A trade deficit is caused by a country consuming more than it produces. That's it.

Americans collectively don't save and their government spends more than it takes in in revenue. The extra consumption has to be imported.
You can argue about the "why" but the deficit is about consuming more than they produce.

"Maybe everyone's just practicing their language skills with ChatGPT?"

Or: Maybe no one's practicing any skills whatsoever anymore, because they expect answers will always be available on-demand via ChatGPT (et. al.)

To be a victim of fraud you would have to have been lied to or decieved and been deprived of something. If someone pretends to be you and an institution doesn't validate that they are really talking to you then the institution has been decieved. Saying you are the victim allows the instituition to pass the blame and inconvinience on you for their mistake. It is an excuse for the institutions to not pay you for inconviniencing them.

18 months ago someone walked into a bank branch 3000km from where I live, didn't show ID, social engineered the teller over the coarse of 3 visits and took 40K from a credit line I no longer had access to. The bank paid for my time explaining to them what the did wrong.

Let's correct this fallacy when someone impersonates you to an institution you are not the victim of identity fraud the instititution is. You are should only be merely inconvinienced. And f@#K the banks or who ever who ask you to jump through hoops to fix their mistake. It is up the institutions to ensure that they gave the aid/loan/whatever to the correct individual.

In this case it looks like the colleges didn't check people's identities very well knowing that the federal student aid program would eat the cost. This is a moral hazzard. The college's want students paying tuition, they have no incentive to check identities because that would mean turning away someone who is paying. The federal student aid programs likely had no way to physically meet the students so they delegated the work to an unmotivated party, the colleges. The easy fix is to put the colleges on the hook for the faud. They should also be on the hook, at least partially, for students who don't pay back the loans. That would quickly eliminate degrees that don't lead to jobs that pay well enough to pay back the loans. If colleges don't like the deal then they don't need to accept students on federal aid.

The cables aren't the bottle neck. It is getting approval to buy them. The electric utilities in most of the western world are guarenteed a return on any capital investment usually of between 11% and 13%. In return they have to go to the public regulators to get approval for any capital expenditures. It is the regulators that won't approve the spending of money on new transmissions. The public regulators are the dumbest institutions on the planet. If you think you have delt with the stupidest government regulators in the world you still won't be prepared for the utility regulators. The power outages in Texas, blame the public regulator for forgetting to have any incentive for insuring power supply during a cold snap. PG&E's power lines fail, start forest fires, people die, blame the regulator for not allowing PG&E to replace them. OG&E raising your rates to pay for 2 peaker plants when they instead had a plan to cut your median rate by $50 month by shifting demand, blame the public regulator.

Here is John Oliver explaining the problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Just ignore the last 5 minutes where John forgets everything he said for the previous 20 minutes and goes on his anti capitalism rant.

My limited sample: I have 3 long-time engineering friends currently looking for jobs, and they've all been asked to use AI tools of some sort in all of their recent interviews.

Weirdly, most of those cases have sprung the requirement on the person by surprise midway into the interview.

You sound like one of the misinformation spigots that are cheesed you can't get traction on Bluesky.

I access Bluesky on the Firefox browser on my Android-based phone.

Listen to Jeff Bezos' Washington Post and Trump's Wharton School.

If you're a right-winger, it's a terrible place to be. Don't come!

I was a senior software engineer (now a CS professor), and I never touch-typed, and it never held me back.

The work of the programmer/engineer is what, 95% mental work, 5% typing? (to be generous to the latter) That's without even getting into rapidly-changing input techniques, autocomplete in the IDE, etc.

Anecdote: When I got my first engineering job in the 90's, I vented my frustration to my father, "The guy in the next cubicle is like 100 times more productive than me" (comparing a day-1 out of college programmer to a senior codebase expert who was indeed one those x100 engineers). My father's response was, "Well, he must be a much faster typist than you are", and it was all I could do to not laugh or choke on such a ridiculous misunderstanding of the job. Consider the degree to which that's a relevant assessment.

Taxing negative externalities like pollution and CO2 is the best way to deal with them.

How is this a capitalism problem? The problems are all created by a dictator manipulating markets, building what didn't need to be built, creating the wrong jobs and no internal demand for goods. The only capitalism here is a free market creating and charging for a good that is in demand.

A few weeks SO staff posted a "we're rebranding" post on the site in the Q&A format. They've been throwing out all kinds of supposed strategic expansions lately, which look scattered and less than coherent.This particular post generated comments and the CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar started responding.

Observation: The CEO (unfiltered by editors, legal, or PR) can barely write a coherent English sentence. They're not making any sense at all with their current plans, as far as I can tell. Their goose is probably cooked. Remember when Slashdot came off its peak and was sold and shuffled around a couple times by corporations grasping for some way to leverage its former popularity? Like that.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/408825/341383

I personally have a lot of white and Asian community-college students who can't do basic algebra.

Since 1866, New York State has had a standardized testing regime at the end of high school to qualify for a statewide Regents Diploma. Since at least 2015, they likewise goose the scores in a broadly similar way. You can see a scoring conversion chart from last year here. For example, out of 82 possible points on the Algebra I test, scoring 29 (that is, 35%) gets scaled up to a reported score of 65, qualifying for performance level 3 (out of 5, like a 'C'), and so qualifies for the Regents Diploma (more).

In the time since that's been done, the proficiency of basic math skills for incoming college students has become so poor, the colleges (like CUNY) have had to abandon the requirement to know any algebra even as an expectation to graduate college.

Being a dick is independent to how much money you have. You should like the rich, they pay far more taxes in absolute terms (and usually as a percentage of earnings), they invest and take risks. They own the means of production that makes the poor more productive. They buy/build and maintain the housing that most of the poor live in. If you don't like the arrangement you are free to get together with others in your "class" and create your own communist paradise. Heck you can collect welfare and have your kids educated by the rest of us while you try. The fact that no one ever does without trying to take the means of production says all there needs to be said about communism.

Elon Musk, the guy that proved electric cars could be profitable, was always a dick, the left though chose to make him their enemy.