And it's gotten worse; I recently got notified by my local power company that they're 'restructuring' their charges; under the new system, the charge for your connection to the grid and the 'generation charge', both fixed fees, will now be assessed separately, so that you're paying both of those charges each month even if you're continuously selling power back to them from overproduction, where previously your overproduction could apply against those costs.

We can look at the statistics for jobs that are replaced by AI, but we don't see statistics for the number of jobs that are not being created because AI is being set up to do those jobs rather than hiring someone to fill them. BLS recently issued a correction that the US added 911,000 fewer jobs in 2024 and early 2025 than previously reported, the largest downward revision on record. Without being able to get data from businesses on the reasons for smaller increases in hiring, we can't point to any specific cause for the downturn. Increased adoption of AI might be responsible for some, most, or all of this reduction, but there's no legitimacy in pointing a finger at AI and blaming it.

In addition, the imposition of a tariff assumes that there is local production to be 'protected' or 'encouraged'. If the only producer for a product is in a foreign country and it's not something that is readily done without, imposing a tariff just sucks cash out of the pockets of consumers -- an inherently regressive tax that hits low-income people harder than high-income people. And even if the tariff does spur local companies to begin producing a competing product, their startup costs and the tariff point give them no incentive to not price their product just below the tariff-raised cost of the foreign product, even if their actual cost is significantly less than that point. A good example of the 'no local competition' is plastic model kits. Virtually all of the manufacturers of plastic model kits are in other countries -- China, Japan, Germany, etc. -- and both the startup costs and lead times are significant; injection-molding machines are expensive, as are the molds to use in those machines, the expertise to make the molds is difficult to acquire, and it's time-consuming to set up a production line to make the kits, so you're likely looking at years before a local manufacturer can set up to compete with the foreign kitmakers. Then, because it's not a high-volume industry, current business-administration practices will drive pricing those kits as high as possible to recover the startup costs quickly, so the kits will be only barely cheaper than foreign kits.

Actually, the snake oil sold in Chinese stores did have health benefits, because of the omega-3 fatty acids in the oil. Unfortunately, when it was brought to the US, the traveling salesmen who picked up on the idea didn't know what kind of snakes to use, and the ones readily available in the US didn't have a significant omega-3 content. So it was an actual health product turned into worthless crap by greedy American marketeers.

They're just waiting for the tax breaks and subsidies they need to be able to make it financially viable, like Mitsubishi's recent withdrawal from the wind projects it had been involved in -- citing an inability to make the projects economically viable, even at strike prices of $140 to $200 per MWh.

Well, he has to pay for the tax cuts for his rich supporters in the OBBB somehow, so he'll just soak the general populace for it. Masking it as a tariff on imports that 'encourage local companies to make replacement products cheaper' throws a feel-good camouflage net over the problems of there likely not being any local manufacturers for some products, and that standing up new production lines is expensive and time-consuming -- but, hey, we're really sticking it to the Chinese... and the Canadians... and the Germans... and the French... and... Never mind that the tariffs don't affect them, except maybe for having to collect it from the US customers. The tariffs come out of our pockets, a tax for having the temerity to buy something that's not a genuine 'Murican product.

Or equally "Our profits are going to go down if we have to make products that are actually better than the ones the competitors we have to allow in will offer!"

Both speech and perception. I had a supervisor whose normal speaking rate was noticeably faster than my coworkers; it was gratifying to be able to get the information she wanted to convey faster than if the same information had been conveyed by another of my coworkers. While I don't know if the pace is deliberate, when I'm watching YouTube videos, I will often bump the playback speed to 1.5x, because at normal speed it feels as if the speaker (or the AI narration; I'm not naive enough to believe that it's not being used by posters who don't think they have a good enough speaking voice) is unnaturally stretching their speech out.

No, this study gives a foundation to why AI-driven narration sounds so horrible. On top of the seemingly-random abrupt pauses between words that should be a single phrase, AI narration either runs on for much longer than a human would, or breaks up sentences with 'normal' pauses, but in the wrong places. They always seem to make Shatner's... dramatic... pauses sound like... smooth... ...delivery.

This is why HD video failed to attract any of the porn market; viewers didn't want to see every blemish on a performer's body. Now it seems as if having the blemishes visible will become a marker of shot-live porn, rather than computer-generated. At which point someone will start 'enhancing' the AI-generated 'performers' to add cosmetic blemishes, at which point the industry will have to find another means of distinguishing real actors from AI-generated ones.

True, there's little difference from outside once the car is fully engulfed, but there's a huge difference between an electrical fire that you can put out with a home extinguisher before it can ignite anything else, and a battery fire that is going to engulf the car, your garage, your home, and (if you happen to live in multi-occupancy structures) your neighbors' homes as well, whether or not you have immediate access to the tons of water that are required to manage -- not extinguish -- an EV battery fire.

What the wind and solar developers seem to be screaming about is how the federal government will no longer be issuing subsidies and tax breaks for the construction of wind and solar facilities, claiming that without these, it will cost thousands of jobs and cripple the industry. Yet, at the same time, we're hearing the green-energy people continuing to push the "wind and solar production is cheaper than fossil fuel generation" -- well, if it's truly cheaper than fossil-fuel generation, then it doesn't need federal subsidies and tax breaks, and wind and solar facilities will be built, selling power at the same cost as fossil-fuel generation, providing a higher return on investment than building fossil-fuel generation, and so will replace fossil-fuel plants.

And then a particularly dense cloud will move over a solar facility, its output will drop almost to nothing, and because wind and solar are incapable of stabilizing the power grid on their own, we'll see another incident like the one in Spain, where voltage and frequency disruption at a solar power facility caused a distribution node to trip and go offline, and because at the time some 2/3 of Spain's power was being generated by wind and solar, there was insufficient stabilizing capacity to keep this from causing a cascading series of distribution centers to trip and go offline as well, shutting down the electrical grid over the entire Iberian peninsula and parts of France.

Or, better, Artificial Ignorance.

And in other shocking and unexpected news, scientists have reported that the Pacific Ocean may be damp.

It took years of ignoring them before whatever algorithm was behind them to 'decide' that I wasn't a viable target, but for a seemingly interminable period I was getting at least one email a month from people I'd never heard of inviting me to join LinkedIn. *plonk* (the sound of an email hitting the junk folder and having the originating address blocked)