> many verticals are simply uninvestable in the US because of labor costs and the gap of cost to manufacture is so large it's not even worth considering.
I think this is covered in a number of papers from think tanks related to the current administration.
The overall plan, as I understood it, is to devalue the dollar while keeping the monetary reserve status. A weaker dollar will make it competitive for foreign countries to manufacture in the US. The problem is that if the dollar weakens, investors will fly away. But the AI boom offsets that.
For now it seems to work: the dollar lost more than 10% year to date, but the AI boom kept investors in the US stock market. The trade agreements will protect the US for a couple years as well. But ultimately it's a time bomb for the population, that will wake up in 10 years with half their present purchasing power, in non dollar terms.
Tribe is a fantastic book that goes into this, fundamentally most humans exist best when they have some form of status in their community.
This could be as simple as a small community club where your assigned a role like treasurer or something, my grandmother did this when she was young. People actually know you and care about your problems .
For various reasons, these groups just aren't as significant anymore.
There's not a really good solution to this. I'm lucky enough to be in a game dev group, and I do have my bar that I go to every now and then, but aside from that I'm not really a part of any small organizations.
I haven't been to church in decades, but arguably that's why most people actually go. It's not because you imagine God is taking attendance, but it's the joy of being around other people. Historically most people stayed in the same town from cradle to grave, maybe you would move for work, or marriage, but for the most part you just stayed put.
I discovered something insideous after being in the iOS ecosystem. Apple still slows down iPhones, but not in the way you think - every year around their iPhone launch schedule, like clockwork, my iPhone 14 Pro Max slowed down just enough to make me think it was ageing, but not enough to suspect - after a lot of tests, it turns out, the reponsitivity of the touch was being reduced in software. So, the "smooth" iOS polished animations feel a bit laggy, but not enough to raise eyebrows. But, this is not even the worst part. I casually - out of pure coincidence discovered that Apple actually reduces the camera's clarity around their new iPhone launches. Particularly low-light performance. I thought I was being paranoid, but I'm a photographer and the hotel I walked across everyday in the evening had these beautiful hanging creepers which combined with golden lighting, always provided a pleasant sight. So, I loved taking pictures of it randomly until one day I noticed that regardless of the camera mode, the noise was insanely high and the pictures suddenly looked like they were taken from an old Android phone from 2015. I cleaned the lenses, had no cover, etc. I copied the images to my computer and the difference was clearly visible.
You can clearly see a spike in as recent as September 2025. But, the camera data was the last straw for me. As a photographer who paid $1000+ for the iPhone Pro Max - supposedly their latest and greatest phone of the time, only to get screwed over by greed 2 years later, I had enough.
I sold the iPhone at a loss, got myself a Samsung Note and I actually took pictures of the same hotel again and the difference was stark. That really told me everything I needed to know about Apple's ethics. In contrast, I also have a Samsung S10+ from ages ago and it still functions flawlessly. The trade off clearly is privacy with the Android eco-system, but until we have a decent Apple alternative that's also privacy focused, I'm forced to accept this trade off.
Funnily enough, my iPad and Macbooks never get slowed down, even if it's 5+ years. It's only for the iPhones. I guess they view the iPhone as fast fashion or something, but the ethical component is not acceptable to me.
>I must admit I’m a little unnerved with how gleefully people enjoy using a fake slur. I realize it doesn’t harm anyone but I just don’t get the appeal.
I think there's a clear sociological pattern here that explains the appeal. It maps almost perfectly onto the thesis of David Roediger's "The Wages of Whiteness."
His argument was that poor white workers in the 19th century, despite their own economic exploitation, received a "psychological wage" for being "white." This identity was primarily built by defining themselves against Black slaves. It gave them a sense of status and social superiority that compensated for their poor material conditions and the encroachment of slaves on their own livelihood.
We're seeing a digital version of this now with AI. As automation devalues skills and displaces labor across fields, people are being offered a new kind of psychological compensation: the "wage of humanity." Even if your job is at risk, you can still feel superior because you're a thinking, feeling human, not just another mindless clanker.
The slur is the tool used to create and enforce that in-group ("human") versus out-group ("clanker") distinction. It's an act of identity formation born directly out of economic anxiety.
The real kicker, as Roediger's work would suggest, is that this dynamic primarily benefits the people deploying the technology. It misdirects the anger of those being displaced toward the tool itself, rather than toward the economic decisions that prioritize profit over their livelihoods.
But this ethos of economic displacement is really at the heart of both slavery and computation. It's all about "automating the boring stuff" and leveraging new technologies to ultimately extract profit at a greater rate than your competitors (which happens to include society). People typically forget the job of "computer" was the first casualty of computing machines.
I would like to thank the activists at r/asbestosremovalmemes for normalizing eating it, first step in normalizing it and making sure everyone will be entitled to compensation.
