Shareholders have this odd habit of wanting their CEO to do things that increase the profitability of the company. Given how many businesses are fleeing the anti-business climate of California for Florida, Texas, and other business-friendly states -- and thriving in those new states -- they might just give him a raise.

And yet, with all that economy, they still can't make budget

One could be forgiven for saying they can't afford to lose a single dollar of potential tax revenue.

What an utterly naive interpretation of world history you have. I can assure you, if you'd been a Jew being rounded up for extermination in WW2 you'd have a different opinion. Likewise, if you were Chinese or Korean being subjugated by Imperial Japan, you'd have a different perspective. There is such a thing as a "just war" even though you somehow ignore the concept. It's usually when your opponent starts the war and is hell bent on eradicating you and your way of life.

Alas, you sit there in perfect safety and comfort, passing judgement on those who sacrificed fa more than you can ever imagine so you could impugn their sacrifices.

Banned for who? And who's going to enforce this ban?

You have to remember any treaty (a) must have signatories that agree to follow it and (b) there must be a method of enforcement. If you lack either of these two conditions, the treaty has no effect.

Not sure how you think you could pull that off, but whatever.

Again...exactly how do you plan to accomplish this? It's not like Iran hasn't been firing missiles at our carriers this whole time. Yeah, it's a halfhearted effort by the Iranians, but what exactly do you think would happen to Iran if you managed to even damage one of our carriers, much less sink one? I can describe it thusly: the American gloves would come off. Iran would be plastered into oblivion via conventional bombardment, and there's very little Iran could do to stop it. Sure, we'd take losses, but the Iranian regime would cease to exist in totality. America has had this option available to it since day one. We haven't exercised it. Not because we couldn't do it but because we chose not to. Do not mistake restraint for a lack of capability.

Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.

He financed, produced, starred in, and distributed the film completely independent from the "Hollywood System". For God's sake, how much less "sucked in" can a person be and still have the means to do it at all???

Give the man some credit.

I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.

As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.

It's subjective.

My wife and I went to see a couple of movies last year because they were big deals to us (Terrifier 3 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice). We enjoyed the recliners, the limited edition popcorn bucket merch, the time out together, the reclining seats and the big screen.

What we didn't enjoy was the other people in the theatre talking through the movies, using their cell phones, coughing, breathing loudly, chewing food loudly, opening wrappers etc.

I'm with the parent, personally. If other people still enjoy the theatre experience then there's nothing wrong with that and theatres certainly don't "deserve to die." But there are those of us who don't consider watching a movie to be a social activity, and get extremely resentful and triggered when the presence of other people in the space pulls our heads out of the film we're trying to feel immersed in.

More people die in the aggregate when censorship is status quo. You start by censoring things you feel are absolutely justified because, allegedly, those ideas "cost lives." But then someone comes along with different ideas as to what is justified. Maybe they are threatened by ideas that challenge their power status. Soon enough science, research, innovation, investigative journalism .. .things that objectively improve people's lives and save many more lives than a virus has ever taken are silenced out of fear of repercussions for saying the wrong thing.

Freedom of speech is not a "laudable ideal". It is a fundamental human right that exists because reason is our primary tool of survival as human beings. But like with everything, there is good and bad to be found. There are bad actors out there who will lie and cheat and steal. The solution is not to prevent people from being able to share information, no matter how justified you feel in doing so. The solution is to counter bad ideas and lies with better ideas and truths. Individuals will make their own individual choices and face the consequences accordingly. Reality always wins.

My wife recently bought a new laptop and, to both of our surprise, it was configured out of the box to save data to OneDrive instead of C:. She's not particularly tech savvy and one day Chrome complained that storage was full. She did a web search of the error and it recommended deleting data from OneDrive, which she did, assuming that her family pictures were only backed up there - not primarily stored there - and ended up losing important data as a result of this.

Thankfully it must have been that particular OEM that chose to do this. I had installed "vanilla" Windows 11 on a custom PC build and that didn't happen - and we just bought a new laptop for our new business, different brand, and that was the first setting I checked (not an issue).

Still... companies pushing this type of crap on users is just batshit. Offer as an option, sure. But fundamentally re-configuring core functionality that people who have been using the OS for decades take for granted is just madness.

No it's not "obvious." My wife and I own 3 properties. One is commercial, the other two are residential. That might paint us as extremely wealthy but neither property is huge. We're fairly middle class. We use both residential properties interchangeably because they're not huge houses and we like our space. We could sell both and move into a single dwelling but we like things the way they are. Especially now that our daughters are adults in their twenties, who still live at home for the time being, but have their friends & significant others stay over quite a bit. I'm too much of an autistic introvert to live with that many other people in the same house 24/7 even if the house were a mansion.

The only reason I pay for the highest tier Netflix account is because of the number of devices allowed. Basically for my wife and daughters. I almost never watch it myself. Every time I open it up I feel like I spend more time scrolling to try and find something to watch than actually watching content. So if Netflix comes after us for "account sharing" I'm cancelling our subscription immediately without thinking twice about it. We're a single family, we just occupy multiple locations most of the time.

And our case is a bit more complicated than people who are talking about paying for a family account that includes kids who are away at school or camp or what-have-you. Or families who travel a lot. My wife and I are magicians (our commercial property is a small theatre and magic shop). This gets me thinking about families that travel for work. Army families or entertainers. Imagine being a Cirque Du Soleil performer - many of whom have kids ... they live on the road most days of the year.

The point is that there is no one-sized-fits-all "family" and it's more common for a nuclear family to occupy multiple locations than many would think.

A lot of us are old enough to have worked through the dot-com bubble and crash. The AI boom over the last year or two feels a lot like the late 90s leading up.

That said, if the market hadn't gone so all-in on the Internet and world wide web, investing stupid amounts of money into so many idiotic crackpot ideas that were doomed to fail, we arguably wouldn't have the Internet that we enjoy today.

In other words, you have to throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what will stick. 90% of just about everything we humans create is unremarkable. It's the 10% that we end up with that matters.

And we will get the 10% out of AI. Which is another way of framing what you are saying.

I've been a pretty big skeptic when it comes to the hype vs actual productivity gains, but that doesn't mean I haven't found a few areas where it has been useful in my workflow. LLMs are a cool magic trick. They can create some breathtaking illusions and are exceptionally useful at a few narrow applications such as searching and pattern matching.

While I don't want to see the ugly side of the crash (layoffs and unemployment), I am looking forward to when the hype train is over so everyone shuts up about their overstated fantasy and we can get on with doing actual work. The blockchain hype was annoying too, but since it wasn't obvious how blockchain could be applied to all types of work we didn't hear every single CEO at every single company talk about how AI is going to fundamentally change the way we work.