> In 2000 there were 17.3 million manufacturing jobs in the United States. The peak was 19.6 million, in June 1979.
The graph right above that clearly shows the peak was 22 million in 1979.
> From the early 1980s to 2000 the count stayed high, apart from the recessions. China joined the WTO in December 2001. By 2010 manufacturing employment was 11.5 million. In August 2026 it was 12.6 million.
The graph shows it was around 1997 when it went into a deep decline, and was still in that decline when China joined the WTO.
The ads I receive in the mail from local grocery stores serve to inform me when stores that I normally don't shop at have something I already want on sale at a better price than my usual stores.
How is this corrupting my preferences or misinforming me?
If you order at least once a month it is probably worth upgrading from Walmart+ to Walmart+ InHome. That's $40/year but it has these advantages:
• Delivery is by a background checked salaried Walmart employee in a company van rather than third party contractors.
• Tipping is not allowed.
• Instead of just delivering to your doorstop you can have them deliver to your garage, or even inside your home where they will even unpack them and put the perishable items in your fridge and leave the rest neatly arranged on your counter top or table.
Since the minimum order for free delivery with Walmart+ is $35, a 10% tip on a single order would be more than the $3.33 that a $40 year annual subscription divide by 12 is (and most people would tip $5 on a minimum order rather than 10%).
Very interesting. The person I know that thoroughly uses the services avoids buying some perishables (milk, meat) because they get to unsafe temps and quickly spoil. Maybe this would solve their problems!
> another example are stories of electricians charging more to people who want EV chargers installed because they already paid a premium to buy the EV.
I've heard people work around this by getting a plug-in charger instead of hardwired. They get a 14-50 plug put in saying it is for a welder for their home workshop or for an electric range or an RV hookup for when their parents visit or something like that. A clothes dryer outlet works too, but usually won't support as many amps.
All those, except the clothes dryer, still do give some indication you probably are reasonably well off or have well off parents at least, so might invite some gouging.
> When your grandkids ask you what you did with your finite time, is "I pwned noobs" the answer you want to give?
You are being ridiculous. First, unless the person was a professional gamer they would probably answer with the time they spend at work and time time they spend raising their family. But let's assume the grandkids specifically asked what they did for entertainment.
The answer would then be something like "I got together with my friends and we played the popular online games together". They would probably also mention any other things they did a lot of entertainment, too.
Really you just need to bring detected servers back. That left people with a community that they tended to police themselves because they owned it. But those community run servers meant they couldn't control/shutdown old multiplayer games at will so they got rid of those. Then they started whining that they needed ever more draconian tools to police the online games that they needed to have 100% ownership of so badly.
If that's the tradeoff, then yes. I don't know. I keep a Windows partition for Fortnite to play with one of my friends, and I miss the days of CS:S with 64 player zombie mod.
I don't know if enabling KLAC in Linux can happen without opening nasty doors for other software. If it existed, perhaps one could have different kernels to boot into: One for the invasive software that one boots into for gaming and a secure kernel for normal work, perhaps even with different userspaces.
> Patent holders don’t reinvent a drug each time it is prescribed. Yet they all extract value ad infinitum, because they hold positional claims on these resources.
The MP3 lawsuits were filed in the districts in which the defendants resided. Almost all of the 94 districts had MP3 sharing lawsuits.
You are probably thinking of patents. For a long time the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) was by far the most popular choice for patent lawsuits by far, especially against big tech companies.
Then there was a Supreme Court decision (TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, 581 U.S. 258 (2017)) [1]. It made it so corporations can only be sued for patent infringement in the state where they are incorporated or a district where they have both infringed and have a regular and established place of business.
EDTX is largely a rural district with no really major cities. Most big tech companies have no physical offices there.
Many of those cases moved to the Western District of Texas (WDTX). WDTX includes Austin, and a whole lot of big tech has offices there.
There was one judge in Waco whose court was particularly attractive to patent lawsuits, due to having plaintiff-friendly procedures and a rapid trial schedule. 100% of patent cases filed in Waco went to him. In a few years his court was handling 20% of all patents cases in the entire country.
The Supreme Court and Congress did not like so many patent cases being handled by a single judge, and the WDTX Chief Judge making it so patent cases filed in WDTX are random distributed among its 13 judges.
Cases against big tech companies mostly moved to Delaware (where many big tech companies are incorporated) or Northern California.
EDTX regained the number one spot for patent cases after that, although not from big tech cases. Delaware and Northern California remain the big places for those.
EDTX is #1 because even though it is rural and has almost no big tech presence, it still has major retailers, grocery chains, distribution centers, and communication hubs. For patent suits not against big tech it still works fine.
Also, Heartland did not apply to international defendants. They can still be sued in any district in the US.
The biggest reason EDTX is a popular choice if you can pick it is not plaintiffs do particularly well there. It depends on when you look because it has varied quite a bit, but there are often other districts where plaintiffs win more.
The big reasons are:
• Patent litigation is complex, both for the court and the attorneys. Regardless of which side of the case is on you want a court with experience. If the court is inexperienced the case can drag on which is expensive, burning up lots of billable hours of the expensive patent litigation firm you are using. EDTX has many patent experienced judges, and has developed rules and procedures to move cases along.
• In addition to cases moving along efficiently once they get going, the get going faster in EDTX.
Patent suits are civil cases. They take a back seat to criminal cases. EDTX simply does not have much federal crime (or state crime that ends up in federal district courts).
It is usage of plants that matters, not number of plants.
Most of the new Chinese coal plants mostly have have low capacity factors. They are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar.
Many are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.
Many are also built to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.
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