For sure, Chinese chip making success or failure will be the real story.

A bunch of people are going to jump in now and say "derp see sanctions and tariffs ... have driven them toward domestic development"

No, this is not the case. The CCP wants a mono-polar world where they enjoy total hegemony. They have had their eye on the prize for two decades at least now. If you look at PRC history as far as 'friend factories' and collaborative efforts with soviet-bloc nations, and other technology transfer partnerships they have set the their sights on manufacturing industries ag, machine tools, aircraft, etc they see as critical and found someone willing to sell them some kind of on-the-job training that then enables them to develop independent domestic capabilities. They dump a ton of second-rate but useful product into the market place until they can grow enough domestic capacity and then they expand into the higher end of the market for their own domestic consumption.

Its like DRAM, China has been building out the capability to manufacture top-draw memory products for more than just the last two years, but they are getting their now, and its going to pay off big if we are dumb enough to let it.

China is going to develop a leading edge process chips industry period. Short of bombing them nothing will stop that..

Which of course brings us to the legitimate capitol of China (Taiwan) and our own dangerous dependence on them for those very same products. Either we need to be making damn sure we have domestic replacement or we need to be making a lot more aggressive/realistic plans for not just preventing an invasion but keeping the trade routes open.

It used to be, maybe still is in some cases, the merchant contract forbid them from charging a different price to non-card customers. So if you wanted to accept cards at all you could NOT offer a lower cash/debit price.

The other reality is cash handling is actually expensive for retailers. I used to work retail finance decade ago so some of this is out of date info, but generally speaking on an activity based cost analysis, the merchant fees were lower than cash handling costs. At least in the later 90s and early oughts, with modern-ish fully electronic card processing.

but essentially no you the card user are not paying for those credit card rewards, mostly everyone using cash and debit cards was.

Right there are plenty of ways to uniquely identify modern PCs. For good or ill most of us have hardware that is serialized in electronically readable way, as well as other things like GUID partitions, UUID for dbus, etc. In those latter cases on an open platform they are documented and I *CAN* change them, with reasonable assurance the former values are not easily recoverable. In the former cases I can inspect the open platform and understand what might send hardware identifiers outside the system, or I could run a VM and present only virtual devices where i frequently rotate serials, but again can't run Windows if you do that because it will think it is unregistered again.

I think anyone given all that has come out over the past decade that thinks they have any privacy at all (from Microsoft anyway) while running Windows 10/11 needs their heads examined. Quite honestly if you are in any kind of high security environment, I don't believe you take opsec seriously if you run Windows and it is not air gaped.

Windows IS SPYWARE that is abundantly clear

Woha! a tech firm overstated their position on privacy and spied on users! I guess it is a day ending in 'y'

People's expectation have shifted a lot too. Having a cookout with another family be it in your own back yard or at the park on one of those nice grills the park service dutifully spends our tax dollars maintaining but (sadly) I hardly see family use much these days.

It works for all ages depending on the people involved you might need to add $6 bottle of wine, or $3 beach ball or package of water guns; but all told you can still have pretty nice little party for 6-8 people for $60 between you.

A lot of it is people just don't want too, and yeah maybe because they think they'd rather stream another movie. I don't know.

Maybe...

However the previous generation certainly could have a novel in their back pocket, a magazine, a comic book, flipped the radio on, etc. It is not like Apple invented personal entertainment in 2007.

Something IS different about they way interact with smart phone and related technologies. Centuries, of anthropological study says humans are social animals. It is hard just go whoops they must have all been wrong, turns out we just did not have good enough portable video games and mobiles, and people just spent time together because they hadn't anything better to do!

Obviously the only answer is we will have to do the science somehow ultimately. Still I find a hypothesis that we just did not have something more stimulating than talking to uncle Marty about old dodge pickup grandad "forced" him to drive in high-school is the reason we did not previously tend to all retire to our own corner as readily.

It sure seems like we are getting 'something' out of these connected devices that meeting or making us feel our needs are being meet.

I haven't made poor choices though. I have happy healthy child, and a great life thank you very much. I think I'd pretty much do it all over again save for a stock trade or 10.

That said people like you are making that harder for everyone else to achieve. Why, I don't know; you're addicted porn, you own Alphabet stock, who knows.

Nobody is forcing you to do shit, we are talking about regulating what are in fact dangerous products; like we do everything else. The simple truth is this, if you think it is reasonably to say you have to be say 18 to buy a box the .380 rounds or a bottle of Rye, then it is equally reasonable to say we should be will to make device manufactures keep the likes of youtube under the black covers.

Have you tried it?

Parenting in a world where kids face unlimited temptation to consume things that you believe are harmful to them paired with near instance access all over the damn place is pretty hard.

In ever previous era, with every previous vice society has agreed to put at least some barriers in front of children and to do so in a mostly if not perfect way. Most 8 year olds cannot simply go get a case a beer anytime they want, and if they do there is ample opportunity for parents to find out about. You know if your two young child is running with inappropriate people and you either do something or don't.

Same thing with other things like smoking, hazardous materials, etc. The book shop won't let your kid into the adults only section...
but here is the important but, you CAN still let your child take their bicycle and pocket money and go to the c-store, bookstore, etc and get some candy and comics/pokemon cards etc. They can go an interface with the world in a safe way.

