False prophets (or self serving scam artist demagogues) have always existed. So have gullible and greedy people that follow those demagogues. War, famine, disease and death were nothing new either. It’s all just normal human behaviour, sadly enough.

One thing also leads to another: If a self serving demagogue gets too many followers, then it’s going to lead to lawlessness and war, which are usually accompanied by famine and plagues, which result in lots of excess deaths. That situation is going to cause societal upheaval and maybe even a societal collapse, which the incumbent powers didn’t want, so they created cautionary tales to hopefully teach the people how to recognize demagogues, to prevent those from getting too many followers in the first place.

I do believe that it used to be a real company with a few real employees, they show a few old projects on their website and those seem well executed. Their old specialization seems to be small scale renovations on culverts and small industrial basins with lots of nooks and crannies. They did the kind of jobs that their bigger competitors would rather not do. Which is probably also how they ended up renovating Trump’s pool: the actual pool companies didn’t want the headache of working for Trump org.

But then this massive paint job is like you described it. Too big for the company, done with loads of temp guys, with materials that they have no experience with … anything goes.

History repeats itself. The bible stories are based on things that had happened before, so with stories they tried to warn people not to fall for it again or the bad times would come back, and now people are falling for it again.

The work was done by Atlantic Industrial Coatings from New Canton Virginia. Their website: https://vaspray.com/aic/

According to their website they have experience with liners, but there’s no mention of using paint. My guess is that they placed an expensive liner in a pool on one of Trump’s properties, but Trump doesn’t want to pay that bill, so to compensate them, AIC got to do this cheap ass botch job for an inflated price for the us government.

With paint instead of a liner, they will have had to waterproof all the joints between the slabs as best as they could. That waterproofing will have become damaged when Trump’s motorcade drove over it.

Pretty much this. A 0.02% error margin when there are tens of thousands of visitors per year, means it’s almost guaranteed to have errors.

99.9% ^700 = 49.6% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^3466 = 50% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^23000 = 1% chance of no errors occurring.

The problem is wider than the tech companies, so personally I’d prefer a wider definition that includes the non tech bad actors. Something like “Return of the Robber Barons”.

Robber Barons = By the late 19th century, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used exploitative practices to amass their wealth. Those practices included unfettered consumption and destruction of natural resources, influencing high levels of government, wage slavery, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors, and to create monopolies and/or trusts that control the market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

That description seems like a perfect match for the present day USA economy.

(Rhetorical) Why is it restricted? With this kind of restriction, my first thought is that something must have happened to cause the restriction to be implemented.

I can imagine a few good reasons (+ also some bad ones) for why the restriction is there, but imo it would be best practice to explain why it’s there. So that people don’t have to speculate, and also to pre-emptively take the wind out of the sails of mysogonists that want to use it as a pretext to attack the organisation.

I doubt it, for example Wikipedia is about as clean as it gets for knowledge sites, and their traffic is down significantly. The ai summaries of wiki articles are usually almost the same as the summary at the top of the wiki page, so if people have enough info with the summary, then they’re not clicking through.

It’s a vague recollection of something that happened almost 10 years ago. These are passing comments, not facts in a scientific article. If the comment is sufficiently accurate that it can be used to find back the event that I’m referring to, then it’s good enough imo. I believe in cutting people some slack, myself included.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_European_Commission this one

Trump’s funniest year as president was his first imo. Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes, Trump’s nonsensical lies about the size of his inauguration crowd, the EU president using simplified colored cards to explain trade to Trump, Scaramucci’s 1 week as spokes person, the still liberal Washington post counting all Trump’s lies, … Trump’s first year was farcical comedy, but nowadays it’s a lot more horror than comedy imo.

“intentionally using low-quality AI output in their work without fixing it”

This reads like victim blaming or scapegoating. That ai company makes shoddy software that outputs faulty results, users output faulty results when using that software, and now the ai company blames the users for outputting faulty results. That some (but likely not all) users know that the results are faulty, doesn’t change that the software itself is faulty.

My suspicion is that it’s because the playstore has become so awful that google is seeing the effect in their earnings. If customers get burned one too many times on a crappy app with fake reviews, then they’re not going to spend any money on anything else in the store anymore. So now Google tries to sabotage the possible alternatives, rather than try to fix their product.

I usually download apk directly to my android devices and install from there, no pc or other device is needed. So your whenever is for me almost never.

It’s what Amazon, Walmart, etc want it to mean. They want the profits, but none of the responsibility that comes with selling goods. So they did some legal linguistic gymnastics and thus according to them, stuff that is bought in the Amazon store, with a % markup by Amazon, with payment to Amazon, and with shipping by Amazon, is somehow not Amazon’s responsibility.

The USA government had gone after the large platforms for selling defective/dangerous goods, but that was in 2024 under Biden, so I expect that investigation to be dead by now. The EU is still going ahead though: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/eu-make-temu-shein-amazon-liable-unsafe-goods-ft-reports-2025-02-01/

Normally running a large deficit acts as a stimulus for the economy, but Trump’s reverse Midas touch is just too strong.

I’d say stupid. I live in a country where most houses are brick walls + concrete floors, and smoke detectors are still common + since a few years also mandated by the government.

The government mandate came after it was found that of the dozens of people that died every year from house fires, 95% suffocated in their sleep.

Some numbers for my region: ~7m population, 70% of houses had smoke detection before the mandate, on average 63 died per year from house fires.

Some incorrect approximative math: Lets assume that the amount of dead could have been halved if those 30% houses had 2 smoke detectors per person (lets say 2 cheap ones for 2x20 euros per 10 years): 7m x 0.3 x 2 x 20€ /10 /63 x2 = a cost of 267€ per year per life saved. Imo that’s a no brainer, it’d be stupid to not invest in smoke detection.

So your idea of justice is to heavily sentence people for actions that are not related to the crime that they are being sentenced for. That’s not justice, that’s called vengeance.

And yes, someone defrauding the government should be sentenced less severely than someone who does a violent robbery. Violent robberies can get people killed and even if noone dies or gets wounded, the victims will still be traumatized. None of that can happen with white collar crime against a big organisation. That this difference isn’t obvious to you, should imo be a wake up call for yourself that you need to calm down and take some time to rethink some of the things that you belief.

And Trump does the following: “President Donald Trump signed off on several eyebrow-raising pardons this week, including a man whose daughter donated millions to his PAC and a convicted fraudster he had already freed from prison for a different fraud scheme during his first term”

Trump hands out pardons after blatant corruption & at the start of people’s sentences. Biden did not do that. That you want to portray Biden to be as bad as Trump, shows that apparently your fairness compass is very broken.

And that person who got pardoned after already serving 10 years of his prison sentence … 10 years is already a freaking long time for non violent crime, which also didn’t ruin anyone else’s lives. Sentences have to follow a gradiant along the severity of the crime, if not you end up with a broken system (like the USA one). Prison should be temporary, a chance for correction and rehabilitation, where the person one day gets released with another chance at living a quiet honest life. That you want that man to die in prison … Says a lot about you again.

I looked it up and there was a good rationale based on fairness behind Biden’s pardons. Most of Biden’s pardons also weren’t really pardons, but commutations of sentences: “Context: The thousands pardoned on Friday were “serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today,” Biden’s statement said.” https://www.axios.com/2025/01/17/biden-presidential-pardons-clemency-record Which seems fair and also needed to me. Imagine having 10 years left to serve of your 20 years sentence, while new convicts only receive max 5 years for the same crime.

What Biden did with pardons was completely different from what Trump is doing with them.