LOL.... They actually modded your rage post up to +4 as Informative. This is the Slashdot I know and love... I tell you what....

But this is too amusing not to have some more fun with it, so allow me to piss you off a bit further with some facts!

First? I didn't vote for Trump the first time around but I actually held my nose and voted for him this time. Why? Because the entire thing is such a shit-show regardless of which idiot is in office, it was essentially just a vote against the idea of a half-dead guy with senility getting re-elected. It's not like they gave me anyone else on my ballot I could choose from.

Second? Damn right I'm "one of the old people". I'm already past 50 and I've seen a lot of crazy stuff come and go during my life, so far. Anyone could wind up homeless for a number of reasons -- but I doubt I'll be one of them. That's because I happen to prioritize having a roof over my head and I'm fine with living in "less desirable" parts of the country so I can own one without paying the "I live someplace COOL!" tax slapped on the land and property. In fact,where I live right now -- it'd not difficult to find a house to purchase that's as cheap as maybe $50,000 or so, if you're willing to do the work to fix it back up to code and make it safe to live in again. I see people signing up to pay nearly twice that for a new truck or car that's going to depreciate by $20K the minute they drive it off the lot!

Medicaid funding? Look .... the whole system is irrevocably broken at this point, regardless of how they dole out the funding. I'm very close friends with people who haven't been able to make use of ANY government assistance for medical care for YEARS, because of their life situations playing out like they did. (EG. Mental illnesses they're able to manage pretty well, but which qualified them for disability only IF they stayed in the same state long enough to go through all the hoops needed to get it. Meanwhile, they have reasons to move to a new state, which starts that qualification process all over again from scratch AND now they can't afford to pay for the doctor visits needed to put a disability case back together again.) Whether Medicaid programs get cut to the bone or massively expanded -- this is still the reality. Some people are milking the system to get all kinds of free care that they really should be paying their far share for. Others aren't able to take advantage of any of it and have to resort to going to Emergency Rooms of hospitals, agreeing to self-pay, and then refusing to pay the bill. Medical care simply costs FAR too much in America at this point. People wanting it free because they manage to qualify for government to pay the bills for them is just a big band-aid. The REAL problem is only apparent if you want to pay your own bills for it. I can fly to another country and pay out of pocket for just about any medical procedure and save many thousands over what American doctors/dentists/hospitals charge! The inflated cost for care is the core issue -- and that really has zero to do with anything Trump enacted.

Don't buy the thing!

I'm pretty much done spending any money on consoles due to the corporate greed that comes with them. My g/f was a huge console nerd and owns pretty much every game system made after a certain year. (She didn't bother to collect the early systems like the Atari 2600.) In her defense, she also had 5 kids so the money spent on all of the games and systems and accessories was justified by all of them enjoying using them too.

But I lost all interest in it after buying a PS4 and seeing how expensive it got for the PSPlus annual subscriptions, required to keep the unit from being little more than a crippled console that can't play anything online. My g/f has a PS5 that we hooked up and it's arguably even worse about it. An X-Box 360 is just as bad.

Nintendo keeps locking their stuff down too. USB-C is intended to be a standard connector/port. Any hardware implementing it in a non-standard way is broken/defective as far as I'm concerned.

I'm far from your typical "Trump supporter" ... but I've always been for the idea of less government spending and reducing its size and scope.

What's deeply disappointing is how those goals seem to be nearly impossible to attain. Every single time someone in a political position of power promise to make these changes, there's either so much push-back by someone else that it gets cancelled or whittled down into something meaningless, OR it just turns into a way to repurpose the same spending in other places.

