It’s 100 billion, if you actually heard million, someone misspoke. Don’t listen when Dr. Evil talks about amounts of money.

Broadly speaking, I’d say simulation theory is pretty much more akin to religion than science, since it’s not really testable. We can draw analogies based on what we see in our own works, but ultimately it’s not really evidence based, just ‘hey, it’s funny that things look like simulation artifacts…’

There’s a couple of ways one may consider it distinct from a typical theology:

• Generally theology fixates on a “divine” being or beings as superior entities that we may appeal to or somehow guess what they want of us and be rewarded for guessing correctly. Simulation theory would have the higher order beings likely being less elevated in status.
• One could consider the possibility as shaping our behavior to the extent we come anywhere close to making a lower order universe. Theology doesn’t generally present the possibility that we could serve that role relative to another.

But that sounds like disproving a scenario no one claimed to be the case: that everything we perceive is as substantial as we think it is and can be simulated at full scale in real time by our own universe.

Part of the whole reason people think of simulation theory as worth bothering to contemplate is because they find quantum physics and relativity to be unsatisyingly “weird”. They like to think of how things break down at relativistic velocities and quantum scale as the sorts of ways a simulation would be limited if we tried, so they like to imagine a higher order universe that doesn’t have those pesky “weird” behaviors and we are only stuck with those due to simulation limits within this hypothetical higher order universe.

Nothing about it is practical, but a lot of these science themed “why” exercises aren’t themselves practical or sciency.

There another option, you believe only the local rich employer can help you.

Grew up in a small town with only one big employer. If they said bigger taxes would mean layoffs, will the town hated the idea of bigger taxes., because the employer was seen as the only things keeping a respectable and comfortable lifestyle possible in the community.

Welfare was both inadequate and shameful, and other than that, they didn’t see upside to government spending. The big projects they see were things like building a big bypass for a big city to have better traffic. Meanwhile all the infrastructure spending closer to home was less dramatic. The roads thanklessly kept drivable without any dramatic news coverage. The local medical center kept afloat by federal spending without anyone really highlighting that. Easy to make the narrative that big government takes your money and gives it to city folk, and anything the employer does to the community is forced by big bad government.

Well for Trump, either way there will not be another election. Either the system stays intact and he is disqualified or he says screw the system and stays in office. Our he dies first.

Well, they exist, and there’s a theoretical market, but it’s just that Tesla isn’t particularly the leader in any except maybe personally owned self driving, but that’s mainly because Tesla’s willing to test in the streets while others are more traditionally conservative about the safety thing.

Pre-unmasked Musk, Tesla might have done well as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Smart people wanted to work with a seemingly smart company, so it was a positive feedback loop.

In the post-Twitter acquisition world, the shine has kind of come off around the concept of working for Musk, and more keenly so with the coverage of what sort of person he truly is.

Yeah, this is one of those terrible ideas even if you thought that, in theory, you were onboard with ‘anti-DEI’.

Out of the blue the wrong person gets randomly pissed at you and invokes the highly subjective clause and suddenly you owe them $1.5M…

Even if it passed the house, wouldn’t Trump just veto it?

With many bearaucracies there’s plenty of practically valueless work going on.

Because some executive wants to brag about having over a hundred people under them. Because some proceas requires a sort of document be created that hasn’t been used in decades but no one has the time to validate what does or does not matter anymore. Because of a lot of little nonsense reasons where the path of least resistance is to keep plugging away. Because if you are 99 percent sure something is a waste of time and you optimize it, there’s a 1% chance you’ll catch hell for a mistake and almost no chance you get great recognition for the efficiency boost if it pans out.

Guess it’s a matter of degree, that was the sort of stuff I was alluding to in the first part, that you have all this convoluted instrumentation that you can dig into, and as you say perhaps even more maddening because at some times it’s needlessly over complicating something simple, and then at just the wrong time it tries to simplify something and ends up sealing off just the flexibility you might need.

In the first term he just was terrible to those trying to cross the border. If you were already in, his first term was largely nothing if you don’t care about others.

This term has been going after people already here, and rounding up and us citizens and looking to remove legal status for those that have it.

The things is you really can’t be that good with windows.

Sure you can get good with registry and group policy and other stuff that is needlessly complicated to do relatively simple stuff. You can know your way around WMI and .net and powershell…

But at some point, the software actively hides the specifics of what is wrong. You can’t crack open something to see why it’s showing some ambigious hexadecimal code or a plain screen. You can’t add tracing to step through their code to see what unexpected condition they hit that they didn’t prepare to handle. On Linux you are likely to be able to plainly see a stack trace, download the source code, maybe trace it, modify the source code.

Windows is like welding the hood shut and wondering why mechanics have a hard time with the car.

We’re they the ones who also ended up leaking personal information about the people reporting?

Yes. Musk’s net worth including his stock is a bit shy of 500 billion, and Tesla market cap is about 1500 billion. His net worth includes all his assets that he could possibly leverage.

Actually he doesn’t. Most of his ‘wealth’ is Tesla shares already. Even if he could toss everything he has just toward controlling more of Tesla, and if the shareholders accepted it at current market value, he’d only have a third of the company.

Tesla is crazy over valued for a company that has only been able to be a car company that is in 14th place, yet assessed as being more valuable than all the 13 more successful car companies combined…

Yeah, the PayPal one is so spot on.

He had a company that I guess was like CitySearch that no one ever heard of and managed to win a lottery of selling it to Compaq who thought they had to do something in this whole dotcom thing.

Then he founded ‘x.com’, a failure of an online bank while Paypal took off. Then, somehow, in the wake of being merged in he talked the company into letting him be in charge, despite his company pretty much the relative failure in that relationship, and he nearly tanked it before being kicked out. Despite this for a long time he got credit as ‘the paypal guy’, despite his only contribution being almost tanking it after losing to it initiallly in the market. Again, won the lottery because he had such a share and eBay tossed so much money at it.

He’s supremely successful at taking credit from others when things work out.

I’d research Chilipad harder if I were in the market again. At very cursory glance it seems like less of an uphill battle. I could be wrong and they could be douchey, or their engineering somehow sucks, but maybe they are good too.

FreeSleep is what I would do if they try to force the subscription on me, but I probably wouldn’t buy the product hoping that I can change their firmware against their will. I don’t want to give money to a vendor I would just be antagonistic with.

If they announced they formally endorsed use of FreeSleep as an ‘advanced alternative’, ok, but that isn’t going to happen.

This is spot on. Note these asshats eventually caved and added local controls when customers kept saying how horrible it was to use the phone. The local controls are explicitly disabled unless the cloud service has recently approved the bed to allow the local controls to work. You have to use the phone to enable the local controls. The phone can’t do anything locally except tell it how to connect to wifi. If you don’t have the subscription or grandfathered in before the subscription, the local controls do nothing.

Well, unless you jailbreak your cover with FreeSleep.

Curious why you got a downvote, if there’s a good reason, I would have found a reply more informative…

I suppose I may be overestimating Louvre security. I guess I would assume a criminal might have to be somewhat smart to overcome what I presumed to be higher security than you might find at a typical target for idiot criminals.