In my experience, when a person asks for a citation to some purported fact somebody posted and the guy posting it responds "Google it", this almost always means "I don't have a citation", which usually translates "I heard it on the internet somewhere, not sure where."

Oddly, I was prepared to believe you right up to the moment you posted this.

It has created massive personal inflation for some people.

The EU decided that to protect local middlemen they would introduce a 3 Euro charge per item type on packages being imported. It seems to have been targeted at sites like AliExpress and Temu. I'm sure they will sooner or later set up local distribution warehouses inside the EU - in fact they already have some, so that popular items and heavily discounted ones can be delivered more quickly and cheaply. I suppose that creates some jobs, but it must be very annoying for people buying less popular stuff who are forced to pay the 3 Euro or buy from a middleman.

Games are around $70 today, which adjusted for inflation is about $32 in 1996. If you look at ads from back then, games were typically $50 on the original Playstation.

What's happened is many of the basics of life have been squeezed. Housing, education, utilities. Meanwhile wages have stagnated, in real terms.

It's more about getting health data into a common format so that it's not stuck in lots of individual providers. Your dentist, your health tracker, the place that did your x-ray, your smart bathroom scales, they can all contribute data to your health records. You can keep those records on the platform of your choice, including your own self hosted one.

And before the paranoid comments start, they did this with Matter for smart home stuff too, and it is genuinely open and local only capable.

How about Grok? xAI is being sued because it lets you make child abuse material, which sounds pretty unrestricted.

Wait, what? They're *making* money now? Last I heard they were still playing shell games with pretend money in a financial merry-go-round of pinky swear deals to make it seem like they are somehow not haemorrhaging quite so many hundreds of billions of dollars as they actually are to try and keep the VC funding flowing in.

The AI endgame, sure. That's totally going to be the kind of bait and switch that Google pulled when they transitioned from a search provider into an ad provider; get everyone hooked on your services, then monetise all the data you've captured and start cranking up the token fees until your customers (only they are actually more your "product" now) squeal, then turn it up some more while offering a rent-seeking subscription model that looks like a good deal until you realise (too late) what they've buried in the small print.

Drug pushers are probably looking at the tech industry in awe at this point.

Interesting. Might be effective against the less sophisticated systems that North Korea and Israel have. I'd imagine that the French and US and Russian ones are probably radiation hardened though.

Except we don't have to bother with importers now, we can easily just go direct to the source. The barriers that meant we needed them in the past have been removed.

Unless you are in the EU, in which case the 3 Euro per item group charge is ridiculous. Almost enough for me not to want to rejoin.

Nukes in space aren't all that useful anyway. Very expensive, vulnerable because you can't hide a satellite, and offering little over submarine launched ICBMs.

First strikes are pointless because submarines will launch a second strike back at you. If the satellites can't be hidden they aren't much good for second strikes either.

Unless you need it very quickly, why pay the 10x mark-up from Amazon at all? Just copy the product image, search by image on AliExpress, and enjoy a 90% discount. Takes about 10 days to get to the UK, or less if you can find one that ships from a local warehouse.

It's not just the return policy you are paying for, it's the middle men.

You pay 10x as much (literally, many sellers seem to just take the AliExpress/Alibaba price and add an extra zero) and over a few purchases the 90% discount you get by buying direct from China far outweighs any losses due to defective or fraudulent products.

That said AliExpress is actually okay with returns now, at least for UK customers. Often you don't have to return things at all. You can always do a credit card chargeback on expensive items too, and they won't penalize you for it.

It's because the US is big on negative freedom, which is freedom from interference, but seems to dislike positive freedom, which is the opportunity to prosper.

In Europe there is a lot of positive freedom. The right to an education, limits on what you can contractually sign away, rules that address the power imbalance between large corporations and individuals.

Chinese companies will finance it because it's a matter of national security, because the Chinese government backs their efforts, and because the potential pay-off is huge.

There are already Chinese DRAM manufacturers doing reasonably well in the embedded/mobile space. This has been brewing for years.

It might not matter in 10 years. Peolpe are already importing Chinese tractors because they are simple and easy to maintain, and decent quality. Depending on how protectionist the US remains, in 10 years the market may look very different.

It seems like there is an obvious business opportunity for a domestic tractor manufacturer here. Anyone care to explain why nobody has moved into this market?