They define 133-400k "family of 3" as "upper middle class".

Which is just patent bullshit.

All it is, is they keep the same old income brackets for "middle class" while inflation pushes wages and COL higher. There are actually far fewer people able to maintain a 1990s "middle class" lifestyle, and I'd argue most of these "upper middle class" people are living month to month. "Middle class" used to mean you were financially secure and had investments and retirement. That's a joke for most people under 50.

They're defining upper middle class as " family of three earning $133,000 to $400,000 per year". So that's 2 middle aged adults + an adult child as the upper barrier.

What's that mean for your typical "family of 2"? Do they normalize on 3 incomes and play funny with the figures, using extrapolation for the third?

Because the cost of living has increased. $133k is going to just barely buy you a house in most of the country. Is starter home ownership "upper middle class"?

Absolutely not.

This is just inflation, and a disingenuous bullshit article in the NYT (as you can expect, at best). The middle class is markedly smaller, not larger, and they're just using old income brackets to define "upper middle class".

I just got the encl nastygram from our corporate IT
"We have recently noticed your use of unapproved AI tools, which creates a risk of data leakage. You must not use any AI tools that have not been officially approved when working with business-related information. This includes data such as profits, order quantities, and similar metrics, as well as MS Office files, emails, or any other content containing business information.
We want you to use MS 365 Copilot. ....Microsoft Copilot MS 365 protects our intellectual property."

(I'd asked grok for some lunar orbital data and calculations for fun...so not business-related in any case...)

What are the odds that pointing out in writing to my corporate IT that MS's own terms say "for entertainment purposes only" to say nothing of "We donâ(TM)t own Your Content, but we may use Your Content to operate Copilot and improve it. By using Copilot, you grant us permission to use Your Content, which means we can copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, edit, translate, and reformat it, and we can give those same rights to others who work on our behalf." is just going to get me more nastygrams and probably on someone's shitlist?

I would guess 100%, and didn't even need Copilot or grok or gemini to figure it out!

Half the world runs on VBA for Office applications (or used to, it's probably less now), and VBA for Office has never been officially supported by Microsoft. You're on your own if you choose to use it.

Pretty much exactly my point.

The fact that every dev seems to just install the latest whatever from npm doesn't help. There's really no "staging", "stable", or "security" branches, and effectively zero vetting outside what the package developer did. That's a lot of trust.

I never said they were new. I, instead, inferred that they're the kind of problems which shouldn't exist, because it's a mindset out of the 90s when the Internet was still comparably high-trust. They're inexcusably negligent.

You can experience over 40 years of UI design differences in Windows still, today: UI dialog panels from 3.1 days still exist in the latest Windows builds, and everything in between.

I don't think you can honestly say Windows has more polish. It has more bloat - yes. But that's not the same thing.

Meanwhile, Windows games (newer titles!) run better on Linux and Mac, emulated and passed through additional translation libraries, than on Windows.

You also grossly misunderstand how prefetch/caching works, both on Linux and on Windows. It does not change the baseline experience, or that the start bar can quickly eat up 10GB+ of memory due to memory leaks and perform worse than a Windows 95 machine deep into swap.

"Overall experience" is also nonsense - most people don't have the capability or wherewithal to switch. They use what is given to them, and have only mild preference in that they want it to work for what they're doing. Nowadays, that means "a web browser" for well over 50% of all users being the primary requirement, if not the exclusive one.

The baseline computers on the shelves have always been under spec'd for whatever Windows requires, and the experience will be poor. This is why so many people are buying Macs.

This is likely a paid advertisement, brought to you by the same people who are trying to avoid the continued fracturing and disillusionment of the remaining non-professional Windows users who aren't hardcore gamers. It's right in line with the "make Windows better again" agenda (I'd argue, propaganda campaign - there's zero chance of it happening) out of Redmond.

