Something with: any one who believes in infinite growth in a finite world is a madman

Sorry, you've misunderstood me. Let me try to clarify. When I said "the goal of the US" I didn't mean the traditional republican politicians. I mean the majority of the political will in the US. The voters. The large number of people who first voted for Obama, then wanted Sanders, and then, probably begrudgingly, voted for Trump. These are working class folks who don't want to drive for Uber or work in an Amazon fulfillment center, and would rather have a good paying factory job like they hear some previous generation had back in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. They want to shift the supply and demand economics of American labor. They want to shrink the supply by reducing immigration and increase the demand by adding manufacturing jobs, which they believe will make general laborer wages rise (relative to the rest of society).

I live in Canada. Every time you hear news about the dollar, it's bad news, whether it goes up or down. If it goes up the news reporters go and interview exporters who complain that this hurts their business, and when it goes down the reporters interview importers who explain how this is going to make all the products we buy more expensive. It's honestly very tiring. I mostly just ignore stories like this.

If a currency is functioning normally (not being manipulated) then it works to automatically balance trade. If Americans start buying more and more from overseas, then supply and demand in the currency market will cause the dollar's value to go down, which makes American products and investments more attractive to everyone else. You just have to understand that the US buys a lot of cheap products from overseas, but mostly exports expensive high end products like aircraft parts and machinery. People around the world really like investing in US companies (and even T-bills) because the US market is large, profitable, and safe. Therefore the long term trend has been that Americans import a lot of cheap products in exchange for a lot of investment capital flowing into the US. This kept industry humming, but also had the effect of pushing up housing prices, as a lot of people invest in US real estate.

The dollar has traditionally been so high because the US was considered to be such a safe place to invest. Investors around the world wanted better returns, and foreign governments wanted a safe reserve currency, and for the most part the US government took advantage of this because it gave the US access to very cheap capital (borrowing) which allowed deficit spending, and it also gave the US enormous leverage over pretty much every other country in the world financially. For instance, the sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia are based on the fact that the global system of trade is mostly based on the US dollar.

The US dollar is falling because even though Americans are still buying lots of stuff from overseas, there's a notable concern about the stability of the US as both a safe place to invest, and as a good investment return. Now I personally think there's still a potential for high return on investment if I were to invest in the US, but I do also have concerns about any money I have in US investments because you just don't know if the US government would do something drastic like confiscate foreign investment, etc. I don't consider it likely, but it's not something I would have worried about 10 years ago, but it's at least a remote possibility now.

I think the goal of the US is to bring more manufacturing back onshore. I think this is a reasonable goal. There are always winners and losers in any change. Bringing back manufacturing jobs tends to help the working class, as does limiting the supply of cheap labor by deporting lots of people. Note that while this is probably a net benefit to the working class, corporations won't like it. They prefer a strong US dollar which makes borrowing cheap and they prefer low wages too, so they're generally pro-immigration. But that's the story of the last few years... the working class has now gained political influence, not just in the US but across the western world, and the right-wing political parties have embraced them, which is a bit surprising because the right-wing parties have traditionally been the party of big business.

Big business now finds itself politically homeless, or certainly far less influential than they used to be. I suspect they're just hoping to ride this out. I'm not convinced this is a temporary situation. I believe that Trump has proven that the working class is now in play politically, and both parties will bend themselves towards catering to their interests. We even saw this in Canada with the liberal party running a guy who's very moderate, perhaps even right-of-center in some ways, and reduced immigration significantly even before the election earlier this year. I think this is just the new political reality. That doesn't mean the democrats won't win again, but they certainly won't win if they don't start adopting some of the populist rhetoric ("working class vs. the elites") that has worked so well for Trump. People clearly wanted Sanders to win the democratic primary, but the democratic party has super-delegates and wouldn't let Bernie win because the party itself (the people running it) are very much against populism. The republican party doesn't have super-delegates, which is why a populist like Trump was able to win the primary in that party.

