I don’t disagree with you, especially in the short term, but Noah Smith (economist at https://www.noahpinion.blog/) does have some eye-opening opinions on the industrial might of China, and what that could mean for USA influence if China wanted to push things. (All this assumes no one uses nukes, of course.)

I’m going from memory, so errors are probably mine, not Mr. Smith’s. But, basically, wrt manufacturing, China is already where the USA was during / near the end of WWII. Even if we had the tech and raw materials, the USA would not be able to up with China’s factories if it came to war. They could basically just keep throwing drones and bombs at the USA until we literally ran out of anything to defend ourselves with, much less fight back with. Even if much of the rest of the world’s factories were on our side.

CHIPS act is one way the Biden admin was trying to restart strategic manufacturing in the USA. We’ll see how that goes.

Education is one area where GenAI is having a huge impact. Teachers work with text and language all day long. They have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ideally, for example, they should “differentiate” for EACH and EVERY student. Of course that almost never happens, but second best is to differentiate for specific groups - students with IEPs (special ed), English Learners, maybe advanced / gifted.

More tech aware teachers are now using ChatGPT and friends to help them do this. They are (usually) subject area experts, so they can quickly read through a generated or modified text and fix or remove errors - hallucinations are less (ime) of an issue in this situation. Now, instead of one reading that only a few students can actually understand, they have three at different levels, each with their own DOK questions.

People have started saying “AI won’t replace teachers. Teachers who use AI will replace teachers who don’t.”

Of course, it will be interesting to see what happens when VC funding dries up, and the AI companies can’t afford to lose money on every single interaction. Like with everything else in USA education, better off districts may be able to afford AI, and less-well-off (aka black / brown / poor) districts may not be able to.

I think “interactive clipart” is a great description. You are, I believe, totally correct that (at least for now) GenAI can’t do what professionals can do, but it can do better than many / most non-professionals. I can’t do art to save my life, and I don’t have the money to pay pros to make the mundane, boring everyday things that I need (like simple, uncluttered pictures for vocabulary cards). GenAI solves that problem for me.

Similarly, teachers used to try to rewrite complex texts for students at lower reading levels (such as English Learners). That took time and some expertise. Now, GenAI does it prolly many tens of thousands of times a day for teachers all over the USA.

I think, at least for the moment, that middle / lower level is where GenAI is currently most helpful - exactly the places that, in earlier times, were happy with clipart.

Am I correct in seeing this as the company is claiming that courts of law cannot require them to transfer control of an account from one user to a different user? This despite the fact that doing so has been fairly standard practice for years now?

Personally, I think the lawyers for The Site Previously Known As Twitter have a very weak argument. However, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, so there’s also that.

Gentoo on my home computer. Started way back in the day when you had to recompile source RPMs on RPM-based distros to get CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support. Debian language support was excellent, but I didn’t enjoy always being 5 package versions behind, especially as fast as some software was being developed.

CJK isn’t an issue anywhere anymore, but I stay on Gentoo because it has all the packages I want, and it doesn’t force systemd on me.

Will be moving away from Ubuntu on my work computer because of all the foolishness with ‘is it deb or is it snap?’. Not sure what I’ll go to.

Haven’t used it in a few years, but if it is still like it was, I highly recommend it for regular users. Solid, good choice of packages (for regular people). Don’t remember ever having any problems with PCLinuxOS.

(I switched away only because I’m not a “regular” user.)

North East Asia, but I’m pretty sure China and Russia would not be cool with it. So, they’d probably try dropping them in Korea or Japan.

Agree. The entire point of the character was that he was a guy that every bad guy would look at and decide they didn’t need that kind of trouble.

The two seasons on Amazon are much closer to the books, at least wrt the main character.

along with citizenship of their born in the US children

Totally agree with your point, but I have a bit of hope regarding the citizenship point. Birthright citizenship is a result of the 14th amendment, so revoking it would be very difficult. I wouldn’t be surprised if maybe they try to ignore court decisions, or just deport people without due process. But, getting rid of the 14th wouldn’t happen, so things could be undone (in theory).

CNN article on the 14th Amendment: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/31/us/14th-amendment-birthright-citizenship-explainer-trnd/index.html

I heard a lot(fuck, A LOT) here how Trump will make himself a dictator and destroy the system but if one stupid clown can do it may be it’s the government system that’s bad. Really bad. And maybe you should address that issue but nobody does.

I don’t think it is as simple as that. Fox “News” has been informing republicans’ world view for like 30 years. The Supreme Court has basically been taken over by partisan Republicans, which is super ironic given how long and loudly republicans railed against “activist” judges.

Much of the used-to-be credible media is now owned by billionaires. Even the ones that aren’t want to at least keep their access in the event of a Trump win.

Trump did significant damage in his first term, but, as the cliche says, “the guardrails held”. Thing is, he learned both about those guardrails AND which people he could trust to choose him over the Constitution.

So, yeah, there are things that should be done to make the system more resilient to internal attack, but without significant time and effort, no majority of USA citizens will every be convinced to support that sort of change.

BTW, I still get new glasses when I visit Japan. About $100 to $300+ depending on the frames you choose, and the eye exam is included for free. This is without insurance (I got 2 new pairs last year, for about $400 total), and I’ve not lived or worked in Japan in over a decade.) Thinner lenses than in the USA, but perhaps not as safe. The store is called “Megane Ichiba”, and I believe it is a chain.

Point is though, that the glasses market in Japan is not as monopolized (or at least not as greedy) as the market in the USA.

Great question. I’m not sure. I believe the government sets the prices - that would be in line with how they generally do things. For some things, I think the patient pays a set “co-pay” and for other things they pay a percent. I generally paid about $5 (500 yen or so) for getting dental cavities filled, but I had a CAT scan (iirc - it may have been some other big machine they stick you in) and don’t remember how much I paid, but it was not an amount that we had to worry about.

I had national health insurance in Japan. They have plenty of problems, some of which will / do affect their insurance, but in general while I was there, it was great. Why? Because the government does NOT try to manage it. They just pay the bills. We chose our own doctors and our own dentists. We paid a small fee for each visit, and they sent the bill to the government. (Or, however it worked - i didn’t look into all the details, just know that we didn’t have to pay nearly as much as is typical in the USA.) Of course, they did take about 10% out of my paycheck each month, iirc.

Just saying that the British national system, which I hear is (poorly) managed by the government and has some serious problems, is not the only system we could use for inspiration.