Such as freetaxusa. Search around. Turbotax is so lame and overpriced. Rant: we should just have some basic withholding percentage, tariffs, and then a similar basic flat percentage from all corporate revenue. No funny deductions, no net profit games, just revenue almost like a federal sales tax. IMHO if these were some reasonable level it'd be fine, we could then fund the rest on deficit spending (like we're so prone to do anyways.)

Why is the goal to create superhuman intelligence? Do we need something smarter than us? Are you trying to get us all killed??

I look forward to the end game where we have no taxes. No corporate taxes. After all they just pass it on to consumers. No income taxes. Just pay for it on import tariffs. Skip that too, why not? We already run a large deficit. All the spending sits on the ever expanding national debt. Now no one has a say except those who sit on massive piles of cash that faces risks of devaluation. Sounds awesome. Even foreign holders of cash/debt. They matter more than the citizens after all. Power to the powerful!! After all, they're already in charge.

What a travesty! What a waste! Hippy nonsense! Do you realize how insane your comment is? Of course, water should reach the sea. Water should replenish aquifers. We should be careful when choosing what and how to dry land farm and what to irrigate. But we aren't, humans are wasteful and greedy.

I have only owned one subaru, and it is a 2007 that I've had for a year. I bought it with 243k miles, specifically because it was cheap, so my daughter can drive herself to school and all her activities.

I've spent more on fixing it than I spent on the car itself. I have needed replace tons of parts. It was basically a lemon (with no rust). However... it does not flash ads. I would rather have this lemon than a new computer on wheels that shows ads.

They were called the Bush tax cuts as a disparaging term. Bush campaigned on eliminating the debt, so fast. But the economy hit a road bump, so he cut taxes. We even then went to war and didn't pay for it. So yea, he gets to wear that. Typical fiscal-cough-cough-conservative. We've been living in his dystopian "the economy sucks so keep taxes low" world view ever sense. Even the democrats couldn't buck the trend. Which is a damn shame.

I have taught C++ and other computer science classes at a community college for the past 9 years. I started out only using paper exams, and students had to print their code for homeworks and projects. Then during the pandemic we moved online, and other than a couple of semesters, my classes have stayed online. Virtually all of the community college CS courses, for the entire state system, are online. I lecture virtually instead of in person and all assignments and exams are done through Blackboard.

Now with AI, I cannot distinguish between what a student wrote vs what AI wrote. It's absolutely impossible to tell the difference. Before AI, I could often tell when someone got help (if you submit code that doesn't match your skill level on the exams) or copied someone else's assignment (if you hand in the same code with the variable names changed...). Again, now I can't tell at all.

At the community college level, the deans are stuck with a problem: fewer students are enrolling, and those students want to learn about AI because they see it as the next job skill you need to have. At the state university level, the CS dept has gone the other direction: exams are on paper and homework is now 5% of the final grade instead of 50%

I tell my students at the beginning of the semester "You are paying tuition to learn the material in the course. Using AI to do your classwork is like going to the gym and having a robot lift the weights for you. Don't use AI"

When I was a computer science and engineering undergrad 25 years ago, there was talk of creating a licensing process for software engineers, similar to civil engineers. It was a terrific idea and I hope it got traction. But AI has turned software engineering into a mess. Software is every bit as critical to the safety of humans as civil engineering, but you would never trust AI to create buildings. The software engineering students of today are absolutely ill-equipped to write the vital software that is used today.

How does this help me (or anyone) socialize? It doesn't help bring people together, it drives them apart into their own little silos with the AI being their only gateway outside of that silo.

Reminds me of war dialing, looking for modems to connect to a network.

This doesn't take away freedom of opinion, but it does let the viewer know whether the influencer has any credibility.

Think back to the time when America was "great", which may be the 1950s according to MAGA. If an average person didn't understand some scientific topic, they didn't pretend to. They trusted Jonas Salk and others because they got to see the horrors or polio and the they saw the effect of the vaccines. The children saw some students not come back to school in the fall because they contracted polio over the summer. The parents saw the same thing and understood just how important vaccines were, whether they understood how it worked or not. Now everyone pretends to be an expert, even if they're actually an idiot. Even idiots knew their limits in the "good old days" before social media.

Best I can tell there's already a classic book in this space: Earl Mindell's Herb Bible. Its a neat coffee table book. You can just read parts at a time and it is enjoyable. Super fun to look out for the herbs that specifically warn they're unsafe during pregnancy ;-) Made me wonder just how effective a cocktail of these would be to induce a miscarriage.

Oooofff...

It is likely true that software quality is dropping. But the important point I would like to make is that quality elsewhere is horrible too. Our relatively new house is on its third bathroom sink faucet in about 12 years total time. I cannot fathom how this could be so bad. Car quality, parts, engines, transmissions all of it is worse. Worse parts, worse designs, it all is bad and so much more expensive. A twenty year old car w/ only front wheel drive, a four speed transmission, a reasonable power v6 in comparison is SO solid. A little worse MPG but that is it, and sometimes that isn't so clear cut. I'm sure there are examples of things that have improved, and others that have gotten worse. But those were a couple I can think of off hand. A lot of this is driven by big government making decisions for us, even during republican administrations ironically. Fuel efficiency standards go back to Bush. Anyways, enjoy, the future is gonna suck. And be expensive.

Farmers will bitch about a def burn/regen, but still buy the new huge combine because even with sitting for 45 minutes, they get so much more done so fast it is unreal. So they buy/rent huge equipment they cannot work on because they run so many acres they really have no other options. Our government bankrolls all their risk so land/rent values keep going up and everyone is too happy to question anything. Red America complains about market access while voting in Trade War Trump. We're all so stupid. Nevermind GMO everything. If only we could make tofu w/ all this cheap soy. Nope, we gotta feed it to cows/pigs/chickens. No one cares about the river and aquifer water quality, or how expensive it is to treat for high nitrate levels. Sorry for the slightly unrelated farming rant. But I really wish our local river was cleaner. It is never a focus and so sad. But I'd refer to it as a "water quality collapse." Ironically you have to pay farmers for buffer strips and CRP, I'm not sure they'd do it on their own. Left to their own devices they're even ripping out the shelter belts around here.

I just have one word for you: BIT. COIN.

People are literally making money by selling the solutions to complex math problems. It's amazing. Those times tables I did in 2nd grade would be worth a fortune now.

Also, everything is a bubble if you wait long enough. It's just nicer when we don't have to experience the ebb of a bubble within our lifespans.

Listen, this is barely even on topic. We should be talking about how bad tariffs are, and if the supreme court will allow the tariffs to continue and force Trump and Republicans to eat their shit sandwich. Etc.

But what he's done to medicine and research? Not really pertinent. Besides, the point I was going to make, is how can the modern medicine complex even continue? You routinely here about how people and their insurance isn't able to pay the exorbitant prices they want to charge for the output of said advances. It's so unrealistic. Can the upper 20% of consumers in America prop this up? That's probably not even accurate, I would bet it's less than 5%, so just high net worth households, that stand a chance at paying for this research. This industry is delusional and has to extend the timelines of paying back themselves for their costs. The current path for health insurance in America that we were already on was going to threaten our "world-leading biomedical research industry."

My favorite story ever I got via an anti-vaccer family member. In the process of sharing a story about vaccine safety the story led with how it was Reagan who indemnified the industry from lawsuits relating to how unsafe vaccines were. Pure political disillusion. MAGA is indeed a cult.