This is what inflation looks like in a single product category.

Something happens to break the former equilibrium; in this case, a few things happened - Covid, then LLMs, and now rapid changes in international commerce stability. This causes uncertainty, disruption and shortages, all of which spikes prices.

Then the opportunists see an opportunity. (And to be fair, prices are going up on everyone, even opportunists.) Prices are already going up and the bulk of buyers have no good reason to be knowledgeable or engaged enough to understand component-level price pressures. And even if they did, what are they going to do about it?

Then everyone else in the supply chain realizes not raising prices is a missed opportunity and they're the suckers if they don't.

Buckle up, this is going to be "normal" for a long time.

Zuckerbook's extruded wheeze was predictable based on the existence of the others - the cool kids down the hall were getting attention for doing it.

It won't matter. We're destroying our universities anyway.

In a decade folks will get their pass/fail participation trophy by correctly answering questions like, "Should Americans be more thankful to Jesus or Don Trump for their record breaking average salaries of $16000/year for only 72 hours labor per week?"

It will qualify them to whip productivity out of their inferiors so long as the report enough subversives each week.

Give give your comment its due, we agree there are powers no state should ever have.

And, if one isn't careful, it isn't hard to creep up on a mode where it seems like giving the state this little bit more power is no biggie. My guy is running the show, it fixes a real problem and it isn't a big deal, right? And at some point you've crossed a line.

However.

Here we are. The barbarians are not at the gate; they are literally redecorating the White House. And you're worried about fantasy commies.

Perhaps we can compromise. "No ubiquitous surveillance for anyone, inclusive of fascists, commies, AND Unitarians."

And you remain free to test your water for fluoride before drinking it (at your own expense).

How's that?

Yep. Municipal power is a natural thing to do - it is a situation where the locals are about as close to fully aligned with one another as they get - everyone wants reliable, cheap power and responsive service when you need it. So you make a captive company with a charter that keeps it aligned with its customers instead of Wall St. You don't take silly risks because you're not chasing infinite growth, customers gets decent rates, the area gets some decent local jobs out of it. Everyone except the predators are happy. If only other all local problems had such great solutions.

But, ohhh, booga-booga, that's communism. (Please just ignore Trump seizing the means of production.)

Learn to read.

There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. Cell phones are different because they're considered private communications despite using public airwaves.

There have been attempts to get precedent that automated, continuous monitoring is qualitatively different than a cop standing outside watching you, with unfortunately mixed results.

Mostly correct. I'd just add the average LEO doesn't care about catching criminals, either, if it takes too much effort.

Going beyond today, this is a long-running theme in US constitutional law. Before the colonial rebellion, King George was a big fan of "writs of assistance". These were effectively licenses for thugs to search or interrogate anyone at any time in pursuit of a crime (or "crime"), and of course anyone subject to such abuse hated it. So that's where the 4th Amendment came from - we do warrants, but you have to name with specificity what/who you want to investigate as well as why and under what authority, and get a judge to agree.

Authoritarians, thugs and control freaks have been trying to reinvent them ever since.

One famous case from before the digital era was Stanford v. Texas (1965). Texas, being extremely Texan, passed the Suppression Act, which made writings, photos, etc. "concerned with" the Texas Communist Party contraband subject to 20 year prison terms. The Supreme Court unanimously held the warrant was an unconstitutional general warrant.

Opposing general warrants is as American as apple pie, opposing kings and displaying amazing senses of entitlement.

The democrats crying is pure bullshit here. They wanted this to

A. This is nonsense on stilts. Name one elected Dem who promoted this.

B. Even shitbags like Cruz are saying this is illegal.

This benefits everyone's donors.

C. You seem to believe only elected politicians matter. What about the actual, you know, citizens who pay these government workers?

where they'll defend all the anti-human rights shit that happened to no end

Weird how selective you are about which humans and which rights.

I completely agree. Waymo has a lot of work to do.

And it isn't just passenger safety - those things are a menace during civil emergencies. There needs to be both a lot of work put in to contextually proper response to exceptional circumstances - from what should be easy stuff like "don't block fire trucks or drive over fire hoses" on through figuring out how to safely get out of the way when power goes out. For reference, right now we're at the point where they still confuse themselves.

Of course if you also intentionally cripple them by omitting multiple available, useful sensory modalities, climbing that capability hill will be that much harder, and you'll obviously never get the same safety in some high-salience situations like a kid running out from behind a parked car if you aren't running something that can "see" behind it.

I'm assuming you mean they were binned with fewer cores.

I guess they are "slightly defective" in the same way an Epyc 9115 is a slightly defective 9965.

A long time ago, I worked as a small-business IT consultant. (I recovered, thanks.) A few of them were deeply frustrated application designers.

Usually they wanted an Excel spreadsheet as an application. "Just like this, except users can't mess with this part." (Readers: it was never "just like that".) I could usually build them a web version of what they kinda wanted, but what they really wanted was "their thing".

I'm pretty sure this is "Satya's thing". He made a pretty in the fashionable version of what "excel development" has become. And because he lives in Microsoft-land, all the weird bullshit huge enterprises require in general and Microsoft's weird bullshit in particular is normal to him, he thinks everyone lives that kind of life.

And that's why he's surprised nobody cares about his shiny report thing.

I suspect the Pareto Principle is very much at play here, in that 80% of customer issues can totally be answered by the scripts that human front-line call centre staff typically worked from (that's why the scripts exist in the first place, afterall), and therefore 80% of the calls can be dealt with perfectly well by an AI bot following the same script. It's only the other 20% that are the unique problems that KB articles and scripted/automated agents cannot handle, and - usually after a lot of pointless tick-boxing to get off-script - those are usually the ones that get escalated to a second line support peon that can actually take some initiative, and ultimately the few real corner cases to third-line support.

If AI can let you cull 80% of your support / call centre staff with no practical loss of service (according to the AI agent salesperson, anyway), then who isn't going to jump at that? Of course, they'll probably go for 90% or more and take extra hit on service levels, then have to wind things back a bit when they realise that the AI agents are not quite as good as promised and some people will get really stroppy about being forced to talk a bot, but at that point they'll have been paid their bonus and who cares, right? They're only customers, and you've got think of the shareholders!

This is Piggie leaving Americans exposed to foreign attack during a war.

He's already been denying emergency funds to states that didn't vote for him.

Now he's literally spreading propaganda about the source of a foreign attack against US citizens. Blue states are on their own, without the tools they'd need to actually act like a sovereign being attacked.

MAGAts need to remember this when President AOC forcibly desegregates the South again. Motherfuckers are going to be lucky we still let them be part of the country - I'm increasingly OK with building a wall at the northern Texas border at this point. (You're such big bad he-men? Enjoy negotiating with Mexico as a tiny neighbor.)

You seem to be asserting sovereign nations other than the US are in the wrong to control what is bought and sold in their countries.

I assume you think the US should also tariff up against Israel for failing to import more pork?

As a practical matter, more tariffs will chase EU customers off faster while punishing American companies. That's just giving them more object lessons in why the US is a dangerously unreliable partner while making sure business owners get their noses rubbed in it - a sure-fire way to convince an influential block of otherwise fairly small-c conservative voters the EU is doing the right thing.

It amazes me how many people seem to not understand very basic things about how people work. Inch-deep mile-wide grievance is a hell of a drug.

(And let's not even get in to however the fuck you think "recoup[ing] the funds" via tariffs would work. After Americans are taxed more on EU products, you think Google is going to get that money? How? What's the legal mechanism? And what does any of that have to do with an EU fine?)