The answer to the headline is, atypically, "Yes". But in fact every age has been the golden age of stupidity. When the microcomputer revolution was occurring... most people were idiots. When the transistor was invented... the world was full of morons. When Einstein and Bohr and Heisenburg and Planck and Maxwell and Schroedinger were revolutionizing physics... yes, they saw stupid people everywhere. When Newton was publishing on gravity... yep, dumb people everywhere. When Aristotle was teaching promising young Greeks in the Lyceum, or Plato the academy, the general populace (hoi polloi) were as dumb as now.

no doubt. Which is why I only have subcontractors, not permanent employees and almost all of them are in Ukraine. Also as I said, should something like that be attempted, I would shut down parts of businesses and get rid of the people who attempt it, I wouldn't run a business where I had to deal with this.

You're leaving out an important element, and you can't even really start discussing it validly until you include it. This element is that the union is itself another firm. It is not the workers exercising power in their control; the union exercises the power.

as someone who owns and runs a few companies, the largest having around 1000 people working in it, I can understand why some people, especually who never built a company, think that the people working for a company are underpaid compared to the people who buolt it. This misunderstanding is easy to develop, people (and many other animals) have a strong built in mechanism responsible for having emotions and feelings related to fairness. This expectation of fairness is easy to channel into a different sort of a feeling - expectation of equality, feeling that equality must be enforced because it may ne argued that it is unfair that there is inequality of outcomes.

So it is clear that there are political forces tbat use thw easiest pressure points in the human condition to achieve low hanging political fruits. The fwelings of unfairness become especially inflamed during harsher times, so an economic downturn can be easily used to pass various socialist, even Marxist agenda, which changes the power balance in the ruling elite (those near the reigns of political power). This is done at the expense of economic health, any amount of political power over economic forces misallocates scarce resources and decreases economic activity in the long run, while achieving short term pplitical goals.

On a personal level, I woildn't allow unions to take over my enterprise, I would rather see the business shrink and restructure than lose control over how it is governed.

Military is made of people. They also burn coal, diesel, gas, kerosene. They eat, they need transportation even more than anyone else. If they cared they woild stop themselves first. Look at the wars, look at all of the world militaries. How much CO2 and varoous poisons is produced by them in proportion to the rest of the population? What do wars cost us in terms of CO2 and poisons and all other ways, that military destroys the environment? Will people of this planet stop fighting and disban all militaries of the world? Quite the opposite, the end of our civilization will be accompanied by the biggest acts of aggression, most destruction, largest conflicts on the global scale.

If bombing solved world problems we wpuldn't have any problems, we definitely have enough bombs.

I just flew over half of the planet to the Maldives, these islands will surely disappear sooner than later due to the glaciers melting down. It is nice to be able to visit in the meanwhile.

That said, I won't buy an electric car. Maybe as my fourth or fifth, maybe, but I will keep driving a gas sedan for work and my sports car is just a fum toy, I don't care that an electric one accelerates faster, electric scales also go 0 to 200 in less than a second, doesn't make me want to drive it.

Teslas make me nautios, that is a strong no from me, some Chinese or Korean just are not interesting. Charging time is not there, it must be less than pumping gas, I don't want to plan my days around charging a vehicle. The batteries are too dangerous and the entire thing is too heavy. Cold degrades batteries, heat may cause a fire. No thank you.

I would switch to a nuclear powered car though, that would work for me.

The same people who are now handwringing about how datacenters are going to overwhelm the electric grid were pushing electric vehicles pretty damned hard; they should be happy that both aren't happening.

The land of neverending surveilance, home of peeping toms.
Flock cameras are a scourge, constantly recording everyone without any courtorder.

LLMs are trained based on gradient descent, this optimizes data relationships. What this means is that this story is really talking about noise in the data. The history of the disabled is noose when compared to overall history, the LLMs show this clearly, it is just that there are people who really really want to present noise as if it was seriously important, that is their agenda.

If the other landlords are also using the software, and all are working off the same information, then the software can determine the prices the other landlords would choose as well. In the limit, if every landlord is using the same software, they can can all act as-if they were colluding even though there is no communication between them.

On the one hand, my libertarian side objects to this. On the other, I think such software can pretty much only be used for evil. Which is to say, allowing the landlords to eliminate all the consumer surplus.

Well, if it collapses the electron cloud front, maybe we could point it at Oracle's cloud and collapse that. It would have the added benefit of screwing with one of the U.S.'s up-and-coming Fascists.

"When the government hands out money in the form of debt it creates that money out of thin air. " No it isn't, that money comes from the bond market, not thin air. And bond rates really matter. We can expect the bond rates the U.S. must pay to borrow to raise due to no fiscal discipline in Washington (always cutting taxes on the wealthy because they "create jobs".....create jobs for themselves).

Washington does other stupid things, like propping up the private medical insurance market causing Americans to pay more and still get screwed for a major illnesses rather than going to a single-payer system. Small companies are getting priced out because they can no longer afford medical insurance for their employees, the ones that they are able to cover. When the opportunity came to have Medicare do deals with Big Pharma for drugs, the lawmakers decided that would make too much sense and destroy their campaign contributions from Big Pharma. el Bunko is in bed with Big Pharma and doesn't give a rat's ass about health care costs.

Another driver of U.S. debt going forward will be Defense and the way el Bunko is destroying the trust of U.S. allies in the U.S. That will increase U.S. military costs over time. As usual with el Bunko, he only cares about the immediate Now and doesn't give a damn about the future.

Also, the U.S. trashing environmental standards thus polluting the U.S. with chemicals and pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere; the latter will dry out the U.S. West faster and the Midwest. It will also cause energy prices to go up in the U.S. and increase acidification of the oceans. Fish are already voting with their fins and heading away towards the N. and S, poles. This causes fishermen to go further to catch the poor buggers before they are all fished out.

Also this will decrease U.S. economic activity and decrease government revenue in the guise of higher taxes and lower revenue. el Bunko must have his cake Now and screw future Americans.

Woz isn't eligible:

Woz is happily not dead yet.