"I think you mean 'North Montana'. Hasn't been called 'Canada' in years."

Apologies for the duplication. I had a similar idea.

This is astonishingly childish and generally stupid. As if the US weren't already embarrassing enough. I probably shouldn't risk giving anyone any bad ideas, but I'm surprised they haven't renamed "America", since Amerigo Vespucci was, after all, an Italian illegal immigrant.

I didn't know this: "The "Shadow Wolves" are a Native American tactical patrol unit assigned to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Sells, Arizona, located on the Tohono O'odham Nation that runs along the Mexico -- United States border." If Border Patrol had been more effective on the East Coast in the late 15th century, things would be very different now.

Dang it, my mod points apparently expired 23 minutes ago. Maybe I'll get some more soon.

Microsoft has been giving free software to schools and students for a long time and still does.

Couple of things questionable about that: first, due to inflation, it makes more sense to use proportion of GDP rather than raw number of dollars. Second, the President doesn't have sole control of the budget: the President presents a draft budget, which is then revised and passed (or not) by Congress. It's also useful to look at annual budget deficits rather than just total accumulated debt.

I infer that by "our farmers", you mean Canadian farmers. You realize not everyone is you, right? In fact, there might even be some people who don't even know who you are or where you are.

That price tag is $100 more than the current $800 1TB Xbox Series X with a disc drive ...." Only $100 more, so probably not much business opportunity to sell upgrades that consist of replacing the opaque box with a translucent one.

Looking at history starting with President Carter: "Every Democratic president of the last half century has left with a deficit that was lower, measured as a share of GDP, than the one they came in with, except Obama, who left it unchanged. By contrast, every Republican president has left with a considerably higher deficit than what they inherited."

This only considers the party of the US President. Other analyses suggest that when the President and Congress are of different parties, the deficit is smaller than when they're of the same party.

And on a related topic: "Where does the money go?": the war against Iran has significantly depleted US stockpiles of weapons: "In a Monday report, researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank estimated that fewer than 827 Patriot interceptors remain in US stockpiles, and fewer than 278 THAAD ballistic missile interceptors are left. ... The figures represent a significant depletion of the pre-war stockpile, which CSIS estimated numbered around 2,200 Patriots (of the platform’s two most-modernized variants) and 452 THAAD missiles." Evidently a trillion dollars a year ($1,000,000,000,000) doesn't buy as much as it used to.

"Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?"
Defense Secretary Robert Gates (May 6, 2010)

Yes, correct, as Google AI puts it: "They lock onto a unique site—called an epitope—on a specific antigen (like a virus protein, hormone, or cancer marker) with high accuracy. ... These antibodies are tagged with a label, such as a color-changing enzyme, fluorescent dye, or gold nanoparticle, which shows a visible or measurable result when the target is present."

Trivia: If the generic name of a medication ends in -mab (the above Wikipedia article has a list), the medication is a monoclonal antibody.

Now I'm having a flashback to one of the stupider episodes of Star Trek ("The Immunity Syndrome") and Captain Kirk saying, "Antibodies! An-ti-bo-dies!" When the Enterprise runs into and overcomes these deadly threats, do they ever publish their results so everyone else knows how to solve the problem? If there are 12 ships in the fleet, how is it that the Enterprise keeps encountering new disasters no one has ever heard of before? [This is the kind of thing my brain does.]

Is he the son of famous Marvel scientist Reed Richards?

Ironic business name of the week, innit?

Spoilers! "Ex-ter-mi-nate!" El-e-vate!

They can only run that fast going straight down.

That sounds like some of the hysterical predictions made about the year 2000 problem. I'm not sure how you managed the mighty leap from my post to your comment. My point was not that "AI itself will die off" (whatever that means) but that AI companies as now constituted are financially unsustainable. In the 1990s, a number of Internet Service Providers spent a lot of money on infrastructure projects like laying dark fiber, assuming consumer use of the Web would grow rapidly. They were wrong. Many companies invested in Web sites, thinking that was the golden path to riches, and they were wrong. Many companies went broke, which resulted in the "dot-com crash" and a recession.

Something similar happened in 2008. Certain predictive models assumed that home mortgage foreclosure rates were constant and unchanging, so a lot of companies bet on monotonically increasing mortgage income. Some people at some companies knowlingly made bad loans, because "by the time they go bad, I'll be gone, and you'll be gone". Again, that bubble burst, producing a recession, and a lot of people lost their homes.

AI now looks similar. An analysis by one economist: "The point is that the big money in AI is far removed from the end product. The chipmakers are making money hand over fist, the energy providers are doing okay, the hyperscalers have less to show, and the AI companies are losing bucks bigtime. ... To use a common analogy, suppose that steel companies are making huge bucks producing steel for rails, and construction companies are making money laying the rail, but the companies that run the railroads are all going broke. That doesn’t look like a story of long-term prosperity."

This is not the only person making this point.

So, no: the self-driving cars and AI-enabled smart TVs and all the appliances that have AI baked into them won't fail -- unless they depend on constant communication with companies like Open AI, Anthropic, and others, but some of the companies themselves will fail, probably producing another recession.

An absolute gem of a TV commercial from the dot-com boom: the gerbil cannon, Outpost.com. "So close!"