They do. And they always have. I don't know how to describe this phenomena to you in a way that communicates what this is like. For disclosure, I have three kids. Two are of high-school age and are largely too old for this particular meme. The third is in elementary school and that's where this seems to hit the hardest.

Those two numbers together is enough to get better than 90% of a group of elementary school students to reflexively shout "SIIIIIIIIX-SEEEEEVEEEEEN." You can punish them. You can deny them recess. You can tell them they get extra homework. They don't care.

Part of the reason they don't care is that educational philosophy doesn't allow particularly hard-nosed punishments for little kids. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. When I was a kid the principal was allowed to literally beat kids with a wooden bat which seems like maybe not the best idea.

But the other reason they don't care is that the meme is almost universally reinforced by people they like and care about: influencers and video content creators. That group is fairly rarified and the meme is extremely wide-spread so, while they're all engaged with personalized content, nearly all of it carries the meme. The people pushing against it are teachers and parents but part of the appeal of the meme is that it is absurdest (kids don't know what that means but they appreciate it anyway) and irritates parents/teachers/etc.

It's like the "jingle bells batman smells" song when we were kids, but not seasonal, linked to two integers, and ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE in media pitched to elementary aged kids.

And so it's really, really easy for it to cause teachers to lose control of a classroom. It's not that the content of the stupid shit that kids say is unique or different here, but that the level of disruption and the ubiquity of the issue is notable.

I own, but do not operate, a few IT companies that manage corporations in the $600MM-$1B receivables range.

Based on our own help desk ticket software, our clients have opened 40% fewer tickets since ChatGPT was rolled out to every desk and phone. 40%. I expect another 40% drop (total 80%) by next year as end users just manage things themselves.

I won't downsize as the tickets aren't really generating revenue as much as headaches. One of my engineers had a broken PDF file that took her 6 hours to fix, and the end user spent 6 days trying to fix it themselves with Ai.

But -- the basic stuff? Reboot your computer stuff? Email rejected because you mistyped a domain name stuff?

You don't need a human, and we would probably have outsource that stuff to India anyway next year if not for ChatGPT etc.

I spend quite a bit on Discord server services, but I'm out.

GFY, Discord and governments, for mandating this bullshit nonsense.

Talking to people in public isnâ(TM)t harassment.

Talking to people on taxpayer funded grounds also isnâ(TM)t trespass.

Tax funded?

Not private property anymore.

SR-71. But yea. And huge exhibits on the rest of the space program, the Cold War arms race, etc. The Dulles annex is a national treasure.

Well damn. Yes. Though, now that I stop to think about it, the Pacific is kind of crazy in that the Western Pacific is in the Eastern Hemisphere and the Eastern Pacific is in the Western Hemisphere.

And now I have a headache.

This ain't the early Cold War anymore. While there are certainly some super-secret weapons platforms out there, a lot of military capability is deliberately communicated and even put on display because it deters conflict.

When the Soviet Union fell the Pentagon's priorities shifted from "World War 3 against the USSR" to "wars against countries with marginally effective air forces." So when the B-2 came online, it served the Pentagon's mission better to show it off. "Look at our invisible bomber. You really think crossing us is a good idea? Be a shame of bombs just fell out of an empty sky on you without any warning whatsoever."

China wants the US to know that it can launch stealth aircraft off of its carriers because that allows it to use its carriers to assert control of the Eastern Pacific. China doesn't regard war with the United States as inevitable. Consequently, it's interested in convincing the United States that a war in the Pacific isn't worth fighting. That means eroding American confidence in American strategic and technological dominance so Americans know that a conflict with China will be costly.

This is targeted directly at American isolationists: "do you really want your kid to die for Taiwan?"

As a historian the only caveat I'd advise there is that we are unlikely to see a long, drawn-out slog like WW2 again. Production capacity is great but the next Great Power war isn't likely to take place over years or even months. So China's technological edge is likely to matter but it's tempered with a willingness to stockpile and maintain systems which may never see use.

Doing that at limited production scale is one thing. Doing it at massive, "we're going to fight a serious war with this stuff" scales is another. China, like many authoritarian regimes, has shown itself to be dazzled by the propaganda value of wonder weapons. The CJ-1000, most recently, seems like a very impressive missile system but if it doesn't exist is sufficient quantity to turn the tide against American assets in theater it's just a waste of money.

Of course, China is also famously closed lipped so it's hard to tell. It might turn out that they have tens of thousands of those things. Probably not, but maybe.

This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.

A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.

Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first kind: a coin which enables some other service that delivers real value. That value is bribing government officials.

Large purchases of Trump Coin necessarily drive the price of the coin up, allowing Trump or his chosen acolytes to sell their horded coins at a tidy profit. Everyone who holds the coins has a commonly held interest. Everyone who buys them to inflate the price and enrich the holders expects to get something for their trouble and then becomes part of the cabal of holders.

Trump Coin is basically an anti-dollar: it is backed, not by the full faith and credit of the United States but by the political corruption and dominance of the MAGA movement.

It's wild to imagine Echostar/Dish being worth anything close to that amount of money. From my own experience working inside the company everything always seemed like it was held together with bailing wire and bubble-gum.

I assume there was a highly competitive bidding process for this because there's no way Dish's board of directors would have had the stones to set the price at "three times the company's market cap" on their own.

Nah.

Iâ(TM)m 51. Iâ(TM)ve had health insurance continuously for 35 years and have used it exactly ZERO TIMES.

I am self pay. For everything but true life threatening emergencies, which Iâ(TM)ve had zero.

Even the ER is cheaper when negotiated self pay.

My urologist is stunned that I pay $85 for his visits. Self pay. Including labs. My colleague goes to the same urologist and his insurance pays $550 for the same visit and naturally it comes out of his deductible lol.

Insurance is a scam. All insurance is legal gambling and gamblers never win.

I'm largely in agreement with you. I don't think its terribly effective to tell people what they can and can't do. If we don't want people to gamble, making gambling illegal isn't going to move the needle meaningfully and it's probably going to increase overall harm. See, for example, the war on drugs.

But we can move the needle by regulating the supply side of the equation and the more infrastructure intensive the supply side is the more effective regulation is. Banning the sale of leaded gas, for example, resulted in a pretty painless transition away from lead in gasoline. We didn't need to arrest people using leaded gas; the inconvenience of getting leaded gas was more than enough to get people to convert.

That's the approach that makes the most sense for online gambling too. We don't need to be kicking down doors to card games or frog-marching seniors out of bingo night, but we probably would be substantially better off if it weren't legal to develop platforms and services which are specifically engineered to engaged young people and nurture in them a crippling gambling addiction.

And we can say "oh, but why can't you just convince companies not to build those products without the threat of government force" but building those gambling products, or putting heroin in the Big Mac special sauce, or handing out cigarettes and alcohol at middle school football games is a fantastic way to make giant buckets of money at the expense of people's lives and nothing short of the threat of consequences exceeding those potential profits is going to convince a profit-seeking corporation to pass on all that money.

Banning tobacco didn't stop smoking, but banning cigarette vending machines meaningfully reduced it, especially in under-age smokers and lighter smokers.

Yes, banning gambling doesn't stop gaming addiction but taking the casino out of your pocket and taking away the casino's ability to run A/B tests on what it takes to get you, personally, to place your next bet will reduce the harm of gambling addiction across the population.