Inflation is the drain on the nation. The reason for all of these 1 Trillion dollar companies is that there are all of these money created by the various governments and banks propped up by government entities, all of the bail outs, money printing, quantitative easing (money printing), etc., all of it is inflation, i.e. expansion of the money supply. Much of it is driven by the pathetically low interest rates, manipulated by the government over the last few decades (as the governments got off the gold), all of it means simply that prices for things (including stock valuations) go up, none of it is increase in any actual productivity, all of it is bad for the world and global economies no matter what the likes of Paul Krugmans and other Keynesian charlatans are telling you.

Basically a trillion dollars is not what it used to be, it used to be inconceivable, now it is just another Tuesday.

I see you haven't seen any version of GNOME from the last 18 years.

For Microsoft, that would be the wrong way. Instead of making many Microsofts, the govts should go the other way, and make zero!

Shouldn't we introduce a "doh!" section for stuff like "vibe coded software has security holes", because it's... well... I mean, what else did you expect? Have you SEEN the results of vibe coding?

Has someone told him about the heat problem in space? Vacuum is cold, but it's also a near perfect insulation. Getting rid of heat is a constant problem for space craft because there is no heat exchange and radiating it off is the only option you have and it's terribly inefficient. And last I checked, GPUs generate quite a bit of heat.

This, more than any "but you can't see the difference anyways" comment is the core problem.

If there's no content, then there's no point in having an 8K TV.

Where high resolution makes sense is computer displays. I'm writhing this on a 5K display, and it lets me keep text at virtually any size readable. You rarely read double-page text content on a TV.

Good point.

So here's my counter-offer: Instead of an Airtag, put a coupon for 20% off a box of donuts into the car. Make sure to let them know when you report the theft. Now they have double incentives.

No, that was all cars stolen. The point was: Airtag or not, 85% of cars are eventually recovered anyways, and the ones that are not you would most likely not recover even with an Airtag. Or do you really think that the cops will unload and search a container ship because you say there's a ping on your FindMy app?

Why?

First, police have been repeatedly reported as being reluctant to go where owners tell them their hardware has reported in. We've had this with notebooks and smartphones. Second, you don't need Airtags to get location data. My current car is 7 or 8 years old and I can ask it for current location via an App, or make it flash its headlights or honk if I lost it in a huge parking lot. That's ten times more useful than an Airtag. But if thieves were even one bit professional, they of course know these things. They will disable them first. As for Airtags - they have this anti-stalking feature, so if the thief is driving around in your car for a bit, he'll be told that there's an unknown Airtag following him. At which point he'll stop, locate it and you can send the cops to an empty ditch at the side of the road.

Two tracks for redundancy and to go both directions. Additional tracks for local trains or freight can go above or below, since we're building vertical anyways.

Disagree. If you have on- and off-ramps, the engines don't have to be in the pods, they can be in the ramp. The main problem with any and all "pod travel" concepts is that instead of one huge engine in front of a train, you now have a hundred little engines. Which is not only less efficient, it's also a maintenance nightmare.

Along the outside wall you could have the largest graffiti ever. :-)

That's an interesting physics question. Over enough time (a couple years, say), would all the air inside the station spin along with it? My intuition says yes.

But we get away from the topic. It's been an interesting little discussion. Thanks.

Pure AI isn't good enough, and that isn't what most people will submit.

AI makes mistakes and humans make mistakes, but they make different mistakes. Humans make grammar and word choice mistakes much more often than AI, while AI makes factual mistakes.

A researcher can run the original through an LLM to produce a well-written, grammatically correct translation. Then they read it and correct the factual errors. Researchers who can't write English well can usually still read it well enough to catch factual errors.

We agree that The Line is silly, so not reason to argue that. And one of the reasons it is not just silly but idiotic is the "200m wide" part. There are tons of buildings in pretty much every major city on the planet that are longer than that. So I think we agree that for The Line to be even borderline reasonable, we should at least double that. Let's say 500m. That means if our transport (whatever form it has) runs roughly in the center nobody is further than 250m away from it. Which means with enough stations we can ensure that every place on this Wide Line has one within walking distance. If you're a slow walker or handicapped, just don't pick a home at the very edge.

I think if someone with more time actually thought this through, it could be salvaged as a somewhat working concept. Still silly, but not entirely unworkable.

But isn't that the main fun factor? You could literally skydive for 20 minutes because you only start falling fast near the end. :-)

Scanning or not, it still needs a cop car with at least one cop more motivated to go after a stolen car than after today's 10% off at the donut shop.

I mean yes, technically you are right that reporting it within a day is better than within a week.

But numbers don't lie. The statistics I pulled up just because I like facts say that 85% of stolen vehicles are eventually found and returned to their owners. Mostly because a large number are stolen either for joyrides - and abandoned after a day or two, often within hours - or to use in another crime, think getaway car, again usually abandoned after that.

The 15% that are never found are either stripped for parts or shipped off to another continent.

In other words: What the criminal intends to do with your car is the main factor in whether or not it is found and returned. Most cars are found and returned because the thieves abandon them, not because they are caught.

So yes, technically, you are right. But given the statistics, how much of a difference do you think it makes? By the time you report the theft, in both cases (within a day or within a week), your car most likely has either been abandoned already and is just waiting to be found, or is already in a bodyshop or container. In both cases, you reporting it timely makes little difference.

America already does it. Several states ban social media for teens. Utah was first. Other states followed.

Most states with bans leave it up to the tech companies to figure out how to verify age.

The economy started collapsing once the government introduced such concepts that allowed it to get to the point of the collapse. 2007 was a result of a number of wrong and bad decisions, it was not the cause. The cause is the government expansion, printing of paper money, federal reserve controlling and manipulating interest rates to be below what market would set, various rules, laws, regulations and taxes that prevent formation of capital and of businesses and promote outsourcing manufacturing.

What we are observing now is just many lines of bad decisions coming together into a single point, everything is being focused together and comes into light.

The reasons for all of this is corruption bottom up and top down, it is people expecting free shit to be handed out by government, expectations are that some people will pay for others, it doesn't matter if we are talking about income taxes, bank bailouts, housing subsidies, various rules and regulations, it is just a culmination of the effects of all of these causes.

That's why not running uMatrix or disabling its deny-by-default mode is insane.

Marking the value of these companies to market, is that it? For decades the idea for all of these 'businesses' was to collect as many free users as possible (which is why they could get hundreds of thousands if not millions of subscribers per day) and then get paid by the 'investors' (gamblers) for this. Their best business propositions were to sell advertisements and to sell user data. By introducing paid subscriptions AFAIC they are actually marking the value of their businesses to market, as in they are going to find out what their business models are actually worth. What will this do to their share prices you ask? I don't know, I wonder if they do.