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.

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.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

Fully agree- Policy makers, armchair education experts, and parents love to forget that kids effectively *lost* two years of education due to COVID. The sad Zoom school that kids mostly slept through didn't count. Screens, AI, Tiktok, etc- are certainly problems worth investigating, but the biggest problem was that everything just returned to normal without any formal, intensive focus on rebuilding lost skills- largely because that would have meant kids needing to take extra classes.

The thing is, I've worked in this field for a long time now. I'm getting invited to do talks all over the US on these topics, and regularly have parents tell me I blew their minds and changed the way they're looking at their kids behaviors. I've taken kids from having violent meltdowns whenever it's time to turn off minecraft to being able to turn off the game when they realize it's not doing it for them anymore and it's time to stop.

And about considering that I might be wrong- I used to think screentime was a problem, and I realized that approach was the wrong one.

But the biggest contributer to success was parents having an open mind on how to solve these problems. Parents who came in with paper thin arguments about screentime being crack and all kinds of nonsense they're parroting from FB ultimately had damaged trust with their kids, and the interventions didn't go nearly as well because the kids saw no reason to engage if the trust wasn't there.

I actually work with kids in a mental health capacity, spend time talking with kids with screentime and school refusal issues, and am a published author and lecturer on child socialization. Kids mental health outcomes are worse for a lot of reasons, but the argument that things got better for the boomers, then increasingly worse is absolutely true. And now as things are getting really bad for kids, and they're aware that it doesn't need to be this way, that's creating a lot of endemic despair- although again that's just the tip of the iceberg on an increasingly complex mental health crisis. Having genuine curiosity and listening to kids rather than insulting opinions that challenge your own is important if you actually want to figure out solutions. Otherwise, you're just part of the problem.

Although, just to make it clear, here's the problem.

-Screens aren't crack. They're a medium. Trying to take away phones at this point is like trying to take away paper. And while there *are* problematic things, it's a much better plan to actually help kids gain digital literacy, plan for use, diversify their opportunities for fun, and learn metacognition around their screen use than compare them incorrectly to drugs.

-Kids mental health really isn't good, and blaming screens is literally blaming both a symptom and a band aid. Being on a screen all the time isn't good for your mental health, but for a lot of kids, after COVID, they didn't really have much else given that going outside isn't something kids are really encouraged to do much anymore.

-Taking away screens turns kids into hackers and damages trust.

-Taking away screens also doesn't help kids build functional relationships with them. Too often the parents don't have functional relationships with screens either, so taking away the screens is just hypocritical, and sets kids up for failure later in life.

-The screentime debate is honestly being poisoned by a bunch of alarmist nonsense that wants to reduce it to the same debate we've been having since the popularization of the novel. It's a very new technology that we need to actually understand how kids interact with, rather than comparing it to mind rotting drugs. While there are impacts, I think, again, the more significant impact is on society as a whole. We're just picking on kids for the same brainrot that boomers are getting (but worse) from Facebook. And kids can smell the hypocrisy.

You're labeling a bunch of right wing, idiotic headlines that aren't rooted in any sort of reality. You can blame the left for all kinds of stuff, but honestly? NCLB did far more harm to kids learning than any of that shit, and that was Bush.

... Did you even read the comment, or are you showing that your reading comprehension levels need help?

the thing is, the kids aren't stupid. Sure, a lot of them are a bit brainrotted from tiktok, but the boomers brainrot is *far* worse. They're smart, they're able to see the writing on the wall, and they see a social contract that has no reason to continue. And we've failed them, handed them a big steaming pile of shit and told them to get better grades. It'd be laughable if it weren't so sad.

yeah, that's bs coming from an anonymous coward who doesn't talk to kids. They hate fascism, they hate the right, they hate that they're seeing their country get stripped for resources with the same energy of copper thieves. They don't like the left because it failed to meaningfully protect them, just give them lip service, but the right's insistence that 'thoughts and prayers' instead of common sense gun reform to protect them against school shootings has made it clear where things stand.

Few things happening.

-COVID. It did a huge hit on kids, on their wellbeing, social development, and academic performance. Kids are still getting over the burnout from that.

School issues. Schools are hitting a teacher cliff, and teachers are all burned out from all the extra BS they have to do. On top of that, schools are wildly underfunded for the things that actually matter, and are having a hard time retaining talent as the stress load for teachers just keeps going up, while their salaries aren't competitive.

Someone posted something about absenteeism with a 'back in my day' sort of energy. So, on that- yes, schools will still send truancy officers to check in. A lot of the time, it's kids with serious mental health problems. See the COVID burnout thing, and the next point.

The kids are not ok. If you look at kid's mental health, it's frankly in the toilet, and a lot of it comes down to the world that they're inheriting. They're facing a global warming cataclysm, the rise of fascism, and a garbage economy with no hope of ever achieving the American dream. They're often latchkey kids because both parents have to work to pay rent. They're having AI and social media infiltrating their lives, and have no real sense of community (COVID disrupted so many community programs oriented at helping kids with this, and thanks to DOGE cuts, a lot of other nonprofits that did great community work are dead.) Doing well in school is based around a social contract that ensures that it will have some meaningful payout, and right now, that social contract is a joke.

It's not 'How much homework' they should be looking at, or 'is homework a good thing,' but 'what sort of homework results in the best academic achievement. A lot of teachers use homework as a sort of ongoing assessment tool to determine if students are understanding the content- which is a really good thing to do! But, there's probably better ways to do that in the classroom where you can correct misunderstandings in realtime. And based on the subject, there's probably a lot of reinforcing instruction that would be best done at home. But trying to ask questions about 'how much' or 'is it a good thing' misses the mark completely, and ultimately is going to give you unreliable data points.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.