Chicken is not beef. Pork is not beef. Fish is certainly not beef. I hate chicken. Pork isn’t bad but can be hit or miss. The only meat I hate more than chicken is fish. So no, I can’t just eat other meats. Even if that wasn’t the case there are also people who are allergic to chicken. We had one of our friends over recently and we have to make sure nothing we serve has chicken in it because of their allergy.

You’re also missing the point entirely. I neither need nor want AI. Nobody needs AI. 90% of what AI is used for now could be done without AI using half the power and just as quickly. It’s a solution in search of a problem and that’s fundamentally the wrong way to do things. All this AI crap is purely being driven by marketing departments that are just frothing at the mouth to find some way to justify slapping “AI” into their ads.

The problem is all those other things are useful, unlike AI. AI is a gimmick and a distraction. It wasn’t so bad when it was a novelty being experimented with, but now that corporations have decided it’s the hot new thing and are racing each other to find the most pointless places to cram it in it’s out of hand. It’s approached fundamentally wrong, instead of looking at a problem and asking “could AI help with this?” companies are starting with AI and then asking “now what problems can we invent to justify using this?”. The result is a bunch of power gets wasted solving problems that aren’t actually problems or could have been solved much more efficiently in traditional ways, and yes that’s bad for the environment.

Good taste vs. tasteless.

Developing from scratch yes, but several decent open source renderers exist. I’d love to see someone grab Servo and polish it to a fully usable state (I think it’s something like 75% of the way there).

The issue also isn’t Mozilla trying to make money, it’s Mozilla trying to make money in the stupidest way possible, or even worse actively wasting money like with this AI slop. There’s also the issue of what Mozilla is spending on. It came out a little while back how much their executives are making and it’s completely ridiculous. They could afford multiple full time devs with just the money the CEO makes for making the worst decisions imaginable.

They should respond with “you first”.

It’s kind of both. Trump is a moron and some of what he does is failing and he doesn’t understand why, but some of it is also working exactly like he planned. Trump is and always has been a conman. He is not a businessman, he is a conman. That’s a very critical thing to understand. Everything he does is a grift of some kind, it’s his default operating mode.

Every action he takes he intends to either enrich himself or attack someone he doesn’t like. He never does anything that will benefit someone else unless he sees some way in which he can also benefit. He will always opt for the scummiest solution to any problem because he likes to feel like he “tricked” someone or got one over on them, that it somehow proves he’s a brilliant businessman. He genuinely believes that scammer and businessman are the same thing.

Funneling public money directly into the hands of his cronies was the point all along, everything else is just a bonus to Trump. I guarantee somewhere in there there are also kickbacks going to Trump and his buddies as well. If we ever manage to dislodge this bloated parasite we’ll need a whole army of forensic accountants to go over every action he’s ever taken to document all the embezzlement and fraud and maybe claw some of that money back.

Try IronFox on android.

Sadly this is nothing new for Mozilla. It’s easier to count the decisions they’ve made that aren’t terrible than the ones that are. Their history is a long series of fuckups occasionally punctuated by a decent decision.

So now that they’re approaching their end game with hispanics they’re starting to spin up the machine to go after the next minority. Now where have we seen this before? Been a while, something like 80 years.

The US was democracy 1.0 up until the civil war when it became democracy 1.1. The rest of the world meanwhile has moved on to democracy 2.0+ that fixed a lot of the fundamental problems that the US inherited from feudalism. We’ve never really fixed any of the fundamental problems with the US government because everyone is too afraid to make significant changes. We would literally have to throw the constitution away and start with a new one, and nobody trusts anyone to do that these days. So we’re left to hobble along while the country slowly tears itself to pieces.

Any one state leaving is similar to what happened with Brexit but significantly worse. It would leave that state in a significantly worse position in all respects than it was previously. The only way to make it work would be to literally dissolve the federal government and reform it as something new, but first you’d need to find enough states willing to do that and who could agree on the form that new country should take.

