Sorry, but the potus is most definitely a protected class. Between his formal powers and immunities, their direct control of the justice department aka prosecutions, and their immense power to inflict pain on the states, they are essentially above the law. Now, everyone under him? Thats another matter. They dont get the same effective immunity. Just the top guy. Trump orders ICE to roam around like the gang from clockwork orange and beat the first random person they encounter to death. Trump? Immune. The ICE officers themselves. Nuh uh theyâ(TM)re probably gonna be facing state murder charges eventually.

The Supreme Court can declare potus actions to be unconstitutional and he pretty much has to comply. At least at the malicious compliance level. Congress can impeach. Those are about the only hard checks on the man himself.

Unless your name is Edward Snowden, my understanding is that the US doesn’t care much if someone gets disgusted with our system and decides to move somewhere else. It’s their decision. And, what’s the point of employing an army of skilled people to make a few hundred unhappy people even more miserable? What a colossal waste of human effort for basically no return on investment. I’m fine if China and Russia want to utterly waste their human capital on that sort of thing. Us? We need good people to be working on too much stuff that actually matters to be flushing time and money down the drain like that.

Oh I totally agree about Starship’s readiness. Nowhere near ready yet. But at least SpaceX has a focus and intensity.

I get the feeling that the people who work on Artemis simply feel no urgency. Wake up at 10. Put in 2-3 hours of real effort to keep things minimally rolling, and cash a nice salary for the work. No sense of urgency. 30 year old technology. No real consequences if the project is delayed by 6 months. Or a year. Or 5 years.

Starship could fail. Musk is losing focus on space and liquidating his successful companies to fund Grok (I just vomited a little). He might now be a liability for SpaceX. It’s his toy and he’ll break it if he feels like it. If that happens, we’ll suddenly be grateful that we kept Artemis alive. It’s an insurance policy.

It would be interesting to see if that would smack the US out of its current state of “head-up-own-ass”. We’ve gotten too accustomed to winning and we’ve gotten a bit entitled on the world stage.

It might not be enough, though. The truth is that landing a small capsule on the moon using a large but conventional rocket is something that we did over 50 years ago.

I’m really, really, really hoping that the Starship development is a smashing success. If I had to list my top 10 most important projects that humanity is undertaking right now, Starship would make the list.

and set-top boxes are a dime a dozen.

It's not that xbox was bad. And some aspects of it were pretty powerful and advanced. Remember kinect? Cutting edge stuff at the time.

But, Sony was just better. Microsoft tried. Not their strength. No dishonor in admitting defeat and redirecting the resources elsewhere.

this person is obsessing about the lack of warm fuzzy human connection when they interact with their rental office rep?

It’s been a while since I rented, but when I did, whenever I called the landlord, my goal was work out an issue with the utilities or get traction on a maintenance issue. As quickly and efficiently as possible. At no point did I ever call hoping for a deep meaningful human interaction. If AI can get me faster response for dealing with that flickering light fixture, I’m all for it.

Human interaction matters. A lot. But anyone expecting spiritual fulfillment from their landlord has bigger issues.

This idea that the USD is dead as the global currency - you need to look at the numbers before reaching that conclusion.

https://www.philadelphiafed.or....

USD is 60%, Euro is 20%,Yen and British pound are 5% each, and everything else is basically noise. Yuan, Rouble, Rupee and all the other currencies are basically rounding errors at the global level.

People who predict the downfall of the US and the USD will eventually be proved right, but that's like somebody telling me that I'm gonna die someday. Wow, sherlock, you're such an insightful genius! Is it gonna be tomorrow or next century?

The executive branch is already quietly prepping for this. A big chunk of tariffs will be refunded to businesses and the paperwork for that has probably been in the works for months. The refund will be something like 0.5 percent of gdp. Big. The admin knew they were almost certainly gonna lose this. They just followed through with the process because it makes great social media

Still, the tribe benefitted from having a few of you around. You were good at keeping watch at night for dire wolves, fires, or raiders from the neighboring tribes, allowing the majority to get a better sleep.

