mctoasterson @ mctoasterson @reddthat.com

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2 yr. ago

Even if the stated goal was to reshore large amounts of production of goods to the US, there are several problems with that.

One, history shows that it is largely not possible, at least in any practical sense. US companies make t-shirts in Vietnam and Pakistan because they can sell them to consumers here for $10. Are US consumers magically going to decide they're OK with an Old Navy (low quality) garment costing $35 instead of $10?

Secondly, standing up manufacturing and distribution domestically isn't an overnight thing. Funding, site selection, construction, supply chain integration etc. all take time. Trump thinks he can trade a few weeks of bad headlines and market hit, for some magically reappearing domestic manufacturing. It doesnt work that way. Even if it were possible, it wouldn't create positive economic conditions on any kind of timeline sufficient to offset the negative effects real consumers are already experiencing.

"Sorry little Johnny, not only can we not afford new Nikes for you anymore, but also you can forget about that Nintendo Switch 2 for Christmas because we can't even order one. But at least we know your GED-educated uncle Jimbo in northern Michigan might be able to get a lower-middle class factory job assembling widgets again... maybe... in 2 years."

That isn't a good economic pitch for most people.

AI can look at a bajillion examples of code and spit out its own derivative impersonation of that code.

AI isn't good at doing a lot of other things software engineers actually do. It isn't very good at attending meetings, gathering requirements, managing projects, writing documentation for highly-industry-specific products and features that have never existed before, working user tickets, etc.

This sucks. I love that app.

My friends dumbass 12 year old kid was told he wouldn't be given access to any social media until he was at least 16. He claimed he understood, and then proceeded to make an Instagram account with his real name and started sending pervy messages to various insta thott accounts.

Basically as a parent you have to give them access to very limited apps and make them repeatedly demonstrate they won't misuse them. Then as they get older, assuming they don't do anything stupid or illegal, training wheels gradually come off.

... and to avoid a boots-on-ground invasion of the main landmass of Japan, which would have cost probably a million soldiers lives, and who knows how many Japanese civilians.

"Put all your changes on 3 separate sharepoint calendars a minimum of 2 weeks in advance. Also do the normal approval garbage in ServiceNow and attend a 2 hour CAB for final approval. If you didn't select the right dropdown menu option in the ticket details, you'll have to start this whole process over.

Also, why does it take you guys so long to get stuff done?"

"Its not in the budget to apply security patches this quarter"

I mean, people already know. A tariff is literally a tax that artificially bouys one domestic industry or class of product, at the expense of all others who participate in the market.

I've never seen or heard of any point in history where the apparent "desired effect" is achieved and all manufacturing production is magically reshored resulting in prosperity. The actual result is Joe Consumer having fewer choices or buying a Chevy he didn't want vs. a Toyota he did want.

... and while we are at it, what is an "American" car these days? Any company that was started or Headquartered here? Anything that undergoes final assembly here? The Ford I used to drive had parts and assemblies from Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, and probably China.

I used to do this when I was below 30 and it works pretty well for a time. If you work and have a family, this is the only segment of time you can carve into, to create more time for yourself.

One thing to be careful about though- there is growing evidence that not getting enough sleep earlier in your life like this can lead to dementia when you're older.

This effort itself is more like a FEMA disaster preparedness set of tools for the public. Whether it's power outages, bad weather, or actual war, the steps make each citizen less of a liability to the overwhelmed emergency responders. Having reserve water, backup communication, and a family plan is not "remilitarizing", it is just common sense.

I recently vacationed in Germany and the immigration polizei agent asked me, in English, "what's the purpose of your visit here?" and I said something like "Urlaub machen und Bier trinken, naturlich!" He applied the stamp and waved me through without incident.

So... Thanks for being cool, Germans!

I mean, this is true that the offramp was always going to be Russia keeping Crimea and the Donbas, and Ukraine getting some kind of security guarantees that fall short of NATO membership. Unfortunately we took the stupidest, most deadly, most costly way to get to this conclusion.

I have awesome luck with this kinda thing. Was in Paris during a huge garbage strike a while back, and may be arriving in Germany during this.

He's a wet sandwich of a candidate.

Keeping an eye on this because it is a concerning trend

Yeah well assisted living with skilled nursing costs a fortune. Luckily most people only need that for 6 months to a year before they die anyway. I'm talking more like "55+ downsized housing" that doesn't yet require a nurse, memory care, or any of that stuff.

I think for most Americans, they are considering it a win if their parents saved enough to retire and have their affairs in order. Just knowing you won't have to do some bizarre financial trickery to handle your parents retirement housing and end of life care is a huge relief, to say nothing of having anything left over to inherit when they're gone.

People don't seem to understand the risks presented by normalizing client-side scanning on closed source devices. Think about how image recognition works. It scans image content locally and matches to keywords or tags, describing the person, objects, emotions, and other characteristics. Even the rudimentary open-source model on an immich deployment on a Raspberry Pi can process thousands of images and make all the contents searchable with alarming speed and accuracy.

So once similar image analysis is done on a phone locally, and pre-encryption, it is trivial for Apple or Google to use that for whatever purposes their use terms allow. Forget the iCloud encryption backdoor. The big tech players can already scan content on your device pre-encryption.

And just because someone does a traffic analysis of the process itself (safety core or mediaanalysisd or whatever) and shows it doesn't directly phone home, doesn't mean it is safe. The entire OS is closed source, and it needs only to backchannel small amounts of data in order to fuck you over.

Remember the original justification for clientside scanning from Apple was "detecting CSAM". Well they backed away from that line of thinking but they kept all the client side scanning in iOS and Mac OS. It would be trivial for them to flag many other types of content and furnish that data to governments or third parties.

I love how the trend in tech seems to be to shift 100% of responsibility for professional development to the employee.

"Just get some certs on your own and build a homelab."

Yeah, I have 2 degrees and a bunch of certs, of which many require CEU or renewal costs. Everytime I ask for professional development it's "yeah there might be some budget for this one specific thing next quarter".

Remember, when iPhones are off, they just become Airtags. Most modern phones are sending/receiving BLE signals even if you don't expressly intend them to. I wouldn't go anywhere near a protest with anything besides degoogled Android, because its the only OS where you can actually disable the radios. Even then I would probably opt for a Faraday bag.

Other considerations... Apple (and probably Google) devices are doing client side scanning of images and turning on GPS to geotag images unless you specifically disabled that features. In other words, there are ways you can be correlated to locations and activities after the fact. Just ask all those J6 rioters.