Personally, I find this depressing but I don't see the US polity as being a reliable partner for at least a generation. Definite Britain after Suez vibes right now.

I do agree that the pay isn't great, but it's the fact that it's considered a cost centre that's been the issue for me.

It has the potential to be incredibly impactful, but often devolves into box ticking (like many compliance functions).

And it's really hard to find technical people to do the work, as it's generally perceived as a cost centre so tends not to get budget.

This is interesting, as my five year old daughter loves Pillars of Eternity. That being said, she mostly just likes to watch me fighting monsters and change the outfits of the characters.

She absolutely adores the simulation games (Avatar World, Toca Boca World etc) which leads me to believe that she'd love the Sims. I wonder if I can get them on Switch?

She has Animal Crossing, but there's a lot of text there which she isn't yet comfortable with.

It's certainly cheaper and faster, so there's potential for it to unlock more demand but I'm sceptical that current models will replace a large fraction of knowledge work.

Snowflake customers have definitely not made this choice, as Snowflake is good but very, very expensive. They're basically the Oracle of cloud.

Unlikely. We'd most likely hum and haw for a while and then go along with it.

Like ultimately, we need both EU membership and US investment to maintain the economy we have at the moment. Losing one or the other would be really bad, but ultimately the only one we can really control is EU membership, and I'm relatively certain that the majority of Irish people, if forced to (and not one second before) would choose the EU.

> There is extremely strong and consistent polling across the EU in general, and Ireland in particular, showing that while the public supports Ukraine and moderate defence spending, it does not support direct military involvement or major escalation, and has zero tolerance for armed conflict, severe economic self-harm, or escalation against major powers.

Can you point to this polling please? I'm definitely not in favour of more wars, but the issue is that the choice may not be up to you or me, rather it will be driven by countries starting said wars (cough cough US threatening to invade Greenland).

> In Ireland specifically, the cost of living is the key political issue at this time for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Neither has any mandate or capacity for military or economic conflict with the United States - our recent diplomatic efforts, in spite of the Greenland and Iranian crises, should highlight that.

While I do agree with your core point around cost of living, honestly, the likelihood of any political party in Ireland (but particularly FFG) doing anything about the cost of living is ludicrously small, depressingly.

The two biggest drivers of inflation in Ireland (and the west more generally) are energy costs and land costs. If you ran on reducing land costs you'd become a pariah in Ireland (again, really unfortunately).

And our planning system makes it unlikely (again, depressingly) that any work will be done on grid modernisation or building energy infrastructure. I mean, I would love to see this happen (I'd even vote for FG or the Shinners to accomplish this), but I find it extremely unlikely.

It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads. Certainly I remember having to go down a few results to get SO results for a while, even when the top results were just copypasta from SO.

It's profoundly depressing, but such is the world we live in now.

You may have me confused with someone else, as I have never said anything about silence is violence.

Economic sanctions are definitely a method of waging war. The loss falls mostly on the ordinary people of the country, and as such are collective punishment and war crimes.

Now, is it better than bombing the people back to the Stone Age? Definitely in the short-term, but one look at what happened to Iraq after ten years of sanctions (everyone who could left) and the impact this had on post 2003 reconstruction would seem to suggest that it's the difference between acute and chronic illnesses.