Actually, I don't care about my mod points, either, I'm here to cost *you*, the rest of you, mod points.

6- digit UIDs used to be able to read and comprehend. Prove it. Typos are insignificant.

Implicit in your argument is, I think, that 'record profits' are an inadequate or unacceptable condition for layoffs 'in droves'.

Among other things, your characterization of these layoffs as ' laying off people in droves' also implies that 'these' layoffs are, in fact, noticeably more in number.

FTFA: 'The year closed with the fewest announced layoff plans all year'

And, since statistics lie:

2020 2,304,755
2001 1,956,876
2002 1,466,823
2009 1,288,030
2003 1,236,426
2008 1,223,993
2025 1,206,374

I see a trend. 2022, 2023, 2024 did not make the list. Comment?

ps - Do you believe we should, somehow, prevent layoffs when the employers enjoy profits? And how?

Fire them all. Replace with Robots. If Starbucks just sells coffee, I might return as a customer.

(Although not sure why I'd abandon the coffee shops that I've meanwhile patronized who never did get distracted from, you know, serving coffee....)

The moment Starbucks employees said "we stand with Hamas" as far as I'm concerned I hope they all have the opportunity to immediately move to Gaza and start helping with the rebuilding of terror-tunnels, rocket factories, and hostage-cells. I problems with things Israel does, says, and stands for (like I do pretty nearly any country) but Hamas is purely a violent terror organization, uninterested in ACTUALLY helping the people of Gaza have better lives.

If Starbucks employees 'stand with' them, then they can stand in the street unemployed and I'll cheer.

I know this is very non-internet-2026 but let's try to look at this with a teensy bit of nuance?

A company can be
a) against its servers unionizing,
AND
b) deeply liberal politically

This is not mindblowing IRL. It is normal.

I know one political side in the US today is very, very 'purist' in its dogma: "if you do not agree entirely with every jot and tittle of every single radical position, you must be an alt-right-fascist"...you know the old thing we all made fun of Bush Jr's simplistic "with us or against us" nonsense? That.

In REAL life, people have all sorts of reasons to believe what they believe, and not everything (!) is informed/guided by politics.

2003 Europe "We don't want to depend on US GPS systems!"
2006: EU mints Galileo collectible coin! (/snort)
(2 decades follow)
Dec 2026: 26 of 30 operational satellites.

So we should expect this new SATCOM program to be operational by...2049... maybe?
Hey, at least we'll probably have a collectible coin for it minted by 2030!

...that TV companies chase down stupid rabbit holes like 8k, 3d tv, UltraSuperMegaHDR, smellovision, or whatever.

Because that almost inevitably pushes the prices for all NORMAL TVs down. I don't know of any industry that's seen as steady price decline as video ?

I know -philes will insist that they can't *bear* to watch anything less than 16k on a 120" screen from the 3 foot distance you'd need to sit at to see the difference, but IRL 99% of consumers truly don't give a shit.
I'm not a luddite: I think there's a legitimate need for 4k / 2160p as screens get bigger (not that most people even need their giganto-screens in a little 12' x 12' room - a 65" screen @ 8' corresponds to the 30-35deg viewing angle around the middle of a small movie theater). And OLED absolutely was a step up in color quality and precision, objectively.

But, yes, Samsung, LG, TCL, Hisense, Sony: please chase all of the silly techs and whatever more you believe you can convince the public they need. Hell, give 3d another swing this year, maybe? In the meanwhile, I'll cheerfully watch as even good quality 65" TVs drop past $500.

Any excuse is used to cover for layoffs. The truth is, for a profitable enterprise, reducing the headcount by removing unnecessary employees is always proper and justified, unless your profit relies on excess employment.

Not many corporations provide useful services by relying on excess employment. The ones that do suffer when their clients realize they should reduce expenses.

Layoffs are not a fault, they are a reasonable response to changing circumstances; economic or other.

"That is why our constituion says that the negro shall be count as 5/9s a person."

The instruments are called 'amendments'. They are used to modify our Constitution for various purposes, to remedy errors in the original, to adapt to current conditions, correct injustices, for instance. Our Constitution is remarkable for this process. To claim it any longer requires that 'the Negro' be counted as less than a person is not merely inaccurate, it is untruthful. A lie.

The wise change their minds when the facts change, or conditions warrant re-examination of their previous beliefs. The fool clings to the discredited.

Now, re-read my sig as you consider your responses. And remember, mod points are not merely ephemeral, they are cheap.

ps - what is a 'sever recession'? A split of the economy? That works better than I thought at first...

--
I'm here to cost you mod points.

"That is why our constituion says that the negro shall be count as 5/9s a person."

The instruments are called 'amendments'. They are used to modify our Constitution for various purposes, to remedy errors in the original, to adapt to current conditions, correct injustices, for instance. Our Constitution is remarkable for this process. To claim it any longer requires that 'the Negro' be counted as less than a person is not merely inaccurate, it is untruthful. A lie.

The wise change their minds when the facts change, or conditions warrant re-examination of their previous beliefs. The fool clings to the discredited.

Now, re-read my sig as you consider your responses. And remember, mod points are not merely ephemeral, they are cheap.

ps - what is a 'sever recession'? A split of the economy? That works better than I thought at first...

but few people can tell the difference [when comparing 8K] with 4K,

I can well believe this. For a very long time I really struggled with sub-pixel rendering because it (to me) left visible colour fringes on the edge of letters. It was "bizarre" when the word "well" at the start of this sentence might have one red and one blue 'l' for example.