Windows hasn't been usable on less than 16GB of RAM since the tail end of the hard drive era (around Windows 7 SP2/3). Windows Vista was never usable with less than 8GB. Since the tail end of W7 around 2010, after W10 was released, things have only gotten worse: slower, more bloated, and more faulty. There are bugs in Explorer which will balloon memory use to 10s of GB just sitting idle for just that process (and many others).

npm is a problem. It's this massive, unvetted self-publishing repository without any easy way to verify the origin of packages, and the packages largely get installed directly to production on billions of sites every day without any vetting or review.

It's crazy, like something out of the 90s.

Yes, supply attacks like those carried out against npm are pretty common in general, at the state actor level. There've been a couple fun ones in recent years. But the openness and lack of basic precautions surrounding npm in conjunctions with common development practice just makes it a recipe for disaster.

As I recall, Ohio toll highways did this years ago; if your time stamp at the booth was less than a certain number of minutes since the previous, you got a ticket for speeding.
Infallible, and took away the point really.

Sure, I guess you could speed and then pull over waiting before you cross the next gate but... Why bother?

Yes.
Have you heard the quality of her court discussions?
A Supreme Court justice that argues against the minutiae of 'legalese' seriously?

"lossy compression"

Yes, just like human memory.

If I read a bunch of books from a series and extrapolate based on them to form something similar, it's not plagiarism.

If I read your book, then write a book using a similar voice, style, and plot, and do it in a different language - it's not plagiarism if I offer citation. Likewise, if I do so with a verbatim copy in another language. It's an independent effort.

Ultimately, it boils down to what you can get away with. Considering how trivial it is now to re-implement things, I'd say the chance of license enforcement is close to zero for anything open source except in extremely rare situations where there's a lot of money involved.

Can we stop pretending that America is still stuck in the 1960's? The overwhelming majority of Americans no longer have a Jim Crow mindset, and no longer regard as remarkable when a woman or "person of color" (i.e., an ordinary person) does something that white people have been doing for years. Diversity is ordinary now, and has been for the past few decades.

Diversity is like a religion with some people - no matter how much you (Americans) repent, you are still a sinner and in need of grace and forgiveness from TPB.

The primary stated goal of NASA's Artemis program for several years was to land the first woman and person of color on the moon. It was emphasized repeatedly, trumpeted, and openly stated on NASA's website for years (before it was taken down in March 2025).

While I certainly understand your attempt to strawman the point, this doesn't logically mean the woman and person of color on the crew are necessarily unqualified.

What it does suggest to anyone who isn't crying racism/sexism on a daily basis, is that given equivalent qualifications, these individuals - to fill the stated goal of the program - would have been preferentially picked over other candidates afflicted with the regrettable conditions of whiteness and/or maleness.

IF NASA would have gone so far as to pick someone to fill those gendered- and ethnically-preferred roles over someone more qualified, I can't say. (Then again, we have KBJ as Supreme Court so anything's possible.)

https://medium.com/predict/thi...

"The real reason we will never be able to "fix" the drought is because the American West is not in a drought right now.
And you can't fix something that isn't broken. ...
The West's rapid aridification isn't being caused by a "once-in-a-century" weather event like the flooding in Kentucky or the nearly constant hurricanes that pummel the Southeast each year.
It's not even the direct result of climate change (although that's definitely accelerating the process and making the effects more intense). Western states are running out of water because they are located in a desert. ...
What we're dealing with in the West is not a drought because the current lack of rainfall isn't "abnormal" for a desert. Dry is the default setting. And you can't call it a "drought" because you wish deserts were wetter.
The problem isn't the so-called drought - - it's the city planners, developers, and suburbanites who built cities in a desert with no plan to provide water beyond wishful thinking and praying for rain.
The fact that we got weirdly lucky with unseasonably wet weather for a few decades has helped us ignore the reality that the American West simply doesn't have the water to support 65 million people - - and half of the country's agriculture - - at least not at anything near our current water usage levels.
And there's really nothing we can do about it." ...
According to researcher Lynn Ingram, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, "The 20th century was abnormally wet and rainy." Ingram goes on to claim, "The past 150 years have been wetter than the past 2,000 years." (cf "The California drought is helping return the weather pattern to normal" https://archive.ph/0m3BI)

In other words, what we're experiencing now isn't a drought. It's a reestablishment of the norm."