hark

The system being set up where the only way prices broadly go down is if the economy is bad has always bothered me.

How dare you point out the hypocrisy?! Seriously though, people downvoting you need to understand that while democrats are better than trump on most issues, they're largely the same on this particular issue, so it's not exactly a point that can be pinned solely on trump.

Too bad Biden kept the tariffs Trump instituted during his term and increased them. Trump will add even more tariffs during his term, but I'm not confident that the democrat that follows won't also keep and add onto them.

Countless resolutions in the UN show that it's not an accepted international norm or policy, but unfortunately nothing can actually be done while the behemoth US exercises its power.

Now imagine if they had to pay for the content they're training the models off of.

Ah, early 2021... back when $15/hr was at least somewhat decent. Heck, $15/hr was being fight for about a decade before even then. Maybe in ten more years $15/hr will become minimum wage and politicians will pat themselves on the back and claim they're the most pro-worker politician in US history for instituting a minimum wage that was argued for two decades in the past.

Can anything be done about this flagrant corruption or nah?

What's with the focus on Jill Stein? Third parties aren't relevant and the number of people who vote for them is far overshadowed by the number of people who don't vote at all. There are better uses of time than this lame two minutes hate session.

Grocery prices is actually a great example of official inflation numbers being underestimated. My grocery bill has increased by a minimum of 50% (and more like 100%) since the pandemic, but official numbers put it at about 25%. They have a basket of goods that they base their numbers off of, but that basket changes and my suspicion is that they change it in a way to make the numbers look better than they really are. In my case, I've been buying the same stuff all along (i.e. mainly simple non-processed ingredients) with modifications only to try to reduce my bill (e.g. I haven't bought any eggs over $2 a dozen, which means I haven't bought eggs in a long time).

I sarcastically pointed out "at least TVs are cheaper" because yes, there are categories where some things are cheaper, but the far more important categories of housing, education, food, and health care have experienced ridiculous amounts of inflation.

Exciting to see all sorts of batteries for different applications. Is lithium-ion still standard for home power backup? I've heard characteristics of the new sodium-ion batteries being ideal for that use case.

I would also like to try a 4-day workweek.

My speculation is that this is a way to let talents retire without sacrificing the marketability of characters. For a corporation, having a character that took so much time effort to develop just to cease being used is a liability. It wouldn't be a Kizuna AI situation since that had such a negative reaction, but I could see continued usage in marketing and merch. I'm sure all parties involved would be happy with some sort of royalty arrangement. It has been described as an experimentation, so it remains to be seen how it will actually play out.