In context, south africa has been expropriating land from white owners due to historical racist inequalities. There's a great deal of tensions on the subject.
Statistically, there is significant violence against white farmers in South Africa. However, the counter to genocide is that the country's overall murder rate is among the highest in the world. The problem is because there's so many white farmers that it's skewing the data?
South Africa during no war has a murder rate of 45 deaths per 100,000 per year. One of the worsts in the world.
The Gaza war since 2023 has roughly a ~20 deaths per 100,000 per year.
Ukraine war is roughly ~25 deaths per 100,000 per year.
My unpopular opinion:
The government isnt the one committing the genocide. The courts failed to punish this political leader's hate speech and stochastic terrorism, leading to genocide of white farmers.
Last time I checked gas pipelines went form Russia to Germany, not to the US, and gas money was flowing from EU to Russia not from the US. And Vladimir Putin attended weddings of Austrian politicians, not American ones. And Austrian and German politicians, not American politicians, received high ranking jobs in Russian oil & gas companies at the end of their political mandates.
So who's the one doing the Russian appreciation here, in practice I mean, not in virtue signaling?
Yes. The US strongarmed Alstom into a merger with General electric for an insulting price (and with GE overly valued, even for people who actually believed in their cooked books). An Alstom's top executive was also inprisonned in the US during the talk.
Trump only makes US corruption more visible. He did not make your country corrupt all of the sudden, he just put a shine on it.
> The primary reason why the gap between the wealthy and and everyone is increasing is that employees started preferring cash compensation over equity.
You're making it sound like equity turns companies into co-ops when in reality most equity remains unexercised (because that literally involves paying your then likely former employer money) or ends up being worthless for all the reasons others have explained.
The gap between the wealthy and everyone else has been sharply increasing ever since Reagan[0].
CEO pay alone has massively skyrocketed, detached from all other economic growth factors (most of the growth occurred in the 1990s)[1]:
> From 1978 to 2020, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,322%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (817%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (which was 341% between 1978 and 2019, the latest data available). In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 18.0% from 1978 to 2020.
The reason workers prefer cash compensation is that you can't use equity to pay your bills. Cost of living has increased since the 1970s[2], housing costs and college tuition have become a lot more expensive[3]. While electronics may have gotten cheaper, the day to day expenses have gone up and those in lower income brackets will necessarily spend more of their income on things like groceries and rent. Standards of living increasing with income may increase those expenses but there's a cut-off point where those increases no longer track linearly even if you throw in money sinks like private yachts. If you want to reduce cash preference, you'd need to first address the underlying socioeconomic insecurities that drive the real need for cash that this preference comes downstream from.
You can't have multi-billionaires (or even near-trillionaires) and a steady socio-economic progression to them from sub-minimum wage. Multi-billionaires can only exist in a system that allows for disproportionate amounts of wealth to be drained out of the system into a minute fraction of the top percentile. The gap is a necessary conclusion of a system that allows multi-billionaires to exist.
Thinking this can be fixed by "making it easier" for corporations to give workers equity not only ignores why workers prefer cash (and why they're more likely to do so now than decades ago) but also why corporations want to use equity for compensation (i.e. because it usually reduces cash compensation while coming with very low (and in any case: delayed) risk due to workers not exercising options or shares becoming worthless or near-worthless due to the way preferential shares are usually structured). If we were talking about actual worker ownership (or at least revenue sharing) things would look very different, but that's not something most corporations want and definitely something most investors/VCs would reject outright.
[0]: Reagan cut the top marginal income tax rate by 20% to a mere 50%, after it had already previously been cut sharply by Johnson from 91% to 70%[a]. He also slashed capital gains tax on dividends by 20%[b]. The 1980s also saw the rise of Financialization[c], i.e. the rise of the finance economy (rapidly eclipsing the real economy), and a sharp decline in the already scarce labor union participation[d]. It's also worth pointing out that the response to Republican neoconservatism from the Democratic Party was (like in much of the West - possibly due to the Cold War hard line against socialism) not a stronger leftist opposition but instead a shift towards Third Way[e] politics and neoliberalism, i.e. while Reagan may have been the starting point, the widening of the wealth gap was a bipartisan effort.
To get a good insight into the problems faced by nations in West Africa and Southwest Africa as they try to implement electricity-based technologies to their populations, I highly recommend watching Season 7 of Itchy Boots on YouTube [0].
Her experiences as she "adventure rides" through this region tacitly documents the true nature of "life as it is lived" by the millions and millions of human beings residing there.
It is stunning to consider and is an Africa I never knew existed.
Didn't China burst this bubble already? Vertical farming, etc. Western aligned farming is currently in a big downturn due to BRICS constantly breaking production records. And they are using Chinese machinery. The world is catching up to American farming yields. China is decoupling from American farming and they have been investing a lot in all the infrastructure for that.
