Lots and lots of Americans cut everything right to the edge. There are lots of jobs in New York that pay like shit and people aren't forced to take and order to get enough experience that they can move somewhere else that isn't so fucking miserable to live.

So I can see somebody driving in not as some sort of status symbol but because they needed to being put off by this massively.

Remember an economist calling modern American Life a fragile existence. No safety no protections everything can come crashing down in an instant and then you just get replaced by somebody behind you in the line.

The number of people who go to restaurants for food is vanishingly small. Most people go because they are either too tired to cook or they just want a place to hang out with friends and maybe drink some booze.

So while I certainly agree with you that to me it seems strange to spend all that money on shitty reheated food to most people it's the going not what do you get when you're there.

Also I have kind of a fucked up sense of taste and smell so my kid would pretty much take anything except what I cooked because I was in absolutely terrible cook, still am too.

Oh and sometimes it's just dumb memories. You grow up eating a certain type of slop from chain restaurants and you associate good things from childhood with it. Burger King might be terrible food but I have associations of eating it after seeing a movie or getting a new toy.

So haven't done quite a bit of tech support I can tell you that there is no such app.

Many many years ago there was but companies decided to fire their local documentation teams and either insist the employees right to documentation in addition to their regular duties, which of course they don't do, or the outsource documentation writing to Indians who barely speak English but are super super super cheap

The result is if you are calling tech support you are almost entirely reliant on institutional knowledge.

Companies are trying to make it so that that institutional knowledge ends up in AI. I don't think tech support people are intelligent enough to realize that's happening when their knowledge is being plumbed. But I also don't think they're capable of writing documentation that would be useful to an AI.

It's possible that the companies will start to hire real tech writers again to feed the AIs and if they do that then yeah, you'll be able to just chat bought your way to fixing just about any problem except things that need to go to the actual development team.

The fun part is we are about to put pretty much every white collar worker on the planet out of work. And the blue collar workers will follow because the high earnings of high productivity white collar workers are what allow us to hire blue collar workers to do all the other work they do.

Basically the entire economy is going to collapse. If you've ever seen what Sudan looks like think of that but the entire world. A tiny amount of people living in God like wealth, a handful of people servicing them and then object poverty everywhere.

Oh and drones to keep the rabble in line.

It's called techno feudalism and I don't think we can stop at anymore. The only thing that could have stopped it was electoral politics and that has failed us. Violence won't work because that just turns into a right wing extremist government and they are going to maintain the status quo.

If we still enforced antitrust law I think you would have a point but we stopped doing that 40 years ago.

So the way it plays out is right now if you're a large Enterprise VMware has you by the balls. As others have pointed out there really isn't anything that can scale the way VMware does and broadcom knows that which is why they're charging through the nose.

Smaller shops can and will switch to other products but like the grandparents is implying VMware doesn't care because when you can soak your big clients that hard you come out ahead.

Now 20 30 40 years ago if you did that then a competitor would use their access to smaller clients to climb their way up the ranks and then they go head-to-head competing with you.

After 40 years of zero antitrust law enforcement broadcom is going to spot that competitor coming a mile away, drop their pants on pricing for a year or two and run them out of business while poaching all their best engineers, and then buy up the skeletal remains to get the patents.

I don't think people realize just how much we have given up in the last 40 years to mega corporations. Especially as tech nerds because we are only just now getting put on the same menu that the blue collar guys have been on for the last 40 years.

I started bringing reusable bags because they were insulated and it's summer. I keep a handful of the plastic bags from the supermarket around for emergency trash but I find that if I am not consistently bringing my own bags I quickly wind up with way way way more supermarket plastic bags and I can possibly use for emergency trash cans.

They're too thin and flimsy and full of holes to use for anything that has actual garbage in it. I don't eat out very often so the constant grocery trips mean that I end up buried in them if I don't just throw half of them out.

The only downside is it's made me picky about how my groceries get bagged trying to get the cold stuff in the right place with the cold packs I usually carry with me to keep ice cream from defrosting.

On the plus side just so I can really piss some people here off bringing my own bags let's be put the n95 mask I wear everywhere in public in the bag so I don't accidentally forget it and have to drive back home to get it.

And just to really confuse and irritate those folks I drive an SUV. albeit one I purchase from a mechanic I trust because it's what they had at the time and I needed a car. Also it's old and I barely drive it. I don't know how SUV owners put up with the cost of gas when you have an actual commute...

I prefer Cookie clicker and the eldritch Grandma apocalypse, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...

Because llms are just fancy search engines.

There is a entire new world of lunatics and scam artists forming cults around various llms. It's becoming a problem because they will reinforce various mental illnesses. They are often tailored to encourage engagement because of course they are and so if you come at them looking for them to tell you they are God or you are God they cheerfully will.

The problem with these new software tools is we aren't ready for them as a species. Not in the cool killer robot way but in the incredibly stupid society not prepared for a 3rd industrial revolution way.

It's like giving a loaded handgun to a toddler. Only without even the pretense of adult supervision.

There's no taking it away though. And there's nobody to punish the idiot handing the toddler the gun.

I'd like to see us just grow up real fast so that we don't start shooting other people and or ourselves but I don't think that's going to happen.

