Ate a lot of paint chips as a child, eh?

"If you must write a check, he said, try to deliver it in person or take it inside a post office to mail rather than relying on your own mailbox or public drop boxes. "

That was the neighborhood advice going around our area 1-2 years ago. I myself was skeptical that mail theft was going on as I had dealt with the Postal Police when managing an e-commerce site and I knew they are very good at finding things like this. Unfortunately it turned out (1) I was wrong: there was mail theft going on in our neighborhood but (2) everyone else was wrong too: the mail wasn't being stolen from blue boxes; it was being lifted from the bins behind the slot in our postal service center. The perps were eventually caught but it took far longer than I would have thought.

Tesla is already in trouble due to profound incompetence.

Good observations, though I am Gen X so after a childhood of editing config.sys to get retail games to run on the PC I have an incredibly high tolerance for putting up with that nonsense.

I'm a busy man. I'm also a lazy man. Could someone tell me if this is cheaper or more expensive than a desktop gaming PC with the same stats?

Additionally, the way it's phrased, as a "bet," is implicitly skeptical.

There is no question that states are betting on AI.

FDNY life is rough but it is still vastly better than Chinese factor worker life. That 18-hour shift is not constant answering calls, a lot of it is downtime. Also, they get a lot of time off in between. And retire with good benefits years and years before the Chinese worker.

"and where blue collar workers get to retire on a full pension before white collar workers."

Yes, if only I could enjoy the life of a blue collar factor worker in China. Why can't I work 12 hour shifts 6 days a week?!

The elites hate labor shortages. They love labor surpluses.

You said "Open Source development." Which in the grand scheme of things is pretty small.

I think the possible adverse impacts to society would not be outweighed by something that small.

Ehh, I liked Universe a lot, and I never could get into the main Stargate series.

The CIA can't just make arrests on US soil. They actually do need the FBI to do that. That's another form of oversight.

I knew several people in ruraltania who bought into the 3rd generation of raising Vietnamese potbellied pigs. First and second generations made a fair amount of money selling into a rising novelty market; the second generation also made money selling to third generation hopefuls. Third generation breeders lost their shirts of course. Before that it was small farmers in central Ontario who discovered that ginseng grows very well in that climate and soil and that was large, nay HUGE, demand for that root in the PRC. This is perhaps even more germane to the tech example because it takes the first crop of ginseng 7 years to mature, so many many Lake Erie-area farmers saw their early-in neighbors harvesting the crop and the cash - only to see the market flooded and prices crash the year before they were due to harvest.