Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

That's not an argument.

"Yeah, that guy is dead now. We have a pretty solid idea who did it. But not sure if that'll make him alive again, so let's not bother with catching them."

Your link - seriously?

"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.

I don't even need to know you to know that you are a complete moron. You have already offered up incontrovertible evidence showing that much. Off you go now ...

Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

Unlike most cops, most people don't commit crimes against humanity regularly. I don't know very many non-cops that do home invasions and kidnappings, or get together in a group to beat up helpless people they don't like for example. Nice attempt at false equivalence though.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

That's strange. I see cops regularly harassing the homeless, young people, people of color, and anyone who doesn't fit the standard white conformist profile, but rarely see the other "regular" human beings doing so. Where do you live that all the "just human beings" are falsely arresting, fabricating charges against, and ruining the lives of people they don't like and/or that won't kiss their ass?

I said I have known / met them. I didn't say they were my friends. Have you ever heard of police associations? Have you ever been to functions that cater to the police? Have you been in and around the criminal court systems where you regularly meet cops? Do you have any relatives with decades in law enforcement? Do you have a family with strong ties to departments in hundreds of different cities and towns? Did you go to visit all these various departments and meet the officers? Were there over 200 uniformed cops at your father's funeral? You don't know anything about me, so calling me a liar might not your best path to informed and intelligent commentary. Cops are like M$ Windows: the more you know about them the more you realize they should be avoided unless there is no alternative.

I have known thousands of cops including a stepmother who rose through the ranks from beat cop to chief of police, and have been at functions with hundreds of cops telling stories of all their crimes. Everything I said is based on first hand evidence except the additional video proof I pointed out. Further research into you shows that you come from a cop family and are a known bootlicker.

I can assure you that most cops are criminals, that they regularly disrespect citizens who do not stroke their egos, and become dangerously unprofessional anytime they think there is an opportunity to do so. Bodycam footage is a major factor now, but one only needs to do some actual research, for example the Bricks and Minifigs / Reckless Ben case, where redacted bodycam footage normally never exposed makes clear how cops actually behave when they think they can get away with it comes to light. Cops don't become cops because they have a strong philanthropic bent. They become cops because they want power over the people who picked on them in High School, or the people who know what bullies and small minded twerps they actually are when they don't have their fellow gang members to join in their crimes.

The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.

It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.

In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.

And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.

Someone hasn't flown in a while.

I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.

Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.

I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.

You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.

So... ordinary airport before enshitification ?

Air travel used to be pretty cool. Now absolutely every part of it is annoying. Especially the booking and its 25 upsale offers.

A few years more of this and you'll have to book business just to get a seat and fresh air.