Great for who's economic growth? As in, when staring at the graph of GDP vs wages plotted over the last 50 years, that big-ass pie slice that everyone's excited about? That appears to have ended up in roughly 800 people's pockets. Meanwhile even mention domestic manufacturing in the country that basically invented consumer electronics and kazoo music starts playing in the background. grits teeth We knew NAFTA was bullshit, we knew it was going to break basically everything, and yet folks just couldn't quite get mad enough to scare the political elite badly enough to back off. I love my country, we have always been at war with Eurasia, I am going the fuck to bed.
For humanity? It is the same reason most of us don't grow our food or make our shoes. Specialization makes a lot of sense. Western tech wouldn't have been able to grow as fast if electronics manufacturing were not concentrated in China. It is (was?) a win-win.
One of those "wins" was based entirely on toxic wealth hoarding by financial elites, which is why we are we are, with the flailing remains of a US government taking a hatchet to science and education while infrastructure crumbles around it, and climate change alternately floods and burns prime real estate.
Nothing short of a neo-luddite social movement would do the trick and even that would at best help a vanishingly small minority of the populace willing to make the kind of lifestyle changes necessary to support the ideology. Taken as a large enough group people kinda suck, they're kinda useless, and definitely lazy. It's a problem our species has been struggling with at least as long as we've had systems of writing available to document the failures of society. One could argue society is nothing more than our attempt to make people suck less.
Well even the NYT didn't state the names of the prosecutor and judge that got this so egregiously and unforgivably wrong. Name and shame would be a start.
I haven't found names or docket-stuff, but this page has more details like exact dates that may help someone with the right databases.
> On October 31, 2019, the District Attorney’s office filed charges of identity theft and false impersonation against Woods.
On December 23, 2019, Woods’s public defender expressed concern over Woods’s mental competence because he kept insisting that he was the real William Woods.
> On February 10, 2020, following an examination by a physician, Woods was declared incompetent to stand trial and was sent to a California mental hospital for treatment, including psychotropic medication.
Turns out the villain in that story is the system itself. Woods proved himself competent but the DA was not persuaded, so at his attorney's advice (the one who threw him under the bus with the competency evaluation) Woods accepted the criminal charges, thus the court feels absolved of blame.
There should be an NTSB for egregious acts of injustice, because the players in the system independently show no aptitude for reform and they all messed up badly. The way they defined their roles was wrong.
I mean, that at least sounds good, but in fact that would not be a start as it has no possible impact on these individuals on a personal or professional level.
What's wild to me is Stephenson nailed this potential threat back in 1995. There's a tight couple paragraphs in Diamond Age that rather presciently detailed the shit outcomes expected from a fractured media landscape.
Sure it does. Or it should, anyway. Unfortunately the internet has spawned a couple generations of individuals that will gleefully take any form of bait that's laid in front of them and now here we are.
Demonstrably untrue. "We" make performative mutterings online while taking literally no concrete action at a personal or professional level to advance solutions to any of the myriad things we claim to care about. Conclusion: what people actually care about is online optics.
Nah. It's big enough for individuals to perform the online ritual of Good Think, but I'm not seeing any progress or even credible solutions being worked towards. Wake me when the processed food and agricultural conglomerate megacorps have all gone bankrupt from concerted, successful, consumer advocacy and I'll start taking these claims seriously. Y'all can't even be assed to stop feeding Amazon's bottom line long enough for consumer retail to stabilize so miss me with claims of serious conservation efforts. Odds are you haven't even met a single individual in your lifetime who'd willingly make the kind of lifestyle changes that that would actually require.
If you find yourself in a situation where you feel compelled to quibble over fine details of the definition of terms like " concentration camp", this is an indication that you are desperately compromised in some way.
the parallel with the Nazis for me is the building of it on foreign soil instead of somewhere with judicial oversight - even while they own the supreme court and Congress.
I never said anything about the degree. Of course my art is not as valuable as someone who has spent a lifetime perfecting their craft. But both are still art.
You're going to fall of that high horse of yours and break something. Most art for blogs before AI was shitty stock photos, maybe with a filter applied. It was not high art. It wasn't a major creative endeavor. It was a means to get Google with it's toxic ranking to bubble a blog post higher than the low effort copy/paste slop.
Google ranks a text-only page lower than one with a hero image. It ranks pages with a single image lower than one with multiple images. The stock art industry had long ago devalued actual art on the web selling vast collections of stock photos for a few dollars or giving away dreck for free.
AI tools have put no more actual artists out of work than Shutterstock or Unsplash. At least with an AI tool someone can make a hero image slightly more creative than "vaguely ethnic woman looking at computer" or a n out of focus picture of a dandelion.
TIL hero images on blogs are a valid metric when discussing art as a concept. If that's your primary exposure you're uniquely unqualified to have an opinion.
You can look at catalog.data.gov it shows totals. I'm comparing January 14th to today.
The biggest loss I see is Organizations - Department of Energy, 5473 to 3647.
I also see under Bureaus - Energy Programs, 4347 to 2521.
These are overlapping categories (-1826 on both).
There are others, but they seem smaller, a few hundred at most.
Looking closer, there was a major increase quite recently before this decrease. On January 8th there were 3617 DoE datasets. On the 14th it was up to 5473. Now we're back down to just 30 more than on the 8th.
Could it have been a publishing mistake, or some order to undo recent publications for review by the new admin?
I can't tell from the Internet Archive. The datasets that went away seem to have been added quite recently, between January 8th and 14th. There isn't a suitable capture between January 8th and 25th to see which tags or categories changed within the DoE datasets.
Code compliance is not a prerequisite for selling a property with a structure on it, and it isn't a guarantee that you can't get the structure insured. If it was you'd never be able to get homeowner's insurance on older homes.
This depends heavily on where you live. I bought a house in a city with a realtor who was fairly new and didn't realize the city mandated inspections upon sale. When I tried to sell the same house a few years later, the buyer's agent did know about it, and when the city came out, they required several updates to the electrical wiring in the garage and to replace an old-style gas valve that had fallen out of code.
Neither I nor (to my knowledge) the previous owners were in any way penalized or even notified that the required inspection was missed when I bought the house and registered it as my primary residence at the city hall (for property tax purposes).
It mostly seemed like something to benefit buyers given that, and I would assume that a company changing hands would mean the the purchasing party has already done their due diligence.
This was some years back in Minnesota. The particular town (a suburb of Minneapolis) was apparently infamous for nanny-state governance, and nothing of what I've heard since has me wanting to go back.
With that said, I've still got a few friends who enjoy living there, so to each their own I suppose.
Yeah that's pretty typical. Every city has at least a few of those rich suburbs full of jerks that run the town that way. I bet they probably have a bunch of police policies that amount to "harass the crap out of anyone who can't just pay for compliance with everyone" too.
Honestly, I wasn't even in one of the "rich" suburbs. Unfortunately, the whole area tends to want to mimic the worst of other metro policies.
The police were actually pretty decent, as was enforcement of other policies like "your grass is half an inch too long" type stuff that I'd heard of elsewhere. For the most part, if the house didn't look like a junkyard or have a lot of visible peeling paint, they didn't pester people overmuch.
It absolutely is not. I've purchased two (2) homes with catastrophic damage to their foundations and structural members, bad plumbing, and worse wiring. The mortgage company didn't make a peep. The insurance company did pitch a bitch about a brick porch attached to one of the homes, so I ended up spending a day and a half repointing it, but that's all.
I’m not sure where you live, but mortgage companies require inspection reports and if the inspection fails of structural condition, you’re not getting a mortgage where I live.
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