Xenophobia and racism, mostly. And yes, it’s a solution to the aging demographic crisis many countries face (at least in the medium-term).

I remember seeing a video of a presentation back in the Bush years by some neo-con group that advocated for immigration to Pentagon or DoD officials or something. The argument for immigration was mostly the same: we have an aging population, so we could integrate immigrants (who are statistically younger) to solve this issue. I didn’t agree much with the broader idea of the presentation though. The broader idea was that there were still some parts of the world not a part of the global U.S.-led hegemony (mostly the middle-east and Africa), and we must spread democracy and capitalism to them. The argument was that globalism/capitalism ensures peace, and that both WWI and WWII happened because globalism was falling apart shortly before those wars. So, to ensure world peace, we need to globalize the entire earth and bring all countries into the the U.S.-led hegemony, even if that means starting wars to spread democracy, lol.

Poor countries, such as the countries people are immigrating from, have a more terrible environment and higher birth-rates.

I don’t understand the Scrum one. Scrum is also agile with short development cycles, and prioritizes communication with the product owners and stakeholders.

I’ve never heard of lean development, but not a fan of “lean manufacturing,” at least not the way it’s commonly implemented in the U.S. (using primarily temp workers so they can ramp up and down their workforce as needed; and it also exacerbates supply-chain problems).

This seems like the most plausible explanation. Only other thing I can think of is they want to develop their own CoPilot (which I’m guessing isn’t available in China due to the U.S. AI restrictions?), and they’re just using their existing infrastructure to gather training data.

I wonder what is the general use for the Mac Mini, MacBook Air, iMac, and MacBook Pro? People generally seem to do all the lightweight stuff like social media consumption on their phones; and desktops/laptops are used for the more heavy-weight stuff. The only reason I’ve ever used a Mac was for IOS development.

I was looking at notebooks at Walmart the other day, and I was amazed that they almost all had less or the same amount of RAM as my phone.

I can understand capitalism resulting in slavery, because it wants to minimize labor costs, so slavery is the logical conclusion (also, slavery is still used by capitalists). I don’t see anarchy resulting in slavery, because slavery is inherently hierarchical. I also don’t see socialism resulting in slavery because the workers own their means of production/businesses/workplaces.

“Using the Internet for the 1st time” (YouTube)

Stock buybacks. Enron and WorldCom. Mass layoffs when not needed. https://sci-hub.se/http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.52686 https://sci-hub.se/https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.491627

No, not much. I use GIMP and Inkscape occasionally for simple things like quick and dirty mock-ups, changing backgrounds, and adding transparency. They’re good enough for that. I’d bet a professional could learn to become efficient at using GIMP, but I don’t think it’s as intuitive or feature-rich as Photoshop.

A lot of the “elites” (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological “progress,” because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable “progress,” which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I’ve seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of “intelligence.” I dunno if they’ve fallen for their own grift or not, but it’s obviously a very convenient belief for them.

Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.

There’s this map: https://liveuamap.com/

I haven’t been following the war very closely, but AFAIK, they’ve been in a stalemate for many months with neither side making any significant gains.

LLMs do sometimes hallucinate even when giving summaries. I.e. they put things in the summaries that were not in the source material. Bing did this often the last time I tried it. In my experience, LLMs seem to do very poorly when their context is large (e.g. when “reading” large or multiple articles). With ChatGPT, it’s output seems more likely to be factually correct when it just generates “facts” from it’s model instead of “browsing” and adding articles to its context.

I think part of the problem is that new cars are bought mostly by fairly well-off individuals; with other people buying used cars. Economy cars sell poorly in the U.S.

Sorry, I was unclear. Chippers are not the tools I was thinking of that would be cheaper to buy (a low quality version of) than rent. Was thinking more about stuff like torque wrenches and rotary hammers. Chipper rental prices were just one thing I was looking at recently that seemed way out of line with what other people from other regions were paying.

Rentals seem extremely expensive in my area. $100/day for a shitty 4" wood chipper, $300/day for 6" chipper. For some tools, it’s often about the same price or cheaper to buy a tool from Harbor Freight than to rent.

Libraries don’t make a profit, AFAIK. Non-profits and co-ops are things too.

I’ve worked for a few small business tyrants that did horrible things as well. It’s more of a system issue. Billionaires do the most damage of any individuals, but I think it would be pretty similar if CEOs made small amounts of money (the corporations themselves often lobby for their interests), or if there were only small businesses (they’d probably just form national organizations to lobby for their shared interests).

I’ve used FreeCAD for hobby 3d printing and plywood CNC projects. It seemed buggy, and the workflow seemed strange, but I’ve never used anything else, so it’s fine, I guess, lol.

I would’ve thought Dimebag’s guitar would’ve given it away long before this.