In 1924 the average earnings were $1,303
And the price of a model T (the most popular car model sold that year) was $290.

Today the average salary is 70k
the price of a new Ford F-150 (the most popular car model sold last year) is from 40k - 115k

So no cars are not cheaper as you seem to suggest. Obviously they're better, but I don't think that was the discussion.

To me the older generation is the spoiled generation. They've lived through one of the wealthiest eras in human history in the wealthiest country and their miserable, constantly complaining and demanding more and electing people who have been massively increasing the national deficit - which the old people will not have to pay off becaue they'll be dead.

I've noticed huge american companies are scaling back, leaving the world to China and India and others. Temu and similar companies are eating Amazon's lunch out there. Our car companies are producing far more expensive and inferior cars and wouldn't be able to compete internationally, but are protected by the goverment here. Airbus seems to be taking lots of marketshare from Boing. A lot of this is the result of tarriffs and the pointlessly setting fire to our international relationships we've built up for decades at considerable expense but I think there's also just a sense of laziness and complacency. Stocks are going up, the american market is the biggest more lucrative one, so why bother compete internationally? Microsoft could keep going in China, but nah, there's not a lot of profit there currently, so why bother? That's obviously shortsited and short-term thinking, but whose incentivizing anyone to do any other kind of thinking?

Huh. That's the first time I've ever heard of anyone using Nostr for anything. I'm glad to see someone is finding some use for it.

I'm an american and I keep looking for good ways to invest outside of this kleptocracy.

Tesla doesn't lose as they were never actually going to mass produce affordable humanoid robots with AI anyway.

Ironically anyone who wanted to build a factory in the US because of tarriffs and wanted to use chinese robots with legs to help automate that factory may now be losers too. Interestingly robots with legs have been around since at least 1813 when they built Brunton's Mechanical Traveller, which was terrifying but only ended up killing 13 people.

Yup and we can't use China's cheap open-weight ai's because of security we so have to pay for our super-expensive ais that harvest all of our data and give it to the goverment. Its the car thing all over again.

Yeah, searching for anything in Reddit using Reddit's own search function is terrible but google can actually do the job. This baffles me, along with other basic features of reddit that have been broken or very buggy for years - in a time when people can SUPPOSEDLY use AI to code 10,000 lines a day and fix bugs like there's no tomorrow.

don't give them ideas!

I guess they would say there were a lot of iphone like products that flopped before the iphone. But no, the iphone is obviously useful, the smart speaker is just obviously annoying.

Now I do see the possibility of great smartspeakers someday in the future but they would need to

A: be fun to talk to instead of grating (OpenAI has a long, long way to go with this)
B: know you very well without it being creepy (probably by having a local ai running in a box in your home)
C: And maybe tailor their personality to one that fits with yours to the point where you can develop a disturbing & unhealthy friendship-like relationship.

Otherwise it will always just feel like talking to a corporate goon that will blandly read wikipedia articles to you.

I can kinda see what they're thinking:

"we could make it a phone app but we want to sell a physical object, and if it was just a thing with a screen it might as well be an app, so we'll make it a speaker, which could also be an app, but is sorta more divorced from the phone I guess. HEY get off our backs we don't have any new ideas, we just need to keep building the possibility we may become a huge apple-like company by saying we're developing this device WHICH WILL BE REVOLUTIONARY. Also old people don't know how to use AI -or phones really- but they sure as hell know how to yell at smart speakers!"

We could have been working for the last decade or 3 to make this a great country to have and raise children in but nah, we decided to have the most expensive healthcare system in the world (by far), no provisions for childcare for workers, no maturnity leave laws, no social safty net that would make having children less risky and very expensive housing.

Instead we were politically focused on getting rid of immigrants, which we'll eventually need to import more of because we don't have any young people because we were too focused on getting rid of immigrants to make life stable & happy enough for anyone to have babies.

I feel like Zuckerberg must personally dispise facebook, because its his only real success and is just a sad place where old people endless discuss politics and share shitty hardwarming ai memes. You can kinda tell when you log in to fb - its been just squeezed for ad cash and enshittified to the max, they don't care about it at all, they want to move on, but they can't because they suck.

I mean I'm not going to be hanging out with anyone wearing smart glasses anyway. That's an automatic trip to my permanent shit list.

If everyone starts wearing them then that doesn't make it ok, fuck everyone in that case. Just because foot-binding was popular in China 200 years ago didn't make it ok either.

Its weird. I'm pretty sure the games they've been making have been profitable. I guess they think "why not triple the profit by making the games with 1/2 as many people!"

"it would actually be useful to have a good secure way to verify to my bank for example that I'm actually the person accessing my banking account"

We have one. Its called passwords with 2 factor identification. It works and has for years and decades.

Is it perfect? No. Is the overly complicated and privacy invasive system that people are proposing likely to be better? No.