I think a lot of it comes back to cars: many people traded longer commutes for suburban houses, which has advantages but comes at the cost of not having much to do without driving somewhere and less free time around other people. This is especially bad for parents when they don’t feel comfortable letting their kids walk / bike around the neighborhood since that means more time spent playing chauffeur.
London in the 70s (which GP was talking about) already had long commutes (large suburbs and lots of commuter towns) and most households had cars. Roads are much safer and public transport is good so kids can get around by themselves.
One big difference is that more women work: stay at home mums used to strengthen communities - doing voluntary work, organising things. Now that is mostly done by retired people so the pool is smaller and fewer households have someone directly involved. Another way to look at it is that the working hours for a similar household has increased greatly so the household as a whole has less time to contribute to the community.
Another factor is that people move around more. Again, very noticeable in London where a lot of people have moved out because of high house prices. People do not near people they grew up with.
That doesn’t fit: Apple’s been experimenting with VR since the 90s and Vision Pro was hardly novel–well executed, but not novel. I think it’s more complex where you have to think about the products executives and Wall Street analysts want to exist providing pressure against the “is it good enough to buy?” response.
And I’d add that like AI, there was clearly a conflict inside Apple between people who wanted to be in the game and the people who correctly recognized that it wasn’t yet where most consumers wanted.
Like AI, the Vision Pro would have been a better product if Apple told the detractors to shut up and ship out. NPUs and AR are not going to sway consumers or compete for market share.
Nevermind the godawful Liquid Glass UX they cooked up and imposed on everyone else...
It’s not different because of who’s doing it but due to scale: creating news which steers markets is worse than trading based on insider information, and there’s a scale question as well (billions versus millions). I want them both prosecuted but in terms of priorities I’d favor the police going after armed robbers over porch thieves.
I think this sort of thinking is why we have people who continue to vote against their own self interests. The fact is we really don't have enough information to make meaningful conclusions about which party is causing more harm with insider trading. It would take a team of accountants and lawyers years to confidently measure this. A random individual isn't going to assess this well.
But because people confidently draw often incorrect or baseless conclusions based on vibes and what largely democrat controlled corporate news media tells them, they're going to fall into us versus them mentality at party lines instead of better understanding that both sides are screwing us over tremendously and not accepting a perceived lesser evil
I am not a fan of the democrats - I think they are corrupt and have in many cases given up on being democratic, totally beholden to their donors.
That said, Trump is unbelievably obviously corrupt and doing immense, immediate, and obvious damage to the country in pursuit of personal enrichment. If you dont see this you are willingly blind.
> what largely democrat controlled corporate news media tells them
If you believe this, ask why and which side benefits from you being so misinformed. There’s a reason why the right-wing spends billions of dollars and encouraging people to blame “both sides” is a key part of it.
Yes of course we are all brainwashed by the famously democrat controlled media at _the Wall Street Journal_ which is owned by prominent leftist Rupert Murdoch. bro you are being robbed in broad daylight.
This is a silly conspiracy theory: the ray ID references the specific CDN edge server which processed your request.
Even the request ID is not what you’re implying: that’s unique for a single request, but it’s not public and anyone who has your HTTPS payload has equivalent tracking capabilities.
It’s also not exactly a secret that the executive class resents having to pay high-income workers and is champing at the bit for layoffs. Even if you fully embrace AI, they want white collar jobs to look more like call center work with high surveillance, less autonomy, and constant reminders of replaceability. Most people saw through that “our people are our greatest asset” talk before, but they’re not even trying anymore.
We just need to be bold enough to take risks and replace the executive class with an AI agent that's been trained on Machiavelli and the Wealth of Nations and all of the rest of the written word to write the layoff letter in corpo speak anyway. Waiting for the AI bot that gets paid $10mm/year to be a CEO.
The U.S. exports fossil, yes, but we import a huge amount as well because many of our refineries aren’t setup to process light sweet crude and it’s also often cheaper to buy oil, refine, and use it on the coast than it is to move it across the country from somewhere in the Dakotas.
If we had a war with China, it’d go much worse given their much greater resources and knowledge of how to hit those import routes for maximum impact.
China has virtually zero conventional capability to interdict those sea lines of communication. Their navy and air force doesn't have the range, logistics, or foreign bases necessary to accomplish that mission. They're building fast so the situation may change in a few years but not today.
They’re not going head to head in a naval battle (yet) but oil tankers aren’t hardened targets and they wouldn’t need to be in American airspace to attack ships leaving Saudi Arabi or Iraq bound for California. All you’d need would be one drone attack to shut commercial shipping down for ages since crews and owners aren’t going to jump to become military targets. I’m certain that, like like the U.S. military planners, the Chinese military has a team updating plans based on which Iranian tactics get results. If nothing else, one way to start a move on Taiwan would be some kind of diversion pulling U.S. resources away escorting shipping.
(That’s ignoring the larger economic impact of all of the other shipping which originates in China)
The technologies we’re adopting now were significantly developed by post 70s research funding. The cars people drive are massively more efficient, the houses we live in, and the appliances we buy for the same reason.
I think this discounts the nature of the threat. American science has been systematically gutted and will be rebuilding for a generation even after it stops, and we’re seeing a lot of effort to put anti-competitive measures in place: from blocking deployment of green energy and removal of EV chargers to forcing fossil fuel infrastructure choices which lock in fossil fuel-based industrial processes for a decade. Japan’s phones were both very unusual, not repeated much elsewhere (due to language support) and they had a world-class electronics industry backing that, whereas ours was moved to China to save on labor costs.
We’re not developing cool tech if we don’t have the industrial capacity to make it or a domestic market. We’ll just get poorer and further behind.
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