This quote is the smoking gun re: these people have no clue wtf they are talking about: "But after all these years, I still don't know how to tell you whether you should want an iPad. Or what you'd want to do with it."

Just replace iPad with NES or Personal Computer... and you'll see the same nimby-ism has existed for a long time in close-minded individuals.

There's a lot of mythology around who Trump voters are. Part of it is that statistics can be confusing, especially if you're prone to jump to conclusions. Yes Trump wins the voters without a college degree, and people without college degrees tend to make less money, but we can't leap to the conculsion that Trump voters are poor. In fact, data shows Trump lost the $50k and under income group solidly in both 2016 and 2020. In 2016 he won every income group greater than $50k, although only *strongly* in the $50k -$99k group. In 2020 he solidly lost every income group betlow $100k, but but won the over $100k group by an enormous 12 point margin.

Putting it all together, Trump's core voter group are people with limited educational attainment who are economically comfortable of (good for them) well off without having a college degree. However he doesn't own any particular socioeconomic group; really elections are determined by changes in turnout in key swing states. There was strong turnout among Trump's *share* of $50-$99 ke voters in 2016; I don't think many of those voters changed their mind, but their compatriots who sat 2016 out came out to vote in 2020.

Just because the cigarette industry pictured doctors recommending smoking in its advertising didn't mean that *all* doctors, or even most thought smoking was healthy for you. This was largely in the 30s and 40s when they took advantage of a positive attitude toward science and particular medical science. They began to pull back from this after 1950 when evidence was mounting for the link between smoking and cancer, for fear of pushback from the medical community.

What does this have to do with lab grown meat?

That's what I was thinking. There might be a service in the future for pets (not only parrots) to interact when they are home alone. Animals get depressed and can either get sick or engage in destructive behavior (which is both sad and costs money.)

What would be interesting is having some sort of bird social network, and see how different birds (parrots, canaries, chicken) can interact with one another.

Answer to A: Probably someone (a company somewhere) chassis that looked like Cisco chassis (or painted them to look like them), added hardware that operated as such, and then slapped a Cisco label or something. The product might indeed work as intended, but making it look like someone's brand makes it counterfeit.

And this is a problem, not only on stealing a trademark, but it also defraud users. When costumers buy a piece of hardware, there's an expectation that they will get regular updates (in particular security patches.) That would not work with a counterfeit piece. Things like this not only defraud the vendor, but also the unsuspecting customers.

Answer to B:: One way I can think of is that someone in procurement is/was on the fraud, or they were getting equipment from a that was on the fraud. Either scenario is unlikely. I cannot imagine a government employee, or a supplier to the government, being that dumb.

So, a more likely scenario is that the supplier (let's called it supplier A) in turn relied on other suppliers, some of them feeding counterfeit hardware. So, supplier A was either sloppy with verification, or it was being defrauded itself.

There can be a scenario where a low-importance government office was fine leasing, say, 2nd-hand hardware, which is fine as long as the hardware works, is legit, and is still under warranty. So this hypothetical office has lease contracts with supplier A which specializes in getting and leasing/reselling 2nd-hand hardware of a certain quality.

And then, repeating myself, either supplier A got sloppy with verification, or it was being defrauded, thus, passing the fraud up the government office, and thus, to Uncle Sam.

It's unlikely the original fraudsters were planning to directly defraud the mighty Uncle Sam, but Murphy and providence got in the way, fucking up the supplier, and thus fucking up the affected office, and then fucking up Uncle Sam, which triggered an investigation and opened the FAFO floodgates.

I could be wrong, completely, I'm just speculating :)

That's for MS to dictate, not you. It's their product, which they license and are entitled, by law, to change the TOS.

I don't like Google's approach on this matter, but they are not offshoring. They are opening offices next to new markets (India and Mexico, with Mexico now being our largest trading partner with a significant industrial base.)

This trend to expand into India and Mexico (and South East Asia) is an attempt to adapt to the reshuffling the West (not just the US) is doing away from China (for better or worse.)

Offshoring, at least in my experience, has been with, well, offshoring work to other job markets, for products and services we are going to consume.

This is different: Kinda like how Japan manufactures cars in North America... for the North American market or American and European car manufacturers having plants in Mexico to facilitate the sales of cars in the Latin American market. That's what's happening here.

Now, the problem I have here is not with opening positions in India and Mexico, but the layoffs in the USA.

Was that really necessary? How many pennies is Google supposed to be saving by making a whole bunch of high-value-earners unemployed?

And if they needed to be let go, did it have to be done all at once, and right after announcing new offices to be open in Mexico and India?

Could it not be done in increments?

This is so corrosive to morale, to begin with. Moreover, this adds fuel to the ethnic flames, for the "they took mawh jawb" crowd. We are in delicate times, so caution is imperative.

For me, I find it absolutely hard to believe a company as large as Google could not find a way to re-utilize all that talent in other departments or projects.

PSA. People aren't tokens, and employees and society watch.

More to the point, they're *guaranteed* bucks.

