That comparison is incredibly unfair to the Cybertruck.

Is destroying the country's economic competitiveness part of the 80% or part of the 20%?

My previous reply was unnecessarily snarky, but I have to point out the "Linux" uses no such thing. GNOME, perhaps? I'm currently running KDE and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+u doesn't do this. Maybe it would if I changed the right setting.

Basically any "here's how you do that" advice is going to be very platform-dependent -- I just use a pair of hyphens. An actual em dash looks nicer, but not that much nicer. Though "—" is pretty easy on /., at least.

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

Without getting into the question of good or bad, chatbot prose is quite distinct from most professional prose. There are lots of common patterns in AI prose that are fairly rare to nonexistent in human-written prose.

Definitely not. Once you've read enough of it, AI prose isn't just easy to distinguish, it's impossible to miss. It's a very definite and unique style.

I just tried it, doesn't work. Alt-numbers just jump to different browser tabs.

Word? Really?

I'm an EMACS user. Complex key combinations are fine.

Fascism doesn't necessarily try to burn down science; Hitler did eject (and murder) a lot of Jewish scientists for being Jewish, but his regime was generally quite pro-science otherwise. Other autocratic regimes were also quite pro-science, once established. The USSR poured a lot of money into science. Not as much as the US but that was mostly because the USSR didn't have as much money to pour.

The regimes that reject science are populists and autocrats who are just establishing their power. Populism is fundamentally about rejection of influential and powerful elites, and the intelligentsia is both elite, because by definition it's a tiny and hard-to-enter group, and influential, because it's full of smart people who can give good policy advice within their areas of expertise. Populists don't necessarily need to eject the scientists and other academics, but they need to be seen bringing them under control. Trump doesn't want to shut Harvard down, he wants Harvard to bend to his will and, more importantly, be seen bending to his will.

Of course, to the extent that a government succeeds in disempowering and controlling the intelligentsia, it also drives them away and deprives itself of the benefits of their work.

Autocratic regimes in the making, whether populist or not, also seek to disempower the intelligentsia because they need to destroy the previous centers of power to solidify their own power. This is why most of the Communist revolutions imprisoned or killed all of the university professors right off. Some went a lot further; the Khmer Rouge basically murdered anyone with any post-secondary education, including all of their schoolteachers which, uh, didn't bode well for the future.

In the modern day, populism and autocracy tend to coincide because democracy has basically won as the default way any regime holds legitimacy. Most of the autocratic regimes today are at least notionally democratic, even if the elections are somewhat rigged and even if the autocrat uses their control of the media to control public opinion in their favor. Anti-elitism is basically necessary to retain autocratic power in a democracy because it's impossible to do without lying a lot, and that means you have to suppress people who seek truth. That means academics and journalists must be discredited and disempowered.

So, it's definitely something that autocratic populists do, because it's essential to their ability to gain and retain power. The long-term effects countries who go this way are predictable.

Neither does Google, and for the same reason: It would be selling the goose that lays the golden egg.

That program was shut down in 2024, so it's no longer running. It's an interesting point, though. The reason LE was buying that data was because they couldn't easily get subpoenas or warrants for it, which makes it far worse.

The amount of money AT&T was making was trivial, a few tens of millions per year at the high end. For a company that has annual revenues exceeding $100B it's hard to see why they even bothered. My theory is that they were more interested in the goodwill it earned them with the DoJ. Anyway, I bring this up because at least for Google (who I worked for for 15 years, so I have a pretty good understanding of the internal views), such trivial potential revenue would be seen as absolutely not worth the PR risk. It's much better for Google (and other tech companies) to be seen fighting warrants and subpoenas.

Also, I'll mention that the strategy I described -- treat user data as a liability, encrypt it all, burn the keys as soon as the data isn't needed any more -- is exactly what Google does. I'm not saying that could never change, but it would require the business environment to change, and if anything the environment is getting more sensitive to user privacy, not less.

Then if Ring is smart they should make it easy for users to provide the data to the police, and ensure that Ring can't, making themselves useless as a subpoena target and encouraging police to go ask the homeowners directly.

Mrs cra'Bapple is quite the stickler for graphene embiggement.

Watermark is the name of my next dog.

Let's call it Clod

Meanwhile people are knee deep off the coast of Zanzibar

Aunty M, Aunty M, it's a fuckin' twister!