This just raises the question of what it means to "know". The LLMs clearly have a large and fairly comprehensive model of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them. If they didn't, they couldn't produce output that makes sense in the context of the models we have of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them.

Men have been steadily dropping out of the workforce since the 1960's. It's a gradual descent, but still constantly downward. Right now we have a male non-labor participation rate that's extraordinarily high for a non-depression economy. A lot of men have simply decided they're not going to work if someone else... family, government, whoever... can support them. So a male applying for a job that hasn't worked in years throws up all kinds of work-ethic red flags to HR departments. No one wants to be the workplace where that guy struggles to become productive again.

Sorry, but no.

I mean, on the one hand, sure, eventually _something_ else will displace the US dollar as the world's leading reserve currency, because that's how history works: nothing stays in a dominant position forever.

But the statement you added "yet" to was much more specific. And no, Communist China's ridiculous "dedollarization" propaganda campaign is not going to have any measurable impact on the dollar's dominance, any time soon. Among other things, the RMB has never been anywhere near stable enough to make it into the top five currencies, and as things stand now, it looks to only be getting worse. It's relatively heavily traded, but it's not stable, at all. (Contrast with, say, the Canadian dollar, which is stable enough but nowhere near heavily-traded enough.)

The further into the future you try to look, the more difficult it is to see clearly, but if I had to predict based on what we know now, I'd say the currently-existing currency that is most likely to eventually unseat the US dollar would probably end up being the Euro; the Pound Sterling and the Japanese Yen are potentially also in the running. History is seldom predictable, and it'll probably end up being something we cannot forsee right now; but even something like the Brazilian Real, has a much better shot than the RMB, which will never be stable with the CCP in power, and probably cannot survive the CCP's collapse.

As for gold, that's not new, at all; we know what its role is, and that isn't changing. People have always turned to precious metals as a reliable store of value whenever financial times are tough. And that generally works except when new technology messes things up (e.g., what happened to the price of aluminum when people figured out how to do high-temperature electrolysis). For gold, the most likely new technology to mess it up would be if somebody managed to devise an energy-efficient way to extract the dissolved gold from sea water; but even then, gold would still be a precious metal, just not quite *as* precious as it is now. (The total amount of gold in the oceans, is only a few times the quantity of gold in circulation, and less than the amount of silver in circulation.) Short of affordable transmutation (which would be *much* more disruptive than just lowering the price of gold), I can't think of any other way to turn gold into a base metal like aluminum.

Honestly, I can't think of a single use case for bluetooth on a desktop computer, that isn't better served by some other set of physical-layer and data-link-layer standards.

For a cellphone, yes, it makes sense to have e.g. a bluetooth headset.

On a desktop computer? Are you kidding? I don't even. *Maybe* on a laptop, but even that is a bit of a reach.

With that said, Windows 11 is undeniably a terrible OS option for a desktop or laptop, either one. Its main use is to make a modern multicore 64-bit system with gigabytes of RAM, perform like a Pentium-era single-core system with RAM measured in megabytes, spending most of its time ignoring user input while it swaps memory pages in and out. In case that is an era of history that you wanted to revisit, for some reason. Nostalgia for the Good Old Days, perhaps. Enjoy.

I'll be over here using a system with a virtual memory subsystem that actually works, and an update subsystem that doesn't try to store half the internet in virtual memory every time there's an update. Because I like being able to actually *use* my computer. Call me crazy.

That has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. I was talking about Trump's cluelessness what is needed to retain the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency which is at best weakly related to its valuation relative to other currencies.

Only if hedge fund managers don't understand how the Fed chairmanship works. Trump can't replace Powell until February 2026, when Powell's term expires. Not unless Trump can make the case that he needs to be removed for cause, which would require evidence of misconduct, not just policy disagreement.

Honestly, I think there are probably more such users on Libera chat (the largest IRC network) than on Slashdot at this point.

China's economy can always sell product to Chinese people. There are a lot of them. Not to mention the rest of the world, which is happy to trade with China, if only because China isn't constantly making unreasonable and incoherent demands on everyone.

Yes, if you'd been following along I was identifying a SPECIFIC PERSON'S hypocrisy.
If I'm calling out one person as a tendentious hypocrite, what relevance would be articles by some Washington weekly, Vox*, or the "Bipartisan policy center"**?

