If I had known it wasn't checked, I absolutely would have lied.

Agile teams are a great way to waste small amounts of money quickly. But if you want to waste money in vast amounts on an enterprise scale, they aren't the way to go. Throwing huge teams at a problem is fantastic by comparison. It drives up burn rate, drives down efficiency, and extends timelines while claiming the opposite. Small teams cannot compete.

Tongue only partially in cheek... I watched a team of hundreds of local and remote workers burn $400M in a catastrophic waterfall grand attempt and fail completely. The worst agile failure I witnessed burned $4.5M before the plug was pulled.

So, barring a hardware failure, my current PC may enjoy the longest life of any in my last thirty years. It's an i9-13900K (yes... I know. But it's fine), 128GB DDR5, 9070 Super 12Gb. Now, while this stagnation may be problematic for some hardware companies, I contend it's a huge win for consumers. At the very least we should be off the top end GPU treadmill. It would be nice to picture a 2030 in which hardware made in 2024 could run current games near full detail.

Yes they expect you to trust them. After all, coin buyers are already a self-selected group of known gullible individuals.

Go fishing in the lake that gets restocked.

We might be witnessing the thing that facilitats the most healthy transition we've had in a couple of decades - disconnection. When the signal to noise ratio degrades sufficiently we may choose to walk away with far less reticence then perhaps we would have experienced just a few years ago.

Sure, they have to believe it. That doesn't make it true.

On things like blackjack you can sway the odds a couple of percent by doing it well, and the statistical odds assist you, On sports and horse racing knowledge matters more... but consequently there is machinery in place to keep those odds always slightly against you. Hence 24-1 longshot, or paying less than even for the favorite.

A great model still can't beat the house statistically, unless it uncovers something fundamentally amiss. The better it models reality, the more it's locked into a slight statistical disadvantage.

The extravagance of Vegas is built in part from the wealth of people who understand that it's a game and a gamble... but in huge measure it's built from those who understand the game and think they can beat it. One group loses is small amounts. One bankrupts their lives.

If the AI got it right, I would say the fix is in.

The modern trend of mumble acting doesn't help. When actors transitioned from stage to screen they came armed to annunciate. They could even speak clearly and act at the same time.

Admittedly my hearing isn't great, but it pisses me off when actors mumble and slur their way through dialog because they and the director both think that makes the performance brooding or edgy.

The AI can be forgiven for getting it wrong when regular people also struggle to hear it.

Watch great actors speak. Listen to Hopkins as Lechter. You can hear every single syllable.

I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1.

I call it "toxic individualism". The belief that individual rights and freedoms should always be paramount is his you get.. well, modern America. Such thinking eventually metastasizes. Yes, some rights have to be abridged in a society.

If we figure out we're missing something important, we can just get our government to put it in our toothpaste. That shouldn't bother anybody..

We're easing up on nearly everything else in the name of any number of lofty goals, so why not homework? In our collective rush to make sure nobody gets offended, is pressured, feels stupid, or gets "left behind", we increasingly regard advancement as untrustworthy, and preparation as a side effect rather than a goal.

So, sure. Let's drop homework into that abyss. Today's teachers are already blessed with students so smart they don't really need teaching at all. I'm sure that our current generation in middle school - clearly the most prepared, literate, capable, and multi-talented generation yet - will continue to outpace and outshine their poor, homework-saddled predecessors.

Failing that, those of us in the Gen X camp and the millennials that followed will have endless cheap, desperate, and unskilled labour at our disposal, should we need to leverage it. Somebody has to fill the jobs those migrant workers are barred from, right?

We need an award show to promote these attempts. We should be celebrating the most creative, effective, and damaging of these countermeasures.

Give out the DA award, perhaps, for "Digital Arsenic".

Oh, I know. I'm not claiming it's a great impulse on my part. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

But I think it gets worse for Americans than it will be for almost everybody else. The long term doesn't look bad for the world at large... but it looks fucking awful for the US.

When I read things like this, I no longer go through the usual thoughts of empathy for the displaced, concern for the state of knowledge in the US, wishful thinking that all will return to normal eventually... Nope. I cut straight through to schadenfreude. I toss it on the mental pie of stuff in the US that is on fire, I make some brown butter popcorn, and I enjoy the show.

Burn it all down, baby. Happy to see it.