As a historian the only caveat I'd advise there is that we are unlikely to see a long, drawn-out slog like WW2 again. Production capacity is great but the next Great Power war isn't likely to take place over years or even months. So China's technological edge is likely to matter but it's tempered with a willingness to stockpile and maintain systems which may never see use.

Doing that at limited production scale is one thing. Doing it at massive, "we're going to fight a serious war with this stuff" scales is another. China, like many authoritarian regimes, has shown itself to be dazzled by the propaganda value of wonder weapons. The CJ-1000, most recently, seems like a very impressive missile system but if it doesn't exist is sufficient quantity to turn the tide against American assets in theater it's just a waste of money.

Of course, China is also famously closed lipped so it's hard to tell. It might turn out that they have tens of thousands of those things. Probably not, but maybe.

...and thanks for all the fish.

A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.

Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first kind: a coin which enables some other service that delivers real value. That value is bribing government officials.

Large purchases of Trump Coin necessarily drive the price of the coin up, allowing Trump or his chosen acolytes to sell their horded coins at a tidy profit. Everyone who holds the coins has a commonly held interest. Everyone who buys them to inflate the price and enrich the holders expects to get something for their trouble and then becomes part of the cabal of holders.

Trump Coin is basically an anti-dollar: it is backed, not by the full faith and credit of the United States but by the political corruption and dominance of the MAGA movement.

Most of the restaurants I go to don't even serve alcohol. Of course, I live in Utah, which is at the very bottom of the alcohol consumption per capita chart. Here restaurants all have normal fountain drinks, water, and then a wide array of specialty drinks, many of which are just normal sodas with some stuff added in.

Being a restaurant owner is hard. The margins on most food is slim. The margins on drinks (alcoholic or not), on the other hand, are ridiculous. There's a reason why sit down restaurants start you with something to drink, and why fast food places bundle sodas. To a very real extent these businesses make their money upselling you from drinking plain water.

It's wild to imagine Echostar/Dish being worth anything close to that amount of money. From my own experience working inside the company everything always seemed like it was held together with bailing wire and bubble-gum.

I assume there was a highly competitive bidding process for this because there's no way Dish's board of directors would have had the stones to set the price at "three times the company's market cap" on their own.

I'm largely in agreement with you. I don't think its terribly effective to tell people what they can and can't do. If we don't want people to gamble, making gambling illegal isn't going to move the needle meaningfully and it's probably going to increase overall harm. See, for example, the war on drugs.

But we can move the needle by regulating the supply side of the equation and the more infrastructure intensive the supply side is the more effective regulation is. Banning the sale of leaded gas, for example, resulted in a pretty painless transition away from lead in gasoline. We didn't need to arrest people using leaded gas; the inconvenience of getting leaded gas was more than enough to get people to convert.

That's the approach that makes the most sense for online gambling too. We don't need to be kicking down doors to card games or frog-marching seniors out of bingo night, but we probably would be substantially better off if it weren't legal to develop platforms and services which are specifically engineered to engaged young people and nurture in them a crippling gambling addiction.

And we can say "oh, but why can't you just convince companies not to build those products without the threat of government force" but building those gambling products, or putting heroin in the Big Mac special sauce, or handing out cigarettes and alcohol at middle school football games is a fantastic way to make giant buckets of money at the expense of people's lives and nothing short of the threat of consequences exceeding those potential profits is going to convince a profit-seeking corporation to pass on all that money.

Banning tobacco didn't stop smoking, but banning cigarette vending machines meaningfully reduced it, especially in under-age smokers and lighter smokers.

Yes, banning gambling doesn't stop gaming addiction but taking the casino out of your pocket and taking away the casino's ability to run A/B tests on what it takes to get you, personally, to place your next bet will reduce the harm of gambling addiction across the population.

Anyone who did Not See this coming isn't paying attention. One of the hallmarks of a fascist ideology is the identification of any competing ideas as degenerate or ideologically poisonous. This is not a "both sides" issue; the insistence that we not teach political fantasy and conspiracy theory is qualitatively different than insisting that we teach what actually happened and we can tell the difference by imagining the opposite.

If tomorrow incontrovertible evidence that the 2020 election was stolen came out, you wouldn't see a bunch of Democrats insisting that we refuse to teach it. How do we know that? Simple: look at how the Lewinsky scandal is covered in Blue-state history curricula.

Pediatric cancer survivor and long-time pediatric oncology caregiver/volunteer checking in. I see this sentiment a lot from people outside of the cancer community and, I get it: chemotherapy looks brutal because it _is_ brutal.

But you need to understand what "letting things progress naturally" means.

Cancer is uncontrolled cell growth. If you're LUCKY "naturally" means that some gnarly tumor in your brain causes progressively erases you from your own mind over the course of a couple months. If you're unlucky, it means that tiny tumors grow in all of your various vital organs, slowly choking off your body's ability to manage its basic processes over the course of years. If you're VERY unlucky, you end up with something like an aggressive leukemia which causes your bone-marrow to grow so fast that your bones POP.

These are not fun ways to go.

The nice thing about the treatment killing you is that, more often than not, it means that you suffer some kind of immune system collapse and an opportunistic bacteria or virus wipes you out over the course of a couple of days. It's not a merciful end but it's often more merciful than what cancer has in store for you.

All I'm saying is... don't write off treatment until you have a good sense of what the alternative is.

Precisely. This is going to be used against the owners of the hardware, not for them. I suspect that these containers are very secure. It's just too bad that my phone is the one device that I own where I do not have root access. This security is not going to be used to protect my data from Google, but to protect Google's data from me.

Hooray!

Ad Hominem would be saying "well Musk is a gross weirdo with a breeding fetish and why would you want to agree with a gross weirdo like that?"

But showing that Musk is an unreliable source **because he has been unreliable in the past** isn't ad hominem at all. The argument isn't about tearing down Musk as a person as a proxy for tearing down his argument; it's about saying "look, Mr Musk, you're asking us to take you at your word that you're the victim of illegal actions by Apple but your word hasn't historically been worth a whole lot."

We could agree that IF what Musk is saying is true, Apple's behavior sounds sketchy, but if we can't agree that Musk is telling the truth (and right now the validity of his claim hangs on his own credibility) then we can't draw any conclusions about Apple's behavior.

There are a lot of jobs posted out there in the computing sciences but there are also hundreds or even thousands of applicants to those jobs. I've got the seniority and the leadership pedigree but even for me, a job search right now amounts to throwing hundreds of resumes against the wall looking for a match. The reality is that, because of the enormous applicant volume -- qualified or not -- the odds of even a company getting back to you, even one that's a really great fit, are low and down to luck more often than not.

The biggest driver is speed of application. If you get your resume in within the first day or so of the position being opened there's at least a reasonable chance that someone will read it and get back to you.

That forces applicants to lean into a bulk application approach. You can't invest a bunch of time in any given application because you're unlikely to see a return on that investment and every moment you spend honing your resume is a moment other people are getting in the resume queue in front of you. And realistically, the hiring manager is going to get sick of reading resumes eventually; you just hope it's after he reads yours.

So yea, the market is terrible right now and the same things that are making it terrible are the things that people are using to cope with it being terrible. Because the moment it doesn't cost me anything to apply to a position with an AI crafted resume that makes sure to tick all of the boxes this company is likely looking for... well... why wouldn't I apply? Sure, there's only a 0.1% chance my application converts to an interview but I can take that gamble if it's two mouse-clicks to put my name in the hat.

This is WILDLY different from the experience of job hunting in CS back in the late 20-teens and early 20s. The combination of hiring pull-back, AI uncertainty, and applicant profusion has completely changed the game.