The single biggest shift in American politics in the last 100 years happened while hardly anyone was looking.

Elon came out and said that anyone who crossed him in Congress would face a fully funded primary challenger.

If you're in the House of Representatives and your Republican that means Elon told you in no uncertain terms that if you crossed him he would end your career.

Primary elections usually have very little money in them relative to the general. Musk can easily fund 300 of them and completely replace every Republican in the house of representatives. It wouldn't even be a stretch for him to do the same in the Senate although that would be a lot more money.

It is the most naked abuse of the power of money we have ever seen out in the open and we all just kind of either didn't notice or collectively shrugged.

The majority party is basically owned Lock stock and barrel by one illegal immigrant. And it's an illegal immigrant who has already worked with our direct geopolitical enemies more than once...

The problem is we don't have a functioning news system or journalism anymore. The information is out there but it's not packaged in a way that people can consume and understand.

The problem was Tesla is collapsing faster than musk can pull out the value for himself.

Elon has a plan to get a 55 billion dollar pay package. When that hits, and it will he's just working on the paperwork and buying off some legislators to get laws to make it legal, when that hits it's going to basically destroy the company.

That is more profit than Tesla has made in its entire life. It's going to starve their R&d divisions when they are already struggling to keep up with newer electric cars from Hyundai and Kia and BMW.

The stock market has figured out musk lies. Also his self-driving cars don't work and that was fine when nobody had working self-driving cars but Google has them all over the goddamn place. So he can't use that as a hype engine anymore.

Musk politics were so bad that it was and continues to Crater Tesla sales. Europe is basically stopped buying them entirely. China was always going to go away for Tesla because they tend to only allow foreign companies in long enough to build their own local manufacturers and they are at that point already.

The kind of person who buys an electric car is often a slightly left of center highly paid professional of the shave the whales variety. Even if that's not the majority it's a large enough percentage that even in America his sales continue to drop. And the price of used Tesla's has absolutely collapsed. There's a YouTuber who went in the sell his because he wanted to switch back to a big honking truck and he waited two weeks after getting his first quote and lost 4K in value.

So musk is backing off of politics to try and keep Tesla alive long enough for him to kill and eat it himself.

All of this means that if you own stock and you aren't extremely risk protected you need to sell it now. It's not a question of if Tesla will collapse it's when and how much money Elon Musk will make off the collapse...

It's a pity we aren't building more wind power because with that whooshing noise from you missing the joke over your head we could make a killing

Musk has a staff in each of his companies that exists to keep him away from decision making because he is a known idiot. He has only ever existed as a hype man.

That said he was able to draw a bunch of engineers to SpaceX because he spent a lot of money building up an image of himself as a genius so I think it's possible that there's a bit of a breakdown and the staff that would normally be protecting SpaceX from his incompetence can't always do that. So it's possible the engineers did something stupid as a result.

Think Elon Musk is some kind of genius and if he told them to use stainless steel they would do everything in their power to try and make it work.

It's called a reality distortion field. Steve Jobs had it and for some reason Elon Musk has it and so does Donald trump. I don't understand it because I am more than a little autistic so the kind of charisma tricks those men use just don't work on me. Not because I'm any better of a person or smarter but because I don't relate to humans the way normal humans relate to each other. So you can't exploit those relationships to create a reality distortion field.

It's not terribly useful but it does mean I can be an outsider looking in and I knew from the beginning when I first saw him in iron Man 2 that Elon Musk was a big fat phony.

Outlandish promises that bring in tons of investment cash. Not just a SpaceX but also to his other business Tesla.

Musk has a pattern of making insane promises the draw it insane amount of attention which generates a lot of hype that he can use to pump his publicly traded companies.

Recently it stopped working because he just kept not delivering on promises, with cybertruck being the final nail in that coffin. That's why he moved into politics so he could secure hundreds of billions of dollars of government contracts that he neither deserves nor earned. Frankly giving him contracts after what he did in Ukraine interfering in the war is a national security risk and he knows it.

He made a show of stepping away from politics but I don't think anyone is so dumb that they believe he's really doing it

It's the process of engaging in fruitless requests for more and more and more information and details and debate in order to continuously derail the conversation away from the topic at hand. It's in advanced form of the Mott and Bailey fallacy.

Learn to spot it and he disingenuous pieces of horseshit that use it. You will find they are always always always on the right wing because the right wing doesn't have any good ideas so they have to have bad arguments instead.

They don't normally send them to a page you come to the page for the content that's there and there happens to be an advertisement. For the most part the ads are unobtrusive if the content is at all worthwhile. If I go to a site in the ads are adjust overwhelming it's almost guaranteed the content there is useless.

Also they aren't relying on Google for customers. Google has a practical Monopoly on discovering content on the internet. They are utterly dependent on Google for customers. That is a very different relationship and if we enforce antitrust law it probably wouldn't be like that.

But we don't care about antitrust law because we are busy with moral panics. In America at the moment it's woke and trans before that it was terrorism and before that we had dungeons and dragons and heavy metal music and even He-Man. Oh and queer people. We've always been freaking the fuck out about queer people. Since like thousands of years...

The real problem is we are too easily distracted about shit that doesn't matter to do anything about shit that does.