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Rage isn’t sustainable. Enthusiasm is down across the board, and the question will be whether enthusiasm among left-leaning voters has wanted waned to the same degree as among Trump’s base.
He’s very good.
Rage isn’t sustainable. Enthusiasm is down across the board, and the question will be whether enthusiasm among left-leaning voters has wanted waned to the same degree as among Trump’s base.
Your description of a drink that takes the world by storm, increasing in market share but dropping in quality may be roughly accurate analogy for a lot of consumer goods, but even in this telling the market is improving if that drink is displacing even lower-quality competition.
In terms of non-alcoholic drinks sold in coolers in convenience stores and grocery stores, we’ve seen the steady march of improving products as an average across the shelves, even if the same product name might be getting worse. In the 80’s, the dominant market share for orange juice in grocery stores was frozen cans to be mixed with water at home. But Tropicana and Florida Natural and a few other brands made a splash with not-from-concentrate orange juice. Old brands like Minute Maid got in on the action, and new brands like Simply rose up, too.
Now, it might be that these brands have gotten cheap with stuff since dominating market share. But if you look at who they took that market share from, it’s unquestionably a lower quality product they’ve displaced.
Across the beverage industry as a whole, you’ve got a whole bunch of newer higher priced drinks, where the unfathomably expensive for 2000 Red Bull is basically the middle of the pack for energy drinks, and where there are so many beverages that cost several times as much as Coca Cola.
So that’s a story of a forward march in higher prices for qualitatively preferred items, over that amount of time. This story I do think applies to processed food and drink, as well as electronics, prepared food, home furnishings, and cars. We expect a lot higher quality every year, as the things get more expensive, and we feel annoyed that any particular brand or model seems to be slipping in quality while we as a consumer market tend to move up the chain.
We’re angry that streaming seems to be slipping back to cable-like quality, when streaming as of 2024 is still a much better value proposition than cable in 2014. The displacement is happening in two directions, for a net benefit to the consumer in a way that doesn’t feel like a benefit. Same with music, video games, etc.
The real story is that housing, education, healthcare, and dependent care (both childcare and elder care) have gone up so much faster than inflation that these things are finally squeezing normal people out of their comfort zones right when the other stuff stopped dropping in price as much as before.
The non-cynical answer is that they’re counting contractor/vendor time in this full time equivalent answer. Which would probably be a good thing, because I imagine that the best people in cybersecurity aren’t actually employees of Microsoft.
To put it in more simple terms:
When Alice chats with Bob, Alice can’t control whether Bob feeds the conversation into a training data set to set parameters that have the effect of mimicking Alice.
Your comment missed the mark entirely.
Not sure why you’re saying that. I wasn’t disagreeing with any of your points, but adding to them another angle that answered the parent comment’s concerns about whether leaving wifi on for airplane mode drains battery. You addressed the cellular radio side, and I was adding a separate point about the WiFi radio that complements what you were saying.
No, the Florida law prohibits voting by felons convicted in other states, when that other state prohibits voting. So Florida would follow New York’s lead. And the New York law prohibits felons from voting only until they’ve served their full prison sentence.
So if Trump doesn’t get sentenced to any prison time, then he’ll be eligible to vote in New York (and therefore Florida).
Great article. It’s long, though, so to summarize the main points for those of us who don’t have a ton of time:
Also, phones don’t use a lot of power to purely listen for Wifi beacons. They’re not transmitting until they actually try to join, so leaving wifi on doesn’t cost significant power unless you just happen to be near a remembered network.
Your scenario 1 is the actual danger. It’s not that AI will outsmart us and kill us. It’s that AI will trick us into trusting them with more responsibility than the AI can responsibly handle, to disastrous results.
