It's obvious we need new physical media that is cheaper than thumb drives. Someone invent a better solution for dirt cheap write-once media, there's a huge market for it as long as the data lasts.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Hopefully Google won't hamstring this by forcing you to enable "install apps from any source" setting to use non-Google app stores. If I use an alternate app store I don't want to let apps from just anywhere be installed, I only want apps from that app store to be installed. Apps from anywhere else I want to continue to block.

If AI were compelled to pay royalties on the copyrighted data they trained on, it might slow down a little. But not enough.

This administration is pouring gasoline on the fire because they WANT a roaring stock market and a weaker, more insecure middle class. There's a lot of 1% money that's tied up in the stock market, and the owners would love nothing more than a home foreclosure spree to shift into.

If you're not convinced, why are all the AI people building impregnable bunkers?

That's actual stock, not options. Incentive stock options (the kind executives receive) don't count as income until you sell the stock after exercising the options. Take out a loan against that stock and you've got dollars in your bank account you can spend but no income to report. Now, suppose the loan's structured so that, as long as the stock is worth enough to cover the principal plus accumulated interest, you don't have to make payments on the loan. Do this through a trust so your heirs don't have to worry about repayment either. Every year now you get the full dollar value of your stock awards in cash without having to declare any income. Possibly even without having to exercise the options, depending on how friendly you are with the lender.

Setting aside SM for a moment...

Looking back, I think the internet caught a terminal disease when LinkExchange and WebRing were bought out (for purposes of ending them), and cable Internet giants were allowed to merge with each other and then merge further with entertainment companies. Even Comcast offered "free homepages" which ended in 2015 (which I was surprised to learn... without a ring/exchange, you were totally reliant on Google and precise search terms which kind of killed publishing for the people).

Of course this merger fever meant we were creating incentive to reshape the Internet as a form of cable TV. Maybe it would have burned without policymakers pouring gas on the fire. But it's happened. The vast majority of Internet traffic is now "apps", generally social media. And the mergers are not stopping. The world is being carved up not by nations, but by billionaires who want (above all) want common people to be disconnected.

If you go back to forums you used to visit in 2014, they are absolute ghost towns. I feel for those admins who are probably spending $1,000s a year to keep them running, hoping people will come back. Networks (of the people kind) don't reverse decline.

  I'd love to see a return of webring/linkexchange, something that's not depending on a central server (I don't know if this new DNS-over-HTTPS and Javascript talkint to DNS-HTTP servers could be a starting point).

If we ever want to take it back, and I don't think we can, but there needs to be a new technology or an old one brought back but also made low-friction and without any easy points of failure.

Any router running SNMP or a web interface configured to listen on the external (WAN) port should be considered defective and replaced (or reflashed to sane non-braindead firmware). Home networks don't need SNMP at all, and business networks not using enterprise-grade equipment probably don't need it with write enabled. The only access to the router from the WAN side should be SSH using public-key authentication, and that only if you absolutely need it (you probably don't). That solves the vast majority of problems.

Russia, China and Iran trying to inflame the AI data-center debate is like pouring 5 gallons of gasoline on an oil-refinery fire: technically you did make it worse but by such a small amount nobody's going to notice.

If businesses were having problems hiring people in these fields, you'd think that they'd be a) offering higher pay and better benefits to make themselves more attractive to workers, and b) scrupulously avoiding filtering out qualified candidates for no good reason. Yet we don't see them doing either one. Tells me they want to use "shortage" as an excuse to move work overseas or bring in cheap labor from elsewhere.

We pay nurses, doctors, pharmacists, teachers and such crap wages, overwork them, force them to deal with idiotic gig-app scheduling, is it any wonder nobody wants to go into those fields? You have ICE showing up at construction sites arresting or scaring off half or more of the crew, pay them crap wages, and wonder why you can't get construction laborers? You outsource aircraft maintenance to the cheapest firm around and wonder why nobody wants to be an aircraft mechanic? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

They MIGHT even have to HIRE!

That works short-term, but then they become a non-resident with CA-based income which means they have to file CA taxes under non-resident rules. Much less favorable, and leaves them open to CA doing any number of things to tax rules. One would be considering loans secured by stock options (not actual shares) to be income.

Sure the billionaires can leave CA. No loss there, because their money will stay there. That's where the businesses they want to fund are. That's where the talent they want to attract is. And billionaires themselves pay jack shit in taxes, it's the businesses that the money's in that matter. And for that matter, where are the billionaires going to move? Manhattan, Kansas?

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Sorry, on mobile now and it's difficult to look up. You can search for the number of arrests and the number of lethal shootings during an arrest by race. Black people have far more interactions with police per capita, but each interaction is less likely to result in death than for other races.

What exactly? The tax return information is available from the IRS. Cross-reference it with Census district zoning.

So offices create value, not people in them? Do a mental experiment: replace offices with remote work. How much value remains?

No. Around 80-85% of people would prefer to live in single-family homes. People instead are forced by economics to live in dense areas that are designed to be hostile for humans (bike lanes instead of roads, forced public transit, no good grocery stores forcing people to eat junk, etc.)