There is a lot of money "wasted" on intermediaries due to the closed nature of the global financial system e.g. 3-5% fees for updating a row in a database. Besides those it allows other novel products that traditionally required trusted entities: - p2p lending - reputation systems - p2p insurance Also we have things like Open Banking i.e. sending money instantly for free which banks started implementing in 2015, one year after Ethereum mainnet went live which suddenly allowed people to send fiat money instantly and (almost) free. Banks and fintech companies having competition is a good thing for consumers.

That is a —good— point.

It's like cancer spreading everywhere. If you go on Ecosia, there's a button for "AI Search" but no button for normal search.

So the people should talk to their representative. A government becomes authoritarian not only because of an authoritarian leader, but also because of the enablers, people like the spineless Mike Johnson.

This is Mike Johnson's district:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana%27s_4th_congressiona...

The people who voted for him are very happy with what he does and that's why they vote for him again. They voted 75% for trump.

They don't want what you or I want.

Well sculpted district shape.

more like third of them are, third of them are not and a third doesn't care

I can agree with that. I sometimes forget that quite a lot of voting-age people just don't vote.

no

They're doing clean coal by idling their coal plants. The capacity factor of their coal plants is dropping steadily, and is now below 50%, meaning they're not running more than they're running.

A coal plant that's not running is clean. Still useful for occasional emergency power.

He did a great job

No

Hard same. None at all, ever, in anything. And I disable any I can in all the apps I use, and I try to find apps that do not embed any kind of LLM.

Currently, I am giving serious consideration to junking Firefox, or reverting to the ESR version or something. I am heartily sick of mindless "AI" bots everywhere.

Have you checked out Waterfox?

https://www.waterfox.net/

Yep. It's been my default browser since Firefox Quantum came out, so circa 2017.

I did switch back to Firefox (but only on my Macs) since Waterfox was forced to drop XUL support, but I am reconsidering that too now.

This is next level thinking:

Let’s check:

5.90 − 5.11 = 0.79

So it should be 0.79, not − 0.21.

If you got − 0.21 , that would be from solving

5.9 − 5.11 = − 0.21