Yeh, the UK government will pay $50 billion to use that $15 billion (which was inflated to justify the $50 billion expenditure) technology.

The UK got a great deal. The US always pays more.

If China wants to invest In space and constructive things instead of using their military as a way of employing a huge part of their country, they should.

The US doesn't need constructive things. That's socialism which is bad. Instead, the US can hire a few million children to swing around guns and pick fights. China just teaches their kids how to mass produce drone swarms so they don't have to give their babies guns.

Hopefully for the US China will play nice and try to look scary so the US can hire more children and teach them to swing around guns.

I've been buying Huawei SSD and hard disk. I buy tape in tens of petabytes, disk in petabytes and SSD in hundreds of terabytes. Huawei is shipping cheap 64TB SSDs, but they need Huawei backplanes. So $120k gets you started with 100TB across 3 controllers and dual hundred gig switches. Growth is much cheaper. It looks like about $260k per petabyte. I'm paying about $100K per PB for hard disk but on 18TB drives. I expect $80K for 30TB drives when we switch. But that will put 3PB in a single chassis which at 20GB/s is somewhat impractical for evacuating or migrating.

IBM tape by comparison is closer to $18K per PB when adding a new drive per PB. But it really doesn't make sense until 10PB

Is it harmless? That's an opinion. Not one I share either.

Is the change an overreaction? That's also an opinion. My answer is, it is no more an "over reaction" than people clammoring for the change in the first place is .

Why is it NOT an overreaction when a feather needs to be changed because someone somewhere was offended, and removing it offends someone else? Who's Offense Matters MORE? Is it offensive or is it honoring? That is the real question and who gets to decide?

And Who gets to decide who decides? Thats the real problem.

Let's start with math.

I sampled all the questions marked hard.
I felt the questions were often obscurities for no valuable reason. It was as though they wanted to test reading comprehension rather than mathematics. As a dyslexic, I disapprove of this.
That said, there were no questions on the exam at any level that were more difficult than "sorta trivial". I think Khan Academy (I've watched every math video on the site as of 2021) covers every topic on the exam by 9th or 10th grade math.

Reading

Oh holy hell. I started by reading an essay... Nay... A diatribe on the importance of communicating clearly through simple wording. The author mastered the art of the 10 word run on sentence (feels as though it will never end) and perfected wording their sentences in the most technically proper but naturally uncomfortable forms. The author conveyed all their points in the first page or so and then used substantially more text to annoy the reader with absolutely unnecessary and uninteresting examples. The author should read Plato and Cicero on rhetoric as they have absolutely no knowledge of it themselves.

I can honestly say that I grew so bored of the writing that eventually started skipping a bit.

The questions were ugly. I'd like to believe I am skilled at these types of exams. But in the case of multiple choice questions, there were often intentionally ambiguous choices.... and I felt this was true for even the basic questions.

I've taken similar national exams in 5 different languages. (Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Italian). I faired poorly on Swedish and Italian because I understand them only due to their similarities to other languages.

The other countries had much harder math exams but that's not unusual because at least Scandinavian countries don't teach math. They teach math exam tricks to a very advanced level.

Reading exams in other countries are much better. The texts are much less pretentious and favor vocabulary common people would actually employ. Not like the author I mentioned earlier who I guess hero worshipped Chaucer.

The one notable exception I've encountered is the Norwegian B2 language exam. As someone comfortable reading university research papers written in varying degrees of Norwegian complexity the wording employed on the Norwegian B2 reading exam, a test of whether you can communicate without you peers having to change how they communicate in order to facilitate you, I encountered entire essays where I couldn't even guess what they meant. I believe this was because rather the author of those essays didn't respect the spirit or intent of the exam, a test of a person's ability to communicate and function in real world environments, they made it an academic test which tested syntax and semantics.

In summary, I wouldn't be concerned by the reading scores. I feel strongly this is a reflection upon the authors of that topic of the exam. I would be concerned by the mathematics. The exam was trivial. I've felt strongly for some time that math should be entirely self paced. Classrooms destroy mathematics. If you miss one topic you may as well just stop or retake the entire year. Teachers should focus on grading whether students learned the topic in math or if they memorized the patterns.

