I left Comcast because they were too expensive.
I went to TMobile... it's wireless, fast, and I've had a lot less downtime than I had with Comcast.
Comcast was up to $95 a month for *nothing* but a basic line with signs they were going to $102 soon.
I'm paying $55 a month (and it would be $50 if I let them do a direct draw from my bank account).
We were not really sharing but were either watching at my house or watching at her house together.
When Netflix went this path, I ended the sub and have never gone back. When I do go back, it will be to binge a few shows and then I'll cancel again.
I'm not "mad" at Netflix... they gave us a great deal until streaming got carved up in to a couple dozen different over priced services with very limited selection.
But it just wasn't worth it any more. Now, I rotate through a random set of 3 different services at any given time.
You really can't project anything past the singularity and since some people are projecting ASI by 2027 we just do not know if there will even be an "economy" in the traditional sense of the word.
Embodied dumb AGI is already destroying many jobs. We have a likely recession in the near future. Amazon could shed 90% of its employees by 2029. And they are not likely to find new jobs.
I can use A.I. to help increase my new development speed by 300%. And that includes new features to existing code.
But A.I. has not been any good at maintenance.
Most debugging sessions are not turned into videos or written up. They are a flow state with the programmer loading sufficient information on the code into their brain until they suddenly have enough to know what the problem is. That or, they literally stumble across the line with the bug.
You'd probably need a million good videos of debugging sessions before A.I. could start to do good debugging.
It doesn't want employees. Most of it's R&D goes into research to eliminate most if it's employees.
They'll use more A.I. chatbots and even fewer humans. Which will be okay if you have a common problem but really suck if you have an edgecase problem.
Youtube is a horrific mixture of censorship and insufficient database power just randomly dropping posts.
Conversations are basically swiss cheese there.
I get notifications for messages that are gone.
I get notifications from discussions and when I return, I have no idea what I said because my own posts are gone.
Sometimes, I can figure out it was censored.
Sometimes, I can break the post into smaller posts and use synonyms to avoid censorship.
Sometimes, I have *no idea* why a completely innocuous post is gone (so I assume the database dropped it).
I hope they *do shut that shit down* on Bluesky and keep it as a platform for mature adult conversation.
Because we've seen it repeatedly turn platforms into cesspools.
If someone slapped the shit out of you and then said, "oops I'm sorry, I take it back" would you trust them? Especially if they did it with no good reason (treating a trade deficit as a tariff) .
People do not understand how much the U.S. image was damaged by electing Trump a second time. Not just Trump because unreliable and untrustworthy. The United States became unreliable and untrustworthy.
Very foolish of you to do so. This is the chance to divorce yourself from the information vortex that is Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. You are literally giving away all your secrets to allow them to do business in your country.
Write your own search engine... Google has turned to complete crap over the last decade anyway. Even chatgpt3.5 gives better search results than google (where half the "results" are disquised paid advertising).
Facebook is actively spying on you and with A.I. analysis could put together a lot more about your real secrets than you may realize is possible.
And I haven't used any Microsoft product except windows for over a decade (including back when I was in business. Hell, I used Libreoffice to *FIX* broken unreadable Microsoft Word and Excel documents) . I must use windows since my gig business is developing for windows but I keep up my Linux expertise and won't run any software that runs only on Windows.
But
Nations can reduce economic dependence on the U.S. by diversifying trade partners, strengthening domestic industries, and promoting regional currency use. Building resilient financial institutions and investing in sustainable development further boosts economic independence. For example, India has expanded trade with Southeast Asia and Africa, promoted the rupee in global transactions, and invested heavily in domestic manufacturing through its "Make in India" initiative.
So it's obvious that Germany can make up half to three quarters of the above loss by selling products that would have gone to the U.S. to the other 194 nations (I don't count the Vatican as a nation).
Meanwhile the U.S. will simply be denied some needed products all together and lose the trade advantages it was given in the past. It's unreliable *and* untrustworthy (It no longer respects its treaties or keeps its word).
It was that way because we had industrial capacity when the rest of the world was devastated. Dependency on the U.S. has been dropping since before Trump's first term.
There will be a recession and the rest of the world will regrow the economy so it doesn't depend on the U.S. You seem kinda delusional in your thought that the U.S. is somehow uniquely special in the world. It's not. And it's been declining for decades with the enstupidification of the citizens combined with the oligarchy of leadership.
The likely outcome of this is the end of the U.S. dollar as the currency of trade which is going to end it's ability to run up debt. And on top of that, the hard recession coming to the U.S. is probably going to expose the existing debt a *huge* problem that will no longer be covered up by growth of GDP.
Even friendly ally's are already selling huge blocks of U.S. bonds to deleverage risk.
Saying 2% of GDP is misleading since it's comparing apples to watermelons.
The cost to field a European solder is much less than in the U.S. because healthcare, veteran benefits, and retirement benefits are funded out of a different part of the Budget than in the U.S. Healthcare *alone* makes up 8% of the U.S. defense budget.
The Finns for example can field an equipped soldier for roughly $3500 U.S. while a U.S. soldier costs $93,000.
No, they really don't. The less than 2% of the annual global economy that the U.S. was going into debt to buy their stuff can be replaced organically by rerouting their trade to other nations.
It's going to be background noise compared to the oncoming climate change and embodied A.I.
Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter
