I'm not an apple fan, but I have to admit that Apple held out the longest against basing their company on a data collection and ad revenue model. Their strategy was to just make products that people really wanted, and charge high markups for them. I respect that.

Talking to people in public isnâ(TM)t harassment.

Talking to people on taxpayer funded grounds also isnâ(TM)t trespass.

Tax funded?

Not private property anymore.

Why stop there? Why not legalize all grifting.M/EM>
BR? Have you not seen who is in the White House? He's the biggest grifter we have. He routinely pardons people convicted of financial crimes as well.

I don't think anybody in government is sitting there thinking about the "purpose of civilization". Sure, they all took political science in school, and to the extent that they realize that governing is compromise, and any government is better than anarchy, I suppose they might have given it a bit of thought in the past. But they mostly just work to get elected next time. All of their actions, and mostly just their words, are always in support of that one goal. "How many votes can I gain by saying this, and how many will I lose by saying it?" If X > Y, then say it. People like their phones, and the companies give lots of political donations, and that means it's a no-brainer to let it be. The only time something like this gets on their radar is if a public health expert or advocacy group rallies enough concerned individuals and shows that this is an important enough issue that they're willing to vote based on it.

... I'll go read that book I've been meaning to read for a while.

If LLM-powered coding is going so well, where are the productivity stats to back it up? Where are the open source projects that are rapidly adding functionality to meet the feature-sets of their closed-source competitors? Answer: they don't exist. It's almost all hype.

Certainly it's better to own assets than cash (due to depreciation), and best to own revenue-generating assets. However, the appropriate value you should pay for a company is the net present value of all future earnings, discounted at a reasonable annual percentage rate. And NVidia and the titans are the ones that are over-valued. Coca-cola or Johnson & Johnson are probably still a reasonable investment that will withstand any significant market crashes.

I can't believe you have to ask.

I remember in the late 90's before the dot-com crash, the stock market was wildly over-valued by the same metrics that say it's over-valued now, and people literally said to me, "no, this is just the way the new economy works. Technology has greatly increased the rate of real growth and the market prices are just reflecting that." Then it crashed. Technology did end up causing growth, at about the same rates we'd seen historically over the long periods of time. Don't buy the AI hype. At best it's a marginally better search engine.

Look, I'm left of center, and I'm not even American. But you aren't helping. Did you agree with all of Biden or Obama's policies or everything they said? If you did you'd be very rare indeed. The people on the right have various opinions. Many of the ones who swung the election towards Trump did it because they view one single issue, like affordability or immigration, to be the one thing they're mainly concerned about, and it was more about the democrats having not done enough to address those specific issues over the previous 4 years. You can't paint half the country with that wide of a brush. There are lots of people on the right that aren't very happy about what Trump is saying or doing, but they maybe just don't trust the dems to do the right thing either. I've also heard a lot of people more liberal than me say, "It's not that I even disagree with some of the stuff Trump is doing; it's how he's going about it." Opinions vary widely within both "sides".

If you don't want the left to be judged by the craziest screaming radicals on the left, then don't judge all of the right by the crazy wack-a-doodles on the right. It's just a straw-man argument. Both the dems and the republicans are massive coalitions of many different groups and make up millions of people. If you're a reasonable liberal you almost certainly have more opinions in common with a reasonable conservative than either of you do with the radical elements of your own parties. Though with that comment I'd hardly consider you reasonable.

They've been pushing this narrative that media can't be trusted. This then allows them to shape stories to fit their own right-wing agenda. Witness for the past 5 years all the whining about a "stolen" election. Almost every day for Biden's term that fake story was pushed out, mainly by their stooge Trump, but definitely put out there on other sites and roundly repeated by the dullard MAGA crowd.

Never mind that the Fox tabloid jumped wholeheartedly on this bandwagon and got bitchslapped for almost $800 million for pusing the lie, or that several attorneys were either suspended from pracitce, criminally charged, or disbarred for repeating the lie in court. Nope, the election was stolen and the media is lying because . . . reasons.

Then of course there are the calls of "FAKE!" every time the truth is put out. Such as when repeating the decaying coleslaw words of dear leader Trump. Repeat his own words and you're called out for being "fake news".

What makes this story so hilarious is that the same people who claim to have low to no trust in media are the first ones to go rushing to the same media to see who the new white guy is shotting up a church or school. They want to see if their biased perceptions are true and when the story doesn't match what they think, they claim the story is false because . . . reasons.

Even more hilarious is when people claim they no longer listen to the media but instead get their news from various social media sites. Where do they think the people posting screenshots are getting their information from?

Turmp is right. Smart people don't like him because he caters to the poorly educated (a group he says he loves) who will lap up any bs he or Project 2025 or the late Charlie Kirk spit out. Because instead of looking at reality, they want to believe there is some vast conspiracy by news media to lie to them, to withhold the truth. Except, when the truth is out there, these same people claim it's all lies. They can't have it both ways (they can, but it shows their stupidity). Either you have to accept these people are doing their jobs reporting on corruption, reporting on who's doing what underhanded thing, who's committing genocide, or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose like all the Senators and Representatives who claim the election was stolen, except for their election.

It's not just news organizations. Trust in all institutions has been falling for a while. That includes things like the CDC, police services, and even global organizations like the WHO, etc. In my opinion the organizations partly brought this on themselves. A good example is that during the pandemic there was a very public discussion that was had about what messaging to give to the public. The idea was that the public isn't smart enough to understand that N95 masks are very good, cloth masks perform quite poorly, and surgical masks are somewhere in between. The confounding factor was that we didn't have enough N95 and even surgical masks. News organizations reported on lists of "42 studies" that showed the effectiveness of masks. Yeah, I actually went and looked at those studies and all the evidence was very weak in terms of supporting *cloth* masks. But here's the thing... they had this discussion about what the tell the public in full view of the public, as if we weren't listening. You can't do that and maintain trust. The only discussion you can have in full view of the public is "what should we tell everyone? THE TRUTH!" Manipulating your message to control behavior instead of just to inform is a really bad idea. We can all see the media and other institutions doing it constantly now and we're sick of it.

The current prices for battery storage are US$75/kWh. Hence 2 TWh cost about US$150 billions. (I just checked, I can order a 4 kWh LiFePo4 pack for less than 300 EUR at Amazon - rated at 6000 charging cycles.) The Australian Health budget is about 112 AUD billion for 2024/25, or about US$60 billion. This means that the Australian public health spending buys us 2 TWh battery storage every three years, given current end user prices at Amazon in the EU.

I also seriously doubt your 15 years figure. Current technology degrades about 20% after 3000 charging cycles. Given that the 2 TWh number is a 3 day storage, you would need to fully recharge them about 120 times a year at a maximum, which means that after 25 years, you still have 80% of the capacity left. This means you have to add 20% of the capacity after 25 years or do a complete refresh every 125 years - and that means that all technology development stops right now.