It could be small scale, low stakes stuff, like an AI designing a menu that humans blindly cook. Or it could be higher stakes stuff that actually does things like affect election results, crashes financial markets, causes a military to target the wrong house, etc. The danger has always been that humans will act on the information provided by a malfunctioning AI, not that AI and technology will be a closed loop with no humans involved.
to my knowledge, Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode
The radio regulations were amended about 10 years ago to allow both Bluetooth and Wifi frequencies to be used on airplanes in flight. And so cell phone manufacturers have shifted what airplane mode actually means, even to the point of some phones not even turning off Wi-Fi when airplane mode is turned on. And regardless of defaults, both wireless protocols can be activated and deactivated independently of airplane mode on most phones now.
an airplane full of 100 people all on Bluetooth might create some noise issues that would hurt the performance
I don’t think so. Bluetooth is such a low bandwidth use that it can handle many simultaneous users. It’s supposed to be a low power transmission method, in which it bursts a signal only a tiny percentage of the time, so the odds of a collision for any given signal are low, plus the protocol is designed to be robust where it handles a decent amount of interference before encountering degraded performance.
It makes them look weak and pitiful
To whom? Are we even the intended audience here?
Reporting over the last 10 years has shown that Xi Jinping has been obsessed with the idea of “color revolutions,” whereby popular movements from within a nation’s population overthrow the ruling apparatus. Rightly or wrongly, the current CCP sees revolution from within being the most dangerous threat on their power, so much of what they do is best understood as being aimed at stifling that kind of movement.
I also speak post college level English. And I can recognize dumb ideas written in English. Mises was a hack.
I’m too old for school shooter drills, but I’m like basically the perfect age for being terrified of velociraptors after watching Jurassic Park in theaters. Not only do I know how to barricade a door, but I also know how to use mirrors to visually trick people into seeing hallways that aren’t there!
One of the worst companies in recent years has been Purdue Pharma, which worked with the also shitty McKinsey to get as many Americans addicted to opioids as possible, and make billions on the epidemic.
Both Purdue and McKinsey were privately held.
Koch industries is also a terrible privately held corporation.
Being public versus private doesn’t make a difference, in my opinion.
After being acquired by Google, YouTube got better for years (before getting worse again). Android really improved for a decade or so after getting acquired by Google.
The Next/Apple merger made the merged company way better. Apple probably wouldn’t have survived much longer without Next.
I’d argue the Pixar acquisition was still good for a few decades after, and probably made Disney better.
A good merger tends to be forgotten, where the two different parts work together seamlessly to the point that people forget they used to be separately run.
Hmm, is this a new take on the “Stop Doing Math” meme?
IT IS SAFER, CHEAPER, AND LESS POLLUTING THAN LITERALLY ANY OTHER OPTION!
It’s not cheaper. New nuclear power plants are so expensive to build today that even free fuel and waste disposal doesn’t make the entire life cycle cheaper than solar.
The only instance I’m aware of where the US military built a specific model meant to be a replica of a real place was the Osama bin Laden compound. Which they did, in fact, raid.
The building of a fake town isn’t the unusual part. The building of a replica of a specific place might not even be that unusual, but it is a strong signal that they definitely intend to attack the real world place that is being replicated.
So narratives are crafted that are divorced from reality the public is experiencing
This is true, but it’s true for many, many more places than just politics, or even messaging about politics coming from politicians. And it swings in both directions.
Social media (including the Activity Pub driven fediverse) takes off with some narratives that are just wildly inconsistent with each other and inconsistent with how a substantial number of people feel. But the nature of how we experience the world now is that our feelings are driven increasingly by little threads of online interaction that may or may not actually resemble the world we are experiencing offline.
Is Taylor Swift a good musician? Is the best cell phone an iPhone? Am I considered strong if I can bench press 220 lbs/100 kg? Do electric cars help the environment? Is it a red flag that my date refused to tip more than 20%?Your answer to these questions depend heavily on who you talk to, and the discussion around these topics can get pretty heated, even when they’re ultimately low stakes issues.
The Internet has a way of catastrophizing little things, ignoring big things, and mixing it all together that it’s almost inevitable that how we feel becomes disconnected with actual metrics, even the metrics within our own life. Negative feelings like anger, fear, resentment, and hopelessness can fester even with people who are thriving.
In other words, while I agree that the correlation between economic metrics and personal feelings has loosened a lot, I’m not entirely convinced that the feelings are correct while the metrics are wrong.
This shifts balance from unelected officials who can be fired by the president (administrative officials) towards unelected officials who can’t be (judges). It doesn’t actually reduce regulatory power, just puts that regulatory power under the supervision and review of even less accountable officials.