This did not destroy it's brand, it reinforced it. All while using a sweet, wholesome version of the fallacious "You need to give up your privacy to help us do police work." argument.

There are few things in life that are 100% evil. The fact that Al Capone opened a soup kitchen, Saddam Hussein instituted free education, and Jim Jones hated racism, does not excuse the murders they committed.

Good deeds do not make up for crimes.

This is practically a stereotypical AI use - look for associations in a massive database, inducing a formula from that data and then reversing the process to deduce a conclusion based on new data.

It is rather obvious that bone structure should both affect one's voice and also be observable via a picture, but at the same time involve such massive calculations that humans would be surprised by it.

According to this website:
https://www.theglobalstatistic...

In Fiscal year 2024, Biden did 271,484 deportations.
In Fiscal year 2025, Trump did 207,000 deportations.

This only refers to full legal deportations - people sent to Immigration court and ordered out of the country by an special Inquire Officer (a direct employee of the DOJ that works as a 'judge'). It does not include people that after being sent to an immigration holding facility agree to leave the country without contesting it.

The truth is Trump is not actually processing more people. Instead he is doing everything possible to scare the crap out of every human being in America, thereby causing people to self-deport - preferably before ICE shows up.

In other words, the vile, despicable actions are not there because they are necessary, but are there because they are vile, despicable actions.

I found with sports betting that people tend to over-react and this makes for opportunities in Pari-Mutuel Betting. In Pari-Mutuel Betting odds maker are not reviewing capabilities, but instead on how many people bet on each side. So often just taking the underdog is a good deal in the long run - particularly in one on one cases.

That is, A) the professional all think the real odds of Sylvester vs Arnold are 3 to 8. but B) but everyone knows Arnold is a much better boxer, so C) so everyone is betting on Arnold.

The house knows this (they see all the bets). So instead of offering 3 to 8, they have to offer 3 to 12, just to get anybody to bet on Sylvester. Otherwise they are taking a huge risk. Which means betting on Arnold is a bad idea while betting on Sylvester will give you a higher profit than you really deserve.

Note, the House knows this and that is often where their profit comes from. They know that 3 to 12 will get SOME people to bet on Sylvester, but not enough to 'equalize' their profit. They could have offered 3 to 13, but choose to offer 3 to 12.

Most of the time real problems are caused because people combine multiple questionable issues.

The housing crisis in 2008 was often caused by the Liar Loan. This was when a bank lied to the customer about how interest rate changes could affect their payments while also letting the customer lie to them about how much money they made. If either one of them told the truth, the problems would have been much less. But because both the banks and the customers used questionable methods, the problems compounded and made things a hundred times worse.

Similarly it is a bad idea to use payment in kind loans in a field where there is already incredible risk.

Every once in a while you see a story about a 'poor' man making $200k+ and not saving anything.

There are two main reasons for their fiscal incompetence (plus a bonus one):

1) They look at their neighbors - the guy to the right has a boat, the guy across the street has a ski house, and the guy to the left has a beach house. They buy one of each. Or they pick one and pay twice as much for it.

2) They do something similar with kids. Often they will buy a great house in a good neighborhood/suburb 'for the kids' and then send them to private school. The entire point of the house in the right location is that it has a good SCHOOL. If you are sending your kids to private school you should be living in a much cheaper house. Just because you have kids does not mean you should spend all your money on them.

Bonus reason: Total and complete fiscal stupidity buying worthless crap. Prime example is Time Shares. [ Even if one makes sense now, ten years later your financial situation will change. Either it will be too expensive or too cheap - and you will not use it. Even point systems are just later regrets]

The second a measuring method becomes officially used, it drops in accuracy.

When something is not official, no one tries to game the system. You get more honest answers and nobody is spending millions/billions of dollars to get the 'right' answer.

I am not saying that holding a photo of a 40 year old woman in front of your camera will 'hack' their ID system.

But I am saying that it is fundamentally stupid to think this system cannot be hacked by a computer savvy 11 year old

The bankruptcy idea is a bad one. That is, if your company sells bonds because they think it is going bankrupt, that just makes it worse. You have more debtors and that means stock holders get nothing.

It does however make a lot of sense to take out long term loans if you believe interest rates are really low and inflation/interest rates are going to sky rocket..

Better to sell a bond at 4% today, rather than having to pay 20% a decade from now.

