tal

As I recall from past reading, in general, the US runs up the least deficit during periods when control of the government is split. That is, the Democrats block some of the things that the Republicans want to do with funds, and the Republicans block some of the things that the Democrats want to do with funds. Tax cuts, spending, whatever.

Right now, the Republicans hold a trifecta, control all of the Presidency, House, and Senate, so my expectation is that they will probably tend to adopt policy that runs up more deficit than the norm, since they’re unchecked.

Assuming that the Democrats take the House in the midterms, though, the GOP will need to compromise on new policy after that.

I mean, I’m not saying that it’s a good policy. My kneejerk take is that it’s probably not a good policy. I’m just saying that I don’t think that there necessarily has to be a more-elaborate motive than trying to pull in more tax from alternate sources.

EDIT: Also, a lot of these are multinationals. So in terms of the companies involved, they can probably shift workers for whom the tax would be fatal for visa prospects to foreign offices somewhere, as long as the workers are still willing to work for the companies on those terms. That could keep them working for the company. That will kill the path to US citizenship for the workers, though, which an H1-B permits for. In general, I’m skeptical that discouraging highly-skilled workers from becoming US citizens is a great idea for the US.

EDIT2: I’d add that Trump’s been on record as making statements about his H1-B policy that are extremely inconsistent. Back when campaigning for his first term, IIRC he claimed that he would expand them, slash them, and leave them alone, partly depending upon who he was talking to. Just last year, he was talking about how they were just fine:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musk-vows-war-over-h-1b-visa-program-amid-rift-with-some-trump-supporters-2024-12-28/

Trump sides with Elon Musk in H-1B visa debate, says he’s always been in favor of the program

So it might also be wise to take pronouncements from Trump on the matter with a grain of salt. I don’t know how serious this is from the article.

And, as those people who keep posting the rainbow colored “Lets talk about the Epstein files” memes keep pointing out, Trump has had a pretty long history of doing outrageous things to try to direct public attention away from other things that he doesn’t want discussed.

Maybe. Could be just needing to offset tax cuts. The present administration and Congress has has cut taxes on the wealthy. Either they find new sources of revenue to fill the hole, or they run up deficit.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-know-about-the-us-h-1b-visa-program/

The number of H-1B applications approved in recent years has climbed. Nearly 400,000 were approved in fiscal year 2024, most of which were applications to renew employment. Rejection rates of H-1B applications spiked during Trump’s first term but fell under former President Joe Biden.

Computer-related jobs have been the most common occupation for H-1B workers for more than a decade. Since fiscal 2012, about 60% or more of H-1B workers approved each year have held a computer-related job. In 2023, the share was 65%, and these workers reported a median annual salary of $123,600.

India is the top country of birth for H-1B workers. Roughly three-quarters (73%) of H-1B workers whose applications were approved in fiscal 2023 were born in India.

This would amount to a tax, mostly on the tech industry employing skilled workers out of India, of about $40B/year.

Pew has a list of top employers. Amazon would take the largest share, at over $1B/year.

On the other hand, Trump also eliminated the de minimis tariff exemption, which was a move that I would guess is probably very advantageous to Amazon (it let foreign e-retailers sell to American consumers while rarely paying tariffs, since they sold product imported in small quantities, whereas domestic e-retailers selling product tended to import in larger quantity and paid tariff).

kagis

https://communicationsdaily.com/article/2025/05/20/cbo-no-de-minimis-would-mean-52-b-in-revenue-first-full-year-2505200047?BC=bc_674b2b83cff7b

If de minimis ends for all imports in July 2027, as proposed in the tax bill currently being considered in the House of Representatives, the U.S. Treasury would collect an additional $5.2 billion in the first full fiscal year after the change, mostly in tariffs, but including $231 million in customs user fees.

So if you figure that Trump effectively levied a tax that principally hit Amazon’s foreign competitors like Shein and Temu with that move, I expect that that partially offsets how hard this hits Amazon.

That being said, a lot of other tech firms are gonna get hurt, and aren’t e-retailers. I doubt that this is a good move in terms of US tech strength.

[Pope Francis] went further in the 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, calling social media an “illusion of communication.”

