Ah, so free speech should be limited?

I'm not saying I disagree. I'm saying the propaganda needs some tuning. Sounds like you and the GP think maybe a great firewall might not be such a bad idea yeah?

Not using a 2400 bps modem to complain about how tiresome new technology is.

Nah. It's because Ford got off a sick burn talking about how much real estate there is on his ass so Trump has lots to kiss.

There's something the kids say about only a handful of unique sentences being left unwritten.

Ketchup.

I was thinking about this. I fully expect the journalist said "weight" because they don't know or didn't think about the difference, but you can't actually measure mass. We always infer it from measurements of force and, sitting stationary in a gravitational field, we virtually always do so by measuring the force required to counter gravity, i.e. by measuring weight.

Nobody has to hold this thing up over a significant gravitational source

The rocket that launches it does.

You either misunderstand which way the Earth rotates or what effect that has on rocket launches. California is limited to retrograde orbits, which nobody uses except the Israelis because they have no choice, and polar orbits.

It's not their fault. They've been immersed in propaganda since at least WWII, and somehow failed to develop the cynicism of your average eastern European.

No way man. Datacentre FLOPs are shit compared to artisanal home made FLOPs.

Datacenters are misguided. Soon enough models and hardware will be good enough that everyone will be able to run their own local AI at home.

My father had an Apple II. It was one of a wave of "personal computers" that would let you run things like word processors and spreadsheets at home.

Guess where most people run those things now.

Interesting how quickly Americans go from God given, inalienable rights to "should they be allowed to foreigners?"

There is a grand conspiracy theory about imposing a sales tax to get rid of income tax but the numbers just don't work out. Especially when your sales tax is limited to imports.

In reality, the US deficit is 6% of GDP. If that doesn't change then there's going to be hell to pay, the only argument is about when. There are two ways to fix it: spend less or make more. Cutting taxes to stimulate an economy sounds great, and the voters love it, but it didn't work. Cutting spending is less politically acceptable but they tried that too and it also didn't work. The only thing left is raising taxes, which is political suicide, particularly when you ran on a platform of cutting them.

Fortunately there's a special kind of tax that you can convince people isn't a tax at all. It's even got a fancy name that is essentially medieval Arabic for tax. Even better, you can convince people that it's protecting their jobs from dirty foreigners! And bonus, US law provides a variety of emergency powers for the president, who is absolutely not supposed to be setting tax rates, to set the tax rate.

To be fair, tariffs are not math or science. They are business.

When I was an undergrad someone figured that the CS students would benefit from a compulsory business course. So we're all sitting there while a business professor explains supply, demand, and price optimization. He proceeded to walk us through very carefully drawing a graph, plotting lines (the course assumed they were linear) for supply and demand, and measuring with a ruler the location of the intersection point.

We all stared for a bit and then did it algebraically.

Tariffs are one of the things he is not supposed to do, at all. Trump is using emergency powers to usurp arguably one of the most important powers a government wields.

The US constitution, backed up by lots and lots of text from the authors of it, assign the power of taxation and allocating those funds to congress, specifically to balance the power of the executive. That wasn't their idea either, it's something England did and does, and a bunch of other European monarchies, going all the way back to the middle ages. They also didn't really think of it; even the Roman Republic assigned taxation to the legislature, not the executive.

Even when Rome assigned emergency powers to the executive, by appointing a dictator, they did not give that person power over taxation.

To be fair, I was also curious what Trump would do when he didn't have to worry about reelection or, indeed, living much past the end of his term. Curious in the way you see the edge of a cliff and wonder what it would be like to jump off.