Parents no longer parent and expect the schools to teach their unruly and coddled child.

cool.

Why?

The computers sat in a lab, and the kids would interact with them a couple times a week in a structured (instructed) setting.

Good grief no!

All the value I got was in the non structured settings where you could fart around on the computers without interference from teachers who by and large didn't know much about computers at all. Of course there was no internet at that point so that was mostly programing. I always did best in the least heavily structured subjects.

I do not know why Americans hate nuance so much but it's pretty deeply ingrained in our culture.

Puritanism.

Murder a bunch of toddlers? Murder is a sin and you're going to hell.

Steal a loaf of bread to feed you starving kid? Stealing is a sin and you're going to hell.

The end result's the same and equally bad either way, regardless of the sin. This strips away all nuance. If you're good you go to heaven, if you sin you go to hell.

You forgot renewed your passport despite it still having 7 years validity left just so you get the one with Trump's face on it, all paid for using $Trump

Are you human? Please complete the following captcha:

What's 0.1 + 0.2.

If the answer is 0.30000000001 then you failed.

Seriously, it's a pretty common metaphor. People don't literally mean the physical objects known as screens are bad per-se. It's what's on the majority of them in the hands of kids the majority of the time. It's much easier to say "screens" as opposed to specifying particular kinds of social media, and particular genres of short form videos and etc. Because we both know that if people didn't be 100% fully precise then you'd be complaining that forums are technically social media and some of those are fine etc etc.

A nerd might say "well akshually it's what's on the screen" whereas most people know what's meant by the phrase.

People don't use pedantically precise language all the time, fully caveated and cited as if they are having a particularly obnoxious internet debate. People use slang, jargon, shorthand, metaphor and simile in order to communicate.

Iâ(TM)m betting during the boom of the gold rush there wasnâ(TM)t any pickaxe vendor lagging behind in sales. Not even the biggest ones.

It isn't. They are doing very, very well with stock nearly doubling in a year. That's mad crazy levels of growth. But they're doing incredibly well from a solid base. Intel spent a decade fucking up so they're a long way down which means they have higher to climb.

Building generators does not require tax dollars.

Of course not. We buy electricity from the utilities. They don't pay us to take it.

That's actually a smart strategy.

But I wonder how many employees will quit in today's job market.

You're assuming every pickaxe is the same, it's not. NVIDIA's pickaxe was bigger, sharper and lasted longer at the start of the rush which is why everyone preferred their pickaxe and only went to the competition if they couldn't get the bigger better pickaxe. That dynamic is slowly changing as the laggards are catching up.

Nvidia has risen dramatically over the past decade or so because it found a crossover market for its video chips, specifically in high-performanced computing, cryptocurrency, and more recently AI-training. I think its stock-price will keep rising as long as it keeps innovating or it finds new markets, and its customers don't find alternatives. However, it has suffered a few pullbacks over the years, so it's not a buy-and-forget stock.

I think Tony Isaac's point is a company that is already very big cannot get a lot bigger without getting smaller first.

Intel is a good example of that. Its stock-price had a big rise up to mid-2000 until the dot-com bubble burst. Then it fell by a factor of two. For about a decade and a half it did pretty much nothing, then rose to challenge its 2000 high starting in early 2020. Then it fell again, reaching early-2010s levels last year. And then suddenly it had a spike upwards in the past year or so, fed by new management, the AI surge, and partnerships.

In all of these cases, Intel's stock price rose after lows, some of them significant. It didn't just keep rising, because it couldn't. There's only so much capital in their sector of the marketplace. An already-large company would need a whole lot more of that capital to grow, percentage-wise, than a smaller company.

You are right that individual investors are not limited by market-cap. However, individual investors need to consider how much more a company's stock-price can grow if it has already grown a great deal. It may need to sell off before it can rise again.

If the 'AI' guys are anything to go by; probably get increasingly elaborate with their attempts to bypass whatever rate limiting is put in place. It's honestly sort of wild seeing the hottest, most heavily capitalized, elements of 'tech' wrap around so rapidly and with so little concern toward the sort of traffic patterns you normally associate with criminals as soon as it's in their interests. At one time I would have been surprised.

There is an intermediate situation that that case arguably illustrated:

Using violence against harder targets is more of an organizational problem; and solving that problem potentially skews your candidate pool; but what's very curious(particularly for a society whose overall violence numbers are very much on the high side by developed world standards) is how safe it apparently is to be widely notorious and a fairly soft target. Thompson was just walking down the sidewalk alone at a predictable time and location. Zero precautions. Something like the Sacklers were a household name for over a decade, with strong cases for culpability in at least low 6 figures worth of deaths sprinkled across a variety of walks of life; even the ones you suspect might be risky like deer hunters with dead kids and members of criminal organizations where internecine homicide is routine, and what came of it? Nothing. Not even any 'foiled at a late stage'/'shot and missed' level stuff.

That's the genuinely puzzling bit to me: not that there's nobody going after people who take the sort of precautions that would probably require one of the old-school 80s red army faction types to deal with; but that it's apparently really safe to be widely loathed and not do much about it in a country where 20k firearms homicides a year isn't considers terribly exceptional. If the people who can actually afford guard labor were having to make the onerous lifestyle commitments to living like someone's out to get them it would be relatively unsurprising that being able to afford competent professionals puts you ahead of angry amateurs much of the time. What is surprising is how often there's apparently no downside to not even bothering. We even have to import the lurid stories of 'crypto kidnapping' by purely financial opportunists from overseas to obtain them in any quantity.

It's essentially impossible to make a good argument for some uncached CI lunacy that has you outperforming the overtly malicious as a source of traffic; but if there's one thing that reliably upsets people it's getting called on convenient behavior that they can't readily justify; so I'm genuinely curious what the ratio of sensible adjustment to unhinged freakout by bro whose subsidy is not in fact a law of nature they'll see.

Obviously trump doesn't care; if anything the grifts that you can totally phone in are probably even funnier than the ones where you have to try; but I'm puzzled by why this sort of thing doesn't bother some of his enthusiasts more. Not the nihilistic edgelords and ethnic nationalists so much; but if you are actually enthusiastic about 'greatness' shouldn't it worry you that Dear Leader, who you trust to deliver national renewal, apparently can't puke up the sort of zero-effort ODM rebadge job that any garbage tier prepaid carrier does anywhere from multiple times a year to at least annually, depending on market conditions?

Obviously the phone itself is basically irrelevant; but it seems like the sort of project that would cause anyone not wholly immune to feel some degree of at least secondhand embarrassment about.