Think it was a rhetorical question, that $800k figure is crazy even by modern standards for a “starter” home.

In my state, $800k is 3,000 square foot, 4 bedrooms, rooftop balcony, in the capital downtown.

$400k gets you about the same, just like 5 miles from that downtown with more yard.

$200k gets you a thousand square foot townhouse built in 2004…

$75k gets you a thousand square foot mobile home built in 2020 on the outskirts of the capital…

Everyone?

That would be an expected consequence.

We have a dizzying maze of providers, insurance, and regulations that produce a horrible bureaucracy that puts any tangled mess the government comes up to shame, inefficiencies everywhere.

Universal healthcare is just such a simpler system that it’s hard to make it worse than what’s going on right now.

I fully anticipate his handlers winding hum up on something like this to get him to try to issue an even more blatantly stupid executive order than usual. Say, early 2027 when they want something to point to “this guy is no longer competent to hold office, JD Vance needs to take over”.

Heh, was just on a call after a big failure of a project, one where 75% of the people on the call had told the project manager exactly what was going to go wrong if they kept going the way it was going and needed to change in a way inconvenient to the project managers world view. Folks repeatedly and loudly got dismissed by the project manager.

Now as they are discussing what went wrong when exactly the thing everyone said would go wrong did, the project manager said “no one could have predicted it going this way”.

The real kicker was the right way to do it wouldn’t have cost any time or money, it just was a somewhat different than the project manager’s imagination (who did not have any actual experience doing the work, but still thought he knew better than the seasoned profesionals because of what he had been reading).

exactly what was predicted happened

In the MAGA mindset, that just makes it all the more suspicious. Curious, you seemed to know exactly what would happen and conveniently it happened the way you said… You must have done something to make it happen.

Colud be someone bragging to someone not expecting it to work all the way out to the media.

Or a narrative that is probably fairly described, but editorialized. E.g. if they did state the fact they had the help of psychologists in negotiating, that statement by itself doesn’t necessarily insult a man that thinks only very smart people pass cognitive tests.

So the reporting actually extrapolates into the obvious, but unstated implications of why pyschologists would be useful in this situation.

Yep, posessing a shred of dignity really gets in the way of manipulating Trump.

I could have sworn I saw that some small island nation basically goaded a bigger power to dispatch some nominal military force just so they could immediately surrender and be “conquered”, much to the surprise of the military folks that were expecting hostility.

But I cannot find any reference, so either some video made it up and I fell for it, or I just can’t find it.

Yeah, fully expect to see that February 2027 suddenly they decide Trump isn’t fit for office.

Vance was a big Project 2025 guy, any presidential candidate would do, so long as they could win. As soon as Trump was the only possible path to make it happen, Vance was there for it.

I don’t think this is unique, it’s just rare for someone to openly say it.

Especially since openly saying it runs the rather high risk of undermining the whole approach. If Trump hears this, he’ll get all pissy and tank things for the sake of his fragile ego.

You can see it in most every person in Trump’s circle. They all play the game of manipulating the president, all you need to do is risk your dignity and you can pretty much get him to do whatever. If they dare to serve their own ego, they fail.

Points for a non-AI fix.

I did recall vaguely something like that, but couldn’t remember what it was, thanks for that.

But absolutely, especially if you had something like a 4.5 foot bed normally, but between frunk pass through and tailgate with load stop you could carry some 16 foot long planks… Something you might rarely need to do and not with a lot of planks, so a huge bed is pointless most of the time.

Funny. I was thinking how cool it would be if an EV truck with a frunk had a midgate, fold down front passenger seat, and ability to open the dash somehow to pass though very long things into trunk area.

Yeah, seen a fair bit of that. Folks giving out homework assignments instead of engaging simply. And good luck if you largely agree with them but disagree on any bit of it.

Is not a false dichotomy, generally AI is called out as useless for helping create novel content.

It is good at producing a knockoff of a reference, and so far they have gotten away with it. So someone incentive produces something novel and then a low effort knock off comes out much quicker than before.

The knock offs have always happened, but the pace of knockoffs increased.

They can also be glitchy as hell because the AI botches something and the operator doesn’t know how to fix it, but this too has long been a facet of knock offs.

Wow, a “kids these days are just lame” sentiment, which is as tired and old as we have been writing it down. Every single generation have broadly had no self-awareness and recalled their coming of age with rose-colored glasses. They were plucky, hard working, courageous, but kids these days seem to never share those same traits.

I’d love to see these kids turn AI into the tool that they want it to be.

The challenge is the consolidation of the power, they can’t realistically expect to actually shape how it will be used, but they have plenty of material and evidence of who actually does get to shape it and how it’s going to go. The biggest sociopathic, out of touch jerks are the ones cheering the hardest, and that is a very bad sign. They are cheering about software without developers, music without musicians, art without artists, and so on. They offer no appreciation for the people graduating at their own graduation and instead see it as a platform to talk up AI instead. It’s a gigantic “fuck you” to the graduates to leverage their commencement in such a way.

We have AI companies running ads about how someone was going to do comp sci, but since that can’t work out, they are going to do dance. Which we are to take as inspirational, but the practical reality to this scenario is no livelihood available. No vision for livelihoods, just elimination of opportunity. Plus they actually have used the damn stuff, they know the disconnect between promise and reality, but they are still stuck competing with it, which is also insulting as folks have no more confidence in grads than generative AI.

We have comments like this, making it plainly clear exactly what sort of structure they have in mind, from Larry Ellison: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on."

Note he didn’t say “our best behavior”, it is “their best behavior”. He isn’t included, he isn’t a part of it. The rabble are to be managed and he is to continue to enjoy being “One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison”.

Then something unexpected happened. Students began to boo.

This was expected by everyone, I recall Eric Schmidt himself talking about how disappointed he was that students were booing but he would turn the students around at his speech.

From there the article roughly seems to be roughly dismissive of the students and pretty bullish about AI anyway. Real Skinner “no, it’s the children who are wrong” energy wrapped up in way too many words.

Heh, back in the day my workplace was abuzz about the very loudly proclaimed bonus that I got for some allegedly multiple million dollar save. They recognized me very publicly, but left the bonus vague, leading to speculation about if I would show up in a nice sports car or maybe even move into a house with the bonus…

It was a 100 dollar gift card to an area restaurant.