It will be hard to move away from China. It will take time. But we really need to: for moral reasons and economic security.

The idea that prosperity brings some kind of democratic capitalism really did make sense many decades ago. All the evidence pointed that way. Sadly, China has disproven that idea. It's time do disassociate ourselves with them, including deep into the supply chain. If we want a TV not made with Chinese concentration camp labor, we're going to need to ban import of Japanese and Korean goods that are in turn made by Chinese forced labor. Because today, all TV manufacturers are guilty. Shoes are bad too.

We need to stop rewarding totalitarianism with trade. And we desperately need to entirely cut of the flow of Chinese propaganda into US platforms. Complete ban on taking money from China on any social media platform of any kind.

If the Chinese people ever heroically manage to overcome their government, we can return to shared prosperity. But right now we're just enriching their oppressors.

Everyone still has guns, but the latest US fighters have like 5 seconds of ammo. It's mostly just tradition at this point, though perhaps is a way to make sure there is a gun designed in just in case doctrine is wrong.

Thus my caveat above. In any serious conflict, anything in the AIR without friendly IFF just dies. It's the only way to use the advantage of modern aircraft - fire at very long range before the enemy gets lockon. It's only when you don't know whether a potential target is hostile that you'd get close, and as I said a drone would be great for that, assuming a good camera feed back.

Except that dogfighting hasn't actually been relevant to air combat for about 40 years. When missiles were somewhat new, they could be avoided or decoyed, but those days are past. These days anti-air missiles are quite reliable (except the man-portable ones). The only way planes are going to get close enough for a dogfight is if, for political reasons, the fight doesn't start until they're already in close. Which, come to think of it, is a great mission for drones: fly close to an unknown but probably enemy aircraft to get visual confirmation, and loiter in harm's way waiting for permission to engage.

Odd, this was not the post I was replying too. Sorry about that,

Semi trucks in particular won't be replaced any time soon. Even if Tesla dies eventually get something self-driving, and we know it won't be fully self driving for years, trucks are damned expensive. The semi you've paid for is cheaper than the new self-driving semi you haven't. It'll be a 10-20 year placement cycle.

We're far from robots doing all the work, for al the "robots terk our jerbs" panic on Slashdot. It will be decades before that's practical. And people aren't going to make the substantial capital outlay to move to robots at that sale without some reasonable expectation of return. People worry that prices won't fall and "the rich" will keep all the money,, which as never happen and obviously can't happen (if people can't buy what you make, obviously they won't). On the other hand, it's also got to be a good deal for the owners - thy need make enough to pay for the robots, and make a bit more profit than they do with human labor. And this is what has always happened with automation.

Taxing production to give to people to buy that production is just a circular argument. You just raise prices by the same amount you give people, and taxing production directly is just the wrong way to do it. Stick with taxing income (and dividends, gains, etc). If "the rich" are actually making money, then tax that, not some sort of robot tax. And always remember that "the rich" here include most retirees.

It's also important to remember that the vast majority of current social program spending in the US is for the old - Social Security and Medicare - and UBI can in no way replace that.

You've missed the core premise of quantum mechanics: there's a difference between what we observe, and a more fundamental reality represented by the wave equation.

The wave equation is entirely deterministic, and evolves over time in a simple, linear fashion. However, we have no access to it. It's not even theoretically possible to know the state if this fundamental reality with any sort of precision. Observation is non-deterministic, and it's limited in the information available. So, while there is a perfectly deterministic underlying reality, it's irrelevant. It you collect all the information about the universe it's theoretically possible to collect, you cannot make accurate predictions of what you will observe in the future.

This is why quantum mechanics is all statistics and linear algebra. You have an observation, you calculate a distribution curve of what the underlying reality might be, you evolve that in time with linear algebra, and then you calculate the distribution of what future observations might be. Not necessarily computed in that order, but you're always describing future observations as the square of some probability distribution of some linear algebra.

Given their response was to create blackouts, it's pretty clear they failed. Only reasonable answer is to move out of California into a first-world nation where the power stays on.

This is just a problem for how we interpret the math, not a problem with the physics itself. In one way of looking at things, one person has become entangled with the system while another hasn't yet. It's not really a problem. The classical analog would be "my second measurement will be close to my first, but since you don't know what I measured, you just have to guess what you'll measure". Not a surprise.

This is a problem for the interpretation that the "collapse" is a real physical event, rather than simply a change in what one would predict for future observations. There's never been universal agreement about this, and it's not really scientific: no one thinks the collapse is itself observable. It's not a falsifiable hypothesis, it's a way of making sense of what the math is telling us.

There's a lot of trying to hang on to 100 year old ideas about reality that lingers on. People still talk about "wave or particle", but it's been 50 years since those ideas were anything more than handy abstractions. There are just fields. A particle is a useful way of referring to a persistent lump in a field, but you can't go too far with that way of thinking about things, it breaks down in all sorts of cases. When you drop the idea of particles with specific identities or locations, most of quantum mechanics stops seeming weird.

Apple has less market dominance than Microsoft did when the shoe was on the other foot. The question is: is it enough less to satisfy the courts. Preventing anyone from running a competing store on the iPhone is going to get the courts' attention, given Apple's market share.

On the Google side I'm not sure how important the courts are. Epic will surely make an easy-to-sideload store for Android. Sideloading just isn't that hard on Android. Now if Google blocks vendors from installing both the Google Play store and any competing store on Android, that's the sort of anti-competitive practice that burned Microsoft, but is the market share strong enough to make that matter?

There's also the argument that if there's an oligopoly that blocks all competition, trust-busting can be appropriate even without overt collusion.

Don't count of Russia as a precedent elsewhere. A "monopoly on the Apple store" only means anything insomuch as the Apple store runs on a monopoly platform. Seems borderline to me, a d I'm sure it will be a long time in court. Both sides have well-funded lawyers though, so it should get a fair hearing.

Obviously, Epic isn't merely "violating a contract" at random. They are contenting Apple's right to charge a 30% tax on everything sold through an iPhone. Don't be disingenuous.

Epic is trying to establish their own store, with the deal being offered as paying 10% to Apple. Much like Steam's 30% vs the Epic store's 12% on PC. Does Apple get to set their own terms, are are they an effective monopoly? That's the matter for the courts.

That has never been true. Android has significant market share, however, so Apple is not a monopoly. They may, however, have monopoly power, which is a lower bar and requires only market dominance, or monopoly in a region or the like. It's not clear that they do, but they're acting like they do, which won't help.

Assuming Epic finds a reasonably quick fix for Android, they don't have that big of an incentive to return on Apple's terms. Of course, that is an assumption, but I do expect there will be an easy-to-sideload Epic Store app for Android soon.

One advantage Epic has here is that they're privately held (and making tons of money regardless). There's no activist shareholders to come after them if revenue takes a dip for one quarter. There are large investors who may get insistent, of course, but a private company with lots of revenue can take a stand on principle (such as it is) better than a publicly owned one.
 

People buy phones for the apps. Yes, iPhones have a new appeal a jewelry, but that only goes so far. A high school kid who spends all day playing Fortnight won't want a new iPhone, and the game is immensely popular with that age group. How big of a deal that will be long term is anyone's guess, but people form lifelong brand affinities in the late high school and college years.