Right, I'm just saying, I can understand why some otherwise reasonably intelligent people might imagine they needed to involve their bank in the process of stopping the billing. Even if they don't have personal experiences with needing to resort to such measures, they've probably heard horror stories.

We're talking about the China market, so yeah, it's gonna be price. The Samsung model has whatever price it has, and there'll be a Songsom (or maybe Sumsang) phone for 30% less, and a Huawei one for less than that (because it's subsidized), and various trash brands no one has ever heard of selling for *much* less (because they have no QA at all and cut every corner it is possible to cut).

Unfortunately, our society (and, particularly, the lack of meaningful regulations regarding how complex the process of canceling a subscription is allowed to be) has trained a lot of people to believe that it's going to be extremely difficult to ever get a company to voluntarily stop billing you every month. Netflix may not be guilty of this, but enough other companies are, that it's what people *expect* based on their past experiences.

I came to the comment section on this story, expecting people to be talking about tactics like opening an account with a different bank and closing the old account entirely. It didn't even *occur* to me that the answer might be "click a red cancel button on your account page".

And, I mean, it's moot for me, personally. I have zero interest in Netflix, and also I don't use credit cards, at all. (I'm... atypical in some ways.) But Netflix actually making it easy to cancel, is not what I expected to read in the comments.

If it won't run on the 8008, I don't understand why anyone is even interested.

Ahem.

> Better than the USSR is a pretty low bar.

Eh, it depends what your standard of comparison is. The Soviets were (mostly) actually trying to govern their country, and sure they made a bunch of mistakes, and did a lot of harm in order to secure their own power, but they also did some important things right. They consistently promoted education, for example, particularly in the STEM fields. They built meaningful infrastructure that benefitted the country: roads, railroads, ports, etc. They pursued trade relations with other countries and genuinely attempted to build their nation's economy.

I'm not saying they didn't also do lots of stuff wrong, because they did, both accidentally and on purpose. But if you want a really *low* bar you look at stuff like the Khmer Rouge, or the Kim regime. They make the Soviets look magnificent by comparison.

> ... the two unidentified engineers were representatives
> of the FAA, which delegates some of its oversight
> authority and certification process to Boeing workers...

Wait, wait, wait.

The FAA delegated some of its oversight authority, to _employees_ of the company being overseen?

Seriously? Who signed off on THAT blatant conflict of interests, and why are we just now finding out about it? To me that seems worse than all the other corruption we've seen in this case, added together.

They didn't create it for the purpose of making money. They created it for narrative-shaping purposes. And while shutting down costs them most of what they do with the platform, at least it lets them at least keep up the "US government is censoring American citizens" rhetoric they've been pushing. Selling it wouldn't net them any gain at all, in terms of their narrative. They could get _money_ out of it, but that's not what they want.

TIL.

I always thought it jumped from 3.3 (which IBM was more directly involved in, and which was as stable as any version of DOS ever was) to 5.0 (which IBM were not involved with in any substantial way, and which was pretty buggy, especially in terms of floppy disk handling IIRC; later versions fixed some, but not quite all, of these bugs). I was not aware that there ever *was* a version 4.x.

It's also relevant that California voters are more pro-EV than other states (or most of them, anyway; not sure about Hawaii), so the political will to absorb this cost, is probably going to be there.

If they drop the prices on the EVs, they can sell more of them. Sure, the per-unit profitability will be even lower, but they can make up for it with higher sales volume!

It turns out that after the One Child Policy was changed to the Two Child Policy, the birth rate continued to decline. It then changed to a Three Child Policy, and the birth rate continued to decline. State-run media then started cranking out articles encouraging women (especially young women) to get married and have children, and the birth rate has continued to decline. And then 2020 happened, and the birth rate declined some more. So everything they've tried, hasn't started working yet.

First-world countries can generally compensate for reduced birth rates fairly easily, by allowing some amount of immigration. But if China wanted to do that, they would probably have to tone down the extensive xenophobic propaganda that they use to deflect blame for anything bad that happens, from the ruling party onto foreigners. And then they would have to find some other way to disperse all that negative energy, or it could turn into social unrest, which the CCP absolutely Does Not Want.

So they either have to find some way to reverse the trend and get the delta birth rate aimed upward again, or else they're going to have some serious population shrinkage. And it's worse than the raw "total number of people" number makes it look, because most of the population is already too old to have children. So even though it's going to be six or eight decades before it finishes happening, the population is going to dip to somewhere around half its current size, unless they can get the birth rate to *explode* upward. Raising it from its current value (1.16 births per woman if you believe the official figures, which may be padded, possibly significantly so) to 2 or even 3 births per woman, at this point, will still leave them with a very substantial population decline in the medium term (a few decades), and _then_ it would stabilize or start to rebound.

At this point, they know about the problem. It took them way too long to realize it, but now they have. They either just haven't figured out what to do about it yet, or they're hesitating to do it for fear of backlash. (At some point, I suspect, they will at least seriously entertain the option of making birth control illegal. And if that doesn't work, there are even more drastic measures that I wouldn't put past them.)

Some combination of social inertia, network effect, bundling, and the fact that most people are either not technically inclined enough or not brave enough to try installing an operating system themselves.

> Just throwing solar panels up on a roof without batteries seems to be a rare thing these days.

That is probably for the best, honestly. Energy storage capacity on the grid is something it's pretty hard to have too much of.

> No, they really are producing too much.

Yes, but with qualifications. It's not too much in any absolute sense. It's too much for the current grid infrastructure, and in particular, the amount of energy storage capacity that is available on the grid.

In other words, as usual, they got the cart before the horse and did things in the wrong order.

It's important to understand that statistics are statistics. Individual cases vary, widely.

My high school English teacher eventually (end of senior year) confided to me that he had been in the habit of grading my papers last, so he could have at least one good paper to look forward to and finish on a positive note. (He liked my writing style; not everyone does, but he did. My papers always got good grades from him.) My surname starts with E, FWIW.

My point is, your grade isn't mostly determined by your position in the alphabet. It's mostly determined by other factors. Position in the alphabet has a statistically significant effect (and yes, the nature and extent of that effect almost certainly varies from teacher to teacher), but it's a secondary effect; other factors have a bigger impact. I expect it's not especially relevant at either the top or bottom end of the grading curve, but in the middle of the curve, where there are a ton of average students who produce just about equally mediocre work, it could be a bigger deal. Sometimes. Up to a point. The first paper the teacher graded that was a comparison/contrast between Barbie and Ken, two weeks after that movie hit theatres, probably got a better grade than the thirtieth such paper, especially if all thirty of them made basically the same points. But the student who didn't see the movie and turned in a comparison/contrast between the Illiad and Beowulf probably got an A, and the student who spent five minutes right before class hastily scrawling a short incoherent paragraph about smoking weed, got the low grade it deserved. Probably.

If there's a take-home point, it's probably this: software that collects student assignments and then presents them to the teacher (or TA or whatever) for grading, should probably present them in a randomized order each time. Well, pseudorandomized. No point making it cryptographically sound; if you're going to go to that much trouble, skip the randomness and rig it so that each student's position in the order is as close as possible to an even distribution over time.