P.S. As a point of interest, I have evaluated many adults who scored with top grades all through school but never learned math. When a person learns math, there is no memorization involved. If you understand it, you can figure it out. "Top achievers" memorize and regurgitate. When they feel as though the information no longer holds value, they forget it.

Dutch Tulips!

Nothing new under the sun. This is the same same. I view most Crypto currencies this way. They are mostly worthless, with people waiting to rug each other.

Back to naive (probably American too), every time people are asked to face realities that make them uncomfortable, they accuse people of ludicrous nonsense like siding with maga or some other nonsense like believing in Bill Gates conspiracies.

I'm working myself to build an app and/or standardize API to link health monitoring data acquired from phones and wearables into federal medical databases for civilized countries where people are lucky enough to have governments who actually care about the welfare of their people. It's an opt-in service allowing people to choose to provide invasive data to their doctors including even GPS tracking data. So, if you get poisoned it could be useful to know where you've been to identify the poison and prevent others.

I also work with nanotech. We are experimenting with electronics that can gather data when passing through you.

Do you feel it's difficult to believe that these technologies may eventually converge? Or that it may even reach the point where these sensors a use in water management for troubleshooting the network but are seen to have health benefits? Imagine if we could produce nanotech indicators and phone sensors that would allow tracking all public water through the network, people's bodies and waste management. Each indicator would transmit nothing but a serial number. This would be so insanely useful. Airbags for water. I'll chat with my boss about it. I'd bet he could get funding for that.

And for the toilet robots. No we don't. For the sake of brevity and avoiding macroeconomics, the toilet robot is an incredible ROI. Need proof? Look at Japanese toilet seats. Toilet paper is surely cheaper.

The robot flushing would also clean. This is long overdue. Transgenderism alone has forced the need for effective methods of maintaining unisex toilet stalls. Robots will facilitate this. You finish and exit the stall and a robot rolls in to flush and clean. Same for the sinks. Men in general require great assistance sticking things in holes. Paper towels land next to the bin, toilet paper on the floor, tinkles everywhere. The smell issue too.

There are human assisted AI droids coming to the bathrooms. I'd bet your soul on it.

The number of developers capable of clearly expressing their requirements is small.

I posit that the greatest gains are achieved by the most coherent communicators.

I have seen massive gains from using AI. I turn on the microphone and dictate what I want. I break tasks into small achievable tasks with clearly defined goals and strict testing requirements. I make the AI commit changes to git and monitor the CI/CD pipeline. I constantly review code and train the models (I generally use three in parallel and choose the best result) to produce the code and comments I prefer.

But it takes time and effort to learn the tools

Kids like my daughter are obsessed with learning. They avoid AI because they'd rather get a lower grade but learn the topics. Other kids want top grades but figure they can learn it later if they choose.

I never look at grades when evaluating CVs. I look at github

" wouldn't it be better if the 300 million plus people in the United States DIDN'T need to sacrifice?"

I'm not sure, but I think this song was written *JUST* for you...

One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fire was burning
Down the track came a hobo hikin'
And he said, "Boys, I'm not turning
I'm headed for a land that's far away
Beside the crystal fountains
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains

"In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
There's a land that's fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains

"In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall, the wind don't blow
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains

"In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come a-trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railroad bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew and of whiskey, too
You can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains

"In The Big Rock Candy Mountains
The jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again
As soon as you are in
There ain't no short-handle shovels
No axes, saws or picks
I'm a-goin' to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In The Big Rock Candy Mountains

"I'll see you all this comin' fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains"

= = = = = =

"The boomers and gen x are hoarding 80% of the wealth..."

Btw, "wealth" isnt a zero sum game it grows and is continuously created -- and I fall in to the gen x category. What I'm "hording" is what I've earned in ~40 years of work. You didn't lift a finger helping me with that work, why do you think you (or anyone else) are entitled to it? It was already taxed -- and the property I bought with that already taxed money is also taxed yearly, itself. If you don't like the level of services the government provides you just ask for an audit. Good luck getting one in California. They will, however provide a lovely "blue ribbon" commission to investigate how moneys were spent and why it costs ~1 million dollars to build a single unit of homeless housing or countless other money-pits that never answer the question of "where did all the money go". You'll get the similar run-around on the federal level. Vote better. Vote for people who actually represent the people who voted for them -- and not some ambiguous "party" that claims the other 'tribe' is evil.

