At work there is a coffee grinder and espresso machine where I get to do the whole barista thing myself . Takes longer than a barista, is cheaper than a barista, and often turns out worse because I'm not trained in the art of coffee. Buying the wrong beans (or mixing beans) is an offence that can lead to you beingn fired.

Like the word hackers, media has taken over "liberalism" for its own benefits

In civilised parts of the world, that isn't called coffee, it's called other names that are best not repeated in public. the coffee civilised people drink is made on demand by a barista, none of this 'pot' business.

Yes, what a lot of people are missing is that these increased prices are going to give inflation a good kick. Companies that are recycling hardware "because reasons" will either need to spend more or upgrade less older hardware. Those that spend more will pass it on to their customers (often consumers.) Then there's manufcaturers like Apple - Dell, Lenovo, HP are also in this boat. Every new hire that traditionally got a new laptop with (say) 16GB of RAM is going to be more costly to hire. And so it goes.

We computer geeks might see it impeding our upgrade/build-out plans but I believe the impact will be much wider and will generally push inflation up.

Is this Elon Musk's way of buying out the VC folks so that he can do with xAI what he wants?

Does anyone know how many shares xAI had privately issued?

If you had put in $10 billion in the last round of funding, what's your payout with this buyout?

How much VC did Musk have in xAI?

Is this just a way of Musk paying himself lots of $ billions from SpaceX?

I'd love to know the details of this buyout.

What took Lego so long? Probably the contracts/agreements around the rights to use the names (that are all trademarked), likenesses, royalty payments, etc. There's no way that this wouldn't fall into the "merchandise" category and thus part of the profit sharing goes to the intellectual property owners. Makes you wonder how much George Lucas made (& Disney continues to make) out of Lego Star Wars.

If humans survive long enough, they're going to have a pretty bad day when the Yellowstone caldera explodes next. Even in modern history there's The Year Without a Summer

Life does not have that long left on this planet, maybe as little as 600 million years due to other changes in the Sun and its output. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...:

The luminosity of the Sun will steadily increase, causing a rise in the solar radiation reaching Earth and resulting in a higher rate of weathering of silicate minerals. This will affect the carbonate–silicate cycle, which will reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. About 600 million years from now, the level of carbon dioxide will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method to persist at carbon dioxide concentrations as low as ten parts per million. However, in the long term, plants will likely die off altogether. The extinction of plants would cause the demise of almost all animal life since plants are the base of much of the animal food chain.[12][13]

Summary: complex life will have existed on this planet for only ~1.2 billion years from its start to end (for some definition of "complex"), from the Cambrian explosion to when the environment no longer supports life. How precious is complex life? It will only exist on this planet for less than 15% of the time it exists in the universe.

Who do you think pays for it to be broadcast? The gambling companies with their ads.

For sports to reach the number of people that it does requires a lot of money Sports have gone from being funded by nicotine, to alcohol, and now gambling. All vices and all highly profitable with healthy margins. Because society has kicked out nicotine & alcohol ads (and thus sponship), all that is left is gambling.

Rich people already have human agents to do that for them - they're called tax accountants. They don't violate tax law, they just use corner cases and loopholes that you and I can't. What this will do is turn you and I into felons because we screwed up line 40 box C on page 5, something that today would only be a problem if we were randomly selected for human audit.

Since AI will be processing tax returns, it would be interesting if the processing of tax returns could be summarised in data so that we know how many billionaires use each of the various tax return loopholes and corner cases. A difficult job for humans, but since machines are processing the data and evaluating it all against "code" (law), it should be an easy output to produce.

Health insurance in the USA is ridiculous because of the profits that courts feel they have to raid when something goes wrong and a someone sues. The $100,000,000 wrongful death award drives up insurance because insurance companies don't want to be out of pocket when a doctor claims.

The problem then is the vertical stacking of health insurance also being health providers, resulting in a loss of competition because it is very expensive to provide health care. The same problems happens with Internet access - vertical integration creates monopolies. Law that prohibits co-ownership of different layers of the service stack (be it health care of telephony) should be considered mandatory to provide customers with the best value for money

This Internet thing is Elon Musk's price for assistance in the election, as regional people will now be herded towards StarLink.

And since the government communicates with citizens by using the Internet (via web services and any other manner of things), it is not possible to put any restrictions in place on how people access that communication. Passing any law that attempts to restrict access to government communication would fail a 1st ammendment test.

It's more than just what you eat - in some people there are biological mechanisms that aren't functioning correctly, such as the hormones that direct whether or not the body should store glucose as fat or consume it or even convert fat for the body to use. In some people, all calories are stored as fat regardless of how little they eat. and then there are hormones that tell the brain to eat less because the body has lots of fat reserves and new food intake isn't required.

drugs such as this are aimed at helping people with broken biological mechanisms that should be saying "I don't need to eat more food" but aren't.

for some people weight gain is a simple problem of eating too many sugary things.

for a small number of people, it isn't possible to not gain weight.

There's been a lot of very interesting research in this area published in the last couple of years, and simply put, two people eating the same diet may not experience the same changes to their body's mass.

Part of the "small town" thing is that a lot of the towns where he has had rallies in the past won't let him do more because he hasn't paid his bills from 2020. This is normal Trump - don't pay your bills unless sued. That's why he is doing small towns and open air spaces - the big cities and big venues won't let him back in because he won't pay his bills.

Think of it like this: the car throws an exception and it is up to the user to catch and handle it ... or crash.