WV? In the 90s, I remember my uncle still didn’t have a septic tank or sewage; the family still used an outhouse. For breakfast, they’d often make biscuits and gravy with this weird, and I assume cheap, canned-gravy I’ve never seen anywhere else (was good, but likely very unhealthy). Most of my family from there are dead now (drugs, shit-life-syndrome).

Did Japan back then pay their assembly line workers the equivalent of $5k USD/year (in today’s dollars) and have nearly no worker protections? Not a rhetorical question; I just don’t know. Seems like Japan had a better standard of living back then compared to Chinese workers now, so I would guess their workers were compensated and treated better.

Not defending US auto corps (or any corp for that matter). The regulatory capture in the US is insane, and workers aren’t treated as well as most of the rest of the first world.

In some climates (like mine), some Oxalis species are called “straggler daisies.” Not related to actual daisies though (the Bellis genus).

Other than just feeling a little light/cheap, I liked it. I actually liked that it used standard batteries so I could just use rechargeable AAs. Only reason I don’t use it anymore, is that I mostly game on PS5 now, and mostly only play strategy games on PC. I used to use it while streaming from my PC to my Kodi/Steam Raspberry Pi in my living room.

Yeah, Musk recently mentioned a plan to have Grok filter out “wrong” data from its next training dataset.

I remember one experiment, where if a LLM was trained on bad and buggy code, it would become more right-wing.

What you’re describing is basically stagflation. It doesn’t necessarily mean a crash. It’s possible for the majority of people to keep on earning less and less real income for a long time without a crash.

I do wonder what the effect of all the layoffs from tech and the public sector and all the cuts in federal funding will do though. Dunno if that’s enough to flood the housing market and crash it or not. I think I’ve read that banks are in a good position to absorb housing market losses, so it won’t be like 2008.

AFAIK, most current economic indicators are OK. Not necessarily great, but not dire either.

The stock market makes no sense to me. It doesn’t appear most stocks move on the fundamentals of the companies or anything like that. It all appears to be driven by hype/gambling, and propped up from sustained lows by 401ks on auto-pilot and people trained to “buy the dip” by the quick Covid recovery.

The USD appears to be rapidly losing a lot of value compared to other currencies like the EUR. But, that fits well into the plan to reduce imports and boost US exports. Inflation with stagnant wages makes US exports more attractive/cheaper.