BTW, I'm not a Republican or Democrat. My votes go to I feel is best qualified. I want a representative who will represent me/our community over what ever party they represent. Neither party does that well.

"There simply aren't as many resources and there are more people competing for them."

It's choices. The stats show that choices and an inability to delay every single gratification leads to much higher risk of poverty. Want to avoid being in poverty? Do the following:

Graduate High School.
Don't have a kid while in High school.
Don't have a kid before marriage
Share responsibility raising your kids.

If you go to college, follow the same rules about marriage and having kids.

THAT is the toolset you need to access "resources" in life for you and your family, and pass that 'culture' on to your kids. That way, your kids will have a much higher likelihood of avoiding poverty -- and if they do experience it, minimize it's duration. A good life isn't guaranteed -- but you can stack the odds in your favor -- dramatically -- without a trust-fund.

"average age for first time home purchase across the population is over 40 buying a starter home not a young family doing the same"

I was 30 years old when I got married. We bought our home when I was 38. My son was 5 years old and my daughter was 2. I was still driving my paid off 1988 toyota pick up. Which I still have. And the stats I read place the average first home buyer age across the US at 38 as of 2024 -- but CA is certainly in the mid 40s now. We got our home about 20 years ago -- so yeah, it took us a bit longer than average back then. Our family was still "young". One of the reasons for the age creep on home-ownership that everyone ignores is that a huge chunk of the US (about 10%-15%) now have substantial student loan debt. Again -- choices -- and a failure for both school and parents to instill the need to consider what they might MAKE after graduating and how long it would take to pay those loans back.

And the cost of housing? Much of it is due to over regulation by local and state governments in building new housing and an almost religious belief that home-ownership is a sin.

"How do you stop subscribing to things when everything is now a subscription?"

Lower your standards. Pluto TV is free and has a wealth of programming.

" When you have to keep saving for and buying the same goods over and over instead of being able to save for something else after buying something."

Stop treating buying something as permanent. If you buy a $1000 phone that you KNOW will be obsolete in 5 years -- the BEST you are doing is you are "renting" the phone for a bit more than $16/mo unless it breaks in a way it's more expensive to fix after the warranty expires. Maybe buy a $200 phone that lasts 3 years? That's only ~$5. And you get a new phone every three years.

"It's all well and good to suggest that everyone should be frugile, eat ramen, and suffer but if a significant number of people actually did it the result would just be that the economy would crash."

To be clear, are you advocating people just not consider saving money? That being frugal is the equivalent to "suffering"? Sorry, but it's not a human right to have a $1000 phone, have 10+ subscription services costing more than two premiere cable services combined, eating quality steak 3+ times a week or driving a new car every 2 or 3 years.

  "The American dream needs to be achievable for the average man not just the exceptional."

I'm not exceptional and I started below average on the economic ladder. I'm the first in my family to go to high school, never mind college. My family didn't give a rip about school. My entire family were substance abusers. My sister got me high for the first time when I was 7 (she's 13 years older than me) because she thought it would be funny.

Today, I'm a home owner, I have two 10+ year old cars (paid off), two adult kids (one in the middle of college with zero debt so far and the other starting medical school next year). My son (going to medical school) has $70k in his bank from money he's earned while going to college and currently making $75/hour tutoring students for the MCAT (doing about 20-25 hours a while) taking an gap year. Daughter has 11k saved up after 3 years -- also zero debt.

The only advantages my wife and I provided were rent-free promise and paying tuition if they go locally. Both went to community college -- which, btw, was free -- just books). We only had to pay tuition once for our son as he refused our money when he got a paying job at UCLA as part of a research group.

Hell, my wife came to the US when she was 19 with her entire family back in the late 80s (she's the eldest child of kids -- and her parents). They had nothing, too. Yet each one of their kids got out of school with zero dept, all post grad degrees and are doing well in their chosen fields.

