I swear, marriage would be easier dealt with if both parties opted to incorporate a business, and put their relevant assets in the name of the corporation. Then at least separation would be pretty clean cut and dry. The Irony is - this is basically what marriage is.

Once upon a time, stoves had a dial you set, and it was basically a resistor and some wires. Today, a stove has a computer built in it that operates the entire thing.

While the computer in a modern oven is simple - it is an illustration that more, and more of what we have is computerized. When you add in reinforcement learning algorithms to adjust factors like say, If the fridge is aware of what time you generally open the fridge it can opt to kick on the heat pump a little before that to bring the temperature down and avoid running while it is open. This could save pennies of electricity in a year. But more importantly - could lead to less duty cycles on the condesor that could cause a fridge to say instead of lasting 10 years, last 12 years.

If you are starting a car company today, what you have to be thinking about is a reality where we move to “Humans don’t drive, the cars drive you” - I mean even a manual control situation could have the AI actually being a watcher in effect we “Let” people drive, but if the AI detects an unobserved obstacle etc it immediately takes over and adjusts. Well: You need to build that - and that, is AI.

If a company isn’t thinking about AI, and makes anything but basic appliances - they are likely on a limited time window because at some point Autonomous cars WILL be good enough, and the safety consideration will make both people, and governments, along with insurance companies to eliminate human driven vehicles.

Apple isn’t looking next year, or a year after. They are looking 5 to 10 years out and they don’t see a path where they can effectively compete in the car industry and make the profits they are after. However, if they can solve the AI driving problem - they don’t NEED to make a car, they can sell the brains and system that drives the car.

Trump is a result of the systems failure to address underlying problems. The underlying problems can all be associated with a single common source: Inflation.

Governments printing money at a rate greater than value is created in the economy, nets you inflation - and that has been going on since around the mid 90’s in a very real way, and even before that. We can more or less call this the “NeoLiberal Era” if you like. Around the 90’s is when things get bad - and to more or less cover it up, the CPI was manipulated (read: Fixed like you would fix a wrestling match) to make inflation look acceptable - in reality: Replace Steak for Ground beef in the CPI shopping cart and tell people it’s still relevant.

End of the 90’s you get the ,Com bubble and crash. 2008 Market Crash - and you get “Quantitative Easing” being sold as a fix - when all it is is, PRINTING MONEY. Then during the pandemic a huge push to shut down the economy (largely impacting the lowest wage earners the hardest just FYI) requiring the government to provide stimulus, coupled with grands, loans, and such to businesses in hopes they would keep people employed (hint: They didn’t). And so we have had a series of the most NeoLiberal thing possible: Publicize the risk, privatize the profits, and screw the poor over in the process.

The fix: Reduce the Money Supply. Drive to a negative inflation number. But the kicker is? The wealthiest hedge funds, realestate investors, and what not would basically go belly up from that type of move. And why? Because if inflation lowers - the debts accrued cost more to maintain the interest on, than they can gain with inflation flipping for real profit over time. Once you reduce the money supply by at this point about 2/3eds - we can move to aiming for a 0% inflation number. The government should at that point be focused on reducing debt one way or another.

The real problem for the US Economy is, if any action is taken to reduce the debt - it will be a clear signal that the US economy is not gaining value, and that the Dollar Value is currently overvalued. And that could in a very real way cause a spiral. And a fear of the Spiral is making the long term problem worse as it’s kicked down the road.

By the way: You can take the US out of this and replace just about any western nation into the mix and find the same problem. Actually, China really fits in here. And oh boy a correction is coming and it’s going to be ugly.