Let’s correct that little statement.

"Record high beef prices due to an orange dumbfucks trade war with everyone. "

Historically when prices spike the U.S. herd size is sold down quickly to capitalize on the higher prices. When the international producers see the prices start to climb, they build up their herds and flood the market a year or two later exporting into the U.S driving down the prices. Everyone who raises beef knows to sell down hard when prices spike to capitalize on the money when they can. Usually these leaks only last around 18 months.

Guess what happens when a trading partner starts to play stupid games? The traditional suppliers kept their herd sizes stable to limit economic risk due to uncertainty.

To make the issue more severe. Beef producers (cow/calf operations) traditionally have multiple revenue streams, cattle and some crops (usually hay). Hay, corn, soy etc are all dependent on export business. Guess what fucking with trading partners does? It’s cratered the price of all of these crops. End result, they sell more cattle to make ends meet further decreasing the herd size.

This is has always been the glaring issue with pure democracies.

That’s why constitutional republics were created. It’s supposed to be a counter to the negative side of democracy. The constitution is supposed to be continuously updated and refined with the changing needs of the Republic.

FYI the last constitutional amendment to the U.S. was in 1992. That is 34 years ago. Unless something changes radically in the next few years, historians will refer to that date as when the U.S. Constitution died.

It’s made some pretty significant additions lately that makes it a viable replacement for Nova.

In pre-industrialized nations the amount of resources it takes to raise each child is minimal. People have so many children because the resource requirement for each one is minimal or even a positive addition to the income of the parents.

In industrialized nations that math reverses. The amount of resources each child requires to become a functioning member of society increases dramatically (up to 10,000x more). Children are a pretty much universally a net cost to the parents not a source of income.

The birthrate is Japan and S. Korea have plummeted recently because of extreme wealth inequality.

S. Korea - the bulk of the countries economy is controlled by 5 families. The average 20 year old is in debt, working obscene hours per week and is barely making ends meet.

Japan - Has had 30 years of wage stagnation as the wealth inequality has steadily been growing. Young Japanese face the same issue as the S. Koreans. Long hours of work for little pay and no benefits.

As the standard of living rises, the birthrate initially increases. This was the boomer years.

Then birthrate falls because an industrialized society requires more resources per child. Eventually you reach a period of stagnation when the resources available match the number of children born.

Then in all capatilist societies, the standard of living declines which triggers the birthrate to free fall.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/japan/birth-rate

Japan peaked in the 1940’s, stagnanted in the '60-'70s and has been in free fall ever since.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/south-korea/birth-rate

South Korea peaked in the 1950’s, stagnated in the '80s and 90’s and has been in free fall since.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate

The United States peaked in the 40’s-50’s. Stagnanted from the 1970’s to early 2000’s (bouyed by 1st generation immigration) and is now in free fall (due to immigration idiocracy).

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/france/birth-rate

France followed the U.S. due with an extended period of stagnation due to 1st generation immigrants. It also has had a much slower decline in the standard of living versus the other countries which has bouyed up the birthrate.

Fixing the birthrate is pretty simple in theory. The government needs to meet the needs of people having kids. The details are a little more complicated.

In order to have more kids in their 20’s people need:

A higher income in their 20’s. If they work full time they deserve to be able to afford a 3 bedroom place, food, etc…

A place to live - Build affordable housing that people can own and build a life. These need to be 3-4 bedroom places that one income can cover.

Medical care: free quality medical care to cover little things like birth cost and the doctor visits a child needs.

Time: Hard to make babies when you are working 60+ hours a week. Mandatory 40 or less work week. 2 months of vacation every year.

Childcare - Free or heavily subsidized childcare for working parents. Currently childcare for 2 children is more than the net average income for one person in many areas. Earlier retirement programs are also highly effective.

Quality schools and education: ban private schools, invest heavily in public schools increasing teacher wages and requirements, reducing classroom sizes, and providing quality educational material. Free college and trade schooling as well.

Hope: Stop fucking up the planet for temporary gains. If we started to reverse our environmental damaging behaviors more people would be willing to have kids

No severance doesn’t effect your eligibility for unemployment. It does often reduce the number of claims however. Many people live off the severance until in runs out, then claim employment. You can also claim unemployment while still actively receiving severance pay.

Severance is usually tied to a non-disclosure agreement. If they want to enforce them, compensation is usually required in most states.

Yep as soon as the game is launched, LAYOFFS!!!