Current Fed effective interest rate is a bit under 4%. Lowest they ever were was about 0.08% (covid caused), and the highest they have been around 19% during Ronald Reagan's first year in office.

1) You are correct that China is building coal for the AI boom.

2) You are incorrect in thinking the US hobbles itself. Having more expensive electricity but cleaner air is not a hobble, it is a competitive advantage. Long term cleaner air = smarter people and lower health costs. Coal pollution in particular is known to settle to the ground, rather than to spread throughout the world.

3) Communism leads to quicker action but also less innovation and singular action. This is really good when following the lead of more advanced cultures but prevents you from ever really taking the lead. You end up as second fiddle. When you try to take the lead, you do stupid crap like, say, killing all the swallows (Four Pests Campaign) because they eat grain, seeds, and fruit. Major problem if they also eat insects, specifically locusts. Locusts that ate ALL the grain, seeds, and fruit rather than merely 10%.

A lot of the big tech companies want to build huge, electrical intensive computing centers.

There has been a significant reaction to this because of the cost of electricity. In some areas, the new electrical demand can drive up the cost for everyone in the area, not just the new centers.

They want to negate this issue, so they need quick, reliable, energy. They have concerns about solar and wind being unreliable, fossil fuels destroying the world. That leaves geothermal which only works reliably in very rare locations, hydro which has fish issues (and the total transformation of the areas near dams), and nuclear.

When logical people look at well designed nuclear, they realize that it is far less toxic than fossil fuels, has minimal environmental dangers, and that the main issues are reputation.

Modern, newer designs entice them. They have the issue of being untested, but the 'move fast and break things' motto of Big Tech does not fear the untested. Whether or not this is a good idea for small nuclear technology as opposed to the software/chip business, well I do not know - and neither do they.

It is easy to understand why these aggressive tech bros want the nukes. But I would not want to live near their first facilities. Hopefully they will be smart enough to build them far enough from population centers.

Every 20 years or so, we get a "Death of Reading".

Printing press caused the death of reading by creating newspapers and cheap pamphlets.
Mass produced Paper back books...
Comic Books...
Color Magazines ...
The internet...
Smart Phones...

No. People that want to read, still read. The common folk that never read the 'right' words never read what the elitists think they should read. Book sales remain steady - though formats do change. We have a lot more ebooks and a lot less mass market paperbacks than we did 40 years ago.

Wow, you ignored the main post, looked at the example and complained like a fool You read the example and totally ignored the actual description.

To summarize the crap you did not read again:

IF IT DOES NOT COST THE COMPANY ANYTHING EVERY MONTH DO NOT MAKE SUBSCRIPTIONS, IT IS AN ABUSE.

It's not me complaining its every single person in the entire world saying hey, doing that is a corrupt business practice that should be laughed at and made illegal.

Just because some poor idiot was tricked into signing a contract does not mean it is fair or that it is legal. You cannot make a contract to sell your daughter. You cannot make a contract to sell your kidney. In one country you cannot make a contract that states the laws of another country will apply.

Contracts are totally things the law can overturn. And greedy shmucks that think they found a great way to cheat everyone need to learn the word NO

Uhm, you clearly missed the point of his sarcastic statement. He is not really saying he wanted the tax break. He was saying that they should not get the tax break they did.

You did a great job of listing the ways Amazon got the tax break and talked about how his own tax breaks went away. You did nothing at all to justify those tax breaks. You clearly thought they were obviously good ideas, when no they were not.

So to clarify:

1) Trump is a bad person for giving tax breaks to a company in exchange for things they already wanted and were going to do anyway. They would have done their OWN infrastructure building with or without the tax break. These were not roads for other citizens, it was building data centers for their own use. Similarly, they needed the research and development more than the country did. We are paying them massive tax breaks for things that benefit them and no one else. Hey - can I get a massive 82% tax break for building my own home? It's infrastructure!

2) Those people that lost medicare coverage WERE eligible for them. He did not increase investigation - he changed the eligibility rules. Specifically, if a Haitian refuge over 65 years old had worked in the US for at least 10 years - paying taxes - they would not get Medicare. He also made it harder to access programs without changing eligibility (MSPS) because poor people definitely are very good at navigating bureaucracy.

His snark was fairly easy to decode for everyone else but you.