1,891 karma · joined October 18, 2012
What you consider “losing money” I might consider “choosing not to participate in an ongoing global financial scam at the cost of my retirement growing slightly slower for a while”.
- 2.9% inflation - Billions of dollars of grants for state-run energy projects - NATCAST - Healthy & stable funding for the sciences - Competent leaders at the federal and military levels to oversee large complex projects - Healthy partnerships with allies
Specific actions that have been taken by Trump (backed by Musk) that caused us to lose the above:
- Starting an unnecessary war with Iran - Cancelling grants for energy projects specifically in blue states - Imposing nonsensical tariffs on trade partners - Starting a full-blown trade war with Canada - Alienating other allies, ex. starting a middle-east conflict without any alliances (excl. Israel) - Specifically closing NATCAST because "illegal" - Gutting of science funding by DOGE & others - Removal of competent leaders & prioritization of loyalty over competence when choosing staff
I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they bring up anything about Trump having a positive impact on manufacturing in America. For 4+ years he's been lying to the American public about how tariffs work and claiming that US consumers paying more taxes to the US gov't in the form of tariffs is going to 'return' manufacturing to the US. We have almost half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US - explain to me again why this is a capacity problem?
He wasn't wrong, and his role was still valuable to the company.
Compare that to Meta, who went all-in (so much so that they changed the company name) despite apparent overwhelming user apathy toward the product.
The estimates I've seen say that Apple spent ~$10b on their VR program, whereas Meta is in for about $80b.
Trump has hired multiple qualified firms to find fraud in the 2020 election and thus far none of the reputable ones have found any.
> they might take this evidence seriously
Whether the cause is global warming, vaccines, election fraud, the effect of gender rights on society, or any one of the military actions being taken by this admin - the only time evidence matters is when it aligns with their previously -held biases and can be yielded as a weapon.
The rest of the time (read: almost all of the time), it doesn't and is swept under the rug or called fake, without any counter-evidence to back that claim up either.
The state's even setup a nice portal to automate these requests across 600+ data brokers.
I submitted a CCPA request to them to give me and delete everything they had on me.
Their response is that they own no data, and I have to make the request to their customer, whomever that may be.
If they're retaining any identifying data about me and then selling it to new customers, they are explicitly violating CCPA.
I stopped PC gaming about a decade ago and my current daily driver is a Macbook. I periodically play games on my a PS5 or XBOX, but there are a ton of great games on my Steam wishlist.
I feel like I'm the exact target market for this (although I'm not going to buy at this price point at this time). I don't want to bother with Windows and would love a 'console' allowing me to play most Steam games without a lot of hassle.
I looked up the city and year cited by the model for my untimely demise, and it turns out the crime is real, but the real victim was a female sharing my last name, with a middle name loosely resembling my first.
I don't think they were. All the Mars stuff is just dressed up version of The Boring Company - a distraction by Elon to better position his other interests.
There's no money in going to Mars and there's no reason to, from a financial perspective, and Elon doesn't care about anything beyond wealth and power.
We have antitrust laws in the US but they do us absolutely no good when the government refuses to even consider enforcing them, which seems to be the case in the past few decades.
1. They're breaking environmental laws in order to meet power demands. xAI has already been busted on this [1], but they keep finding willing accomplices in rural parts of the country to bypass public opposition or speedrun through regulatory exceptions [2].
2. Companies seem to be fudging their numbers when it comes to GPU capacity & current workloads [3], likely to inflate their IPO valuations. I know Ed Zitron is a divisive figure but I've not seen any journalist on the other side of the argument provide the volume of data that he has.
[1] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/musks-xai-draws-more-opposit...
[3] https://www.wheresyoured.at/where-are-all-the-data-centers/
Sometimes I get the "you're right!" response, but often it will also explain why it made the decision it did, and it's rational enough that I accept the new approach.
It's still very much like a junior dev in this way - pretty good at 'just make it work', pretty good at monkey-see-monkey-do, and occasionally surprises you with something novel (to you).
Although if you've ever used Claude's search tool, you'll be unsurprised that the team knows nothing about indexing.
How a company, whose primary product is text-based chat, doesn't allow users to easily perform text search on said chat is beyond comprehension.
We are also refusing to maintain critical water-system infrastructure, setting ourselves up to lose critical water storage capacity [1].
We can get fined for washing our cars at certain times (although it's rarely enforced), but nobody ever turns the screws on the business machine.
[1] https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/north-county/plan-f...
Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar issues with a previous 2015 MBP model. The transfer speeds will be so slow as to be considered unusable.
On the 2024 MBP, using ANY microsd card adapter with any microsdcard causes the card to immediately overheat, and the card will never be properly usable by the OS. Only full-size SDCards work.
I've seen some posts about this elsewhere, but it seems to me like one of the few peripherals on this expensive piece of kit being incompatible with the vast majority of the hardware it's supposed to work with would be kind of a big deal.
This is why so much of vetting & compliance is toothless. You can have robust change management, physical security, network security, identity management, etc. policies but absolutely nobody wants to spend enough on audit & enforcement to make them meaningful.
The gov't will make you _claim_ that you do all of these things before awarding a contract, but they won't ever check.
Good actors will do the right thing regardless because they know the consequences of cutting corners.
Microsoft forces AI usage down everyone's throats.
AI bot usage takes down github.
I have to assume that there are some serious fights going on between the poor SRE teams wanting to throttle bots, and MS not wanting to do anything to dissuade AI usage.