Sharing profits with the people who actually did the work is anti-capitalist.

The OS desktop environment has stagnated over the past 15 years.

Many businesses have transitioned from a 3-4 year rotation on desktops/laptops to every 5-6 years today. Hell my work laptop is 6 years old and I don’t forsee replacing it for another 3-4 years. For work functions there is no significant improvement to upgrading more frequently today.

So if they launched W12 next year, widespread adoption will likely not occur until 2032-2033 or at the Win11 EOL whichever comes first.

The developers today are working on a system that will not become mainstream for 8+ years. They want to launch in the next 2 years knowing it will not be adopted for years.

They ignoring the reality of today’s market and building to meet the latest fads. It’s Windows 8 all over again.

Its a U.S. medical bill.

The hospital asks for whatever the fuck it wants after it does the treatment.

Then insurance says “we only pay a negotiate rate” and pays $25-$30K."

I had intern from France a year back when I worked in research. He went skiing and broke his leg around 6 months in. The French healthcare system sent him a check for how much the medical treatment would cost in France. It was around 10% of the bill. He paid the 10% to the hospital.

The hospital kept billing him and sent some of the bills to collections. He asked me what to do about it. “Tell them they have been fully paid by the French health system and to take it up with them. Then go back to France in 2 months and forget about it.”

He laugh and said they immediately stopped bothering him after that.

Windows 11 UI is a downgrade from XP.

Windows 11 is also deeply unstable. I haven’t had this many program crashes, errors, and other bullshit since Vista and ME. Windows 10 had it’s annoying quirks but it was at least relatively stable.

I have saved myself the headaches with UI changes since the Win8 clusterfuck when installed a 3rd party taskbar/menu.

Honestly most of the issues with OneDrive are from one setting:

Files On-Demand - it’s turned on by default. It uploads all the files in the drive to the cloud and then deletes them from the local computer. Its absolutely, fucking stupid and should be banned.

AI hardware is a sales pitch without a clear product. Consumers have no clue why they would want to buy something with AI on it.

For most consumers AI is a webpage that kids cheat on homework or adults attempt to cheat at work with. It makes ugly fake pictures with all sorts of weird errors. Its also the annoying as fuck answering services that you have to yell at 4 or 5 times to get to a real person.

Why would an AI PC be desirable?

It’s worth $30 more per year. Aka it’s a subscription rate hike.

They hiked up all of the subscriptions. Then made it confusing as fuck to subscribe back to the one that you had.

The real solution would be for the EU to mandate an standardized open source connection platform that all car companies are required to support.

I currently use android auto on my truck. I had to make a bunch settings modifications to make it semi-functional. It took me months to figure out how to get it to do what I wanted, when I wanted it

Umm… With 2 free computers and nothing on them.

Run down the list and install all the different distros. Test them out for a few weeks then onto the next. Pretty soon you’ll one that you prefer.

Keep paying them but use it less = more profit.

How about today’s, random complete freeze. Had to hard reboot then spend 30 minutes watching it trying to “fix the issue”. It then failed to find anything. So I had to force it to reboot to windows. Then it worked fine the rest of the day.

While it was down, I was working on my 11 year old, budget laptop running Mint.

Yep I did it. There is still some annoying bits of it floating around that you can’t get rid of.

The phones in the midrange are getting to be better than the top end ones in my opinion. Decent enough build quality for the phone to last 3-4 years. Expensive enough that the bloatware is reduced. If the company does do a modified launcher it’s generally pretty clean.

I am liking the OnePlus 13R I picked up. Stable UI, decent battery life, and not a bad price. The stock launcher does a pretty decent job.

For my work phone I have a Pixel 8. I really regret buying it. I had to disable 30 different bloatware apps. Plus I have 4 apps that I have rejected all updates because they can’t be disabled. I also installed a launcher because the stock pixel UI is trash. The hardware is solid and works well once you clear out the buggy bloatware

Apple made a major fuckup with IOS26. I upgraded my iPad and felt nauseous from the blur effect almost instantly. I can’t completely get rid of it, just make it less horrific. Their “new” multitasking options I am not even bothering to turn on or try to use yet. This is like their 10th edition of multitasking. Let’s see if they get it right this time. Then I will bother to learn their “simple” process that usually involves having to read a manual and remember half a dozen new commands. Fuck it still takes me 2 or 3 attempts to get the the home screen without a button.