The word corruption, the only thing it means is - tax payers money is stolen by people with access to it. In the private sector this is known as theft. Corruption exists because governments exist and governments take our money and then it is used for personal gain of people with access to it.

All the things FTC gets its hands into are not corruption (they often become corruption once FTC gets involved).

> There are no trade secrets or anything special in RISC-V.

It's not what's in it that matters, it's what's not in it.

If the Chinese people use chips without backdoors then they will have a global competitive advantage.

Of course Americans could also do that but domestic spying is too important to the fat unearned paychecks of the DC intelligentsia.

FTC shouldn't exist in the first place, all of the things the Federal government does to hinder business is illegal, it should be the Federal government that receives letters from everyone, telling it to go to hell, not the other way around.

They only apply Enron standards to protesters and rioters, not corporate execs.

Worse case is the complex total back door hidden in the A5+ gpu silicon that Kaspersky responsibly disclosed.

100% deliberate and not engineering code. Apple was able to patch in a block - for this one that we know about.

It's believed NSA used this backdoor to spy on Tucker Carlson's Signal messages. If they will spy on an American journalist they will spy on SK military generals any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

SK knows what's up and if anyone at Samsung betrays them they have means and methods.

One more: since you can't upgrade later for $150 you have to pay $450 more up front if you'll ever want more.

Better to buy no-name OEM from Taiwan at this point than big American brands.

I'm so glad I got off the Apple bandwagon when they started ignoring the Mac for iPhone.

I actually had linux running on my MBP for a while before buying a PC laptop to when it was time to upgrade.

Every convenience feature is potential spyware when they could have done it cryptographically secure from the beginning.

I actually had a good chat with on-staff cryptographers back in the 90's. This one gal was a genius at elliptic curves

Those were the days.

I use rsync and syncthing to do those.

I happen to generate all my scripts out of puppet modules with reflection but for just a few devices you can absolutely roll it by hand.

> Sure it sucks, but it isn't dire.

Dropping the kids off at McDonald's at 7am in a snowstorm is indeed dire.

These providers usually have enforced monopolies which always come with wealth redistribution.

Fix all of the above problems before dunking on poor families subject to these policies.

Some of these comments make no sense in the reality that remote schooling is now mandatary and enforced by law.

Kids in poor families who need to be on Zoom 6 hours a day do not have other options claimed here.

Unemployment meetings, seniors' telehealth, etc. all fit similar patterns. There is often no choice given.

Fix those maybe before claiming that a 1GB cap is plenty.

> Wait. Why on earth are you using an account for television.

So you can watch your YouTube videos on your TV?

Cut off the pharmaceuticals for a few years and we'll have all-new politicians.

I stopped asking them after years of a "coming soon" ticket if they were going to support tor hidden services and they were like "no really, soon!" every time.

OK, Lucy.

Don't assume only one intelligence service here.

(it takes one guy a day to set this up).

Sure, Americans pay taxes and inflated costs of goods to provide military security for Europe, drug development, technology development, etc. so they have more money for healthcare, arts, and leisure.

Everybody should need to work less as technology and productivity increases while maintaining the same standard of living, but nooooo, we can't have nice things.

Materialism plays a small part but GenZ has correctly realized that they can never live as well as their grandparents under this regime.

Boomers are happy to shout "avacado toast!" at them from their country-club golf carts.

I wrote here about coming Age Wars a decade ago. Let's hope somebody comes to thier senses.

it is called inflation - expansion of the money supply that accumulated over the years (bail outs, social payouts, covid.. ) In terms of gold HDD prices fell.