41.9 degrees Celsius is approximately 107.42 degrees Fahrenheit.

44.9 degrees Celsius is approximately 112.42 degrees Fahrenheit.

Thank you.

I was about to comment that Slashdot is a US centric site, and if someone posts an article like this, they really NEED to translate the temperatures into F too, as that per usual, you're lucky for Slashdotters to read the whole summary, you can't then expect for us all to open up another tab and start googling for a damned translation of the temperatures.

40C doesn't mean squat to me...but 107F + does.....

Anyway...thanks for the info!! It actually made the article mean something to me.

Healthcare must be operated as a public resource, not a private profit center. But the HMO parasite is deeply, deeply embedded in America and it damned well won't go without a fight.

Well, American here....I'll say "No:Yes" in answer to you here.

As others have mentioned, for an example of how well the federal govt in the US runs healthcare, just look at the VA system.

No thank you, I would NOT want to depend on that system for my healthcare...I'm doing MUCH better now with things as they are, even as screwed up and $$ as they are.

But for point #2, with HMOs...I agree....when those parasites came into the system, it blew up.

If there was some way we could go back to those days, when I was a kid...Dr.s largely hung their shingle out and generally worked with people as to what they could pay. And people could afford it.

Insurance back then was knows as "Major Medical"...and THAT is what is was used for...an emergency that you could not afford, like a heart attack or getting hit by a bus.

Why? No middle men...and not as much litigation by $$$ grubbing lawyers. Dr's today have to keep rates up high to fight off the scum lawyers.

Are there bad Drs and malpractice? YEs, but not to the extent of litigation levels we see today.

If we could get the for profit corporations out of hospitals and go back to older ways....it would be much nicer.

But an emphatic NO to having the Feds run nationalized healthcare. We have it and it is NOT pretty.

Not only that, but the US could NOT afford to give that same level of BAD care to everyone in the US, it would bankrupts us even faster than were going into debt now as it is.

Again, very American. We all need money, but for some cultures it is not the top priority.

Well, we are talking about the US and American culture here, so the comments are apropos.....

So, what other cultures think or prioritize doesn't mean jack shit in this conversation....

As part of a deal to raise the country's debt limit last year, Congress required changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, a 54-year-old bedrock law that requires the government to consider environmental effects and to seek public input before approving any project that necessitates federal permits. That bipartisan debt ceiling legislation included reforms to the environmental law designed to streamline the approval process for major construction projects, such as oil pipelines, highways and power lines for wind- and solar-generated electricity. The rules released Tuesday, by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, are intended to guide federal agencies in putting the reforms in place.

But they also lay out additional requirements created to prioritize projects with strong environmental benefits, while adding layers of review for projects that could harm the climate or their surrounding communities. "These reforms will deliver smarter decisions, quicker permitting, and projects that are built better and faster," said Brenda Mallory, chair of the council. "As we accelerate our clean energy future, we are also protecting communities from pollution and environmental harms that can result from poor planning and decision making while making sure we build projects in the right places."

So...the Biden administration took law passed and signed by Biden, and THEN added and manipulated this law to fit their ideas and goals?

This sounds exactly like what the SCOTUS has been doing slapping the hands of executive agencies that were essentially making law up to suit themselves....this time, it appears the Biden admin is going to before even pushing this to the executive agencies?

Ugh...I see lawsuits coming.

Congress GAVE him some clean energy bits in the law, but they couldn't be satisfied with that and are trying to basically make new law that suits them more?

The executive branch isn't supposed to legislate, they don't make law.....yet, here they are apparently trying to again.

(I miss that).

This stuff, will never be 100% safe from external enemies, nor people with casual access being nosey and potentially getting into your business.

That's bad enough for medical....sure it could happen in paper record days, but it was a bit more difficult in many areas that you had to gain physical access to the facility, access to the storage area, looking around with people working around there with you, etc.

None of this was from the safety of a keyboard 1000's of miles away...

And as for mental info...geez, I'd NEVER go somewhere where I told people things it was even written down, much less stored in a database system.

You're just asking for potential life ruining situations by doing that. I guess if you're hearing voices and hallucinating, that's one thing...but someone that is basically sane, giving out their deepest, innermost thoughts to someone recording it...well, you're risking things there.

I wouldn't do it...

And none of this I mentioned, was concerning major efforts today, to gather than info and put you on "a list".

That stuff is happening now....

... and her job is to make sure this country has a diverse, plentiful, and cheap energy supply.

The trouble is, this administration is filled with extreme green folks that are determined to take the US off fossil fuels....whether we are ready or not with alternate sources.

