That’s a shit circle. I figured most of their articles were already written by LLMs.

Amazon never could figure out how to make that profitable on it’s own

They are so dumb. Every house could use their products, they just need to charge normal prices. Everyone has light switches in every room. Imagine if most new houses came with “Alexa” switches and electric plugs.

They tried to make money on a few hobbyists who could set it up for themselves. They needed to go after the construction market. Charge half of what they were charging and sell a ton to every house in America. It’s not an iPhone. It’s a basic device to turn on the lights.

Retaliatory tariffs are not really allowed by the WTO. They are really destructive for trade and just create scenarios where a third country is used to bypass the tariffs.

China has been proven to steal technology for years, it’s just that the benefits of manufacturing there outweigh the costs on an individual company level. No one company can “sue China” as you suggest. They’re too big and can just ban that country from manufacturing anything there. So most companies put up with it.

Your comment actually illuminates the need for US government action. Since no particular company is actually hurting China, they can’t be individually retaliated against by the Chinese government.

That’s the problem, you’re only talking about houses (and probably in an expensive part of the country). Apartments are a simple solution to that in expensive places. Also there are lots of houses under $300K , just not where you’re looking.

I had a better idea that would allow people to buy their own homes that they are currently renting:

1. Every home gets appraised to determine what it would sell for. This is done by the county and is used for property taxes too.
2. Every renter is allowed to buy a percentage of their primary residence from the owner. The owner has no choice in this. It’s a requirement for being able to rent a property.
3. Renters can pay as little as $100 extra per month and the county puts their percentage ownership on the deed. If the home is sold, the renter can’t be kicked out involuntarily. If they do leave, they get the percentage of home value they own.

Pros:

• This would avoid the issue of high interest rates hurting primary homeownership.
• This would blunt the impact of corporate landlords having a monopoly where they refuse to sell. They are forced to sell at a fair price.
• This would create a simple decision between owning their home and spending money on luxuries or eating out.

Cons:

• This would hurt small landlords who would have their property bought out from under them. This is actually a good thing because the benefits of rising property values are now shared.
• The implementation is hard. This is actually a good thing because bad landlords would sell property they didn’t want to manage, lowering prices for renters who want to buy.
• It would cost the county money to hire appraisers. But this could be paid for by increased property taxes due to better appraisals.
• Property taxes would go up for landlords. But this would be good, as it encourages them to sell the property. This appraisal process and increased property taxes wouldn’t affect people who just lived in their home without charging rent.

And that’s why only Chinese stuff is banned, not all ex-US drones / electric cars.

China only has themselves to blame. They intentionally break WTO rules regarding unfair subsidies for their domestic companies. Plus they steal technology and ideas from every company manufacturing there. It doesn’t matter for toasters or t-shirts, but high tech stuff is more important.

No other country does this, especially not with government support.

exposing customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, login IP addresses, home addresses, and order details.

So, nothing important? You know what else has names, phone numbers, home addresses, etc? Publicly available databases. It’s called a phone book. IP addresses? Please. It’s not static anyway and it might just lead to a VPN.

You can ask these LLMs to continue filling out the outline too. They just generate a bunch of generic points and you can erase or fill in the details.

True, and it’s excellent at generating basic lists of things. But you need a human to actually direct it.

Having Google just generate whatever text is like just mashing the keys on a typewriter. You have tons of perfectly formed letters that mean nothing. They make no sense because a human isn’t guiding them.

Current froth doesn’t erase the previous crash. It’s clearly just a tulip bulb. Even tulip bulbs were able to be traded as currency for houses and large purchases during tulip mania. How much does a great tulip bulb cost now?

I think this is an interesting point. What if they gave a concert and a murderer attended? Should they leave if they found out who was there?

Of course it’s more personal when it’s a private concert, but this is Amazon not Gaddafi. They are kind of supporting the company, but who’s working as an Amazon executive just for the concerts? I’m sure they have free gym memberships or something too. Should the gym ban them?

Do you buy houses all the time? Do you want your income info to be sold to anyone who will pay? You are paying extra for them to have access to your info.

$300? Just use Free Tax USA. It’s free for federal and $15 for each state. No, you don’t need extra stuff, unless you think you’ll be audited.

If you spend a little time figuring out your tax situation, you don’t need to pay someone else to do it. Here’s a secret: the people they have doing your taxes don’t necessarily have a master’s degree in tax. Those people are helping corporations or wealthy people with trusts.

a lot of it does end up raining down on the ocean, and we can’t use it again without desalination

Where do you think rain comes from? Why do hurricanes form over the ocean?

Do you believe everything that companies tell you? If Google or Apple tell you “we’re the solution to everything, you never need to buy anything else”, do you listen to them?

?

Have you never used any of these tools? They’re excellent at doing simple things very fast. But it’s like a word processor in the 90s. It’s just a tool, not the font of all knowledge.

I guess younger people won’t know this, but word processor programs were very impressive when they first came out. They replaced typewriters; a page printed from a printer looked much more professional than even the best typewriters. This lent an air of credibility to anything that was printed from a computer because it was new and expensive.

Think about that now. Do you automatically trust anything that’s just printed on a piece of paper? No, because that’s stupid. Anyone can just print whatever they want. LLMs are like that now. They can just say whatever they want. It’s up to you to make sure it’s true.

All of that is way more productive than crypto because something actually gets produced. Crypto is literally only gambling and scams, plus it’s bad for the Earth. And I have nothing against gambling, it’s the fact that vulnerable people lose tons of money thinking it’s an investment.

Plus actual gambling is way more fun.

Yeah, it’s relatively easy to make good money in crypto if you understand investing. There are a lot of things that are illegal in regulated securities markets that are not yet illegal with crypto.

I intentionally don’t invest in crypto, because it doesn’t produce anything. Any money you make is just taken from another investor, usually because they don’t know what they’re doing. When you invest in a company, you make products and sell them to customers. Something is created and rarely are people cheated.

The people investing in crypto are intentionally cheating uninformed investors in a way that is not possible in regulated securities markets.

There’s a basic problem with replacing human experts with AI. Where will they get their info from with no one to scrape? Other AI generated content?

They can’t learn anything and are just “standing on the shoulders of giants”. These companies will fire their software developers, just to hire them back as AI trainers.

I’ve used Target for groceries and they’re routinely cheaper for most things.

Vacation time is not sick time. If you want any type of vacation at all, you need to plan ahead of time. Offering only 2 weeks is a joke. If you get sick one day, you lose one week of vacation.

Monitoring and rationing sick time is like limiting bathroom breaks or coffee time. if your job does it, you have a crappy employer.