The problem I see is that the way we measure trade deficits don't account for the flow of wealth due to the value of American intellectual property.

Consider, for example, that in the trade deficit metrics, China gets full credit for the $500-ish import cost of an Apple iPhone. That, despite the fact that most of that $500 winds up in the pockets of a California company rather than in China itself.

When you take into account the value of intellectual property around the world, it explains why some of the most valuable corporations to be created in the past 50 years are American, despite supposedly persistent trade deficits for the entire period of time. Because we're surprisingly good at creating new intellectual property--thanks to a legal and cultural environment which encourages greater levels of risk-taking than does Europe or Asia.

So all this finger pointing over trade deficits, all the actions taken by the Trump Administration, all the hand-wringing over how the US is somehow being 'bled dry'--is all based on a faulty metric

And so long as we keep measuring the wrong thing, and talking about the wrong thing, we'll keep doing the wrong thing to fix the wrong problem.

If this works...

There's a lot there to hang your hat on, especially for something not slated for completion until 2030.

When a government--any government--announces they are doing something for a stated reason, I tend not to believe the stated reason. In this case, if what they wanted was to guarantee a steady flow of electricity by creating a supply of 'on-demand' energy sources that can ramp up when there are disruptions in the grid due to weather, they'd be looking at things like natural gas turbines (basically jet engines attached to power generators which can spin up and down at a moment's notice).

Not nuclear.

So I'd be looking for an underlying explanation that makes more sense than "we need an on-demand source of power, so we're going with the one energy source that does the shittiest job with on-demand energy supply."

Unless there has been a breakthrough in on-demand nuclear that I haven't seen...

Where I live, Most of our stations are owned by either IHeartMedia or Cumulus. The "DJ's" are all nationwide cookie cutter Random Factoid Top 40 Celebrity News spewers that are basically placeholders to give them an excuse to tell you what car dealership bought the Studio, News desk, Weather center, Traffic report, ETC's Naming Rights in between more commercials and playing stingers of one of their station "Brands" such as Kiss, Froggy or Real.

At this point an AI DJ would be an improvement. They might actually play music on the station instead of commenting how a gecko loses it's tail when it feels threatened and how he wished he could do that when confronted by his girlfriend. (actual random factoid one of our stations used BTW)

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

AI, while it may in the next decade, isn't cutting jobs. If anything, Telecommuting is. and when I mean telecommuting, I mean halfway across the world.

The Reason H1B's exists, and the reason you have politicians on both sides of the isle fighting tooth and nail to keep them even though it displaces high paid American workers out of jobs, is because even though it's a job held by a foreign employee, it still counts as an American Job on paper complete with it's tax revenue. Simply put, if H1B's disappeared overnight, then thousands of jobs would basically disappear in the US and reappear on foreign shores overnight thanks to VOIP and Teleconferencing.

Here's an example. Where I work, the finance dept is working on transitioning their old accounting system to a new accounting system created by the Big O due to someone hearing their pitch of "Visibility and Control" and "Single Source of Truth" on the radio against our better judgement. Once they singed the contract the Big O sent us to an Implementer headquartered in the US (since that was a requirement) to transition from our old system to the new system. Imagine my zero reaction shock and awe when we had to open India on our firewall because none of the programmers could access our servers or even chat with our staff because their Webex server cluster was based in India and our staff couldn't join their Webex sessions. The same goes for their Microsoft Cloud service since they use Indian based cloud locations.

TL:DR: COVID proved that Telecommuting works, H1B's are getting harder and more expensive to get, and it's cheap to rent a former scam call center in India and fill it with minimum wage coders than hiring coders that are expecting big bucks to pay their college loans in the US.

I mean, wasn't that the whole point of the Euro being rolled out around 1990, to allow Europe to dominate (or at least counter) US dominance in the financial markets, and unwind the effects of Bretton Woods?

And how is that going?

There's always "powershell.exe -command ..." to get PowerShell to download an .exe from a web server and run it.