If we don't preprogram them in advance, then how will kids learn "Math class is tough!"?

Selecting office software is not a political statement

That's right, it's not a statement. It's just a position. You either hold the position that it's ok to be dependent on a third party and it's ok to fail if that third party turns against you, or you hold the position that it's not ok and you would prefer to stay up no matter what adversaries want.

It only becomes a statement once you tell someone that security and reliability are among your values. ;-)

Scale isn't the main problem, interoperability is. If you've solved interoperability (i.e. you've got SPF, DKIM, etc working so gmail.com and outlook.com will receive emails sent from your system) then you're in good shape.

Not that running large systems is necessarily easy, but it doesn't have enemies the way interoperability has enemies. Scale is a merely conventional problem that Google and Microsoft aren't making worse for Linux users. Nobody's pushing back, trying to make you fail; your only foe is savage reality.

And man-vs-savage-reality is a pretty nice conflict to be involved in, compared to man-vs-man.

How do they measure this? Did all the pirates magically agree to put Google Analytics on their web pages and share reporting with Muso? Or, in accordance with The Pirate Code (?!) do all pirate pages request the browser load http://muso.com/arr-trackme-1x... and (again, in accordance with The Pirate Code, I guess) the visitors configure their browsers to whitelist and load it? I am skeptical of any third parties who claim they "track" pirate site visits.

Surely whoever bills for Trump's services knows exactly what has been sent so far. Trump doesn't "work" for free.

Paper strips don't depend on anything to persist.

Get that desk fan out of here!!

You could replace "mosquitoes" in that headline with polio, smallpox, measles, AIDS, malaria, or any one of a thousand different pathogens. No one is agonizing over eradicating them.

Except RFK Jr.

Oh FFS. Food banks are locally run, staffed, and financed.

I don't believe you.

Who's stopping you from writing a check?

It's not our responsibility.

I'll just have to learn to live with the knowledge that you disapprove.

Except that the cash is drying up anyway, per the article source. And it was inevitable that enrollment would slow down as soon as China ramped up their higher education system enough to provide for their own needs. That's been their M.O. in every other sector of their economy: get Western help until self-sufficient, then kick the West out to protect their own markets. Education is no different from factories in this case.

In 1950, most women were married and stay-at-home moms, with the female labor participation rate at just over 30%. Most men did the working. We have a vastly different social situation now. The women's labor rate is now 57%. Men are now under 67%. In the year you citied, 1950, men had an 86% participation rate. The male rate has been steadily dropping since the 60's. So there's definitely been a change in attitudes and work ethic since the 50's.

Such revolutions always end up with the revolutionaries killing the very people they were supposedly fighting for. Ask the French how that turned out for them.

That's not the argument. The argument is that simply giving people money all their lives with no requirements for work in return will make them permanently dependent on others. Worse, they'll come to have a sense of entitlement that their neighbor owes them a living. The West has always prospered with the worth ethic: He who does not work, shall not eat.

So, if AI takes that work away to an extent that will truly leave masses of people permanently unemployed? Then better a Butlerian Jihad than Behavioral Sink.

When work and purpose is taken away from Man, he rots.

Americans would have no problem temporarily helping a nation that had a crop failure one year, or had food supplies destroyed by a hostile force. What they have a problem with is permanently taking responsibility for feeding that nation, when that nation is more than capable of feeding itself. And that became the problem with USAID. It became a permanent burden, often with the expectation that US tax dollars were always going to show up to do the job that the native people and their governments should be doing themselves.

I also suspect that much of USAID wasn't for humanitarian purposes as much as it was for buying influence abroad, under the guise of humanitarianism. One of the primary objections to cutting the USAID budget at places like the Brookings Institution and CSIS is that if the US stops paying foreign food and medicine bills, then China will step in and play sugar daddy. Well, good. Let China drain their coffers then. As far as I'm concerned, that's not a bug, that's a feature.

The people of the United States are exceedingly generous in giving their money to charities, foreign and domestic. Americans sent almost 30 billion dollars abroad to foreign recipients in 2023. Americans pretty much have decency covered. But this isn't about decency. It's about responsibility.

So, I ask again: who is responsible for feeding those children abroad? The implication of the parent post is that the responsibility is squarely on US taxpayers, and not the parents of those children or their own governments.