And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.

You misunderstand wealth.

Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.

Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.

So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.

The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".

These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.

In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.

It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.

Now THAT is a rare example of an actually smart law.

No government funds needed to enforce the policy, while the stores have an incentive to post the right prices. Why the max $5 though?

My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.

Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.

Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.

Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.

That's in character, sure; but what's the paper-thin excuse for that being a cogent policy idea?

The same excuses to impose tariffs because "DRUGS!" while pardoning drug kingpins. Or sinking boats because "DRUG BOATS" while again, pardoning drug kingpins and smugglers.

The excuse is that its pay to play. Those drug king[ins paid Trump for pardons. China pays Trump for chips. As long as you're paying Trump, you're good.

If you think Meta doesn't already censor accounts all over the world on behalf of the United States, I have a space elevator to sell you. For example, make an off-hand comment about how easily Canada could manufacture a dirty bomb as protection against US aggression and watch limitations start to be applied to your activities. Meanwhile, Russian bot pages continue to be treated as honoured guests.

no problem.

Not just Kafka, but also stream processing of Kafka originated data.

We use it to run a cities public transit realtime data system (track vehicles, display information on realtime maps, public information displays, make predictions), and it works well - there are features which I think are snake oil (schema registry for example), but its been rock solid, performant, and the UI is decent.

Keeping people employed just because is probably the reason the USPS is having the issues it already has. Cutting the workforce and cutting every other day of delivery could make a HUGE impact to their bottom line. Likely the same mail trucks could carry and deliver two days of mail every other day without needing to put more trucks on the road.

No, the USPS is having to fully fund pensions for people not born yet is what's causing the problems. If you look at the profitability graph it nosedives around year 2000 or so purely because Bush Jr and the GOP were trying to kill it by forcing it to fully fund pensions for the next 75 years or so, which includes funding pensions for people not born nor employed by the USPS.

Most companies aren't doing this which means if they go under, there goes all the pension funds. USPS pensions being fully funded means those people keep their funds when USPS goes under.

It's basically been a way to kill the USPS without killing the USPS directly.

Before this ruling came out, the USPS was really quite profitable, and those profits could've been used to fund the pensions until the obligation was met rather than force them to pay for pensions fully by going into debt.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

The other problem with biodiesel is there isn't enough of it. The only reason it works right now is few people are converting used oils to biodiesel for their own private purposes. If you're doing it at an industrial level there just isn't enough feed stock available.

And it doesn't work too well in cold environments - you have to start the engine using regular diesel because biodiesel when cold is basically a cold gloopy fat blob and needs regular diesel to be thinned out.

Hardly. There's no memory manufacturers in any way restricting production to "manufacture this shortage". They may be price fixing (they have a history of that) but right now they are producing memory at full tilt.

And if you ask why they didn't invest years ago, can you please tell me tonight's winning lotto numbers since you are so good at predicting the future?

They are also not increasing production - because the past decade they've done so and gotten screwed over - prices spike, they increase production and then demand collapses, leaving a huge oversupply of RAM and them having to dump it for low prices. So they aren't producing anymore memory than they normally could.

Instead they're switching production to things like HBM needed for the AI chips and such.

How do you know that?

Being from Google, I rather assume the opposite - and that they probably focused their engineering effort to make sure the reduced battery life didn't give their corporate surveillance activities away.

I'll find out in mid January, lol - it's en route on the Ever Acme, with a transfer at Rotterdam. ;) But given our high local prices, it's the same cost to me of like 60kg of local filament, so so long as the odds of it being good are better than 1 in 8, I come out ahead, and I like those odds ;)

That said, I have no reason to think that it won't be. Yasin isn't a well known brand, but a lot of other brands (for example Hatchbox) often use white-label Yasin as their own. And everything I've seen about their op looks quite professional.