You keep telling yourself that.

The fact is that - still, for another generation or two - the bulk of Americans are descended from people who are self-selected risk takers. People who would throw all their crap in a trunk and spend what they had to hop a boat to what they hoped was a better life.
Sure, tons failed. But tons succeeded.

I'm an American who has spent his entire working life employed by a European megacorp. There is a *vast* difference between Euros and Americans (generally) in terms of casual tolerance of risk, willingness to go ahead with partial information, and try new things.

Americans have plenty of problems, I'm not saying one is better than the other. Euros- as you say - value quality of life and are quite a bit less materialistic, if you need some pats to make you feel good.

But in this respect, the article's comments absolutely track with my experience.

...the administration's dawning realization that they might indeed lose to Trump in November prompts them to actually enact regulations like this, it might make an election year actually worthwhile instead of the the misery it otherwise usually is.

I have an LG CX (OLED) and love it.
The whole thing about burn in is a canard; I guess it's a risk if you have like a bar-tv where you leave it on one channel with a chyron or a video game with a persistent UI (like the frames of buttons) that doesn't change for hours and hours and hours.
And "potentially thinner"? My CX is literally the thickness of a single pane of glass - 4mm. There's a point where thinner isn't necessarily better, I don't even know how the guy mounted this thing without cracking it.

The foundational premise was that 'stuff's blown about by the Martian wind'.
https://www.quora.com/Are-ther... is a long thread.

Unfortunately, they still have to launch from Earth which is seething with them.
Wasn't that why Juno didn't use RTG? (that and the shortage of Pu238)

Ofc I don't mean LITERALLY nobody. There are niches of readers here and there.

But my kids are all in their 20s and 30s, and they have many friends who say things like "you know, I haven't read a single actual book since college".

To me it's incomprehensible, and I sort of take it as evidence of the collapse but...is it really all that different than say, the 1950s? 1930s? Sure, intellectuals of all eras read but I don't believe the % of intellectuals by nature has particularly swung one way or another since then.

I'm curious what they're going to use up power dragonfly?

  Sure the atmo density should make flying easier* but that distance and air density combine to make solar basically impossible.

*I'm not sure that's as "given" as they make it sound. Low air pressure on Mars meant that even hurricane-speed winds aren't that forceful. At 1.5bar, I'd assume the force of even a gentle breeze will be significant.

Ingenuity leveraged daily solar charging to avoid having to lug hefty batteries around; certainly that won't be an option for dragonfly.

"He'd like to see the government encourage more competition"

I think we all would like that, but let's be clear that is an ECONOMIC preference and (in essence) an ideological preference, not a security one.

I do NOT believe that the security environment of the US government - a government were a lot of sites (esp internal) look more like myspace pages - would be materially IMPROVED by having a vast array of churning alternative vendors of uncertain provenance being managed by IT depts that can barely keep up with one vendor, either.

No, the 'security-focused' answer is that if I'm putting your (MS's) code on government-critical and security-critical machines, that code is
- transparent
- only accessible to a hot box of HIGHLY secured and vetted A-team of MS coders (ie vetted to the standard of actually working in the agencies it's deployed in)
- every patch is critically vetted by that same team to the last byte, and yes, this means those patches are going to come out slower to the secure ecosystem.

Let's be clear that this has been the experience for a LOT of people in a lot of companies.

My firm is an ardently left-leaning European manufacturer who is all-in about a host of left-of-center values such as sustainability, DEI, etc etc. ...and we too are compelled to move to Onedrive, despite lots of objections and (by now) many examples of Onedrive's shortcomings.

Maybe the point of this isn't political, it's about a shit piece of software that's not ready for the critical needs to which it's being put, management choices that have little to do with actual staff needs, and IT accountability for following those dumb fads.

WHETHER we're talking about an organization led by an orange-colored nutball, or a senescent child-sniffing grandpa.

As someone in logistics, I'm more interested in the actual performance.

Amazon's operations run at scale that is usefully simulative of real delivery-truck operations, more telling than the performative 'tech demonstrations' of other companies (eg a truck or two that they trot out for pictures when the Sustainability C-suite is giving a speech) where it's impossible to discern if the trucks are providing a value/performance that means EVs are *actually* interesting for businesses.

The comments to the OP referenced article are few, but the one is positive:
"The Amazon Rivian vans are great. Quiet in the neighborhood, and the drivers I have spoken with love them. They also carry more packages than their older trucks. "
+ Drivers love them is a huge plus. They could make all the economic sense in the world but on a practical level, if the drivers hated them they're going to find reasons to make them fail.
+ More packages than other trucks is also huge.

In short, this is promising. Local-region delivery vans that can charge nightly, deliver during the days, lots of start/stops (ie the absolute WORST performance envelope for ICE in terms of efficiency, wear, and pollution!) is a great place to see where EVs can leverage their strengths.

So far, so good. But let's be honest: while the costs for this are large in absolute numbers, Amazon profit was $30bn last year. In terms of what they spend on shipping logistics, $200 million could still be a performative, boutique, tech demonstrator for them.

One question I would also like to know is regarding these vehicles being custom-built for Amazon purposes. I am curious if somehow the EV 'frame' is more amenable to easier/cheaper/more varied internally custom body builds than that of an ICE: that could be a compelling plus in favor of EVs as well? Would Amazon's mentioned benefits - driver preference and better capacity for the kinds of loads they handle - have been available in a custom-built ICE vehicle? If not, why not?

...at least we know in the hands of Uncle Sam, it won't be abused.

"...They are known for their resistance to heat, water, and oil,..."
"...they are persistent and don't break down over time..."

Feels like the latter is a completely predictable result of the former.

...but I know a lot of charities that would be delighted and thrive on $4 million a year.

I like how they frame it as some sort of tragedy, when they control their own purse strings.

...but isn't compelling customers to connect to your ecosystem to simply use your product (particularly when this wasn't part of the original terms of service) pretty obviously an anticompetitive violation of their antitrust agreements/evasions?

"at least it's real (leftists) talking about things (leftists) care about"

FTFY.

The only place you might be able to speak your mind for a moment before getting banned without appeal or explanation is r/unpopularopinion and even that is only a brief respite from the compulsory doctrinal lockstep. r/NeutralPolitics isn't bad either.

I mean, to be fair Reddit DOES fully align with Google's goals politically so them regurgitating each other would be on-brand.