Since switching to 4K I've not had a problem. While writing this I double checked and the colour edging is still there but I can't really see it at all. Now I've looked carefully I can see that the 'im' in the middle of "time" has a faint reddish hue which changes as I scroll the text but it's so faint as to be almost unnoticeable.

Additionally, anti-aliased text doesn't look particularly blurred any more, certainly not enough that I'm straining to "bring it into focus" - obviously not going to work as it's not out of focus to start with.

At home, I've still got sub-pixel rendering and anti-aliasing turned off. Yes, text is sharper but it's also more jagged and, at 4K, it's not obvious which one is better (to my eyes) and were I starting from scratch I wouldn't take the time working out how to turn off sub-pixel rendering and anti-aliasing (but I'm also not going to spend the time working out what I need to undo to turn it back on after all these years).

Of course, countless people will say "you can't see colour fringing if sub-pixel rendering is done correctly, you must have it setup wrongly" - but it's a fact that I can, no matter how it is tweaked. Anti-aliasing on lower DPI screens is equally as uncomfortable to me although that difference is visible to others too, just that they disagree with me about which is easier to look at. FWIW, it's obviously a fact that I can see colour fringing that others can't because we can talk about the same text on the same screen at the same time, and I can say "look, that "l" has a green fringe, that "M" is red etc, they can say "I can't see it". Then you take a screen shot, zoom in and they say "Oh, yes, I can see it now!"

I love this result.

Butâ¦I also saved for many decades and am fine living on my small catamaran catching fish and ignoring the world.

Sucks you all had to have the latest car and binge Netflix all those years.

I think it plausible that 99% of new energy this year come from renewable sources because many of those sources come from renewable types with relatively short construction times.

Up until recently, the US adds about 50 GW of capaicty per year. There's a huge uptick in generation capacity because of energy demands from data centers, so recently it's more like 65 GW/year. The challenge is you can't exploit *this year's* high market prices by starting a nuclear power plant that won't come on line for a decade. Even a combined cycle natural gas plant is going to take five years. But you can have a wind farm up and running in months.

It's not the renewability *per se* that's driving this; it's profiting from the high prices before the AI bubble bursts. Nobody is rushing to bring new hydropower or geothermal plants online, and they're just as renewable as wind or solar.

This move to renewables is not about changing the world. it's about short term financial optimization. But these short term, local optimizations *will* change the world, and planning to handle the transformations driven by short-term market forces is going to take coordinated, long term national action. At present there are regional mandates that will stabilize the local grid against variations in electricity supply. But carving up the nation into small regional markets means higher prices and economic inefficiencies where electricity is transfered from high price areas to stabilize low price areas. Market economics don't work if there are non-market forces (stability) that trump profitability.

Strictly speaking, Gates' name appearing in the files as a "note to self" isn't dispositive of anything. Epstein was a sociopath, and while he was profoundly and disturbingly weird, not a dummy. He'd already been publicly exposed and convicted of child procurement. So he knew he was radioactive. He might well choose to salt his own records with poison pills.

But that's the context we shouldn't miss: Epstein was publicly known to be a child trafficker years before Bill Gates initiated his contact with him. And Bill Gates has people to look out for him and extensive contacts with Epstein's clientele. He must have known. So the parsimonious explanation is that he was seeking out what Epstein uniquely could provide.

As for Gates, he's really smart in a certain way; he's probably usually the smartest guy in the room. But not one-in-a-million smart. I bet a lot of us know people who are smarter than he is. What his history shows is a willingness to act ruthlessly and transgress legal or ethical rules for personal gain, while being aware of reputational risk. I'm not reducing him to a cartoon villain — he may genuinely care about issues like malaria. But he understands the value of curating his reputation. Epstein is a perfect match for him: high school math teacher smart, sociopathic, but obsessed with amassing social capital through connections with academics with tech-bro appeal that opened doors.

It is indisputable that Gates had a relationship with Epstein — Gates himself doesn't deny it. Gates is contesting the veracity of what Epstein wrote in his files, and you know what? I think ithose things are likely false. If Gates needed to score some antibiotics on the DL, he wouldn't need to beg is pedophile buddy. But if Occam's razor serves here, the STD story is just a distraction. Getting or not getting and STD would just be a matter of luck. It wouldn't change the fact Gates sought association with a known child sex trafficker.

And here’s the other big piece of context we shouldn’t miss: while appearance in the Epstein files isn’t strictly dispositive of anything, the unprecedented structure of Epstein’s plea agreement and the resulting absence of federal prosecution constitute a smoking gun for deliberate non-enforcement by law enforcement. From this, we can reasonably infer that powerful individuals were being shielded from scrutiny. Epstein received an extraordinarily lenient deal that explicitly immunized unnamed co-conspirators — an inversion of standard prosecutorial practice, where defendants are typically flipped to expose broader conspiracies. It is reasonable to infer, in the absence of any credible explanation, that prosecutors were motivated to protect those co-conspirators for some reason.

at first, but only for 12 parsecs or so . . .

Possibly. And after all this, I neglected the most obvious modern example of rent-seeking; John Deere's repair lock-in. Farmers have begged for right-to-repair legislation. This problem isn't limited John Deere, and in that the other examples are also instructive.