Is a "National Science Foundation" really necessary? I'm far from convinced it is. Will Americans just stop researching anything because this big, Federally funded agency goes away? Anything is possible, I suppose -- but that sure sounds like an extremist/exaggerated claim! How many public AND private schools of higher education do we have in America today? Most of them are doing scientific research in one form or another, since that's how the next generation learns science. On top of that, there's always going to be a business incentive to do R&D so companies can improve on products or make new ones. They'll surely keep funding scientific research that benefits them. And beyond all of that? Yes, the entire rest of the civilized world ALSO does scientific research and there's nothing I see wrong with learning from properly done research that comes from Germany or Japan or China or anyplace else? This patriotic "need" for America to always be the world leader is a hugely expensive undertaking that doesn't necessarily justify how heavily the citizens get taxed to fund it.

They just want to subsidize enough of their operation with revenue from ads to keep things afloat.

Realistically, a whole lot of people will tolerate a bunch of advertising if it's a trade for viewing the desired content free. YouTube is living proof. But sorry ... once you pay for the experience, you really DON'T want to be bombarded with 30-some minutes of advertising. Clearly, AMC is banking on getting the ad revenue by running all the ads, but telling the moviegoers to essentially come 20-30 minutes later so you can skip all of them and still see your movie.

This plan doesn't sound too sustainable to me.

This has really *always* been sound advice. Getting a foot in the door at a company because you know someone there beats just about anything else you could do to apply for the job.

For example? A friend of mine had a daughter who wanted a banking job. She applied at a bank that said they had an opening which she was a great fit for. The bank rejected her almost immediately, claiming the position was already closed or filled. It turns out, my friend knew a lady who already worked for that same bank in a management role, so she asked her why her daughter wasn't considered for the opening. Within 2 days, her daughter got a call back from the bank offering her an interview, and she was eventually hired! (Their excuse for the complete turn-around? Just a claim that they tended to promote from within unless an applicant could be vouched for by someone already employed there.)

In my own I.T. career, I've gotten hired a couple of times based only on my resume and interviews. But I believe just about every other job I've held, including my very first one as a lowly telemarketer for a carpeting cleaning business, was obtained because of someone I knew who already worked there. In one instance, I knew the owner of the company that was hiring because our paths had crossed before in a shared hobby interest.

If I'm honest about it? I feel like it's been years since any one web browser felt "better" than another to me for technical reasons like speed/performance or ability to work properly with web sites I needed to use.

My preference for FireFox has more to do with such things as the UI layout and the way it "compartmentalizes" certain things. (EG. On a Windows platform, it still manages SSL certificates in their own place, vs. sharing the common set of them stored and managed in Windows itself.) The fact it's NOT another Chromium-based browser means it's handy for troubleshooting too. (If I have issues with a web site, I like to have both a browser like Edge or Chrome AND FireFox to use so I can test it with both web engines.)

Who are these people who care SO much about how fast a browser renders content, anyway? It's the ongoing joke over on Apple forums with Safari browser.... "New MacOS release makes Safari snappier!" On any non prehistoric computer, web browsers performing poorly almost always have more to do with either the speed of the Internet connection itself, memory issues from somebody leaving a million tabs open, or poorly written web site code. I don't care what a stopwatch says. I care about the overall user experience, and it's fast enough in any decent browser.

The *real* problem is with people who aren't skilled enough at operating a motor vehicle while manipulating a device or controls. Long before cellphones existed, we had people accidentally rear-ending other cars because they were trying to change their radio station or volume. Yet, we didn't pass laws banning car stereos. (We collectively acknowledged the benefits of a car stereo while driving and decided people just needed to learn how to work the radio controls in a safe manner while driving -- which most people figured out how to do.)

People used to manage to unfold paper maps and refer to them while driving, back in the 1970's and earlier, without wrecking into people, too.

I'm amazed at how lax the drivers' ed testing has become in recent years. My daughter went to get her license last year and the entirety of the practical part of her exam was having her drive around the block, out of the shopping center the motor vehicle dept. was located in, and back into the lot to park in a parking space next to it. They didn't so much as get her out on the highway! I have a hard time rationalizing that as ok, while worrying about good/experienced drivers who multitask glancing at smartphone screens.