You have very low expectations of people. I think it's those low expectations that cause far more of the suffering you attribute to being "frugal" than eating Raman a few times a week.

"It's much easier to lifestyle adjust your way into feeling comfortable on $70k (median household) vs $40k (30th percentile)."

I came from nothing. Almost literally. I was raised in a family full of substance abusers. I got high for the first time when I was 7 because my sister (13 years older than me) thought it would be funny. Nobody cared about school in my family.

I am the first in my family to finish high school, never mind go to collage (did that, too). I rejected that life entirely and the moment I bolt, I was out of it and never looked back. There were a few times I needed to make choices such pay for food, pay for rent or pay for books, for example -- but could only afford two of those. I lived in a cheap studio apartment with a mini fridge that was a dumpster dive find and got by on Raman and $0.25 burritos from Taco Bell's $0.25 cent Tuesdays for a year straight. I did this while working in data entry (brain dead typing).

My wife is an immigrant -- came from Syria in the late 1980s. with her entire family -- she was 19 years old. They also had nothing, but were a much better example of a family that I came from. She was the eldest of 4 -- all have post grad degrees and are successful in their respective fields -- and all in the state of California which does *NOT* make it easy.

I'm sorry, the problem isn't the "evils of capitalisms" but far more the poor choices people make with the resources they have. The only benefits my kids have received is not having to pay for college (other than books). Not that we could realistically afford to pay anything but local tuition -- they both made due by working and saving. Free rent (in our home) and both took advantage of the local community college free tuition -- that knocked two years of college out of the way with zero expense. Son transferred to the local state college and managed to split time between that and UCLA (both very local to home). He's disciplined and only spends the interest he earns (that's his spending money) -- all he makes from work goes in to the kitty. He breaks his cash in to 4 piles -- each one goes in to CD in such a way that he has money back from other CDs every three months (4 times a year). He'll be taking his first and only school loans for medical school next year.

Again, it all comes down to what you do with the resources you have. Our kids are taking advantage of what we CAN offer and not selling their future on unrealistic expectations of employment paying back all their loans for the "college experience".

Blame the students, blame the state for not teaching the important of RoI when planning for college or even how to manage money, blame the parents for not teaching this and blame everyone who tries to brush it off as "exploitation of the workers". It's a load of fly shit.

MAKE BETTER CHOICES. And yes, not everyone starts their life with their glass half full or more, but it's REALLY not that hard to to survive and build yourself up if you make choices that match the resources you have available.

" Assuming they can avoid excessive exploitation of their labor by the ones who own nearly everything"

I keep seeing this -- but I don't really see anyone mentioning how many of those "exploited" have new cars, school debt and/or $1000 phones -- which strongly suggests they aren't very smart with excessive spending.

I own a home. My phone is over 5 years old and works flawlessly. I own a 1988 Toyota pickup and a 2011 Honda CRV (both paid for long, long ago). With the exception of some "luxuries" I allow myself and my wife allows herself (for me, it's the occasional vanity collectable like a movie poster or lobby card -- and maybe a game now and then) we don't keep buying new things. Hell, I picked up a great copy of Axis and Allies for $10 at a local garage sale and finally retired my 30 year old set that was falling apart.

The closest I've come to buying a new car was that 1988 Pickup I got in 1989 -- with 170ish miles on it. It was selling as used for about $3,000 cheaper than it's brother sitting right next to it with 27 miles on it.

Lets see -- we've managed to buy a house (about 80% paid off), have a son ready to start medical school with about $50k in his bank (he's making $75/hour being being an MCAT tutor and made money as a paid research assistant at UCLA) and a daughter half way through college with zero debt and about $11k in her account.

I'm one of the "exploited" masses, yet somehow I don't feel "exploited" -- other than by an over-reaching state government (I live in CA).

Nothing will change. Since everything will be taxed and there simply aren't enough people in the US to make alternatives... especially with low wage immigrants being kicked out... the people will still pay less than otherwise. This is just a very big federal sales tax. This is the biggest tax levied on American lower and middle classes ever. The good news is that tax reductions have made it much easier for the upper classes.

Expensive enough that I'd rather spend my money on other stuff.