Zompist Bboard Again

and I don't feel like biden is less WW3ish than trump: sure, trump has a wacky rhetoric, but on the level of actions the guy didn't start new wars, for example, Trump doesn't have a coherent overarching world view. He has his own personal business interests, and that's it. Remember the "Muslim...

[snip] Do you honestly think that the Republicans are going to help the average American more than the Democrats (which I presume you do considering the number of times I see you say "Dems" above)? If the Democrats are bad, the Republicans are infinitely worse (e.g. all their populism is ...

Social security takes from the young, who mostly don't believe it'll be solvent when they're old, to give to the old, many of whom are members of the AARP, which is a lobbying organization that is good at its job. We hear that a lot from young or young-ish conservatives here over pensions. The beli...

So, what happens if Trump is both found guilty of something in one of his four trials and imprisoned, *and* is elected president in November? There's nothing in the constitution preventing a criminal from being president, so I guess he gets to be president from a prison cell? If so, does the secret ...

Yes, definitely. I'm always a little surprised to find Americans agreeing with me on politics, and a fair amount of them being to my left. That just never happened 20 years ago. Surely, the growing enshittification of living in America over the past 20 years has partially caused this. It's easy to ...

When I was a child/teenager in the church, I wasn't aware about the sexual abuse scandals until the Boston Globe report in 2002. Weren't jokes, or, if you prefer, "jokes" about that stuff already fairly common before 2002? In 2002, I was 13, so I wouldn't know, because I was too young to ...

I think an even more important factor, however, may be the ongoing loss of prestige. My late husband was ordained in the 70s and he still experienced the reverence with which priests used to be treated in public. He told me it could be embarrassing at times, such as when an elderly man would insist...

Many high schools and colleges/universities in the US have both a varsity team (the main one) and a "junior varsity" team, composed of younger and/or less experienced players; the junior varsity players either serve as backups to the varsity players, or play separate games against other j...

It's not really that I disagree with you, jcb, but I kind of wonder who you think you're talking to - someone who approves of outsourcing and union-busting? I hope that Zompist doesn't support those things, but the current Democratic party certainly does. And at the end of the day, that's who I'm s...

I suspect you are assuming that all technological change is good and that this replacement process is some kind of eternal law. No. and for the last forty years tech change has benefitted only the top 10% of the US, not everyone. That mechanism of generalizing prosperity no longer works for most pe...

AIs are now being used to plan, script, and run entire events. Be afraid! Be very afraid! It leaves out the best part! Behold, the depressed oompa loompa: https://carboncostume.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/oompaloompalady-character.jpg People who need small-scale art and can't draw— por...

other things which have struck me as us-culture-what-hasn't-become-world-culture include the game jeopardy, dr phil, family feud, farenheit, baseball, the funny armored rugby, nascar, Are you sure about baseball being on that list? Baseball has become quite big in some non-American countries (Japan...

Any chance that this might make executive types rethink? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/ What makes you think that companies won't just push to have what AI chatbots say be immune from prosecution?, like how currently sel...

I don't know about monitors. They're already big. I have a 48" monitor. I meant that they'll become more common for a typical workstation, because they'll be cheaper. if you have several monitors you can position them separately to avoid angle problems Or get a curved monitor. Drop a Google St...

Precisely. I mean everyone's happy and it makes sense to change machines regularly when the field is advancing rapidly. The obsolescence looks a lot more obviously planned when technology is mature. From, say, 1988 to 1998 there were several revolutions in the field. You could do orders of magnitud...

Manufacturers like disposable devices not only because they can sell new ones, but also because it removes maintainability as a design constraint; consumers, for their part, prefer it not only because there will be better devices in a few years (a consequence of technological progress) but also bec...

For any item in that list, I could list ways in which capitalism is making things more difficult: computer and cell phones are way less durable than they should, social media have been turned into Nazi enablement machines, the whole enshittification things, plus the damn things are spying on you. A...

Interesting article from Cory Doctorow : is the AI bubble likely to leave useful residue or little at all? Speaking of the AI bubble, why does the character recognition on my smartphone still suck? It recognizes only ~95% of my finger-written characters, which is high enough success rate to be usef...

What is the capitalist "solution" to this crisis? One suggestion is to remove government regulations on building trailer homes. Everyone can be housed as long as newcomers celebrate coming into possession of worse quality accomodations. Indeed, most American cities have poor zoning laws t...

Not everyone may have an exhaustive knowledge of where the hot US cities are, so here are the top cities by population: Miami Beach FL, Asheville NC, Detroit MI, Pompano Beach FL, Concord NC, Macon-Bibb GA, Augusta GA, Dayton OH, St Louis MO, Birmingham AL Not everyone may have an exhaustive knowle...