You would have to get voters to put politicians in office that agree to those fines and that don't just allow the courts to quietly renegotiate them down to zero.

About 40% of voters are currently super super concerned about trans girls in sports having suddenly become big fans of women's sports in the last couple of years after spending their whole lives ignoring them.

Eventually they'll forget about that and move on to some other pointless moral panic and continue to ignore there ever worsening economic situation except in a few situations where there's an opportunity to vote for a particularly pro corporate politician who promises them cheap eggs or something...

Seriously this is very much a political problem but I don't know what you do with the voters we have. Maybe if there wasn't so much voter suppression but there is so..

It's painfully obvious this is just a shake down and I'm wondering how the money is going to change hands and who gets it besides Trump.

I'm sure Papa Nurgel will get his cut but I wonder who else is going to get in on the action.

Assuming we managed to get rid of the Republican party the way the hungarians managed to get rid of Victor orban we are going to have so many years of cleaning up this mess. And the worst thing is is the majority of old farts that put us in this mess are going to drop dead before they have to deal with the consequences.

Has several people here have pointed out the way Macs get those numbers is by heavily optimizing their CPUs and the software that runs on them. That means if you're going to run the Adobe suite on your Mac then yeah you're in good shape because Apple built custom features into their silicon for you and Adobe wrote software to use those features.

But if you go outside of the stuff Apple made specific optimizations for things get much less Rosy very quick.

To be clear there's nothing wrong with what apple is doing. They made a purpose-built computer for specific tasks and you get very very good performance and very good battery life if you're doing those specific tasks. Think of the old commodore Amiga computers it's like that. They could do all sorts of amazing things in certain spaces but they were kind of pants as general computers.

If you want a general purpose computer you're not going to beat what AMD and Intel has on the desktop right now. You trade a little bit of battery life to performance for that though. Depending on how much money you spend and how well built the laptop you get is sometimes you trade a lot.

Of course the absolute shit show that is Windows 11 isn't helping matters though. But that's another matter entirely and Linux is a viable option for a lot of things.

Even if Microsoft didn't do any AI crap whatsoever they would still have to jack up prices because the bubble is devouring all the ram. Storage is also up quite a bit in price though not as bad as RAM.

The price of ram has quadrupled. And it's not going to come back down in price anytime soon. Even after the AI bubble bursts and the winners are decided and demand comes back down you will not see prices come back down probably for 8 to 10 years.

That's because like everything there will be collusion between the manufacturers and eventually there will be enough Democrats in charge of Congress and various attorney general positions that they will go after the ram producers and give them a little slap on the wrist and make them lower prices. But it's America's political system is so fucked up that's going to take a long time and Europe just does not have enough weight to force something like that. If the European Union could act as a United Force they probably could but it's too easy for one corrupt politician in one of the European Union states to screw that up. Although without Victor orban that might be a little bit harder it's still a problem...

You have a double whammy of out of control demand and inelastic pricing caused by zero competition in any markets because we stopped enforcing antitrust law. Like out for the longest time flat panels were stupidly expensive even though the technology had come down in price until the Democrats in America got around to smacking the panel manufacturers around a little bit.

That makes sense. It should be a general law about harmful/addictive behaviour.

That's likely exactly how it will work. Infinite scroll itself won't be banned, just infinite scroll intended to be addictive. If a social media company wants to argue it in court, they can try to convince a judge that their implemented it for some reason other than to keep people on the site.

These lawsuits are terrible for consumers. McDonald's has been doing them with beef producers instead of lobbying for antitrust law enforcement.

So what happens is that instead of competition the beef producers pay out settlements to a few big guys that can sue. McDonald's pockets the money, they can run their competitors out of business because smaller guys can't force settlements and prices keep going up along with corporate profits.

That's what's happening here instead of law enforcement we get back from deals from billionaires

Any vty, pty or tty will do.

Something like 60% of the country reads at a 6th grade level or below.

As a country we don't do nuance. We are All or nothing. We just do not have the educational equipment to pull off nuance.

AI data centers are bad. Really bad. They guzzle drinking water and they go straight for drinking water because their design requires very pure water and its pricey to purify it and they're already losing money hand over fist. They also guzzle subsidized electricity. When one of them gets crapped down into your city it's guaranteed that your water bill and your power bill are going to skyrocket.

And God help you if they are near where you live. The noise they produce causes active physical harm. It's a weird sort of low pass filter noise the damage is human psyche and physiology in a variety of weird and frightening ways. If you remember that story about The Havana syndrome it's like that only 24/7.

Oh, and no jobs. I mean I guess there's a handful but literally you could count them on one hand. The administration is done remotely overseas so you've got a couple of security guards and a couple of guys that show up every other week to change out some parts. Everybody is contractors making a little bit more than minimum wage. You don't even get a lot of jobs building them because it's highly specialized work so they bring people in from out of state to do it.

They offer absolutely no advantages except the bribe to your local politicians. It is absurd to greenlight these things in your community. The only reason to do so is that your voters are too stupid to say no.

Audiences expect a certain level of quality, which is why most of the Star Trek fan stuff never gains any significant viewership. The only one that ever got much traction was funded to the tune of millions of USD to build proper sets, hire professional camera and sound people, that sort of thing.

Apple clearly doesn't give a shit about privacy and safety. Look at AirTags. Easy to disable the speaker, and they could have detected that kind of tampering easily enough. At launch there was no practical way for non-iPhone users to defend themselves against being secretly tracked with those things.

Maybe we need privacy glasses. Like smart glasses, but instead of cameras, there are IR LEDs that flicker randomly to screw up any cameras pointed at you.

Between 100 million and a billion dollars. It's a really huge gap that people have a hard time grasping because human beings are bad at grasping numbers that large.

The absolute top Stars might have net worth in the hundred million range or so but besides one or two super duper Stars none of them approach billionaire status. They simply do not have the money to start their own production studios that are capable of competing with Disney and Warner Bros.

And nobody is going to give them the money to do that because it's a good old boy Network and they are not going to fund their competitors. Because why the fuck would they find a competitor that is just going to dilute their market power? They are literally merging so that they can have less competition not more of it.

I said this on another comment but it's worth repeating, we stopped and forcing antitrust law and that is a fundamental underpinning of capitalism. We broke capitalism. It doesn't work anymore. I suppose we could try fixing it but we have to try first.

Nobody's going to give you the money to compete with Hollywood. At best you might be able to crank out a b movie or two that you can dump on Netflix but even that is dodgy because the people in charge of everything all go to the same golf clubs and they all belong on each other's board of directors so if you're actually going to try to break into that by competing they're just not going to let you do it.

If you happen to have enough money to start your own thing then sooner or later you will trip up and lose a bunch of money and they will be there to deal The killing blow. Either they will buy you out or if they can't do that they will create a competing product and sell it for a fraction of your price running you out of business the rest of the way.

We stopped enforcing antitrust law. As soon as we did that every system designed to create better products and make capitalism work broke down.

Capitalism is supposed to be a contest among equals but that requires a referee and we fired the ref.