Market distortions favoring heavy trucks include:

* The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE), enacted in Congress in 1975 under the Ford administration in reaction to the Arab oil embargo, with its tiered structure on passenger vehicles vs. trucks.

* The "Chicken Tax", tariffs on light trucks enacted by Lyndon Johnson as a reaction to French / West German tariffs on chickens. While much of this trade war was repealed, the light truck tariff never was.

* Section 179 tax deductions, which are biased in favor of heavy vehicles. As I understand it, this particular deduction was inserted into the tax code via the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 under Reagan, for the purpose of aiding small businesses that might rely on such.

So it's been, from my perspective, a fairly non-partisan desire from all of US politics, with protectionism as perhaps part of the goal, but perhaps due to other goals that had unintended effects.

Personally, I think that government regulations can only explain so much. Even with the market distortions, trucks tend to be rather expensive compared to smaller vehicles sedans, and that's before factoring in the bad gas mileage. My presumption is that America's vastly more rural landscape contributes just as much to the preference for trucks as government policy.

I do surmise from articles, though, that the above US policies have impacted the ability for lighter pickup trucks to entering the market. I suspect that some smaller pickups, like the small "kei trucks" that seem to have a bit of a following in the US even with all the regulatory hassle, would be much more present if a lot of these protections were removed.

In that:

* Nuclear power plant failures can be very, very nasty. As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty. Yes, dam failures are spectacularly nasty, too (but don't create unlivable land as much). Yes, fossil fuel power plants also are quite bad in a "more silent way" via pollution (plus the occasional centuries-burning coal mine fires etc.). All power sources have problems. But this is a pretty big negative.

* What this means is that big centralized nuclear is also a big target for rogue actors... similar to dams, but not similar to more distributed energy sources like solar or wind. Blowing up a single solar farm or windmill doesn't have a huge impact, relatively speaking, compared to blowing up a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants thus have to spend extra expense protecting themselves against this sort of thing. (And, in the United States at least, classify much of the process of doing so.)

* Nuclear power plants can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. Now this is where the really fun politics begins. Many countries would be really unhappy if their adversary countries start making nuclear weapons from their nuclear power plants. A lot of military stuff has been spent over the last decades trying to prevent such.

This last point is where China's solar panel play actually makes more sense compared to nuclear. Think of the politics involved if China builds a big nuclear point in (insert adversary of some other country here). Could be very, very tricky in many cases. Whereas, there is very little if any politics involved with shipping a solar panel somewhere.

The distributed, small scale nature of solar panels also means that customers in countries with poor centralized power grids (common in developing countries) are able to use them to bypass the current system. This happened previously in many of these countries with mobile phones, where customers were able to bypass poor centralized phone networks. In this aspect, I think the "decentralized" aspect is far more important than the "renewable" aspect... but still.

(There are positives to nuclear, of course; I'm mainly countering the "transcendental" word here. All power sources have plusses and minuses.)

(Note: I have heard of work on smaller scale nuclear systems, but I am not certain if even a small nuclear power device completely resolves political or security concerns.)

Using the terms of The Economist's "democracy index", I see the United States under Trump 2.0 as a denigrated "flawed democracy". There is even some danger of the United States backsliding towards a "hybrid regime". Hybrid regimes combine some aspects of electoral democracy with some aspects of authoritarianism. Prominent examples of hybrid regimes include Turkey and El Salvador.

Maybe we won't get that far -- strong federalism will help here. But while The Economist has ranked the United States as a borderline "flawed democracy" for the last several years, I suspect 2025's rankings will be considerably lower. My "gut feel" is that the United States could end up ranked close to present-day Hungary, or Poland under PiS. In both cases from what I remember, democracy still was present, but considerable damage was done via institutional attacks on the press and the universities. A US attorney general arresting judges for what seems like a minor dispute (but one involving migrants) seems like a pretty big flag that some degree of authoritarianism has taken hold. As is the erosion of due process involving immigrants.