That ready with alternate sources includes comparable cost/pricing so as not to raise prices and increase inflation even more.

This makes you a huge part of the problem. Instead of using your own money and saving, you're perpetuating a continual cycle of debt. You're sitting there telling everyone you _should_ live your life on credit.

Apparently you missed the part where I said I paid off my card balances EVERY month....basically like spending cash, however, I get cash back on those cards (not mentioned in OP), so it actually saves me a little.

In no way was I advocating going into CC debt...I was advocating just the opposite.

Maybe go back and re-read what I said.

"Nobody stops you from making your own copy of Wikipedia with your own theories about climate change"

I think you're missing the point. The aim to prevent or deter the expression of some ideas is widespread in the West. It also is increasingly successful in recent decades. How this aim is realized, who has the aim and the power to realize it, are different in Western societies because their institutions are different, and so the aim is tried for and achieved in different ways.

When looking at societies its important to realize that changes are not always what they seem, often they are more of the same, but in a very different and disguised manner. Often you can only tell by looking at the disguised effects. In the former Soviet Union, for instance, the expression of dissent was treated as a mental illness by confinement. How different was that from incarceration and internal exile under Czarism? Recently schools and medical professionals have started to treat evidence of gay sexuality as as gender dysphoria, something to be treated. We arrive at the same point by different means, with the same underlying idea. In the Soviet case its that Marxism-Leninism was indubitable revealed truth. In the gender case the idea is lurking that heterosexuality is the true normal and that difference is a medical condition.

The point about Wikipedia is not that you can start up your own. The point is that Wikipedia plays a certain role, as does Facebook and Twitter, and it therefore attracts the activist impulse to prevent the publication of dissent in those forums. What has happened in the English speaking world is that some ideas are now beyond criticism in many forums. To express gender critical views in private can lead to firing, as Maya Forstater found in England. It can also lead to workplace agitation which forces you out of your employment, as Kathleen Stock and Suzanne Moore found, one in a university, the other in the Guardian. Bari Weiss found the same at the NY Times. It can also lead to meetings being impossible to hold, if you are engaging the wrong speakers who will voice the wrong ideas. Think about the issues which arose with the recent meeting of conservative politicians in Brussels. Serious attempts, partially successful, were made to prevent it from being held. Think about the opprobrium which greeted any dissent from whole hearted endorsement of BLM.

But, you will say, Forstater could get another job. So could Stock, so could Moore. Yes, maybe. Not the point, is it? The point is that a university or a newspaper or an employer which play important roles in society have become dissent free zones.

The point is, we may think, we have always assumed, that in the West there is free speech, and that is a key difference between the Western liberal democracies and China, Russia, North Korea etc. Yes and no. Yes, there is no state board of censorship. There is no index of banned books. Don't be so sure. Is a book banned when privately owned publishers all refuse it because they are afraid of the consequences of accepting it? Its not the same as being obliged to be a member of the Writers Guild. No, its not the same as what Russia is doing and what China does. There really is a difference between the UK's attempt to clean up the Internet on the grounds of child safety, and the Great Firewall of China, or the wholesale elimination of historical narratives on some subjects by Russia.

But it rhymes.

"In other words, the DMA is lobbing some serious stink bombs into Apple's walled garden."

This is the point. The Commission has an agenda of which this is part. Its not financial. Its to open the walled garden. Its not to compel anyone to buy or use anything. Its to make the iPhone as open a platform as an Android phone for those that want to exercise the freedom that openness will give.

"The EU is simply picking on Apple because none of their member countries can contribute much to technology, and Apple has a lot of money, so they're being total GOONS."

No, they are not interested in raising money from Apple. Their aim is much more serious, it really is totally to demolish the walled garden.

For some reason most Apple fans don't want the freedoms this will bring. But whether they want them or not, whether they use them or not, they are going to get them.

If may be that a lot of buyers of GM cars are very happy to buy only GM parts, and do not want to be able to buy from third parties in the aftermarket. All the same, the FTC makes sure they can, and then whether they do or not is up to them. Back in the day, people might have only wanted to buy their PBX from ATT or the local Bell company. When deregulation happened, no-one obliged them to go elsewhere. All that happened was that they had a choice whereas earlier they did not.

Same thing, just its the Commission doing it.

It is of course different if its done by a state agent acting on behalf of state censorship.

But Wikipedia in English is heavily censored and rewritten by activists, presumably acting as individuals or loose associations of them. Try expressing sketpicism on Wikipedia about whether there is a climate emergency and whether wind and solar are the solution, or part of it. If your entry lasts 24 hours that will be a miracle. So don't get too enthusiastic and complacent about the English version either.