The problem is ultimately the civil war. The US was originally envisioned as something much closer to the EU. Each State was effectively an autonomous country with the federal government setting some simple common ground rules and facilitating inter-state trade. That worked right up until the states could no longer agree on those ground rules which ultimately led to the civil war. Following that rather than going back to what existed before or reevaluating the fundamental design of things they instead just attempted to paper over things by increasing the federal government’s power while slightly reducing each state’s power, but without addressing problematic leftovers of the previous system like the senate or the electoral college.

The US government makes sense as a very loose confederation of countries. It doesn’t make sense as a country in its own right. Too much of the federal government is designed to grant power to states governments at the expense of the public’s right to democracy.

The reality is that following the end of the civil war they should have gone back to the drawing board and re-architected the federal government rather than attempting to go back to business as usual.

Unfortunately states don’t directly pay the federal government, their citizens do via their federal taxes. The state would need to figure out some way to get each person and business within their borders to reduce their federal filing and then somehow shield them from the IRS.

It’s mostly the Republican lead states that use it. It’s funny how the biggest federal welfare queens are all the supposedly fiscally responsible Republicans while the Democrats meanwhile actually run balanced budgets and aren’t reliant on federal bailouts.

Part of the problem is that Trump says a lot of things but only ends up doing a few of them. Everyone ends up wasting a lot of time and energy reacting to things that never end up happening, and that ends up taking away from time to respond to things he’s actually done. Like yes, if this happens it’s a huge deal, but right now this is just the latest load of bullshit to come tumbling out of that cesspool Trump calls a mouth. It’s very concerning, but nearly everything Trump says is very concerning, and the things he actually does even more so.

Going to be hilarious when they do this and it ends up hurting Florida and Texas the most. They’ll end up losing a ton of congressional seats, mostly out of Republican controlled areas. They’ll have to scramble to redistrict again to keep their gerrymandering going.

Yes, in a perfect world the EU would require banks to support Taler for transactions in euros and presumably also provide the necessary infrastructure for that support. Doing so would allow you to seamlessly (and transparently) convert back and forth between Taler and Euro as needs require just like is done with cheques and credit cards.

It would honestly be the smartest play by the EU since they would avoid reinventing the wheel. That said I doubt it would happen because even at the best of times government of any type rarely makes the best decision. If you’re lucky they still make a good decision, just not the best one.

Yes, that was me. Unfortunately much like GNU Hurd, Taler is less of a project than it is a thought experiment. It lacks a sufficient number of people pushing it to become a viable project. It exists, but as far as I’m aware it’s never been used seriously in the real world outside of some proof of concept type deployments at a university. Without a champion, ideally a major business or significant public figure, it’s likely to continue being far more conceptual than practical.

Bitcoin is sadly a failed experiment and you’re not a luddite for pointing out its various shortcomings. I was an early adopter back when you could get an entire coin for a buck or two, but never invested much in it and lost most of what I had when one of the early exchanges imploded.

The concept of bitcoin was great, a decentralized currency not under the control of any government or institution, but that was still reliable and pseudo-anonymous. The execution however was beyond disappointing. It was quickly commandeered by “investors” looking to gamble on something even more volatile than forex markets and ceased being able to function as an actual currency due to the wild swings in value. In order to be a useful currency something must have a relatively stable value. Additionally scammers and criminals also gravitated to bitcoin further driving legitimate businesses away from it not wanting the guilt by association. Finally it turned out that the anonymity was even easier to break than initially thought and the tax headaches involved in buying, selling, or trading in bitcoin or any cryptocurrency make it too annoying to actually use (massively compounded by its wildly fluctuating exchange rates).

It’s because they’re concentrating all the wealth. The wealth in the US used to be far more distributed, with the majority existing in the large middle class. Reagan started the policy by Republicans to pass laws and regulations designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and then Clinton got the Democrats on board with the same strategy. We’re approaching the end game now where the middle and lower classes are nearly bled dry and the rich will start cannibalizing each other to be the last fattest rat in the garbage pile while the entire US economy collapses around them. Be on the lookout for the smarter rats to start fleeing the ship by transferring as much wealth as they can into foreign assets that will survive the collapse of America.