Long run, I think this institutional damage being done by Trump is the most concerning aspect of Trump 2.0. Trump is actively damaging future engines of American growth (research science and universities). My guess, too, is that the anti-immigrant hostility might damage the previous paradigm where many of the brightest in the world came to America for both research and careers. There is a significant core of American voters that supports this stuff; the most vocal of this core in fact cheer on the arrest of judges and actively attack technologies where the conspiracies overwhelm the facts. (Witness the recent push of a few states to actually restrict mRNA vaccines for... reasons? Nothing solid that I can think of.) I do not think that this element will go away after Trump moves on.

Personally I would absolutely love it if humanity didn't have to rely on billionaire philanthropy for these sort of things. But you are talking about a significant paradigm shift in world politics, one of which unfortunately (from my perspective) much of the world is moving away from at the moment.

Musk was far, far less political (at least regarding his public persona) even 10 years ago; his persona was more heavily futurism oriented. Electric cars to help mitigate climate change, colonizing Mars, that kind of stuff. It wasn't really a "liberal" or "conservative" thing then. Would've been nice if he stuck on this path IMHO.

The story is fine and interesting, the headline just detracts from it. The headline from earlier articles (such as the 2000 LA Times article http://articles.latimes.com/2000/apr/03/local/me-15542 -- "The self-prescribed therapy of Dr. Rapp") is much better IMHO.

That's what I did for Wikipedia's article on software synthesizers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_synthesizer), which in 2014 was rather out of date, particularly on its "typical" examples and other elements.

The article does look a fair bit better now. It does seem to still carry a little awkwardness (eg statements like "a software instrument is akin to a soundfont" which is not really correct) and a few out-of-date moments (eg why mention Csound and Nyquist as music programming language examples but not mention more common examples these days such as Max/MSP or PureData?) and some other quibbles I have. But it is better. Maybe I'll have to make a few more talk points someday. :)

Personally, I do think Wikipedia for the casual contributor is unfortunately broken. But given the amount of trolls and agenda-oriented people out there, I actually can understand why there is a high barrier to entry. It's just a bit unfortunate because it also restricts the diversity of the contribution ecosystem. I'm not sure how to reconcile the two personally...

But I do believe that bias could be a genuine concern here.

Both the Buzzfeed article and the Stanford article (https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf) seems to focus strictly on political fake news.

But Donald Trump fake news is not the only fake news out there.

Given that Donald Trump supporter demographics lean older, I am wondering if an exclusive focus on political fake news (most of which was indeed leaning in the Donald Trump direction) is skewing the results towards the conclusion that people older than 65 share the most fake news.

Would the study look differently if they included sites propagating non-political fake news -- such as celebrity oriented fake news or health woo?

In another case -- Russian disinformation campaigns -- it's well known that they targeted pretty much all sides with divisive Facebook ads on contentious issues or identity politics. Some of the ads certainly are in the "fake news" category (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russia...). The question I would have is whether the same demographics would apply to identity or issues related fake news. I'm not certain here.

It's possible that one can include the above data points and still draw the conclusion; in a tangentially related case, age is one of the factors in other forms of susceptibility to fraud (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3916958/), so it's possible that age is a factor in not recognizing fake news as easily.

But until then, while the article does make a good case that people older than 65 share the most fake pro-Donald Trump news, I'm not sure I can apply that conclusion to other forms of fake news yet.

The study appeared to correlate two sources to determine the nature of fake news:

A) The primary source was a list of fake news sites compiled by Buzzfeed Media: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa...

B) The study was cross-checked with a list of sites from a peer reviewed paper (H. Allcott, M. Gentzkow, Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. J. Econ. Perspect. 31, 211–236 (2017)) and according to the paper was similar.

There is some additional methodology in the study link.

We do have this statement (and a little more detail inside) in a report by a joint report by the US Intelligence Community (regarding Russian interference with elections):

"We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks."

Source: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

But that doesn't explain whether Assange is either a "compromised front" for the GRU or someone else, or more a "useful idiot" to Russian intelligence for their goals.

Nonetheless, I will say, at minimum, Wikileaks and Julian Assange can no longer be seen as a neutral player, at minimum. And not a reliable narrator, either. For example, some of their tweets on the Panama Papers, which in theory I would think would be something they would in theory support, were rather strange, and actually stooped into ridiculous conspiracy theory involving USAID and George Soros (eg https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7176700566505308... and https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7174580643249643...). I generally don't treat sources that delve into conspiracy theory with a whole lot of respect...

