Yeah that seemed pretty confusing. Of all the things a bitrate reduction would harm, a connected thermostat should be pretty low on the list. Reduced video stream quality & reduced download speeds make sense as consequences of lower bandwidth.

I wonder if Uber is making money on anything because the numbers I saw say they lost nearly three billion dollars last year and I doubt this does much to improve the situation.

I agree. The "right" rests on a misunderstanding of "legal tender". It means it's valid for exchange, accepting it is not compulsory for a private business. The US Treasury has a page on the topic:

https://www.treasury.gov/resou...

"There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services."

This ignorance leads people to assume they can pay in buckets of pennies and they think they can legally force the receiver to accept it as payment.

I'm not a fan of going cashless, I just don't think faulty arguments should be used to stop businesses.

The headline seems pretty inflammatory and off-base. I'd look at TFA but the link goes to some other story that doesn't mention Coinbase.

The way you say it makes sense but their opacity about it seems pretty weird. I don't understand why it doesn't just display the correct adjusted value in the first place.

It worked pretty well for that length of time because more was being mined to make up the difference of increasing wealth and it's still being mined at a thousand tons a year. Once bitcoins are mined out the parallel stops working on a far shorter time scale.

The original decision to develop the RD-180 in the first place was because of a government cooperation with US and Russia. General Dynamics was paid to integrate the engine into their Atlas rockets. Maybe they weren't forced but there might be nuances that imply some level of pressure.

Despite what the press release implies, no RD-180 engines were made in the US. ULA had revived the idea a couple years ago but that has taken a back seat to BE-4 and AR-1 programs.

They're hoping to collect marketing data. I am skeptical that the marketing data is worth that but even so it strikes me as a bad deal for everyone.

Also, I'll believe the author is earnest about killing subsidies, I would have expected a mention of the fossil fuel subsidies too, including sweetheart resource extraction deals on federal lands. Or say Ford's still-unpaid bailout loan from the US government. Or ULA's expensive military satellite launch business. It just strikes me as an easy hit piece rather than an honest means to do away with subsidies.

Elon's gone on record several times saying he'll give up subsidies if everyone else gives up theirs.

All car companies can access the subsidies for electric cars. You can say Elon benefits more since he's only building electric cars, most of the big automakers have only been building half-assed compliance cars. Because Elon didn't start out with a huge car company he couldn't start out building a cheap car because it takes an enormous amount of money to develop a vehicle and everything needed to build it. Roadster proved an electric car can be interesting. Model S & X was needed to help scale up and develop the next thing. Model 3 is not *cheap* but it's getting closer to what the "average person" can afford. I suspect whatever follows Model Y will be even more accessible. He needed the Gigafactory battery plant to help push the cost of batteries down faster.

The article saying the same about SpaceX is pretty fuzzy if you're talking about subsidies. NASA contracted companies to ship cargo and (soon) people to the space station rather than developing it in house. The original commercial cargo contract was helpful for developing SpaceX's commercial satellite launch business. If it weren't for the Commercial Cargo & Commercial Crew programs, all the US ISS launch business would have gone to ULA's even more expensive rockets and Russia for expensive rides to the space station.

What's daft is the gaming talk when it's an average *two hours* a week out of 60 hours of leisure time. Watching TV rates at 17 hours on the same chart. The charts don't show hours worked so it's like either assumptions on gaming taking away from working hours or they didn't bother to present the information they're working from.

It really seems wrong to use the internet and a livestream platform to make a linear broadcasts. I liked the Internet because it helped break the linear "timeslot" format for entertainment. And twitch doesn't seem to have a way to go to the beginning of a show either.

They pretend to eat each other but send big bills to their clients instead. Sharks win.

If you consider Slashdot to be reporting. TFA does have a much better headline.

There's some truth to that, but being on a salary is very different from fabricating fraudulent payment documents.