There are plenty of crappy scripting languages out there. Why did Python rise to dominance over AppleScript and Visual Basic and bash and MS-DOS .bat files and Perl and Tcl and all the rest?

I suggest that it's because Python is significantly less crappy than its competition.

Seems like not-enough-people is a relatively straightforward problem to solve, if your country isn't completely awful. You just invite some immigrants in, and presto, you've got more people. There are plenty of people around the world looking for stable, decent places to live, so sourcing shouldn't be a problem.

Too-many-people is a much trickier problem, since nobody wants to be voted off the island.

Soon it will be just like over-the-air TV, except you're paying Amazon $180/year for the privilege of watching their ads.

CPB and the government have been collected data directly from the airlines ever since the aftermath of 9/11 through a number of programs, for example to check passengers against watch lists and to verify the identity of travelers on international flights.

What has changed is that by buying data from a commerical broker instead of a a congressionally instituted program, it bypasses judicial review and limits set by Congress on data collected through those programs -- for example it can track passengers on domestic flights even if they're not on a watch list.

Fascism isn't an ideology; it's more like a disease of ideology. The main characteristic of fascist leaders is that they're unprincipled; they use ideology to control others, they're not bound by it themselves. It's not just that some fascists are left-wing and others are right-wing. Any given fascist leader is left-wing when it suits his purposes and right-wing when that works better for him. The Nazis were socialists until they got their hands on power and into bed with industry leaders, but it wasn't a turn to the right. The wealthy industrialists thought they were using Hitler, but it was the other way around. The same with Mussolini. He was socialist when he was a nobody but turned away from that when he lost his job at a socialist newspaper for advocating militarism and nationalism.

In any case, you should read Umberto Eco's essay on "Ur-Fascism", which tackles the extreme difficulties in characterizing fascism as an ideology (which as I stated I don't think it is). He actually lived under Mussolini.

I think they are going for "reduced waiting time" and "more consistent high quality preparation", with an option for "cheaper prices" at some point (if they feel they must). It's not clear that AI will actually provide any of those things, but that's the goal.

The song will advise you to "share and enjoy", and the beverage will be almost (but not quite) entirely unlike the one you wanted.

Depends on how clearly written the instructions are. Even when the instructions are correct and unambiguous, language that is well-defined to someone with experience is often inscrutable to the newbie. (e.g. have you ever been following a recipe that tells you to "fold in" an ingredient and had to figure out exactly what "folding in" is supposed to consist of in that context?)

Traditionally your newbie barista would ask their co-worker at that point, so I'm not sure that having an AI on-hand provides much benefit unless it's faster and/or more accurate than getting a co-worker's attention would be. If it turns out not to be helpful, it will go away quickly enough.

I think people expect commercial social media networks to be something they can't be -- a kind of commons where you are exposed to the range of views that exist in your community. But that's not what makes social networks money, what makes them money is engagement, and consuming a variety of opinions is tiresome for users and bad for profits. When did you ever see social media trying to engage you with opinions you don't agree with or inform you about the breadth of opinion out there? It has never done that.

The old management of Twitter had a strategy of making it a big tent, comfortable for centrist views and centrist-adjacent views. This enabled it to function as a kind of limited town common for people who either weren't interested in politics, like authors or celebrities promoting their work, or who wanted to reach a large number of mainly apolitical people. This meant drawing lines on both sides of the political spectrum, and naturally people near the line on either side were continually furious with them.

It was an unnatural and unstable situation. As soon as Musk tried to broaden one side of the tent, polarization was inevitable. This means neither X nor Bluesky can be what Twitter was for advertisers and public figures looking for a broad audience.

At present I'm using Mastodon. For users of old Twitter, it must seem like an empty wasteland, but it's a non-commercial network, it has no business imperative to suck up every last free moment of my attention. I follow major news organizations who dutifully post major stories. I follow some interest groups which are active to a modest degree, some local groups who post on local issues, and a few celebrities like George Takei. *Everybody's* not on it, but that's OK; I don't want to spend more than a few minutes a day on the thing so I don't have time to follow everyone I might be interested in. Oh, and moderation is on a per-server basis, so you can choose a server where the admins have a policy you're OK with.

No, there are all kinds of information the government has that are legitimately not available. Sensitive data on private citizens, for example, which is why people are worried about unvetted DOGE employees getting unfettered access to federal systems. Information that would put witnesses in ongoing criminal investigations at risk. Military operations in progress and intelligence assets in use.

The problem is ever since there has been a legal means to keep that information secret, it's also been used to cover up government mistake and misconduct. It's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep things from its citizens *if there is a specific and articulable justification* that can withstand critical examination.

And sometimes those justifications are overridden by public interest concerns -- specifically when officials really want to bury something like the Pentagon Papers because they are embarrassing to the government. "Embarrassing to the government" should be an argument against secrecy, because of the public interest in knowing the government is doing embarrassing things. In the end, the embarrassment caused by the Pentagon Papers was *good* for the country.

All you need to know about RFK's fitness for office is out in public for everyone to see.

... and for good reason. Difficult projects are risky and expensive, and if they don't work on the first try, the voters blame the politician and then very soon afterwards he isn't a politician anymore (or at least, not an employed one). Even if they do succeed, the politician will get blamed if they turn out to be more expensive than predicted (which they always do, because that's the nature of difficult projects).

The "safe" way to do it is leave the old system in place and running, and install the new system next to it. Let them both run simultaneously for an extended period of time, with the old system still in charge and the new system running and computing results, but its results aren't actually controlling anything; they are only recorded to verify that its behavior is always the same as the old system given the same inputs.

Once you've thoroughly tested and debugged the behavior of the new system that way, you flip the switch so that now the new system is in control and the old system is merely having its results recorded. Let the system run that way for a period of time; if anything goes wrong you can always flip the switch back again. If nothing goes wrong, you can either leave the old system in place as an emergency backup (for as long as it lasts), or decommission it.

This logic made a lot of sense on the original Mac 9" screen. It makes less sense on a modern Mac with multiple large monitors, where the distance between your window's content and the menu bar can be significant, and your mouse may move up past the the menu bar and into the screen "above" if you aren't careful.

Yes, excess energy that the grid can't accept should be stored for later use when possible, or perhaps used to generate hydrogen (or synthesize gasoline or whatever fuel is most appropriate) for resale.

Being able to code without having to look away from the screen whenever you need to press a key seems like a big win for efficiency to me. Every time you look away from the screen, you have to relocate your text-line of interest again when you look back; that may take only half a second, but if you're doing it 10 times a minute, those half-seconds add up.