In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

Sounds like a good dogfooding opportunity for Google to use Gemini to devise and implement these sweeping changes.

I think Clementine was my favorite, for it showed not just his imagination and humor, but his skill.

"Reports of two recent incidents where robots wiped out vast numbers of humans after vibemanufacturing mistakes."

You should be careful of taking the claims of the Chinese Communist Party at face value. China has universal health insurance, but it is administered in a way that many people canâ(TM)t access critical care *services*.

For example if you are a rural guest worker in a city, you have health insurance which covers cancer treatment, but it requires you to go back to your home village to get that treatment, which probably isnâ(TM)t available there. If you are unemployed you have a different health insurance program, but its reimbursement rate is so low that most unemployed people canâ(TM)t afford treatment.

Authoritarian governments work hard to manage appearances, not substance. This is a clear example. It sounds egalitarian to say everyone has the same health insurance, but the way they got there was to engineer a system that didnâ(TM)t require them to do the hard work of making medical care available to everyone.

If you want an example of universal healthcare, go across the strait to Taiwan, which instituted universal healthcare in the 90s and now has what many regard as the best system in the world.

The COVID mRNA vaccines were the culmination of decades of research into genetic vaccines that could be in essence engineered to target a selected antigen without the years of trial and error that are required by the methods we have been using since the 1950s. Within days of the virus genome being published, they had a vaccine design, the months it took to get to the public were taken up with studies of the safety and effectiveness of the heretofore untested technology, ramping up production, and preparing for the distribution of a medicine that required cryogenic storage.

It would be unreasonable not to give the Trump administration credit for not mucking up this process. But the unprecedented speed of development wasnâ(TM)t due to Trump employing some kind of magical Fuhrermojo. It was a stroke good fortune that when the global pandemic epidemiologists have been worried about arrived, mRNA technology was just at the point where you could use it. Had it arrived a decade earlier the consequences would have been far worse, no matter who was president.

The lesson isnâ(TM)t that Trump is some kind of divine figure who willed a vaccine into existence, itâ(TM)s that basic research that is decades from practical application is important.

This cannot be emphasized enough: Boeing lied.

I do not remember all the details right now. But in order to fit a larger engine with enough ground clearance, they had to change its thrust angle slightly. They told the FAA there were no changes that pilots needed to know about or retrain for. They lied, to airlines, to the FAA and to the public. The two crashes were due to pilots not knowing about the changes.

I watch a lot of maritime disaster videos, so YouTubeâ(TM)s genius algorithm thinks Iâ(TM)d be interested in traveling on a cruise ship.

        Because I am drunk, this Independence Night,
        I watch the fireworks from far away,
        from a high hill, across the moony green
        Of lakes and other hills to the town harbor,
        Where stately illuminations are flung aloft,
        One light shattering in a hundred lights
        Minute by minute. The reason I am crying,
        Aside from only being country drunk,
        That is, may be that I have just remembered
        The sparklers, rockets, roman candles and
        so on, we used to be allowed to buy
        When I was a boy, and set off by ourselves
        At some peril to life and property.
        Our freedom to abuse our freedom thus
        Has since, I understand, been remedied
        By legislation. Now the authorities
        Arrange a perfectly safe public display
        To be watched at a distance; and now also
        The contribution of all the taxpayers
        Together makes a more spectacular
        Result than any could achieve alone
        (A few pale pinwheels, or a firecracker
        Fused at the dog's tail). It is, indeed, splendid:
        Showers of roses in the sky, fountains
        Of emeralds, and those profusely scattered zircons
        Falling and falling, flowering as they fall
        And followed distantly by a noise of thunder.
        My eyes are half-afloat in happy tears.
        God bless our Nation on a night like this,
        And bless the careful and secure officials
        Who celebrate our independence now.

Well, your buying power would be crippled.

If it's any consolation, my 3-digit UID and five bucks might buy me a cup of coffee. I didn't even get a lousy T-shirt.

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Rollover protection is part of why A pillars are so much thicker now. The first time I drove one of them, it amazed me how much I had to keep moving my head just to keep track of what was across the intersection.

Agreed. I'd be happier if they instead updated Google Earth Pro for Desktop to natively support ARM64 CPUs like the Apple M series.