As long as he's referring to his own field (creation of animations/art for film or video), I think he's essentially correct. AI will become a required tool you need to be familiar with as part of your career. It won't take people's jobs, except for people who refuse to learn how to utilize AI as part of it.

I'm FAR from convinced AI usage will play out the same way in all industries. For example? If you work in law, it makes sense AI could replace your lower-paid paralegals who essentially just open Word templates and fill out fields with appropriate info for each client. However, AI isn't at all likely to take jobs of many attorneys out there because that line of work involves showing up in courts in person, and presenting things to other people in a persuasive way.

If you're paid to publish ad copy, then AI is likely to reduce the number of employees needed, but again? The ones retained will need to know how to utilize AI tools well (and how to supplement or revise what they churn out).

AI isn't going to do anything meaningful in most "blue collar" fields like construction, IMO. It might help an architect out with the design stages of a project, but people getting paid to build things won't get anything done by some software code running in the cloud.

My feelings don't necessarily prove or validate anything... but they're based on the reality I've witnessed unfolding all around me over the years, plus statistics and data I've seen over time that corroborates it.

What are "the numbers" you speak of, anyway? You act as though there's some definitive set of numbers out there that proves everything I said as untrue?
All you have to do is study your recent American history to see changes in corporate America like creating the job description of "Human Resources", where no such department used to exist. This was strictly a move to give excuses to hire more women in white collar career office settings. (Companies got along just fine before that by letting management handle personnel issues directly, on their own. Issues related to insurance or benefits were probably handled by the same Finance team that paid those bills.)

I agree with the people pointing out how Canada eliminated the penny and it's worked fine to round up or down to the nearest 5 cents.

But it seems to me the value of the penny in U.S. currency has more to do with enabling the psychological "mind games"? EG. Promising people can get an item or service for only a penny, because people equate that with "pretty much no cost". While sheer volume of customers accepting the deal means it adds up to at least a sum that's worth collecting vs. just giving the same thing away free. Also encourages the mind game of wanting $10 for a product but pricing it at $9.99 instead to make it feel cheaper.

I guess over time, people will just view a nickel the same way, mentally, as a penny is viewed now.

We're still caught up in this big political/cultural war, where the more "liberal leaning" half of our population is still sold on the idea that we need to keep making more "opportunities" for women in the workplace, and secondarily? There was blatant sexism against women up till now, preventing them from obtaining workplace equality.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. The core issue at hand is really a level deeper. In my lifetime, I've witnessed a big shift in focus away from valuing the "stay at home mom" and the idea of the man being the "breadwinner" of the relationship/marriage. Unfortunately, this resulted in a whole generation of women who believed they should/could "do it all". Raise the kid/kids but ALSO get the full-time demanding career job.

If we're honest about it though? This results in basically doubling the number of applicants for given career job openings across the country. All of a sudden, the work that was traditionally done by men has just as many women applying to do it. The basic rules of supply and demand dictate this brings down wages and makes it harder to obtain a given job. So what happens next is, you get families who suddenly find they need 2 incomes instead of just 1 to survive. Both people go to work and wind up bringing in little more than what just the man would have earned if things were different. (And because women can't *really* give full focus to raising kids AND a demanding job, it results in more income spent on nannies, babysitters, daycare costs, etc. to get through it all.)

I'm not denying there were women out there not interested at all in raising kids who got a raw deal trying to work in a career field. But I'm saying, we went too far in the opposite direction and we're collectively paying the price. Yet, a big chunk of the population still wants things to continue full steam ahead.

You've got the developers of the phone operating system not providing a usable option for people trying to develop this type of application. On one hand, they're complaining that the "All files access" permission is unacceptable to use, as a security risk .Yet on the other hand, you're talking about an application that's supposed to allow syncing much of your phone's content to your remote server (your photo collection, music collection, calendar info, etc.), and allows general uploading and downloading of files between the phone and server.

