Without De minimis you would need a customs structure say, a hundred times larger, or more, I dont have the figures, but it’d be ridiculous.

Also, it would make people buy from the big importers, who would have the capacity to process many shipping containers in one go, and these would have it easier to impose the prices they want, since consumers woulnd be able to source from overseas. De minimis makes a lot of sense.

Aamericans tend to over engineer, an approach which in many cases can be very desirable, but in this case would result in 1 inch thick of the heaviest rubber, with a tread, with a leather covering for entire foot, up to over the ankle, and the whole thing held together with shoelaces.

The other day, in another thread about eggs (damn we talk a lot about eggs lately!) someone mentioned a 15 egg pack. WTF is wrong with your countries!! The natural egg set is 12. a dozen! because, 12 is the logical… Because 12 eggs is… Hmmm. we don’t have twelve fingers, or toes… Why dafuq do we use dozens? I mean, even decimal months make more sense

Yeah! Did yours sprinkle the shavings on top of your cereal like mine did, too?

Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or even Google. They give a shit about your wellbeing, as long as they profit.

That’s delusional. The try to cater to what will keep you engaged, so that as much of the data you can generate can be milked. That’s like saying that agrobusiness cares about livestock’s wellbeing.

Right around the confinement my sister and I were talking about getting some seeds for my mom. Neither of us searched for seeds. From that point we both started to get ads for seeds, many for the ones we had talked about in particular. This thing was so unequivocal that it proved to me that our phones listen. Maybe they don’t analyze, but they definitely listen for words actionable for an advertising purposes.

And chinese EVs are still competitive in the EU. Tafiffs are effective, and can be positive, to prevent dumping and stuff, just not across the board.

Tape presents its own share of problems. If not strored in some very particular conditions, like temp, humidity, and others that I can’t recall, they can stick to tbe adjacent layers, become brittle, curved, etc…

Bog standard? They are more like “god knows what’s inside these” and cionsidering I have a solid suspicion there is no god…

There is a fairly reasonable theory floating around that no name drives have B quality chips, so these may have started with chips that were iffy from the start. Id like to see a test of this type , carried out by Backblaze, with thousands of drives.

Where is bluesky based? As far as I know you have to follow the laws of where you are based. Otherwisse we’d have to follow the lowest common denominator, like north korea, or afghanistan or the like

double the Ai?

As a Spaniard I was going to comment that it is kind of overpriced dog food.

Ignorant here. Would mining rigs work for this?

Did you miss the “usual” part? I know there are translations that need to be done strictly by humans, but they are definitely not the majority. In my country there is a group of translators that are “official” translators, people with an actual masters in translation, and who must pass a very hard official exam. They translate things like official documents, legal matters, etc, but they do a very small percentage of translations.

It’s been a couple of decades since I’ve lived in the states, but I used to watch some US TV, via satellite and later cable (TV through fiber, actually) I stopped watching US TV 2-3 years prior to COVID. I just can’t stand it. Regular TV is pretty bad worldwide, but US TV is on another level of bad.

Long haul freight truck yes. There are a few test convoys driving through Europe’s highways, with only a human driver in the first one. Trucks in smaller roads, or cities, are still quite a bit in the future.

I believe that a few jobs will be hard hit. Things like first level phone customer support or service are probably going to be decimated, keeping humans for 2nd or 3rd level.

A similar thing happened with the irruption of the PC. In a few short years, the majority of professional typist jobs disappeared.

I have done professional translation, as a side gig. The usual workflow involves a first run through machine translation (Deepl is my favorite), then opening the machine translation in a translation program (I use CafeTran), which is used to make the second pass, by the human translator. This program doesn’t translate (they can use one of the main translation engines) but provides a bunch of tools to make the translation refining process easier.

Pure machine translation is a hack. AI can’t grasp nuances, contexts, etc… You will often see many words that may have several meanings, used incorrectly, for example.

Wasn’t it Tibbets?

What sick, uncivilized, heathen place is that where eggs sell by the 15!?¿! Infidels!!!