So it's interesting to see this story trying to paint a low US dollar as a bad thing. It's bad for big business, but not for the working class. I find it surprising because I wouldn't normally think of msmash as a pro-big-business editor. But here we are.

I don't understand how you can make two video games, where the first received critical acclaim, and the sequel was widely panned due to the story, and then when you adapted that into a TV show, you turned the second game into the second season without thinking, "hmm, the fans really hated this story... maybe we should change it?" It's just mindboggling.

When reading statements or listening to interviews, always keep the speaker's motivations in mind. What would the CEO of Ford be trying to accomplish by what they're saying? The typical motivations are to reassure investors. How does saying that half the white collar jobs are going to be gone in the coming years reassure investors? It says, "this new technology is going to allow Ford to cut half of a very large expense."

Is it realistic? No. But it supports his goal: you should invest in Ford because we can already see how to use this new technology to drastically decrease costs.

Another goal he has is to keep workers fearing for their jobs. This is an implied threat to a bunch of Ford workers... you're lucky to have a job, so keep your head down and don't make a fuss. Cuts are coming.

430 ppm? That seems high. We should do something about that. Has anyone considered getting all the countries in the world together to agree to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

Other than graphic designers, is AI actually displacing workers anywhere, or are companies just cutting back on their workforce, making everyone who's left do more work, and using "replaced by AI" as an excuse to deflect the blame?

Just to give you some feedback: this post just comes off as completely crazy, conspiracy theory, drivel. Even if there is a bit of truth buried in there somewhere, nobody's going to see it because they just picture you standing beside a wall full of newspaper clippings, pins, and string trying to connect it all together.

Diminished maybe, but not all that much.

I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.

And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.

No disrespect to the Chinese engineers. There's some brilliant guys over there. But there are also very large geopolitical forces that shape our world, and engineering can only do so much and so fast. At the global scale, we're shaped by trends that are very, very difficult to change.

I watched that video. I found it kind of ridiculous. First of all, that low end manufacturing left the US a couple decades ago. Any low value item with a high labor content, or that is intrinsically dangerous, makes more sense to off-shore because Americans get paid more per hour than most other people, and American labor laws are more stringent than theirs. Making commodity bolts is, by it's nature, a low value job and you don't want to do it in America. What matters is, does the US have the expertise to make the machines to make those things, and the US is a major machinery exporter, so yes. And Destin didn't look very hard either. I work for a tool & die company and do a lot of work in manufacturing. The US is a big country and there are lots of people who still know how to do injection molding, machining, and tool & die. Destin just didn't know where to find them, probably because he's too young to have heard of the yellow pages.

Why? I get why anything accessible on the public internet should be IPv6, but it doesn't matter for anything behind a NAT box. Why can't my home setup use IPv4? Or the tiny little network on my mobile robot that isn't connected to the internet? There are tons of cases where an isolated IPv4 setup with static addresses is simpler to setup and troubleshoot than an IPv6 network.

Probably French literature or basket weaving. Seriously, though, the US is a major exporter of highly advanced manufactured products. One of the biggest categories is commercial aircraft components, followed by pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and machinery. The US is a highly technical nation. I wouldn't be worried.

There area also a lot of people who say that "nobody is eating cats" and that's not exactly true either. I'm personally sick of the partisan rhetoric. Talking heads blatantly ignore the half of the facts they don't like, and it's pathetic.

China is certainly investing in renewables big time, but mostly that's out of desperation so that they can reduce their dependence on imported oil from the middle east, which they know they can't provide effective security for.

There are a lot of headwinds for China. For starters they have poor geography. Their demographics are very bad. International investment is drying up. If anything they're over-investing in solar, with huge plants being built up in the northwest areas where they don't have industry, nor the infrastructure to get the power to where they do have industry. I'm not saying they're going to disappear, but the overall trend for China is downward. Don't buy into the hype machine.