People don't understand the significance of risk to profitability. By underwriting 80 billion dollars of risk for banks, it's essentially guaranteeing them profits. When it's politically infeasible to spend money on something, the government guarantees loans. That's politically popular across the board because it's spending *later* money and it puts money in bankers' pockets.

To be clear, I think nuclear can and should play a key role in our response to anthropogenic global warming. I just think we shouldn't (a) talk about it like it is *the* answer in and of itself and (b) misunderstand the full breadths of risks and challenges, the most difficult of which are likely to be economic rather than political objections by environmentalists.

Ss you point out, climate change is in effect an economic externality that fossil fuels get a free ride on. This is a key reason for nuclear power's economic non-competitiveness -- in effect fossil fuel use is subsidized by future generations. If you made fossil fuel users pay the true cost of their energy use, nuclear would *instantly* become competitive. But politically that's not going to happen. The only politically possible way around that is to subsidize other energy sources as well.

If you haven't seen any nuclear advocates claim that we should stop investing in renewables, you haven't been paying attention. Usually they come out in response to some article on climate change or perhaps renewables and they will trot out the bogus argument that environmentalists killed nuclear, which is (they say) the only solution to climate change.

The argument that a particular technology is a panacaea isn't confined to nuclear advocates; I think renewable advocates oversell what's possible in the near future, just as anti-renewable people -- and yes, they exist if you're paying attention -- exaggerate renewables' limitations. Really any all-eggs-in-one-basket approach is unnecessarily risky and likely more costly than having several approachs that can work together and compete economically. Key to making that happen will be improvements in grid infrastructure, which will increase the size and therefore the efficiency of the energy market, allowing multiple sources of power to compete.

As for thorium, that's something we'll have to turn to if fission remains a long-term part of our energy supply, but it's not really a help in the time frame we have to respond to climate change. I think the most promising developments are in the development of fail safe reactor technologies and small modular reactors. There are such things as both economies of scale and *dis*-economies of scale, and SMRs are a different way of scaling production than the traditional and every expensive nuclear power plant.

It was never the case that the public being scared caused nuclear to be outlawed, or even *discouraged*. The problem is that investors are scared by the high capital costs, long construction times, and uncertainties about future electricity prices.

This is why nuclear requires government subsidies, either in straight grants, loan guarantees or price guarantees. It's no coincidence that the only country in the world that did a serious nuclear crash program was France, where the electric system was *nationalized*. They didn't go in big for nuclear to make a profit, for them it was a national security issue in result of the OPEC oil embargos. As soon as France privatized its electric system, nuclear construction stalled, just like it did in every other privatized system.

In any case, even if we *were* to underwrite a crash nuclear program, it's neither necessary nor desirable to put *all* our eggs in the nuclear basket. One place we can put investment in is a modernized grid. This will not only help renewable sources like wind and solar, it will be a huge boon to nuclear plants, eliminating questionable siting choices that were driven by the need to locate the plant within 50 miles of customers.

The norm thirty years ago for a hardware store battery was zinc-carbon, with premium batteries being alkaline. The norm today is alkaline, with fancy batteries having a lithium chemistry. So it's absolutely true that the "regular AA" battery you put in your flashlight back then had something like an 800 mah capacity; there is nothing on the market today that is that weak.

In any case that's primary cells, which have zero relevance to this topic. We're mainly interested in secondary cells, and there the improvements in the common rechargeable battery has been dramatic and continual. Thirty years ago the standard hardware store rechargeable was Ni-Cad; a AA probably had about 700 mah capacity. A modern alkaline AA has a capacity of 2000 mah or so roughly 3x as much. This understates the case because modern rechargeable alkalines can typically be recharged easily twice as much as a 1990s NiCad. And *rechargeable* alkalines are getting significantly better almost year to year.

Of course the hardware store battery only has minimal relevance to what we're talking about. What we really care about is Li-ion, and capacity, lifespan and cost for *those* are improving faster than any other battery technology ever has.

You're not going to Gish Gallop your way out of this one. You're the one who brought up your personal experience with the price of batteries at the *hardware store* as proof that batteries have not gotten cheaper. I'm actually being charitable in assuming you're talking about shopping for primary cells; if we're talking *rechargeable* cells the argument is even stronger because they are recharged over and over again which means the steady increase of capacity and lifespan in secondary cells over the decades dramatically lowers your lifetime costs.

As documented in my links above, the cost per energy stored of secondary storage has gone done dramatically in the past twenty years, over 90% since 2000. As for why the Tesla Powerwall isn't dirt cheap yet, customers report waiting months from order to delivery; Tesla already has more customers for this product than it can handle at the current price, why would they drop it? This is Tesla milking the early adopter market segment for a product that they can't produce in high enough volume to sell to the pragmatist market segment.

In any case we're not talking about home storage, we're talking *utility* scale grid storatge with is three orders of magnitude larger. There have been economically successful grid storage projects for years now. Hornsdale in Australia earned back its construction costs in just two years [source]. That's probably close to an ideal econmic situation for grid storage, but as costs continue to drop more and more projects that wouldn't quite clear the normal profit bar will become economically feasible.