There are probably a lot of criticisms one could make of this statement, but I think that a really good one is that the only reason I’m reading content from your papal encyclica is because it’s in an article that was submitted to a social media system.

The relentless pursuit of profit and growth ruins absolutely everything it touches. Capitalist rot.

The factor driving age verification has been laws passed by countries. It’s not private industry forcing it, but government. That comes from people complaining to their legislators that they are unhappy that their kids can see <random thing that they object to> online.

If you want a communist system, fine. But there are far too many users on here who, when faced with virtually anything they don’t like, immediately post a screed complaining about ownership of private industry, when it often has absolutely nothing to do with the actual issue at hand.

EDIT: I’d also add that there are actual solutions if you object to something like this. You can pass a law against biometric-based age validation, which I can certainly understand — that form could be prohibited. You could have some alternative form of age-based validation to be instituted to create a path of least resistance for services, like having government provide and fund a zero-knowledge service to confirm various facts to services like age. In countries which have constitutional law and a higher bar to modify it than lower law, you could pass a constitutional law against any form of age validation (“ageism has no place in our country”) to prevent legislators from easily passing things like age verification laws, which I personally don’t think will fly politically in most places, but it’s at least one theoretical option.

I would love to load up custom ROM though… What annoys me the most is lack of RTC battery, because the time resets whenever there’s a power outage.

They made an Internet-connected fridge and didn’t put an NTP client on it?

Ah, thanks! Well, that’s one lone ray of light.

I’m still grouchy about a sandwich place that I liked that recently changed ownership putting in kiosks that apparently do facial recognition, as once I walked up, they suggested items that I’d purchased last time. That started me looking, and I’ve been noticing that a lot of the ordering kiosks that places have been installing around where I am have cameras (though none have been actively making suggestions). I can only imagine that that gets hooked into the tracking and advertising system at some point too, though.

Between increasing use of facial recognition and ALPRs, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to avoid targeted ads. I don’t have a fix for that. I mean, it’s illegal to block use of ALPRs. A lot of places also have anti-masking laws, though I suspect that in practice, they aren’t enforced much, and someone could theoretically put something on their face. I don’t especially want to run around wearing stuff on my face, though.

kagis

It sounds like that was a joke from some years back.

https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2018/06/11/skyrim-special-edition-announced-for-samsung-smart-refrigerators/

Skyrim: Special Edition Announced For Samsung Smart Refrigerators And Alexa

If that headline has confused you then let’s be very clear, this is a joke by Bethesda…

They do have a screen and Internet connectivity, but I don’t think that ATMs are actually a great route (unless they force people to stop and wait to get their money, which I don’t think will fly and will cut into capacity). There isn’t much eyeball time on them. The reason a car or a refrigerator works is because you’re likely to be around it a lot.

I will say that the rise of gas pumps at gas stations that play back advertisements is pretty obnoxious, though.

To enhance our service and offer additional content to our users, advertisements will be displayed on the Cover Screen for the Weather, Color, and Daily Board themes.

I really hope that Steam games don’t head down this path over time. Internet-connected refrigerators I’m willing to avoid, but that’s not the only vector for this sort of thing.

EDIT: And as has been pointed out on here before, some Internet-connected cars are starting to have updates to show ads on their UIs pushed out. Any time you’ve already spent the money and are kind of locked in and the manufacturer has Internet connectivity to the device and can update the thing subsequent to purchase, you’re kind of in a bad position regarding leverage.

I’d be pretty comfortable saying that buying enough battery storage to power-shift a year of power is more expensive.

What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer’s electricity for use in winter.

I mean, I think that it’s probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I’d think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn’t shining, the wind is blowing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.

The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:

https://globalsolaratlas.info/

But it’s one of the best in terms of wind potential:

https://globalwindatlas.info/

Well…

From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re basically the same collection of mostly-hairless primates that, 20,000 years ago, hadn’t yet figured out agriculture and were roaming the land in small groups of maybe 100 or so at most, living off it as best we could.

From that standpoint, I think that we’ve done pretty well with a brain that evolved to deal with a rather different environment and is having to navigate a terribly-confusing, rather different situation.

I mean, you see any other critters that have been outperforming us on improving their understanding of the world?