To stand a chance at making some money as a small business (and I'm saying the more typical "some money", not the "strike the motherlode" type language many of the make.money.fast type scams promote), you have to have a good product idea, and do the full work of the low-margin retail business, with all that this entails.

In this regard I do imagine it's possible to make some money via Amazon with a traditional retail business. But even though it's the behemoth of American e-commerce, Amazon probably should not be a product's only Internet retail outlet. (You should probably have your own e-commerce site for a start... and other more focused outlets, especially if they fit a product's niche -- like, say, Newegg for a computing oriented product -- should also be pursued.)

The world of Usenet, BBSs, forums, blogs, etc. Had their dramas and trolls and whatnot. What they had much less of was the clickbait, post order manipulation, and spammy notifications. Whether major social media can become less "extra" probably depends on whether an alternate commercial model can be found, I guess.

I remember when one of the consequences of Alabama's 2011 immigration laws was them ticketing or arresting two automobile executives. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/02/alabama-car-bo...) I thought at the time that was a (sarcasm) great promotion to international corporations of the benefits of putting an office in Alabama.

As an atheist I certainly wouldn't move into any very religious area, which unfortunately is a fair bit of rural places. (For examples why, see: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2014/05/24/atheists-in-the-bib...)

What we don't have is the proper detail to allow me to make up my mind which cases licensing makes sense, and in which cases licensing doesn't. Sure, licensing has costs. That doesn't tell me anything, because licensing may protect me from bad work quality, which also can cost money, or even possibly be a safety hazard (eg the shoddy electrician that didn't ground a light and nearly electrocuted another worker as a result in the Angie's List piece).

I am fine with the position that occupational licenses aren't necessary for careers where licensing doesn't add any value. But my hunch is that in many careers, licensing adds value overall. The posted piece did nothing to change my position on this.

A long time ago, I remember the difference being illustrated at a Dragoncon in the early 2000s. Guests on the fame level of, say, Babylon 5 cast members, could walk around the convention just fine. They could do standard things like, say, go to the restaurant and have a meal without being heavily interrupted. Walking around they'd maybe get some hellos and photo poses and whatnot but it didn't seem terribly intrusive.

And then there was Alice Cooper, who walked around the main convention floor one day and instantly got mobbed by a huge crowd.

My hunch is that Taylor Swift probably is at the fame level where she needs security of some sort merely to walk around in public. That's a negative in my mind.

It seems like for these systems, there are often multiple teams developing the algorithms, with multiple algorithms in play behind the recommendation. Each algorithm has their own style of metrics system. Some of them are probably relatively simple with not very sophisticated AI/ML (or even no AI/ML at all) behind it. And, there is a lot of internal political conflict preventing better analysis of said algorithms to refine them.

In other words, you're absolutely right.

I would personally believe that if there are issues with quality of service or price or whatnot, this governance style allows for a much better opportunity of addressing issues. Versus being run by a very large monopoly that honestly may not care that much about the ongoing needs of a 1200 population town (read: small revenue source) in the future.

A competitive environment would be better if possible, but failing that, I personally would take a municipal broadband system with a good degree of accountability built into the town governance over an oligopoly.

I haven't had a dead SSD problem in a while though, so I don't know how common firmware issues are now.

To me, more specialized news sources sometimes definitely can be relevant to your career (think trade journals and similar), or perhaps helps you learn new things (techniques, tools, etc.) about your hobby. Definitely I've learned some things from these type of sources.

If you have a good local media source, you will also see stories with relevance to your life, perhaps affecting some of the things you do, at the least involving the town you live in. Unfortunately good local media can be tough to find in some places.

It usually does not involve me directly (though it indirectly involve me if said investigation is about things I pay for via taxes), but I do appreciate good investigative journalism sometimes for unearthing various wrongs and putting public pressure on organizations to do the right things. Good investigative journalism unfortunately is also in decline, however.

I think Aaron's point is absolutely correct when it comes to the current trend of "news" to be talking heads shouting at each other, and yellow journalism designed to titillate, not inform. Even more sober journalism can over-focus on national issues, and that can be problematic without a balance of the local, as Aaron IMHO correctly implies. Unfortunately increasingly national and increasingly overemotional is the most visible trend of "news" today.