If I'm honest about it? I feel like it's been years since any one web browser felt "better" than another to me for technical reasons like speed/performance or ability to work properly with web sites I needed to use.

My preference for FireFox has more to do with such things as the UI layout and the way it "compartmentalizes" certain things. (EG. On a Windows platform, it still manages SSL certificates in their own place, vs. sharing the common set of them stored and managed in Windows itself.) The fact it's NOT another Chromium-based browser means it's handy for troubleshooting too. (If I have issues with a web site, I like to have both a browser like Edge or Chrome AND FireFox to use so I can test it with both web engines.)

Who are these people who care SO much about how fast a browser renders content, anyway? It's the ongoing joke over on Apple forums with Safari browser.... "New MacOS release makes Safari snappier!" On any non prehistoric computer, web browsers performing poorly almost always have more to do with either the speed of the Internet connection itself, memory issues from somebody leaving a million tabs open, or poorly written web site code. I don't care what a stopwatch says. I care about the overall user experience, and it's fast enough in any decent browser.

The *real* problem is with people who aren't skilled enough at operating a motor vehicle while manipulating a device or controls. Long before cellphones existed, we had people accidentally rear-ending other cars because they were trying to change their radio station or volume. Yet, we didn't pass laws banning car stereos. (We collectively acknowledged the benefits of a car stereo while driving and decided people just needed to learn how to work the radio controls in a safe manner while driving -- which most people figured out how to do.)

People used to manage to unfold paper maps and refer to them while driving, back in the 1970's and earlier, without wrecking into people, too.

I'm amazed at how lax the drivers' ed testing has become in recent years. My daughter went to get her license last year and the entirety of the practical part of her exam was having her drive around the block, out of the shopping center the motor vehicle dept. was located in, and back into the lot to park in a parking space next to it. They didn't so much as get her out on the highway! I have a hard time rationalizing that as ok, while worrying about good/experienced drivers who multitask glancing at smartphone screens.

As long as he's referring to his own field (creation of animations/art for film or video), I think he's essentially correct. AI will become a required tool you need to be familiar with as part of your career. It won't take people's jobs, except for people who refuse to learn how to utilize AI as part of it.

I'm FAR from convinced AI usage will play out the same way in all industries. For example? If you work in law, it makes sense AI could replace your lower-paid paralegals who essentially just open Word templates and fill out fields with appropriate info for each client. However, AI isn't at all likely to take jobs of many attorneys out there because that line of work involves showing up in courts in person, and presenting things to other people in a persuasive way.

If you're paid to publish ad copy, then AI is likely to reduce the number of employees needed, but again? The ones retained will need to know how to utilize AI tools well (and how to supplement or revise what they churn out).

AI isn't going to do anything meaningful in most "blue collar" fields like construction, IMO. It might help an architect out with the design stages of a project, but people getting paid to build things won't get anything done by some software code running in the cloud.

It seems we 100% agree, but based on your final jab I think you missed the key point. I am not saying "both sides are bad." A more accurate paraphrasing would be "anti-science positions are wrong no matter what side they come from." But even that misses the crucial point. Take a look at what the OP posted:

This person asserts that typically, conservative people question the use of fluoride, not liberals. Anyone watching the current US news cycle might conclude that too. But historically, it was the other way around. My point was this: People should stop associating concepts like "liberalism" with Democrats, and "conservatism" with Republicans. It doesn't work like that. Parties change their positions over time and cannot be mapped to these basic (and overbroad) concepts.

This realization helps people break free of partisan thinking. I have had hyper-partisan family members who don't care if their position is stupid. But if I remind them that a liberal once held that position, well suddenly they question it. I've seen the look on their face: "How could I possibly have had a liberal thought? Impossible!"

You are exactly right when you stated "Mainstream Republicans took the stupidest ideas from the lunatic left and made them the center point of their platform." Just understand this completely shifts people's assumptions about party identity. If someone chooses to, based on data, consume raw milk, consolidate power in a unitary executive, and raise tariffs -- that is totally fine. But they should not call themselves conservative. And we should call it out when people erroneously assume that a belief is conservative or liberal when really it's just "dumb."

The anti-fluoride and anti-vaxx movements have always been on the Democrat side. Under Trump, those anti-science conspiracies are being embraced by Republicans as well.

This is, once again, a reminder that Trump and MAGA are not conservative movements. Anti-science positions are not, and were never, solely the domain of one party. They just chose *different* anti-science positions. The Republican who believes that climate change isn't real is applying the same kind of wrongthink as the Democrat who believes that alkaline water cures cancer.

Nah, the large Microsoft hops they have their documents on the cloud anyway. Share drives and local SharePoint have been replaced with OneDrive, Sharepoint online. Outlook is in the cloud, messaging is Microsoft Teams, etc. Half the people open a document from SharePoint and edit it in the online Microsoft Word and don't even know they are doing it. Then if you get really fancy, you have documents in ERP systems that are on the cloud too.

PLUS: The hybrid solutions are sneaking into things that are supposed to be on-prem anyway. So IT goes through all the work to setup their ERP system on-prem (SAP, Oracle, etc.) but then a bunch of features require cloud connections to work anyway. So technically the documents are local, but maybe your indexer, search, analytics, virus scan, and reports all require the cloud. It's the worst of both worlds, and it is becoming the default.

My feelings don't necessarily prove or validate anything... but they're based on the reality I've witnessed unfolding all around me over the years, plus statistics and data I've seen over time that corroborates it.