Now try this online... At best you get parental controls on the platform, which may or may not reflect what YOU the parent feels is or is not fit for your child, but rather what someone at Meta decided was fine. Things like youtube-kids, ok but nothing stops them from just watching as a guest. Sure you can lock down their phone, but you have control over the library PC, their friend bobby's tablet, etc. Thanks to 'privacy and security' which we all know is really just about DRM you can't implement your own parental controls without entirely breaking the web and apps, and smart devices.

You are left with accepting mega corps get to put whatever they want in front of your kids eyes, infantalizing them entirely and/or never letting them touch anything electronic without your shoulder surfing.

The status quo is an should be treated as unacceptable. The privacy and expression concerns should be the problems to solve rather than reasons to toss our hands up. Anyone just saying 'parent harder' should should get busted in the teeth!

I am not sure I agree. Strong typing prevents a lot of errors in large complex projects. It adds a lot of complexity to small and simple projections.

I still think Visual Basic was and IS just fine. The problem is that people tried to use it not for the simple intake forms, business calculators / quoting tools, "scripting" on top of ISV built COM enabled apps, it was designed to be and tried to do stuff like make Enterprise scale server applications with it, and usually it was people with previous experience consisting of writing those little calculator and intake form apps and little else.

This idea is purely another example of 'this time it will be different' its bogus and would not play out anything like the way you think it would. Actually it would probably bring down that Empire (which is what I think you really hope for).

Go look at the history of Soviet healthcare. Sure there was a time it was envy of the world but it did not stay that way, because Socialism and Workers Unions turn everything they touch into shit.. Let me give you the really short version. You might end up with a paid for MD to stand over you but you're still going to die because he won't have access to diagnostic tools needed to treat you let a lone a sterile syringe to use.

The SSR managed to do things like mass vaccination (mind you they had to important everything from capitalist economies to do it) but the standards of care and the technical capability absolutely stagnated at 1950s levels. At best you could hope a government run system to trap us where we are at. You will never see cure for cancer, never see type-1 diabetes solved, and so on... If that is what you want for your fellow citizens - well DAMN YOU

I don't think it is really about the backlash so much as the value of the AI is going to replace soooo many people narrative has played out.

Amodei, Altman, et al needed massive amount of capital to buy a compute hardware by the ton as well as the facilities to house it and the power to run it. Jensen Huang can only funnel so much of NVIDIAs own money to its customers to buy its own products without the markets crying foul, turned out they could push that much further than I would have initially expected but still limits exist (at least in theory). So to make it possible for everyone to keep doubling down, they needed a story growth story like never before to keep soaking up all those investment dollars.

The reality is starting to overcome the rumor, with Ford bringing back engineers, Microsoft having to back pedal on CoPilot features, the PC market not exploding because of people wanting by new machines that are AI ready.

Now that the idea every business is going to be able to drip 30% of work force and/or the compute resources can be rented or capitalized cheaper even if they could is getting harder push, they have been pivoting to AI is so dangerous... Defense contractors, the DOD directly, and F500 financial engineering space have stupid amounts of money and can be relied upon to spend it out fear the other guy might show up the party with fancier toys. Those guys actually have more concrete applications for this tech any way. - At least something better than hey lets provide an agent to help you navigate our product offerings but rather than deliver a consistent experience with Dialog Flow or similar for 15 years ago, we use and LLM that will cost 10x to run and occasionally fail in spectacularly embarrassing ways..

Counter argument is that is does happen and its intentional to the point it becomes an actual practical barrier to fighting wars. Without economic integration what would US-Sino relations look like, probably at lot more like US-USSR between 1946-90.

They did it in the pre-release software knowing that the issues would get picked up by the tech press. Remember this was Windows 3.1 era. Most Windows/Dos users were not internet users.

People relied on what they read in things like PC Mag and Byte, yes even corporate IT decision makers. Microsoft knew that those sorts of publications would leap on the opportunity to test pre-release Windows, would actually try it out on a variety of PC hardware and DOS versions. These were monthly publications at most and would be unlikely to give space to a second review until after the RTM version hit store shelves.

The message would be clear, for a smooth experience on the new Windows, you better plan an upgrade to MSDOS 5. I know a lot of people jumped from MSDOS 3.x to 5.0 at the same time they bought Windows 3.1[1]. So it worked..

By the time everyone figured out Windows 3.1[1] was just fine on DR DOS, they'd already switched MSDOS or already paid to upgrade to MSDOS 5, so Digital Research was not getting the users back.

So be part of the owner class.

You can get treasury's that pay almost 5%, you can get CDs that pay more. You can buy index funds.

Got one of those 3% mortgages, good stop paying anything but the minimal monthly and start buying debt at better rates with that money.

Even better rent your current place and move somewhere cheaper, you work from home anyway right?

The simple realty is the current generation of American's largely likes to complain they are not winning but they can't be arsed to play the game.

That is also interesting given the source.

The EIT (earned income tax credit) is more or less UBI. It is probably the most effective program we do have in terms of improving people's economic situation. Okay it is 'means tested' so it is not truly universal but functionally it works similarly in practical application.

Given the other arguments about income insurance etc, I am not sure why we would not look at EIT expansion, including state level implementations, and maybe temporary enhanced credits for classes of displaced workers. We have a thing that works, why not do more of it?

Again I come back the source and my suspicion is there are not enough strings attached, you got a job and stayed in the work force isn't enough, I am sure she wants to make sure you take some sort of Green/Woke/Nonsense job...