$$$, one of the classic bad faith motives. Most of tech nowadays is subsidized by advertising and profiling to some degree, often quite a large degree.
It's not just about ads. The same data and tech is also about locking you up and identifying you for deportation you if this admin thinks you are in the USA without permission.
And laundering responsibility. If the government uses a contractor to identify deportation candidates using this data, and they get it wrong, the government can at least try to shrug it off and blame the contractor, whose job is in part to absorb public outrage for these sorts of things. Whereas if the FBI wiretaps you and still gets it wrong, it's a lot harder to deflect blame.
>The attempt to restrict screentime is based on today's parents wanting their children to have the same experiences they did, i.e. screens were the exception not the rule in the 90s through the early 2000s. This impulse is understandable, but it's not really about improving learning.
I assume you mean low cost broad market index funds when you write 401k, but what other mechanism has offered financial security to so many other than having lots of productive and well networked kids that believe in helping you when you are old?
There is, of course, taxpayer funded retirement benefits, but that is just taking from others’ kids.
The pensions that are so underfunded (either due to corruption or bad math) they need repeated bailouts from federal taxpayers? Hope you’re in a sufficiently politically influential union.
If federal taxpayers are going to bail out old people, might as well be the whole stock market so it’s not just a few politically influential unions that get bailed out.
Union members not in an insufficiently influential union can have their benefits cut:
What do you think pension funds invest in if not the same things as my 401K?
Pensions are useful to individuals, because they support you until you die (while your 401K will either run out before you die, or will 'waste' money in the bank if you die before it runs out). But they aren't a magic money tree. They are the exact same formula. Money in, money out, it just gets distributed a little better.
Depending on how you measure, not as bad as the one we had a few terms ago. There was a pandemic, which should have been a unifying event the president just had to straightforwardly lead us through while letting the domain experts at agencies handle the details. But instead he must have thought he was still campaigning or something, and staked out some edgelord position that we should just ignore the public health emergency. Predictably, this caused a lot of societal chaos from people who weren't good at thinking for themselves following nonsensical direction from an authority figure. I'm sure glad that guy was only around for one term. I remember him being a pretty sore loser too.
Idk. That loser still had guardrails on for 80% or his term. He might have even been re-elected if he didn't use his election year to pretend millions weren't dying.
A morbid part of me wonders if hisnl "advice" literally killed off enough of his voters to swing the election.
I personally think he would have had a shoe-in second term if he had simply led through Covid. Got on TV, told people things were hard but we'd get through it, then spend the rest of the day playing golf or hanging out at whatever the new spot is after the island got shut down.
Did you mean to take that course on human sarcasm?
I can understand how a one or two sentence comment that is wholly sarcastic is readily misinterpreted, ala Poe's Law. But my context should have been pretty clear.
I don't see how talking about abject failures of leadership and policy response in the first term is "outdated" when the second term is essentially a doubling down on these derelictions of duty.
Are we just supposed to forget those past failures in favor of focusing on the current catastrophe? What tariff tantrum? What Greenland treachery? Don't you know we've always been at war with Iran?
Conversely, arresting people going paddleboarding and filling skate parks with sand was a totally sane reaction. Good thing we didn't overreact to Covid and completely fuck up the economy and the education progress of millions of children.
Your "domain experts" are often chronically incorrect sociopaths.
Let's not even get into the categorical and coordinated censorship campaign.
Shocking that people even support the covid response that happened. Much less make light through smarmy sarcastic shitposting.
I'm a libertarian, but you've got to be honest with yourself about how much nuance you can actually expect from bureaucrats. If we didn't have a large contingent of social-media fueled rebellion against the idea of any sort of restrictions, there would have been more regulatory bandwidth to spend making exceptions for privately-owned outdoor establishments like skateparks and paddleboarding (which included the need to figure out things like equipment rental/cleaning protocols).
Note that only half of US states had any kind of "lockdown" (ie stay at home order with the force of law), and they were predominantly red states. I'd say that bigger crowd control problems caused larger overreactions. The state I was in merely had a firmly worded suggestion to stay home. I'd call that the sweet spot.
TDS (edit: Trump Derangement Syndrome) actually pretty well describes the cult following Trump has. His charisma and messaging cause literal derangements in their thinking. Every accusation is an admission, yet again.
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