If you take the numbers for spending and just look at competitive elections, the correlation is very weak if non-existent. Harris and Clinton both outspent trump and yet lost their elections.

More money tends to be spent on individual competitive elections, but the spending on competitive elections is not correlated well with winning, and there are way more safe elections than there are competitive elections. So more money tends to get spent over all across the many safe elections than on the few competitive, and very few donations go to the unfavored candidates in safe elections. Creating the illusion that higher spending correlates with success.

Ultimately the money flows to those liable to win because that is the best spend per dollar for someone trying to buy influence. And those safe seats need lots of money for their campaigns as a way to reward to those who have worked for them, but can’t be guaranteed further promotion do to a lack of opportunities. The rewards being things like lucrative consultant positions.

It gave CEOs an excuse to do layoffs even though they knew it would hurt their human capital long term, and that they would probably have to hire back a lot of those positions long term at higher wages. In the short terms it gave them a few quarters of increased profits. It also let them push out blatantly unfinished products on the promise of future improbable improvements. This will hurt companies reputations long term, but in the short term is let them juice the stock price.

They needed the increased profit and the pie in the sky growth promises to game the stock market, say all the right buzz words and show an improving price to earnings.

Sure they made the companies worse and less sustainable long term, but, they got huge compensation packages right now thanks to the markets, and they probably won’t be running these companies long enough to see the true fallout.

Lmao, who needs a processor?

Like, people really do be showing how little they know about consumer electronics when they say “yah this phone was 100% built in America”, or that they’re a grifter lying to their audience.

I don’t think there even is a facility In the US that could even potentially make the panel for the display. And there is exactly one fab that could make a modern processor for a smartphone SOC, (excluding intel’s facilities, but they do X86 chips so not really relevant for a smartphone.)

I think Google is doing this specifically because of the anti trust trial against their ad monopoly/monopsony.

Like they’re clearly loosing the trial and that means they’re probably going to have to sell off parts of their advertising company, or at least massively alter how they operate to end the anti competitive practices.

It used to be that Google made money on every user, even if they left the site, because they served all the ads on every other site as well. Now that they won’t be making money that way, so they don’t want people going to other sites anymore.

I think the argument in this context it’s more about how Google is acting as a company, and less about how the underlying technology is dangerous.

Like Google clearly intends to turn off the web traffic to anyone who isn’t them. They want to maximize the amount of time users are spending on their page, seeing ads served directly by them. With their ad monopoly liable to get broken up in court, they won’t be able to monopolize advertising on other websites, so they’re just going to prevent people from going to other websites.

The fall out for smaller websites, news, blogs, ect, will be that suddenly a lot of their traffic is going to disappear because Google is no longer sending people to them, instead Google will scrape their pages and then just give that information directly to users. It will be an apocalypse to those making information to put on the internet.

I think this might be part of the whole “bring in military to crack down on protests”

Trying to throw red meat to the “law and order” crowd. Spin a narrative that these people opposing his gestapo are “mass looting and destroying our cities” intentionally escalate the situation by throwing national guard and marines at the situation, then position him self as the only person who can handle it.

Specifically, it’s for the rural folks who have been slipping in their unfaltering support for him due to his fucking with their economic situation. The disruption and halting of a lot of programs and subsidies for farms has been legitimately horrifying for a lot of them, as have been the counter tariffs on American food exports. Not to mention the worries about being unable to get seasonal labor for farms. Like a lot of people in these communities were all in for trump, but, now the flags are coming down and the hats are off.

It’s so funny to watch C-suite executives slowly turning in to fanfiction writers for investors and getting payed hundreds of millions to do it.

Meanwhile their systems are drowning in “exquisite attacks”. Of course instead of hiring more people to deal with that (or training up people to deal with it if there is a shortage of that skill on the market), they’re just making up these fantasies of infinitely scalable unpaid skilled labor.

It’s a lot harder to alter/forge/discard hundreds of thousands of paper ballots than digital ballots, and thus requires a lot more people.

More people involved means more people who could speak out or slip up and reveal the plot.