If Google doesn't want someone like Nextcloud using "All files access", then they should design an acceptable alternative. Perhaps a special permission for file management and syncing type software that allows all of the needed data to be accessed while logging it someplace secure, in case there really is some kind of security issue to be researched with an app's behavior?

The idea of a 125% plus fee slapped on imports or exports to and from a couple of nations producing huge volumes of goods each other need is simply unsustainable.

At the same time? I don't really think even the MAGA crowd ever believed this was supposed to be some kind of long-term solution to anything? It was blatantly obvious to me from the start that Trump was throwing out these insane percentages to force real negotiations to happen. And here we are.

I mean, to use an ever-popular car analogy? Say you want to buy a guy's vintage Mustang. You've always wanted one but you're also sensible enough to know you're going to drive it regularly so it's going to be a constant drain on your finances keeping it running. The seller wants over twice the price you envision as sane/doable. If you go into things asking the seller to consider selling to you for $1000-2000 less than his asking price? You're still going to wind up paying FAR more than where you wanted to be on it, EVEN if he just accepts your offer at face value.

To have any hope of getting the car near your desired price point, you're going to have to completely "lowball" the guy, saying "Hey... if you get tired of trying to sell it and want to get rid of it? I'm willing to pay X price." A lot of people would tell you, "Well - you just can't afford a Mustang, my friend. He's going to ignore you and sell it to someone else paying his asking price!"

BUT ... maybe he lives in an area where there's not much demand for one? Maybe he needs the money and was only pricing it so high because he heard other people got that much at auto auctions before for similar ones and was just hoping he'd have the same luck? The point is, at least now, the buyer has his cards on the table and it's in the sellers' court to consider entertaining his much lower offer.

America has been screwing around for decades, complaining about China stealing our intellectual property every time we have them manufacture items for us, China polluting without any controls on it, Chinese government subsidizing the cost to make products just so they can flood the American market with them below cost to make it uneconomical for a US company to stay in business making the same things, etc. etc. Our negotiations have amounted to real specific complaints and relatively insignificant tariffs applied selectively. None of this moves the needle for substantial changes.
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But with glass, you can get plenty of sand with very little effort along any beach or in a desert.... I don't see how there's much savings if you're driving around big, inefficient garbage collection trucks to get used glass from recycling bins and then having to have people sort it out to ready it for re-use?

For all the talk of landfills being some kind of "last resort"? I remember one statistic saying the entire nation's garbage disposal needs for 100 years being able to be handled by putting it all in a 250 square mile area. That's "a lot", subjectively.... yet with 3.8 million square miles of land in America, it's not much at all.

Exactly! It's been said many times that one of the only items that makes any economic sense to recycle is aluminum. Aluminum cans are cheaper to recycle than the cost of mining for more aluminum ore and refining it.

I bet if the truth was told, most of your city-wide recycling programs count on capturing those aluminum cans as the main/only item that makes the program profitable on their books?

Most other material I see going into recycling bins are glass or paper/cardboard items, plus your random plastic containers that likely don't get recycled at all but people mistakenly believe they do so they toss them in. (Laundry soap jugs, etc.)

I know at one time, they claimed they made money selling the recycled cardboard and paper after compressing it into bales. But most of that went overseas, before other nations stopped accepting more of them from us in the U.S. Anyone who ever lived near a paper mill can attest to the horrible stench it gives off from the chemicals needed to process the pulp into paper products. Recycled paper/cardboard is of a lesser grade than fresh lumber so it has limited uses and demand. It's fine to make more cardboard shipping boxes, but does you no good for making a good quality greeting card. If you're dealing with nasty polluting chemicals to process paper either way? You usually may as well make higher grade paper instead of low grade stuff from recyclables, while you're at it. The big environmental impact is from the processing; not the fact you had to use fresh cut trees instead of scrap paper/cardboard. The trees are a renewable resource.