As for the impulse to censor (and indeed criminalize) speech, the recent tendency in the English speaking world to criminalize something called 'hate speech' has quite strikingly, as expected, moved increasingly into attempts to criminalize dissent from a given approved line.

The latest and most striking example of this is the Scottish Hate Crime and Public Order Act. The Scottish government's own account of this is that

"New measures to tackle the harm caused by hatred and prejudice come into force today".

You notice the objective: to tackle the harm caused by hatred and prejudice. Not to tackle the harm that can be done from acting on hatred and prejudice, the aim is not to penalize that. Its to tackle the thing itself, hatred. Also prejudice. Good luck with that!

There is a BBC summary here, pretty reasonable account:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/art...

The result of this was that the day it came into force, the calls starting coming in, and in the first week reached 8,000.

The question of course is what is "hatred and prejudice". In Scotland it appears to include doubting that men can be turned into women. In English universities it can apparently include expressing skepticism about veganism while on the phone in one's own room, but unknowingly being overheard from the room next door:

https://freespeechunion.org/un...

In the English speaking world we do not have the kind of officially sanctioned censorship and penalization of some kinds of speech that the post cites in Russia. There is of course something similar in China. And in the US at least there is the Consititutional protection of the First Amendment.

But a similar role is being played now by the small army of zealots in the English speaking countries who define disagreement as hate, and vilify and target anyone publicly dissenting from the party line. And by 'target' is meant attempts to drive people out of their place of employment (the Guardian is notorious for this) or calling the police who then will record the accusation as a non-criminal hate incident.

Harry Miller for instance (obviously a Monty Python fan) received such a visit after tweeting:

âoeI was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Donâ(TM)t mis species me.â Miller also tweeted: âoeTranswomen are women. Anyone know where this new biological classification was first proposed and adopted?â. He later wrote that the statement was âoebollocksâ."

https://www.theguardian.com/so...

So don't sit there reading about barbaric and authoritarian Russia and think that everything in the West is hunky dory. It isn't. It happens through different mechanisms, but it still is happening.

Apple still has room to improve the hardware in many ways. Most important is that it's not high resolution enough to use as a second monitor for your laptop. Text is harder to read than on the laptop screen itself. This is a big disappointment.

Oh no...THAT was one of the things I was thinking of as a reason to buy one...along with how you described the large movie experience (especially on an airplane).

Well, darn...maybe the next version.

I need to go down and at least do a demo and see for myself.

You know what isn't social? Having a physical barrier that isolates you from others. So while Apple will tout the device's AR capabilities, show us ads with fathers participating in birthday parties while wearing the headset, and slap some creepy eyes on the outside that fail to make eye contact, so far as everyone around you is concerned you're just wearing a VR headset. The world doesn't care that you say you can see it, it can't really see you because you made a choice to physically separate yourself. You're distant. You're disconnected. You're removed. You're not present in the moment, no matter how much you insist to the contrary. And that's fine when you're at home playing games or watching a movie by yourself, but it's a really tough sell out in the rest of the world where things are social.

My use case for this thing...and I'm still considering it....is EXACTLY for times when I want to not be social and want to isolate from surroundings.

There are good times for this you know.

I'd LOVE it for flying on an airplane...tune out the whole plane and watch movies on a HUGE screen.

I'd like this also while on travel, in my hotel room to be able to open up multiple large screens to do work, browse the web, etc.

Hell, if you were forced to come into the office to work, it might be nice to cut the world off....people use headphones for just that, why not do the visuals too?

Remember, there ARE good times to be alone you know.

I'd be pretty sad if I were stupid enough to finance $3900 on a gadget with no financial return potential. No idea what the terms are for such financing, but at 6% over 36 months (eg. similar to what you'd pay for a car loan) you're paying an extra $500 on that price. That's insane to me.

Well, if you have the Apple Card and finance through Apple Pay, I think you can get from 12-24mos interest free....

I bought my Mac Pro that way and got an additional 3% off which covered part of the sales tax.

I paid it off....no interest.

Dunno if this guy did it....if not, guessing he IS paying interest which would suck.

If you don't have the cash to buy the latest gadget for entertainment, you shouldn't be buying it. I have no sympathy.

Yep....the only way I "finance" is something like if they give me 6-12-24 months interest free, then sure I'll take it.

BUT I only do this when I have cash in hand to buy it....I'll then take that cash and invest it in my market account of high yield savings and earn a bit of interest on it while making my monthly payments....

Going into debt is never a really good idea in general.