This is why paper ballots will always be more secure, not matter how good encryption is, how hardened and secure the machines are or how many safe guards are put in place in software.

In addition to what they mentioned , I hate airports so much, they feel super alienating and hostile, even down to the architecture and interior design. Everything is stupid expensive and since they won’t give you a meal on the flight most of the time, and security hates people bringing food and drinks through, you kind of have to get something there. Airport security is also just a nightmare in general, having to pull my luggage and outfit apart and then reassemble it quickly so I don’t hold up the line is just stressful.

The fact that Amtrak doesn’t have security, complex boarding, or assigned seats is probably one of the biggest reasons I will always choose a train for travel if it’s a practical option. Most of the travel I do is in the northeast and mid-atlantic, so that works for me, I’ve even taken the train out to Chicago a few times, it was about 5 times longer than the flight would have been but still, cheaper by 100 dollars and way nicer. If I have to use a plane to make a trip, it legitimately makes me try to avoid the trip. Would be nice if we had more high speed trains than just the Acela to make more routes practical.

i don’t think this will go well for trump ultimately.

Like, two ways this goes, the national guard shows up, says “there are no ongoing and active riots so we’re done.” and leave

Or they just make a big PR mess for trump by massively over reacting to something.

I suspect that they’ve been pressured to keep it out of public by turbo tax lobbyists, but with the straight on attempt to kill it lately, they decided just to ignore that pressure and push it out to spite those lobbyists.

If it was from 10-20 years ago, top down from an angle with modeled 3d units, it might be one of the Wargame titles from Eugen, or if it was WW2 setting maybe Combat Mission: beyond overlord, Company of Heroes, or Men of War.

If it was straight on top down 2D, it might have been Mud and Blood, which was a WW2 wave defense flash game.

Was it top down in the sense of looking straight down or from above at an angle? Were the units modeled as individual 3d models or just 2D icons?

Also, roughly what time period was it set in? Like, Napoleonic, WW2, Cold War, Contemporary?

Was it single player or multi player focused?

Could you get additional units as the game went on or were you locked with the units you started with? How could you get additional units? Points? Timer?

This group will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai.

Don’t worry, the hen house guard force will report directly to the fox.

And of course this is all definitely worth it so checks notes we can become dependent on a handful of private companies to move us through our highly car dependent society and dismantle what little public transit is left.

Yup, totally a good idea and definitely worth it.

Interestingly, certain types of welding are not actually that difficult to pick up, and you could get to a base competency with simple guides and fairly cheap equipment and a bit of practice on scrap.

You could absolutely build a perfectly functional bike by MIG (metal inert gas) welding mild steel. Even with little to no experience and cheap equipment.

These days, most mass produced bikes are aluminum because it’s a cheap material and the difficulties of welding it (very heat conductive, hard to get the metal at the joint to flow) are kind of irrelevant in a mass production setting. A lot of people still prefer steel bikes due to the rigidity and durability though.

They’re assuming that just because they can bullshit legal authorities to get the things on the road, that’s a fait accompli. Once the services is operating and generating income it’s untouchable.

Thing is, they’re going to cause problems that will affect people, they will cause traffic jams, they will piss people off, they will cause accidents. These vehicles are, by design, unattended, sure they have cameras, but, anyone with nondescript clothes and a face covering can sabotage these vehicles without much risk of legal consequence.

The cost of maintaining a fleet of these vehicles in the face of road rage induced sabotage will sink these companies even if they are able to bribe every politician in every major city.

Butt why?

Enclosure of the digital commons. An attempt to at least. I do think that it’s ultimately doomed.

Fundamentally, the internet is an open thing, by the very nature of how it works, thus it is difficult to enclose. Google is more likely to destroy its market share than to fully gate off its user base.

But when all is said and done, the average person will be left to pick up the pieces of the fractured web they leave behind.

There is a very interesting dynamic occurring, where things that didn’t used to be called AI have been rebranded as such, largely so companies can claim they’re “using AI” to make shareholders happy.

I think it behooves all of us to stop referring to things blankety as AI and specify specific technologies and companies as the problem.