*oops:
"Initially effective at increasing deportations, the Secure Communities program was short-lived. It faced blowback from primarily liberal jurisdictions, driving a revival of the movement to offer sanctuary to undocumented immigrants in the 2010s.
The concern among progressives was that it would reduce trust in law enforcement among immigrant communities and make everyone less safe because fewer people would report crimes. It also led to the deportation of people who had only committed minor offenses or had no criminal convictions.
In 2014, Obama rescinded the program in response."

** to their main question: why isn't Trump prioritizing the worst criminals? Well....they don't appear to really know, "it appears" "it seems" - when a quick perusal of the WH's own official statement repeatedly mentions prioritizing public safety. https://www.whitehouse.gov/pre...
FWIW, honestly, I don't care how they prioritize them. If they're caught, send them home, full stop. Bird in the hand is one that doesn't get to fly to some shitty "sanctuary city" and rob/rape/kill some innocent person there.

Is "inability to act like a functioning adult" really an excuse, though?

Yes, because certainly nobody did science (tm) before governments drove it?

Maybe we could check in with Mr Eisenhower, from his famous "beware the military-industrial complex" speech:
https://www.archives.gov/miles...

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

...it's funny nobody remembers this bit, ain't it?

"Mad Max" seems to have seriously underestimated the creativity of Australians regarding energy production :)

... But it seems to me that being able to deploy a "fueling" station that requires no grid connection, not that much space (and what you're using for the panels is still technically available ground, if shaded) is a rather good thing.

I mean... If you're doing a video call and someone undresses (and you didn't want them to), are you unable to simply hang up?

Of course, I've never in 57 years had someone undress in a phone call, so what do I know?

That's bold, considering the last flu vaccine round had a NEGATIVE 26.9% efficacy.
#followthescience

Yes, you read it right, if you were vaccinated you had a 27% HIGHER chance of getting the flu.
https://www.medrxiv.org/conten...

Now, a host of slashdot leftists are ALREADY TYPING THEIR RAGE_REPLY because I must be an antivaxxer.

Actually, I'm not. I just don't participate in the "with us or against us" bullshit binary that's accreted around the COVID vaccines. (So that probably does make me an "enemy" in their book.)

I consider vaccines to be one of the greatest achievements of modern technology. I'm vaccinated. All our kids are vaccinated, and I haven't a single qualm about recommending MMR and the slate of childhood vaccines for every little kid.

THAT SAID, I also think that
- COVID panic was largely bullshit. It was a highly communicable but otherwise not-very-virulent corona virus strain that mainly affected older and vulnerable people. Thus the term..."vulnerable". At the end, the IFR for COVID19 was basically a bad flu*. Cry all you want, argue the actual data.
- the COVID vaccines were rushed, not nearly tested enough, and have resulted in some very questionable ongoing heart and other issues in younger people that had NOTHING to fear from COVID. Given the high effort in deliberately confounding the outcomes during the Biden administration, it's unlikely we'll ever know the truth.
- I'd have had much more confidence in the entire COVID event had one side not made all the decisions for everyone and insisted no debate was allowed. OPENLY discussing the causes, the treatments, and what we did/didn't know would have been preferable to the "STFU we know what's good for you" nearly-totalitarian approach. Hell, here in MN there was an almost-palpable disappointment we didn't get to use the corpse-storage-buildings the state rushed to rent.

Do you take issue with my tone? Tough shit. Anyone daring to question the Holy COVID doctrine was aggressively silenced for YEARS while the mandarins in charge RUINED lives flexing their emergency doctrines and now will evade any consequence for their awful decision making. Yeah, that bothers me.

* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...
The median IFR (COVID19)was
0.0003% at 0-19 years
0.002% at 20-29 years
0.011% at 30-39 years
0.035% at 40-49 years
0.123% at 50-59 years
0.506% at 60-69 years
https://www.medrxiv.org/conten... median IFR for flu you'll have to look as the graph isn't postable in (the ancient shit-code of) /. comments but sits at about 125/100k or 0.125%
Yes, lots more people got COVID. It was highly communicable. But nobody under 30 should have been even faintly discomfited, even people under 50 really shouldn't have given much of a shit.
Quarantining sick people in elderly homes was a catastrophically stupid idea and we knew it by March/April 2020.

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.