But, yeah, being nearly unable to do things during the day must be rough.

For almost everyone, working the night shift is brutal on your health. It messes with your sleep, circadian rhythms, mood, hormones, blood sugar, healing, blood pressure, and pretty much everything else. And not in a good way. I had a primary care physician doctor friend who told me that, if a night shift worker started getting pre-diabetic, there was almost no way they could avoid progression to type 2 unless they stopped working nights. If he had a prediabetic patient that couldn't get excused from the night shift work, he would offer to recommend them for disability as an alternative.

Some things absolutely must run on a 24/7/365 schedule, and small numbers of people do just fine with a flipped schedule. For most of us, it burns our lifespan at a much faster rate than day work. We should let AI and the robots take care of the night shifts.

I’d be surprised if Texas is ready to dump Paxton. He’s basically a party-line Republican, corruption doesn’t matter to the voters nearly as much as it used to, and adultry is practically a badge of honor nowadays. There was a time when infidelity would quickly destroy a political career. It’s a different era now.

Paxton will get voted out when his shenanigans start costing the local taxpayer too much. Remember Joe “I torture immigrants live on telivision” Arpaio? His constituents loved him until his reality-show bul*s^%t started wasting 100s of millions of Arizona taxpayer dollars. That’s why they booted him, not because he was a monster.

Call this a landmark trial. More like a show trial.

His evidence for a AI white collar armageddon is a single unnamed tech company that plans 50% staff cuts over the next few years? Sorry, but during a recession a 50% staff cut for a tech company is basically a normal tuesday. And recessions happen almost every decade like clockwork, regardless of AI.

I'm not losing any sleep about my job. At least, not in the 18 month period. The AI revolution will unfold over decades.

Your points about IP are spot on. US citizen here. Yes, we stole knowledge ruthlessly mostly but not entirely from Europe before deciding that maybe ideas should be protected somehow. Yes, China is probably following the same path. To me, it'll be interesting to see how China navigates this. The US frequently struggles to get it's way because it's constantly accused of various forms of hypocrisy (and we usually deserve it). But I think China is going to have that problem 10 times worse. Their law basically amounts to "whatever the Emperor wants it to be" and everybody knows it. In this sense, they're treading the same path that Russia did.

Your thoughts on the US empire are off target, in my opinion. Most of this crap with the Trump administration is not new. I watched a very similar thing play out during the Bush years. Liberals went too far left, and the everyday Joes decided to elect an utterly unremarkable born-into--wealth basic bro, because he "vibes" with a big chunk of the electorate. Queue up 8 years of mostly sh&*y right wing policy mixed in with a small amount of reasonable policy correction, and then the country swings the other way. There's been a few unique things about the Trump train, but overall this feels like a mostly normal political cycle in the US.

The US will eventually fall out of the top spot. It happens to all hegemons given enough time. But, at this point, I think that it's the wrong conclusion.

Your data on teachers is a bit off, at least in the US. Look up median engineering vs K-12 teacher salaries. Not mean. Median. You have to account for the fact that the teachers get around 4 solid months of vacation, good benefits, high job security and ironclad retirement. Accounting for that stuff, their salaries lag behind engineers but only by a little bit.

Everyone on slashdot knows the stories of fresh cs grads being offered insta-millionaire amounts of money. Those are extreme outliers.

Teachers in the US are, overall, paid a solid middle-middle-upper class salary, way above the median. It’s a bit of a secret. I know quite a few of them and they absolutely play the “we’re underpaid and overworked because we wuv the cheeeldren” role. I say that with nothing but respect. Every profession has a bit of an image to project. US society kind of expects teachers to be poor and struggling, so the teachers lean into that identity. But the numbers tell the reality. As a group, they’re never gonna be rich but they ain’t sufferin’