It was always a Potemkin village.

Why does Microsoft care what browser you use? Why do they even make a web browser? Revised: Why do they bother taking someone else's open-source browser and rebranding it with their logo?

So it's good.... except for the bad shit.

Yeah, it would probably take legislation forcing all of them to post and advertise prices including taxes. If everyone had to do it no retailer would be disadvantaged by being the first.

That said, I think it's a bad idea, unless retailers also have to itemize out the taxes on receipts so that consumers can see how much tax they're paying, which typically doesn't happen in Europe, as far as I've noticed (other than VAT, which is often itemized out on some purchases so that foreigners can get a VAT rebate). I think it's important that people see the taxes they pay so they can evaluate whether they think they're getting good value for their tax money. This is why I also oppose corporate taxes and any other sorts of taxes that are ultimately borne by individual taxpayers but are hidden by layers of obfuscation. Actually, there's another reason to oppose corporate taxes: Corporate taxes delegate to corporations the decision of how to allocate the cost of the taxes between customers, employees and shareholders. That allocation is an important public policy matter, and it should be decided by legislation, not by corporate bosses.

To be clear, I think there are a variety of public services that absolutely should be funded by taxpayers, and wholeheartedly support taxation for those purposes. But exactly what should be taxpayer-funded, at what level and with what efficiency are all important questions that voters should have input into, and that requires that they actually see what taxes they're paying.

ARM's TrustZone is definitely more secure than the alternatives on Intel/AMD, but TrustZone is also subject to side-channel attacks. To a first approximation, it's impossible to run two workloads on the same CPU and keep them perfectly isolated from one another.

However, I don't think any of these secure enclave concepts are relevant in this case. The way you'd build a private AI cloud is not to run it in enclaves (which are essentially just security-focused VMs) on CPUs that are running other tasks, the way you'd do it is to devote a bunch of CPUs solely to running the private AI workloads. Then your isolation problem becomes the traditional ones of physical access control to the secure machines and securing data flowing into and out of those machines over network connections.

Moore's law is over. TSMC 14A node is pretty much the end of the road with the current 2nm node close to it in terms of performance. nVidia has also got packaging quite good, so the chips can't really get packaged much closer. In other words, compute capability per rack is not going to increase very much beyond the next couple years, and even from now to then there won't be a whole lot of improvement. I think old data centers will still have some value, just less than the final ones a few years from now. If the AI hype holds, they will all be needed. When the hype dies, they will all be worth less.

For an additional fee.

THAT, I believe, is the main part of this change. Ryan Air already doesn't even break even on the pure ticket cost. It's the horrendous extra fees that make it profitable.

Which cost, exactly?

We are speaking about paper boarding passes the customers themselves print. The gates read the barcode and don't care if it's on paper or a phone screen.

So which cost, exactly?

That's putting it mildly.

Smartphones can crash, run out of battery or any number of problems. On important trips I usually have a paper boarding pass with me as a backup. Only needed it once, but I'm just one person with fairly normal travel amounts. Multiplied over the number of people flying Ryan Air, statistically speaking this happens constantly.

Frankly speaking, I think it's a gimmick to milk the customers for more money. Someone at Ryan Air has certainly done the calculation, estimated how many people can't access their boarding pass at the gate for whatever reason, and how much additional money they can make by forcing all these people to pay the additional fee for having it printed.

Credulous boomers that think it's 1950 and the people inside their teeve^H^H^H^H^Hcomputer are benign white folk like them.

>> The analysts project $300 billion in high-grade bonds going toward AI data centers next year.

I'm not sure who is rating these bonds "high grade" because it's the worst investment around.

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.