And hope that the item is not a counterfeit... unfortunately that is very hard to determine from the plethora of weird vendors offering similar items at slightly different price points.

What I wonder about it what happens to the legions of displaced and their children? Seems like this will be the industrial moves to Asia but with a far wider impact. One starts to think about stuff like the French Revolution... or perhaps the Russian. And in the US at least the displaced will be well armed and not too happy. A problem that has been building for decades. At least the birth rate is falling.

Copilot became available at the time I was doing my taxes, so I gave it a try. Nothing more complex than locating certain transactions in an excel sheet and a bit of math with the group. The thought... it should not be this hard came to mind as we crawled down the rabbit hole. Was grateful when I found there was an obscure way to turn it off and refuse the extra cost 'upgrade'. I can see that management is rubbing their hands over the thought of all the extra licensing fees. But from a simple productivity perspective they should be paying the user to alpha test the stuff.

No surprise here. The hinge and the ribbon cable across the joint was the failure point for my Motorola flip phones and a series of Psion pocket computers (much missed). A minor miracle that none of the laptops I have worn out over the years died quite that way. But being larger they were a tad more servicable. Which was not a feature of the other devices. Nice that the concept has resurfaced but a better approach to the failure points remains elusive. Sigh.

Gettinf through videos that are mostly just talking heads needs 2x, most content is fine at 1.5x. Glad Youtube allows this and their speedup algorithm does reduce the chipmunk effect. Items in the general news that are talking heads I just skip... too painful when there is no text summary. Maybe an old fart but can still read way faster than these jerks can babble.

Have seen harbors on the east coast jammed with jellyfish. Wondered how long it would take before it was noticed that industrial cooling would be affected. Guess someone needs to design a better tea strainer. Also, with wildfires threaatening power lines, curious about the viability of one grid to rule them all. Somehow, loosely integrated local power plants doesn't seem like that bad of an idea -- especially if one can manufacture them as opposed to crafting...

Meat alternatives have exised in the market for years, except in the US backwater. The products 'Beyond' offered, at least in Canada, were good but wildly expensive. We would see their burgers in fast food places as a more expensive alternative to the traditional dead critter. But as a grocery store product alternative it was easier and cheaper to make our own. Have seen the 'reports', which ignore the minor detail that most of the world does not consume meat in the quantities that are presented as normal. And many places don't eat it at all or in very small, occasional quantities. And the chemicals in US meat products are considered health hazards almost everywhere else. The decline of these companies comes down to two factors -- the unaffordability of their products and the relentless drumbeat of meat industry advertising. And we forget that this is very different from the world some of us grew up in many decades ago, before the explosion of industrial scale meat.

Over the years I leased two Chrysler Cirrus cars -- both shared the same defect, the pillars on both sides of the windscreen were so wide that one or two people in acrosswalk would be hidden by them. Exterior visibility has been an issue for many years -- of the 7 cars that I have owned, only two had clearly visible corners and were easy to parallel park -- my '66 caddy and '73 benz sedan. The rest required braille parking in crowded urban areas. The only saving grace of my current small SUV is a backup camera. And don't get me started on touch screens...

I have a piece of algonquin yellow pine that was cut over 100 years ago -- old growth wood and a long time to cure. Have wrecked a carbide blade trying to cut it... pretty impressive stuff if you let the trees grow slowly over the years and then let the cut lumber dry slowly. Nothing like modern wood that is rushed to market -- the growth ring spacing shows it.

A few years ago the Conservative government here in Canada decided to turf all the payrolll programs that had been paying Federal employees for years (very much lie SSA). A number of big name firms were hired and a new payment system was born -- even while the consulting types were struggling to understand the arcane payment rules for different specialties. A cutover date was announced and the bridges were burned. No parallel running to ensure it worked correctly. Old staff was laid off. Problem is the new system didn't work. And the tax folks decided people need to pay based on what they should have got vs what they did. It was a screwup of cosmic proportions and problems are still extant. After burning bushel baskets of money and decision was made to write another payment system.

Somehow this SSA initiative really does sound like the same playbook. And the chaos will make it easier to just steal the entire trust fund... our money. As for a rewrite to move it into a more fashionable language -- the bugs in the existing runtime should be well known by now. So they will be replaced by new bugs and constraints. Cobol is cobol... it did the job it was designed for.

How is anyone going to differentiate effectively between AI fantasies and actual genius? It is hard enough to tell with people (baseline academia and Mensa for many decades), even ignoring some of the antics being perpetrated around us by folks who should know better. To some extent it takes one to know one -- if you are interacting with someone whose conceptual universe is radically divergent from yours, how do you actualy tell? I think we would do better to try to make better use of the human talent we are currently wasting because their gender or racial ancestry doesn't match our current prejudices. Maybe if we understood what we already have first we might be better prepared to build something that transcends us. But not this week...

First of all, I agree with you completely. Secondly, there is only one thing I am aware of that grows relentlessly over time -- its called cancer. And the effects on the patient over time are not good. And the high priests of this IMHO are the MBAs who have claimed one did not need to know anything about a business to run it profitably. Even if making this quarters numbers destroys the business. Looking around, this short term transactional view is probably why we are where we are. Sad.

I have always considered reading to be the gateway drug to critical thinking. And if a news item is ONLY available as video of a talking head chatting about a problem with no associated text it becomes easy to skip. Typical news folks are 60 to 80 words per minute -- a fraction of reading rates. And no way to double back if a later statement conflicts with a former. And it is sad how much of the daily news feed is talking heads.

Th e accounting courses I took in university helped me manage my small consulting practice and stay on top of the pros who were doing my business taxes. But in a world where the likely answer to the hiring question 'what is one plus one' is 'what would you like it to be', the profession is yet another endangered species. In the court of the red queen a sane person will soon go mad.

Problem is that the Electoral College idea was dreamed up because the founders felt that the great unwashed were too ignorant to contribute meaningfully to choosing the next leaders. This has been cut back over the years so now only the president is chosen this way. Sad part is that, as alluded by others, the level of public ignorance as to the issues and choices is still pretty bad. Whether we are heading towards 'Idiocracy' or already there is just an opinion. But the concerns of the founders were well justified -- as a quick read of current news would suggest. Not sure this is redeemable anymore.