the hunger by the 1% to remove as much humanity from the workplace is sickening.

they fully know they are destroying the middle and lower classes (even more than they already have).

they, like the R party, just dont care. they think they are rich and insulated enough. they never cared what their own people need. the 'let them eat cake' time has come back again, but even worse.

there will be no thought to social systems needed to support the unemployed (which will be many of us, given enough time).

I'm glad I'm retiring soon. I would not want to compete in a job market that bosses think can be done by computer, alone.

and I would not want to be the 'prompt meister' to try to coax answers from the machines that make sense.

some see a great future with AI. I see nothing but doom and gloom. the greed factor is strong in humans and the class disparity will cause rioting and civil wars.

maybe not wars. the US has created a special police force that is above the law, so any uprisings will EASILY be dealt with. they thought about that. ICE is not just for foreigners. its a general purpose police force answerable only to 1 person.

people, please show me I'm wrong. but all signs point to a very bad future for 95% of the 'thinks for a living' workforce.

but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

every bit of land that is occupied by islam has been stolen from some other culture. by the sword, 100% of the time.

you want some justice? have the arabs give back all the land they stole from the native peoples of the time. every land they have was stolen. why is that never talked about?

there were religions long before islam, but all the countries that are islamic were forced under threat of death to convert.

genocide is what the arabs did to everyone who did not convert.

funny how you guys want to flip the narrative.

actually, its not funny.

the real culture war is islam vs the west.

islamic countries with big pockets are paying to have 'good PR' in universities. they are playing the long game. they are not stupid.

they have a clear goal in mind. you either know this or you dont. go search if you dont know what I'm talking about.

but they have funded the universities in order to have their message forced on all the students.

is there any natural reason why women would protest against their own rights? and yet, that's the side they picked.

its about funding and buying mind share.

they are winning. and its sad to see.

but this is what's going on.

The "de minimus exemption" isn't a loophole or cheating, it's a choice by virtually every collecting tariffs to only collect tariffs from large cargo shippers, not one-off purchases, because it's a waste of time and money to do the import duty paperwork for every single little item shipped. The whole system globally, for all countries, does the same thing because they don't want to charge a typically $50 or so processing fees (to cover the manual labor and processing fees for doing the paperwork with the various governments) in order to collect a few dollars in tariffs, they want to focus that work on tariffs for bulk shipping containers, etc., not wasting their time on tens of millions of individual items. In response to the US cutting the de minimus exemption dozens of countries have stopped all shipments to the US as they're not prepared to process an increase of several orders of magnitude in the volume of bureaucratic paperwork, so other than letters and gifts under $100, which aren't tariffed, they're cutting the US off.

enjoy your enjoyment of 'sound'.

as you get older (GOML) the sound of the sound matters so much less.

there were times that listening to a single speaker fm pocket 'transistor radio' was good enough to enjoy the songs.

have your fun with your rumble and explosions. as you get older, that shit becomes SO much less important, you wont believe how irrelevant all that hype really is.

I have not been to a theater in - 20 years? more? I cant remember.

its been unpleasant for decades. and with home theater, unless you're a teen trying to escape home and get 'privacy' somewhere else, theaters have long outlived their usefulness.

I think I stopped theaters around the time I cut the cable.

all around, what passes for entertainment is just plain rotten and/or boring.

you can keep it.

Apple has a long history of replacing proprietary with open standards, working with the open standards to make them good enough to replace the proprietary tech. Apple likes to have the option of innovating, e.g. ADB was better than the serial ports for keyboards and mice that PCs had, then they worked with Intel to create USB that replaced ADB. Similiarly, Apple had early cheap LANs when ethernet was very expensive and fragile, then when ethernet got cheap and easy Apple moved to ethernet. And they helped create USB-c, and adopted it aggressively, giving it the advantages of Lightning, replacing older tech. The only lightning ports they still had when the EU mandated USB-c were on low end (low power, slow data) phones, keyboards, and mice, where Lightning worked well. Desktops, laptops and iPads were already USB-c. Moving the low-end devices to USB-c wasn't bad, and I don't think Apple fought against that, they just don't like mandated tech, because it prevents them from future innovations. For example, if the EU had mandated USB-a, then that would have blocked USB-c, so the both like open standards and they like the ability to innovate, they balance the two.

It would let you see where Apple is heading, giving you hardware and software to develop for, letting you start developing and prototyping to be ahead of the game for the future market, when Apple works down the price into a higher volume AR product. As Tom Cook and others explained in interviews and presentations.

Apple has a much higher success rate than most product companies. They're famous for killing off numerous internal products that could have been "fine" because that's not good enough, they want "amazing". They don't always succeed, of course, but many companies would have shipped things Apple refused to.

Yes, Apple's products are for people willing to pay more for better, not for people buying the cheapest possible solution. That's not bad positioning, they dominate the high end phone market, for example, last time I saw the numbers they made 85% of all the profit on selling smartphones globally, Android phone sales are more units, but mainly just breaking even on low-end phones. (Yes, there are some high end android phones...)

Apple was pitching a vision of how AR could work, which was fundamentally different from VR gaming, it's about embedding virtual in the real world. Of course, the use case to show that vision are things people do, at work, play, etc. It was very clearly described in numerous interviews as the first generation, for developers and early adopters who were willing to buy in early to be ahead of the curve, priced for that market. it was absolutely not marketed to be bought by normal consumers. Apple sold more of them than they initially targeted. It's similar market segment positioning as the MS Hololens 2, which is also aimed at developers and early adopters, low volume high price market, though of course the product details are different. In both cases the product descriptions are about what the products do, the pricing is what makes the market segment they're selling to obvious. Kids playing VR videogames don't buy either one, they don't buy a $3,500 headset for that!

Survey response rates completely depend on context.

For example, if you're in a paid panel that does high value surveys for real research, response rates are fine.

If you're sending out fake "push polls" or fundraising appeals using a fake poll as a hook, and there are a flood of those, they've trained people that polls aren't real, they're just scams of one sort or another, so people tune them out. I would not be shocked at all that the scammers have driven people away from all polling. Which is why real pollsters have paid panels of people who opted in.

1) break government
2) privatize what's left
3) profit

that's really it. they have zero care (the R party) for regular non-billionaire people. regular people need government. ultra rich are the ones who pay government to make laws that favor them.

I guess its not clear to everyone so it will be stated again: the R party is the robber baron party and they are not here to HELP anyone but themselves.

clearly, you must be right.

after all, life is *so* good for jews, here in the US.

with the ratio of muslims to jews in the US, yeah, the jews have it made.

#include "oh_wait.h"

This is IMO a reminder that changing an industry from the inside is unlikely, because the legacy players have too many internal conflicts. That's why the legacy companies, such as Sears, utterly failed at transitioning to online eCommerce, it took a new player, Amazon, to make it work. So while renewables are booming, led by new companies, not oil companies, oil is roughly flat, which means that they're trapped by their need to maximize short term profits so they're missing the big strategic transition that'll ultimately be very bad for them. BP was a bit smarter than most, covering both renewables and oil, but apparently the investors are demanding that BP destroy their long-term options to maximize short-term profits. Sigh.