Yep, I think my megacorp's cybersecurity department is just a bunch of checklist punchers that now just copy and paste any of our technical writeups into ChatGPT, and I am not even joking. Fucking infuriating.

They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.

I know _for a fact_ that most companies don't care. There might be a select few out there that genuinely do, but most don't. I've literally reported numerous GLARING vulnerabilities to companies in various different industries, only for the vulnerabilities to remain unpatched for MONTHS. Few of the most comical examples, one major game studio was compiling their Linux binaries with FULL DEBUG SYMBOLS AND INFO plus they were shipping a 600M .sym file with practically full paths and all source info. Literally all the paths and function signatures to every single one of their functions was in there. I had to submit FOUR bug reports before they patched it (didn't even receive a bug bounty). The second one was with a major multinational telecom that was distributing routers that _had an open telnet port to the wide internet_ ... with a default password. And there were countless more. The telecom one I had to BEG them to ship me a new router, or to at least do an over the air update, because "they didn't understand what the problem was".

Shipping debug symbols isn't a security vulnerability. It might be sloppy, but we all know that security through obscurity doesn't work. Especially not with modern analysis tools and access to the executable code.

That's what it means to be a cost center. Anything over the minimum translates to wasted effort and inefficiency.

A student populace not taught financial literacy and memed they have to go to college to succeed. High schools hiring "advisors" whose entire job is to maximize the college application rates to make the school look good.

My high school, quite a few years ago had 10 "advisors" you only met in senior years their entire existence was to milk those college numbers. The one I got assigned to ended up throwing a major fit even including the principal because I refused to let her write a recommendation letter for me. I didn't know her and she knew nothing of me but some bullshit she wanted me to write down to guide her. I told them to fuck the right off.

Boomers turned college into an industrial pipeline.

> hardware is made by different companies and no actual proper integration like Apple does

This is literally a Microsoft made hardware product which is extra integrated with Windows.

To be picky, it is Nvidia made hardware with Windows bolted on top. And who knows how many other hardware components whose drivers are shipped by their respective manufacturers. I wouldn't hold my breath on the quality of the final software product and user experience.

>And this is the more important part. As long as you're <40 you SHOULD always buy SPY or VOO, even at the very top.

But why? The US population is set to dramatically shrink in the next 30 years. Where does all the money come from?

The US population is projected to 385M in 2055. [0] What makes you think the population will dramatically shrink?

Even if it did, the money would come from global investors who find the US more attractive than their home markets.

[0] https://database.earth/population/by-country/2055

The birthrate across all western nations has been below replacement levels for quite a while. All nations will see population shrink in the coming decades (aside from labor importation)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11537490/

The calculus has changed because people don't give a flying fuck about celebrities on golden thrones these days, especially since your average YouTuber is more popular. The cost of celebrities in movie spins is fucking massive.

Hollywood has also completely failed to cultivate a new generation of celebrities. God, we had a few years of nothing but Pedro Pascal to the point we have memes inside memes.

And the cost of production has gone way down, you don't need a specialized studio to put in CGI these days when some guys Blender can do better.

So Hollywood is busy being in a downward spiral eating itself while so much room has opened for "indie" to eat their lunch and dinner.

We do have tons of education resources available nation wide. Over here in NYC, we have the highest per-capita spending on students with some of the worse outcome rates in the country. The biggest problem nobody wants to address is parental involvement.

Parents who want their kids to learn and excel will get their kids to learn and excel. Be it through their own involvement with classwork or actively hunting out better education opportunities. _Money_ helps but it isn't the end-all solution.

Meanwhile, if you have parents who treat schools as day care and do jackshit to be involved in their kids education. Well, those are the failing students you get.

Shit, I'll add as a child of two eastern european immigrants. My parents both worked 2 jobs each for years while I was in public school here in the US, they immigrated with basically nothing to their name and hard labor jobs. And they would still make time to help me with homework.

Zoning laws. Many parts of the US but not all have land use zoning. The zoning for any property you buy is public record, so any business knows well in advance of what they are buying. If you want to deviate from the zoning you have to submit an application for that zoning variance which requires usually a community hearing.

Neither small or large businesses really have any big advantages here. Got to win over the community. If anything, the small business may be local and the operators more readily able to convince the community for a variance than some corporate lawyer.

Zoning is only part of it. If a plot is already zoned industrial, but is empty, you still need to get the permitting for building construction, utility hookup, waste water & stormwater, environmental inspections, etc.

It varies from state to state (and city specific laws), but to go from empty land to productive asset can take several years.

Or better yet, farmer Johnson lets his D rate hay plot grow over because he never really thought it was worth it and the son that was managing that plot left for college.

Someone buys the plot 30yr later. They can't clear it and farm it without spending a quarter mil on environmental permitting because the government sees it as a pre-existing forest and the drainage ditch farmer Johnson's dad dug back in 1988 is now a stream (i.e. protected wetland) so they want the new owner to get the same permits that someone bulldozing a swamp for a strip mall would.

You see comparable fact patterns on every axis of regulation.

The community hearing is the easiest and cheapest part if your use is mundane.

The government will still screw you out of hundreds of thousands (mostly in the form of "pay these other people four figures for study X and plan Y" type requirements) to even get to that point though

Also for a large enough utility hookup you will need to coordinate with the utility and or government since you can’t just plop down a large consumer on any old power line or pipe.

That's interesting, because I thought it was common knowledge that Republican presidents actually add more on average to national debt...?

Wonder if they are finally exploring installing anti air defenses on these datacenters given they are massively expensive and devastating targets of extreme opportunities.

Propaganda. We americans ate that shit up.

There's nothing special about anything we design in the US other than time and money commitment to create it. China did have some espionage of course going on, but the vast majority of shit isn't some secret. And with the US shitting on China with restrictions, we increasingly caused them to invest time and money into things they otherwise would have passively accepted as coming from the west. ASML sees the writing on the wall for themselves in particular.

It's both.

The US has generally resorted to propaganda rather than addressing the self-inflicted structural conditions responsible for the erosion of our dominance. China also conducted a broad, sustained, large-scale campaign of IP theft across almost every industry.

Obviously there is no natural law preventing China from innovating (We have treated political liberalism as a prerequisite to innovation in a way that was always partly self-congratulatory), but it's also obviously true that the speed of the gap closure is due in significant part to theft.

That doesn't change the fact that they are now a legitimate competitor who has gotten a lot of things right (and among these, some things that we get very wrong) and probably actually leads in some areas.

I like this take a lot and agree with it. The US for too long has been asleep at the wheel on many areas, power generation one of them. China with no doubt has conducted very deep and sustained espionage campaigns and even with LLMs there is enough evidence that most of the initial gains was training off of western models. Again no complaints here but I think it’s important to acknowledge both which can be true at the same time.

Huh?