Itâ(TM)s a measure of profitability relative to other similar investment options over a period of time.

Grossly oversimplified example: if the overall market is returning, letâ(TM)s say, 4% year over year, and a specific investment (stock, bond, whatever) is returning 5% for that same year, the alpha on that investment is 1%; itâ(TM)s the gain youâ(TM)d realize above and beyond just putting your money in the overall market.

Alpha is a big big deal to pro investors; finding large alpha opportunities makes you considerably more attractive to money looking for investment opportunities.

I concur. The unemployment rate is about 4% and even the more padded U6 unemployment rate is below 5%
Those are normal.
Under condition when unemployment rates are normal the primary job of the federal reserve is to bring down inflation. It's not simply a good idea. It's their mandate

The fact that there are more jobseekers than jobs is also close to normal. There's always a mismatch between jobs and jobseekers.

It may well be that those jobs are demotions or involve moving etc..

So the Fed has done everthing correctly.

But now they are on toes because we have the immigrant labor leaving and hightarrufs.

While those might increase the number of jobs available it might not fund takers. And both will cause supply side inflation. Simultaneously extending the tax cuts and the debt ceiling means the high rate of pumping debt into the economy will continue.

So the Fed is in an uncharted territory . It could mean high inflation is coming. Most likely. But it could mean a recession. You love the rate in opposite directions there! Most likely is both: stagflation. Which is awful. We did the stagflation experiment in the early 70s and tried both spending into it and later raising interest rates sky high. Only the latter worked.

Fed is exactly doing the right Thing by being watchful

I have two theories
1. Other languages are falling faster than Perl making Perl rise

2. Perl is what smart people use instead of bash. So for all sysadmin tasks or ad hoc system scripts or gluing you'd be crazy to use bash when you can use Perl.

does 2x shift the frequency?

I haven’t meaningfully used Windows since September 2023. I'm approaching two years on disability and am about to take early retirement for health reasons. My work laptop (still running Windows) has sat unopened this whole time. Once the paperwork is finalised, it’ll go back and good riddance to it.

I use Mint, Debian, and OMV across my machines. My daily driver is a Framework 13 with an AMD board and 64GB of DDR5 RAM. Total overkill, but I love it. Even when I code, I barely touch its resources, but that's likely down to the fact that I rarely compile anything. In my work life, I was a data scientist, so I coded in Python and R, and when I code now, it's Python or BASH scripting itch-scratching utilities. Anyhow, just browsing Slashdot and syncing with NextCloud, my CPU idles around 2%, RAM at 4%, and it's running at a balmy 41C. Why add bloatware to that?

Now contrast that with a family friend I recently helped. She's almost 80 and only uses her computer for email and browsing. Her CPU was pegged at 100% and her 4GB of RAM was constantly maxed out. I’d already replaced her spinning drive with an SSD a while back, and recently upgraded her to 16GB of spare DDR3, yes, DDR3, I had lying around. Still, her system crawled. Why? Windows telemetry alone was eating 49% of her CPU. We cleaned up startup junk and malware, but she’s still stuck on Windows 10, on a dated Lenovo G505 that was low-end even when she bought it. If that's Windows 10, how much worse is 11, with its Copilot interference, Microsoft malware, and nearly irremovable junk?

I honestly don’t understand why non-technical users who only browse the web feel locked into Windows. It's like people with limited computing resources feel the need to give away their processing power to corporations that monetise their data and make their machine unusable for what? a familiar UI? Her only installed application is Firefox. She doesn’t even use a stand-alone email client. Meanwhile, I keep an old first-gen i7 Toshiba Tecra running Debian 12 with XFCE around just for its optical drive. That chip is from 2009 and it still feels faster than her 2015 Windows 10 machine.

This isn’t 2001 any more. Running Linux on the desktop isn't niche, just practical. Most web traffic is bots, spam and a few portals anyway. It just sucks that Windows is so abusive to the folks who buy it and they as for plead for 'more please'.

I think it’s time I updated my .sig. Spammers have moved on from polluting blogs...

I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

Coitus interruptus

If amazon pays the tarrifs they can deduct them from their taxes.

If they pass along the tarrifs then the consumer can deduct them

So
1. They have to do this if they are not deducting them

2. And there is no net revenue to the us government on any tax deductible tarrif collected

If amazon passes along the excise tax on a good for resale then they have to provide this to consumers who can deduct it.

If they don't pass it on then they can deduct it.

Either way there is no net revenue to the us government from any deductible tarrif

I've been using Linux since I've been on Slashdot. I use Mint now mostly because I can't be arsed to use anything else. I am not sure if it's faster than Windows or not because for my last two laptops, I removed the SSD, put a new one in and installed Linux. I'll take your word for it.

I bought a friend a laptop and let Windows 11 install itself. What a pain to install. It took hours with all the updates and reboots, then hours removing bloatware, copilot and ads. Something is messed up when it takes editing the registry edits to remove crap. That's before even installing apps. I'll bet the unwanted stuff comes back on the next update.

SMFH I don't remember Windows being that much of a PITA back in the Windows 7 days or was that just forgetting stuff because it was so long ago..

I thought best buy already served as Amazon's showroom ?

Altairs had a little as 1K memory and you entered the boot loader by hand using binary switches. I got a lot of practice with octal using that very Altair computer that bill gates gifted my high school.

Why octal you might ask and not hex. The importance of hex only emerged after we started trying programs. But when you had to enter machine code by hand using 16 dip switches in a row octal could be done using three fingers on each hand. Try to slap four switches at the same time is two spastic a movement for most people's hands. You could go wickedly fast in octal

With the Altair there was no overriding operating system at all so comparing it to Linux is weird. No hard or floppy drives. To write a program you keyed in the boot loader that had enough brains to read something off cassette tape which was a more sophisticated loader that then could read in the 2K basic. The basic could then accept input from a teletype.
If you wanted a file manager for your cassette tape then you write one in basic and ran it.

For me the phone is an appliance. I don't seek crazy standout features if it an anyway degrades my legacy knowledge and expectations in operating my appliance. I don't like relearning how to use a different microwave oven. A toaster is simple and all that matters is that it's a good toaster that cooks evenly and reproducibly.
But I like new features so I don't just want to keep my old phone. I just want an ecosystem that has tamed new innovations and integrates those across my existing apps well.
Getting the cheapest phone is never of interest. Anything you touch more times per day than your wife should be a graceful pleasant experience and so paying a dollar or even two per day for the best experience phone is a no brainer.

You may note I did not say the word Apple. If that sounds like I just described the Apple experience that is your imputation. But you'd not be wrong that Apple serves that customer better than any other

The competition has had years to study Apple, and even hire away their engineers but no one has such a user centric experience as Apple,

I don't need to care what processor I have inside. My privacy is as protected as much as possible. Devices last years. Everything works together. Apple saves time rather worrying about flash.

Apple has been creating its own processor and bus architecture letting it make fan free high performance long battery life computers. It may not be a new product category per se but it sure is innovative as it has let them create awesome performance systems.

You may recall Microsoft spent years failing at moving its OS to arm. Abysmal failure. Surfaces are still playing catchup.

I also like the expansion of my privacy on sppple with things like private relay and on board AI task specific entiiies rather than external servers.

The Apple AR system was sure shell of a lot better than anything Zuckerberg produced. Just because AR isn't being adopted fast doesn't change that they smoked Zuckerbergs
passion project

And the Apple ecosystem still "just works" better than the competition. The creation of a secure privacy centered seamless integration of long lived products is very satisfying to any user that values their time