American farmland values falling nationwide as margins go negative, investors flee "chaotic" market https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DjpjgOln-U (beware pro-China bias, but it's solid analysis)
What is not sarcasm, that I once lived in a region in germany where apples are grown. The local government had a project where they created some hiking trails. They wanted to call one of those "Apfelweg" (apple street or s.th. in englisch), because you know, there are apple trees everywhere. They had been sued by apple and had to rename it. Real.
django-simple-deploy, a tool for making your initial Django deployment easier across a variety of platforms. It's plugin-based, so it should cover a growing set of platforms and deployment approaches. I just made the 1.0 release this month.
> I believe in the "Let a hundred flowers bloom" philosopy. However I can't understand why systemd is the point of so much disagreement.
Your first sentence explains, to a great extent, your second. You see, systemd is designed to _prevent_ a hundred flowers from blooming. Unlike most Unix-like system components, the idea is for systemd not be an alternative replacable component, but the whole installation above the kernel. You don't choose things; you get those services and facilities which live within systemd; and those which don't - mostly won't work. That is, unless you tear out everything related to systemd. Which is difficult, since GNOME and some other packages over time have introduced dependencies on systemd, rather than on services or facilities it provides via a common protocol or interface.
This was also how the big Debian debate exploded, causing the fork of Devuan: The "opposition" did not demand "No systemd in Debian!", but rather, that the user would be able to choose not to have systemd at all, if they so please. I am paraphrasing from memory of course, but I believe that was the gist of it.
And the speaker in this video faced this situation.
I am not well-versed in NixOS and certainly not in this new project, but I imagine that if the author could easily just configure NixOS not have systemd, they might not have bothered starting this project and would more likely have published some kind of recipe/how-to page on
If anyone is looking for a comprehensive accounting tool for personal finance or small business, GnuCash also has the ability to generate invoices.
In my opinion, the PDF generator made by OP makes way more beautiful invoices than GnuCash. However, generating is only part of the story; tracking invoice balances and knowing who still owes you is another. GnuCash does both in one place, which is why I am plugging it here. It's worked well for my small business. It even gives you a nice pop-up reminder when you open the program that reminds you about unpaid Accounts Receivable.
An unfortunate blemish on her record is her handling of `wasm-pack`.
She worked to ensure it become a critical part of the Rust/Wasm ecosystem and then silently stopped maintaining it. For most of 2020 / 2021 `wasm-pack` was not updated with pull requests and security fixes because Ashley did not transfer publish rights.
Even though `wasm-pack` became unusable for many users it was still described as necessary in the official Rust / Wasm tutorials. Likely this set back the Rust/Wasm ecosystem by discouraging many new members.
It would have been far better if she just spoke up and asked for help.
It seems she wanted to ignore a problem she didn't want to deal with, which I can relate to, but that's not a good quality in an executive director.
Notification Cron - This is a great way to use your phone for reminders and learn Quartz Cron.
SunTimes - This app will set alarms at certain sun/moon points in the day. So whatever time sunrise is at your location an alarm can go off. I like to use it to let me know when Golden Hour starts and the day is almost ending.
QuillNote - I love this note taking app, and have taken to posting thoughts there to lower the number of tweets/posts I send. I get the dopamine rush of typing out and saving my thought, and it all stays local.
Mindful Notifier - Whenever this bell goes off (and I set it random between 90 minutes and 120 minutes) I take three very deep breaths. The sayings are okay, but the healthy intake of oxygen is great.
SMS Scheduler - An older app, but a great way to send a text at a later time. My daughter has a different work schedule than I do, so I schedule texts to her for when work is done. Also, if someone asks me to remind them of something later, I schedule the text and it sends as a reminder.
Dodge - Simple game of getting across the screen. My record is 13.
Snotz - I like this for non-thoughts (Quillnote) but tend towards quillnote more. It's a note taking app with nice colors.
FOSS Browser - This is a nice simple browser for when I don't want to be tracked.
Nunti - Pretty good feed reader that supposedly uses AI to tell what stories to share. I'm still training it, but prefer it over online news aggregation.
Vector Pinball - I played this game longer than I should have.
1list - great shopping list app, or any other list you may need to make, and all stays local.
I think this is covered in a number of papers from think tanks related to the current administration.
The overall plan, as I understood it, is to devalue the dollar while keeping the monetary reserve status. A weaker dollar will make it competitive for foreign countries to manufacture in the US. The problem is that if the dollar weakens, investors will fly away. But the AI boom offsets that.
For now it seems to work: the dollar lost more than 10% year to date, but the AI boom kept investors in the US stock market. The trade agreements will protect the US for a couple years as well. But ultimately it's a time bomb for the population, that will wake up in 10 years with half their present purchasing power, in non dollar terms.