What are "the numbers" you speak of, anyway? You act as though there's some definitive set of numbers out there that proves everything I said as untrue?
All you have to do is study your recent American history to see changes in corporate America like creating the job description of "Human Resources", where no such department used to exist. This was strictly a move to give excuses to hire more women in white collar career office settings. (Companies got along just fine before that by letting management handle personnel issues directly, on their own. Issues related to insurance or benefits were probably handled by the same Finance team that paid those bills.)

I agree with the people pointing out how Canada eliminated the penny and it's worked fine to round up or down to the nearest 5 cents.

But it seems to me the value of the penny in U.S. currency has more to do with enabling the psychological "mind games"? EG. Promising people can get an item or service for only a penny, because people equate that with "pretty much no cost". While sheer volume of customers accepting the deal means it adds up to at least a sum that's worth collecting vs. just giving the same thing away free. Also encourages the mind game of wanting $10 for a product but pricing it at $9.99 instead to make it feel cheaper.

I guess over time, people will just view a nickel the same way, mentally, as a penny is viewed now.

"Grigar says they're still looking for a PC that reads five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks."

Is that so special these days?

leave it to demo coders to push hardware to the limits, specific the ones that target retro computers. sometimes i can hardly believe what i'm seeing.

Perfectly said! The "claptrap" came from the very people who are complaining today. Those who are screaming about teachers feminizing male students are the anti-intellectuals that defined masculinity to be violence and stupidity. They perpetrated that culture upon themselves, then when it turned out that punching the smart kid in the face wasn't a useful job skill, they blamed their failure on the schools.

We're still caught up in this big political/cultural war, where the more "liberal leaning" half of our population is still sold on the idea that we need to keep making more "opportunities" for women in the workplace, and secondarily? There was blatant sexism against women up till now, preventing them from obtaining workplace equality.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. The core issue at hand is really a level deeper. In my lifetime, I've witnessed a big shift in focus away from valuing the "stay at home mom" and the idea of the man being the "breadwinner" of the relationship/marriage. Unfortunately, this resulted in a whole generation of women who believed they should/could "do it all". Raise the kid/kids but ALSO get the full-time demanding career job.

If we're honest about it though? This results in basically doubling the number of applicants for given career job openings across the country. All of a sudden, the work that was traditionally done by men has just as many women applying to do it. The basic rules of supply and demand dictate this brings down wages and makes it harder to obtain a given job. So what happens next is, you get families who suddenly find they need 2 incomes instead of just 1 to survive. Both people go to work and wind up bringing in little more than what just the man would have earned if things were different. (And because women can't *really* give full focus to raising kids AND a demanding job, it results in more income spent on nannies, babysitters, daycare costs, etc. to get through it all.)

I'm not denying there were women out there not interested at all in raising kids who got a raw deal trying to work in a career field. But I'm saying, we went too far in the opposite direction and we're collectively paying the price. Yet, a big chunk of the population still wants things to continue full steam ahead.

But at half the range because of the lower energy density. Americans are very concerned about range.

So time will tell which is the winner. Sodium-ion will only be viable if it can provide some superscalar benefit. Suppose it winds-up half the capacity, half the price, and charges in half the time -- then it is really just equivalent to halving the lithium-ion battery. Hopefully it will be much much cheaper, because that is the key factor that will drive adoption.

You've got the developers of the phone operating system not providing a usable option for people trying to develop this type of application. On one hand, they're complaining that the "All files access" permission is unacceptable to use, as a security risk .Yet on the other hand, you're talking about an application that's supposed to allow syncing much of your phone's content to your remote server (your photo collection, music collection, calendar info, etc.), and allows general uploading and downloading of files between the phone and server.

If Google doesn't want someone like Nextcloud using "All files access", then they should design an acceptable alternative. Perhaps a special permission for file management and syncing type software that allows all of the needed data to be accessed while logging it someplace secure, in case there really is some kind of security issue to be researched with an app's behavior?

The idea of a 125% plus fee slapped on imports or exports to and from a couple of nations producing huge volumes of goods each other need is simply unsustainable.

At the same time? I don't really think even the MAGA crowd ever believed this was supposed to be some kind of long-term solution to anything? It was blatantly obvious to me from the start that Trump was throwing out these insane percentages to force real negotiations to happen. And here we are.

I mean, to use an ever-popular car analogy? Say you want to buy a guy's vintage Mustang. You've always wanted one but you're also sensible enough to know you're going to drive it regularly so it's going to be a constant drain on your finances keeping it running. The seller wants over twice the price you envision as sane/doable. If you go into things asking the seller to consider selling to you for $1000-2000 less than his asking price? You're still going to wind up paying FAR more than where you wanted to be on it, EVEN if he just accepts your offer at face value.

To have any hope of getting the car near your desired price point, you're going to have to completely "lowball" the guy, saying "Hey... if you get tired of trying to sell it and want to get rid of it? I'm willing to pay X price." A lot of people would tell you, "Well - you just can't afford a Mustang, my friend. He's going to ignore you and sell it to someone else paying his asking price!"

BUT ... maybe he lives in an area where there's not much demand for one? Maybe he needs the money and was only pricing it so high because he heard other people got that much at auto auctions before for similar ones and was just hoping he'd have the same luck? The point is, at least now, the buyer has his cards on the table and it's in the sellers' court to consider entertaining his much lower offer.

America has been screwing around for decades, complaining about China stealing our intellectual property every time we have them manufacture items for us, China polluting without any controls on it, Chinese government subsidizing the cost to make products just so they can flood the American market with them below cost to make it uneconomical for a US company to stay in business making the same things, etc. etc. Our negotiations have amounted to real specific complaints and relatively insignificant tariffs applied selectively. None of this moves the needle for substantial changes.
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