I recall reading that one application of sentiment analysis in voice recognition — like, determining what a speaker’s mood is — is that if someone gets upset on a call talking to a computer, the system will route them to a human.

Altman said in a statement accompanying the announcement, adding that the company is “building an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT.”

I suppose our theoretical teenager could get an account on, say, Grok and ask it to rephrase all of his prompts as if they were written by a 30-year-old and then send the output of that to ChatGPT. Let the models fight it out based on their profiles of what constitutes an adult.

I’d guess that the argument on natural gas is one of the following:

It’s replacing coal and coal emits more carbon

The problem is that coal-based power is rapidly declining, at least in the West, and it’s not a huge chunk of the generation mix anymore.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/energy-2025

In 2023, the energy mix in the EU, meaning the range of energy sources available, mainly consisted of 5 different sources:

• crude oil and petroleum products (37.7%)
• natural gas (20.4%)
• renewable energy (19.5%)
• solid fuels (10.6%)
• nuclear (11.8%).

Oil is a pretty expensive way to generate power. I doubt that wood pellet power plants are very common. So if you want to reduce fossil-fuel-based generation past that, you probably do have to look at reducing natural gas.

We can use it in conjunction with intermittent renewables at lower levels to avoid expensive energy storage

Solar and wind aren’t always available when someone wants to use them; they’re intermittent. You have to fill in those gaps somehow. But energy storage is expensive and for pumped hydrostorage, the most-currently-economical form, somewhat geographically-limited. So the idea is that one uses natural gas instead of storing energy from a less-carbon-intensive source to fill in those gaps…but at least you’re using less natural gas than one would if one weren’t using renewable resources and just using natural gas all the time.

Also, one more tidbit:

Austria had sued the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, over the inclusion of gas and nuclear in the EU’s classification system for environmentally sustainable economic activities.

My guess is that Austria’s probably unhappy because Austria uses a ton of hydropower, is very mountainous and has favorable geography for hydropower, so they’d prefer to have hydropower favored.

kagis

https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Austria

This has hydropower in Austria being 56.2% of Austria’s electricity generation.

As Miku has no physical presence, the relationship is purely platonic.

If someone isn’t already banging on that, I am pretty sure that they will be before long.

kagis

https://aimojo.io/ai-powered-female-sex-robots/

AI-Powered Female Sex Robots: Top 8 Models for 2025

Yeah.

Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.

— Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, HTML, URLs, and HTTP

I think a more interesting question is why there aren’t major US TV news sources between Fox News and the center, occupying the area that the three-more-liberal-kids wanted to take Fox News.

To the right of Fox News, you have upstarts One America News Network and Newsmax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsmax

During the 2020 United States presidential election, President Trump began to promote Newsmax over its rival, Fox News.[80][81][82][83] Trump’s preference for Newsmax over Fox News became clearer after the latter became the first news outlet to call Arizona for Democratic challenger Joe Biden.[42] Newsmax has made their more conservative leanings a selling point to disaffected Fox News viewers, as well as employing Fox News alumni to join their lineup on Newsmax TV, such as Rob Schmitt and Greg Kelly.[42][84][43] Emily VanDerWerff of Vox reported that the outlet “spent lots of time arguing that other media outlets jumped the gun in calling the election for Biden and that Trump still has a path to win this thing”, and that it was one of the only networks that didn’t call the election for Biden, citing the Trump campaign’s legal challenges. However, she did write that “Newsmax doesn’t go full arch-conservative” and “doesn’t give airtime to QAnon paranoiacs”.[46]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_America_News_Network

OAN saw growth in its audience as a result of its election coverage. It was boosted in particular by Donald Trump, who expressed disapproval of Fox News’ reporting on the presidential election and encouraged his supporters to instead watch OAN or Newsmax TV, another conservative channel promoting election falsehoods.[150][151][152]

In the US, there there are a pretty broad range of media outlets on the left. On the right, things are considerably more concentrated. There’s a bunch of data out there on this, but just to dig up a quick recent Pew survey:

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-political-gap-in-americans-news-sources/pj_2025-06-10_news-media-sources_0-02/

You’d think that there’d be space for a center-right TV channel to the left of Fox News.