That's just the start. After the tax cuts start working their way, there is going to be a massive shortfall in public funding, and then the, "Who could have seen this coming?" will start and then the real Tightening of the Belt.
Well, yes, of course! I mean, for a hundred years Harvard hosted foreign students, but NOW they are a security threat.
It must be really hard to be a lawyer or judge facing these cases, knowing that if you laugh you are going to become the next national security threat.
I just had to learn French in middle age, and it's been fun. They key takeaways from my experience:
Contact is everything. The longer you spend listening, reading, speaking, just in general interacting with the target language, the better. Doesn't matter what you do - Duolingo or PeerTube videos, novels or comic strips.
Communication is the goal, not fluency. You can get the gender of a word wrong and people will still understand you. You can use the wrong tense and that's usually okay. Don't try to "sound more like a native" or "learn slang words that everyone uses," because heaven knows nobody is going to take you for a native. But if you can get the point across and can understand what people are saying, you win.
Speaking is 10x harder than listening or reading or even writing, because it involves not only forming sentences in an unfamiliar language, but also saying them, which involves your muscles. At first, it's really hard to say the sounds of the language that don't exist in your own language, and I found that very frustrating.
Language and culture are different, but interconnected. You don't really speak a language if you don't understand the culture it's attached to. For instance, at first I didn't know what the cashiers were asking me at the checkout, until I learned that they want to see the bags you brought from home to make sure they are empty. The problem with missing cultural references is that everybody around you knows them, and they don't understand why you don't, or what there is to explain.
One of the very few great use cases of LLMs is, in fact, talking with a chat bot. You give it a good prompt (look for them online) and you are forced to talk in the target language. If the bot can understand you, a native speaker probably will, too. A good tip is to try an AI conversation on the topic of something you are about to do in real life, like applying for an apartment or having a conversation about cheese.
Personally, I found that my language skills drowned completely under certain, specific circumstances. For instance, for the life of me I cannot understand voice messages, at all. Even phone conversations are really bad for me, both in talking and listening. I can have a perfectly fine conversation with someone, but when I have to talk with them on the phone, it's like I never learned the language.
The tool you use is not as important as the time you spend. Duolingo was really meh: too much useless vocabulary, not enough grammar and pattern recognition, lack of ability to specify areas of interest, down to always on animations even when you had them all turned off. But, despite the heavy focus on the words, "chouette" and "trousse," I sort of learned French to the point where I can follow everyone along and can speak and be understood. Took a year to the day and the entire tree.
As strange as it seems, Trump's highest approval ratings can be found in his handling of immigration. So, yes, there was a chance that these dramatically illegal and unconstitutional acts might be pleasing to some of the voting population. It's the shit timeline we live in.
I mean, the law firm executive orders read like they were written by a first-year who flunked Constitutional Law three times in a row. If a law firm can't appreciate how easy they would be to defend against, and what great PR a win would be, then they can't be helped - and worse, can't help anyone.
Oh, the joys of being old! I remember the GWB years, when PBS was pressured into a Both Viewpoints era and suddenly they had "experts" extolling the virtues of Trickle Down Capitalism.
If you stand for something, like PBS has, it's always a terrible idea to cater to the opposite. Liberal law firms that settled with the Trump administration have found that out, Target is finding it out, and PBS might do, as well.
It's so weird that we have to go through hoops and loops to get rid of this stuff! I was sick of my Android responding to a long press of the power button, meant to shut it down, with a Gemini prompt. Took me an hour to figure out I can't get rid of the function, but I can switch back (for now) to old style Google Assistant.
If you have to force functionality down your users' throat despite them not wanting it, you already lost. Gemini is Google's Clippy, just less iconic and more also-ran.
We may very well in the future, of course! But maybe at the rate technology develops, it could be smarter to start working on it when the threat becomes visible.
I venture the uneducated guess that satellite to satellite might be the next space defense frontier ahead of space to ground.
I think it's because the threat model against which a Golden Dome defends is just not that plausible any longer. Given the distances, a space-based ground defense can only protect from long-range attacks, like ICBMs. Unlike in the 80s, the technology to intercept and destroy ICBMs safely is now probably there, but the threat of all out nuclear war is much reduced.
My pet theory is that Reddit is trying the battleship steel approach. Let me explain: Battleships sunk before the end of WWII are special, in that their steel has never been exposed to the radiation from nuclear blasts. That is important in a series of applications, so there is a market for that kind of steel, and obviously it's a very limited resource.
Reddit has one of the biggest collections of purely human-generated text that is not domain-specific. That is an incredibly valuable resource, especially now that we know that LLMs hallucinate worse if they are fed LLM-generated content.
I am thinking Reddit is planning to sell that text for the long haul, until changes in language and technology make the content irrelevant. What actually happens on the platform is not important anymore, as long as it doesn't cause the ire of the powerful.
In fact, at this point, Reddit has a vested incentive in making the Internet worse, which means banning real humans from Reddit, too. Current Reddit content is not valuable, because of course it contains lots of bot generation, so making it visibly worse is a quick way to make the old content more valuable.
Basically, the company plans on getting rich on the backs of yesterday's you and I.
It boggles the mind that the only sanction for willful violation of the Constitution of the United States is a judge having to beg to have the guy brought back.
There really should be jail time for anyone in a position of power that knowingly ignores people's rights.
The really weird thing about this election, which this analysis here repeats, is that a majority of young, especially young male voters went for Trump.
That is bizarre, because the political platform of Trump, the GOP, and especially Project 2025 is a frontal assault on young people. From reproductive rights to recreational drug use, from LGBTQ+ rights to employment rights, from access to universities to access to health care. Everything in that platform is meant to take from the young and give to the old, because the old have been reliable voters for the GOP.
It is not surprising that Trump suddenly polls tragically bad with GenZ after the vote. The question is, how could GenZ voters fall so easily for the mirage of lies? That's the same people that accused Boomers of voting GOP because of lead poisoning, after all.
Oh, great. Took them only a month and a half to decide. During that time, Trump's tariffs have shown to be political and economic poison.
Now he gets to walk away with the threat of imposing tariffs still in his pocket (since it takes the judiciary that long to make a call), but the ability to blame "Liberal Activist Judges" if things don't work out.
Imagine the utopia of milk and honey the USA could have been if ONLY the tariffs could have been enacted like the Constitution wanted! /s
If you get within earshot of a Republican, chances are you'll hear complaints about "damn taxes" within five minutes. So to a certain set of people, definitely everyone they talk to is constantly complaining about taxes.
When I was starting out and making little money, the taxes I paid were definitely cutting into my ability to live. I think instead of "standard deductions" we should have real minimum incomes. If you are under the minimum income for your location, you don't pay taxes.
Now that I am at the end of my career, I think it's stupid that my taxes are not higher. If I could have given young me some of the money I am keeping now, I would have had a much better life overall. I obviously can't do that now, but I can give someone else the same breathing room.
That's just the start. After the tax cuts start working their way, there is going to be a massive shortfall in public funding, and then the, "Who could have seen this coming?" will start and then the real Tightening of the Belt.