That's some fucking bullshit right there.

I tried to open a checking account for one of my kids. I've banked at that institution for decades. Kid in question has had a savings account at that bank for years. It took a fucking hour because of all the hoops that had to be jumped through. Lest you respond with "your bank sucks," my wife tried to open an account for another one of our kids at the bank she has used for decades. We left after 90 minutes, still no account set up.

The post 9/11 banking environment is a shitshow.

That's missing the forest for the trees. Taiwan has to constantly import coal and natural gas. Tens of millions of tons of fuel per year getting burned. Compare to the ABWRs that they mothballed/cancelled with, what, a couple of hundred tons of fuel that gets replaced every half decade or so?

Now imagine they have a hostile neighbor with the ability to blockade them.

Taiwan is a probably the best case study you'll ever find on why nuclear power is expensive--start, stop, start, stop, delay, delay, delay, then mothball the plant after you finish building it but before it generates any commercial power.

That's not punishing the lawyers--that's punishing their client.

Did you not even bother to read the title of your cited article? "Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts" doesn't seem like a good choice to refute my claim, and indeed, figure 4 does not refute it but in fact supports it. 10th percentile wages (i.e. "minimum wage jobs") are down 5% in real terms since 1980, while 50th percentile wages are up 6%.

The same way the GDPR does.

[citation needed]

This is certainly true for "minimum wage" jobs (because the minimum wage has not increased in line with inflation) but that's about all it's true for. Wages have been stagnant relative to inflation but they have not decreased. The metric you're likely thinking of is wages vs productivity.

Wickard v. Filburn allowed the federal government to claim that growing wheat for your own personal consumption constituted "interstate commerce." AI development and use seems like far less of a stretch.

I'm really hoping we come out of the current unpleasantness with a broad consensus that an overly powerful federal government is bad for the American people... but I hoped we'd come out of Covid with the sense that "globally distributed supply chains are a terrible idea" so I don't hold out much hope.

Yes, obviously this was a plan formulated at the discovery of Panama Disease in 1876 with the mustache twirling heavies of our piece smirking as they exclaimed, "in 150 years, we strike! Those fools won't know what hit them!"

Ah, purposefully being obtuse it is. And an asshole, too. Yay, you win the internet today!

Thank you, Chris Knight.

Yes, I understand--that is not something you can do. You can, however, effectively achieve this by following the instructions given.
You know, the adverb form of "effect." Specifically, definition 2, "in effect; virtually" which rests upon definition 4 of the root word, "the power to bring about a result." So, to answer your snarky question, yes, in effect you can't but you can.

Is your brain not firing on all cylinders this morning, or are you just purposefully being obtuse?

I mean, you can't "block" anything, but you effectively can. Change your comment modifiers and set ACs to -6, set "foes" to -6, mark commenters you don't like as foes, and browse at 0 or above. You will no longer see AC comments or comments from people you don't like.

I'm going to copypasta part of a comment I wrote above: What you have here is a nice, touchy-feely story of a dead man forgiving his killer, which is going to bear on his sentence. Who doesn't love that kind of story? What happens when the fake rendition of the person demands vengeance and cries out in court, "his life for my life!"? What happens when this is weaponized, where the fake person is specially crafted to send a specific, desired, message to the court, rather than "what he would have done?" When a DA advises a family, "if you want this motherfucker to burn, here's the prompt you can type into ChatGPT?"

No. This is court, a public legal proceeding, where fiction has been allowed to be presented as fact. This IS of concern to everyone, not just the principals involved.

What you have here is a nice, touchy-feely story of a dead man forgiving his killer, which is going to bear on his sentence. Who doesn't love that kind of story? What happens when the fake rendition of the person demands vengeance and cries out in court, "his life for my life!"? What happens when this is weaponized, where the fake person is specially crafted to send a specific, desired, message to the court, rather than "what he would have done?" When a DA advises a family, "if you want this motherfucker to burn, here's the prompt you can type into ChatGPT?"

No. Just fucking no.

Bezos paying Musk to launch his payloads seems decidedly unlikely. Musk agreeing to launch payloads that break Starlink's monopoly on low latency space-based networks seems even more unlikely.