In my lifetime you could open a bank account with just a name, ditto for renting an apartment, and pay for everything in cash.

This guy is screwed unless he's only a guest of a patron.

Crime was lower and people were more responsible back then too.

All this control grid surveillance still hasn't caught the Building 7 people.

Maybe it's possible to decide a course of action was a bad idea and reverse it?

Unfortunately, I think at least a *part* of it has indeed been the unintended consequences of Obama-era legislation.

From the 70's through the 90's, we had station wagons. They were the family car, along with the minivan. They got 20-30 MPG, and could fit between five and eight passengers, depending on model. In the 2000s, minivans and SUVs became a bit more popular, but the station wagon still existed.

Then, the MPG mandates came. Cars had to get a certain amount of MPG, irrespective of other factors (e.g. not MPG/passenger). A car that fit seven passengers simply couldn't physically make that possible. So, the station wagon died...and instead of getting 30MPG in a car, people got 15-20MPG in an SUV, because they were classed as 'trucks', which weren't required to meet those criteria.

So, anyone who would have *wanted* a smaller, car-like way of transporting larger amounts of people or things, were stuck getting an SUV or a minivan. The squeeze continued, because the sedans that *did* exist had ever-more-stringent MPG requirements placed on them, which tended to involve design changes that reduced cargo space in many cases.

Also, with more and more higher vehicles, driving a regular car means getting blinded at night with floodlights from cars at mirror-level right behind (I *always* have to turn my side mirrors down to the point of uselessness in order to avoid getting blinded by SUVs behind me), and the feeling (irrespective of accuracy) that an accident between a sedan and an SUV involves the SUV walking away with a fender replacement, and the sedan driver ending up in the morgue.

I remember a few years ago, going to California for the first time and taking note of what was driving with me on Interstate 5. California - tree-hugging, forest-fire-having, $7/gallon-gasoline California...3/4 of the vehicles within visible distance were SUVs. Really? *ALL* of them wanted an SUV purely as status symbols, and wouldn't have preferred a station wagon, or something like it, if they were both available and common enough that they felt safe in them? Don't get me wrong, I love getting 51MPG in my Elantra...but you can't tell me that the laws intended to push automakers to make that possible didn't end up putting at least *some* pressure on consumers.

> Apple builds the handset, the OS and the store

Remember, when iPhone came out there was no App Store.

That was a separate business that came later, competition was prohibited, and by prohibiting competition rents were extracted.

This is called "illegal tying" in the law.

They're gonna install malware on your device but heaven forbid your website sets the wrong cookie, then they're fining you 6% of annual revenue.

When did East Germany win?

It's not just Germany. Most of Western Europe has been trending this way since the end of the Cold War, and the roots of such thinking were there long before Hitler was even an itch in his daddy's pants. A lot of Americans seem surprised by this. But Europe isn't America, and European governments have always had a more paternalistic view of their role than American political philosophy allows for. Further, most Europeans are fine with that. Americans gasp when they see such things, but this is just the latest line of code in the old European We'll keep you all safe, comfy, and warm under the blanket of *insert European capitol here* script. European thinking sees the welfare of their people in totality. So it's not just social welfare you get from such systems... "free" healthcare, subsidized housing, schools, etc... but you also get the rest of the "protection" philosophy... that you have to protect people from themselves. Speech codes, bans on anything the government deems "extreme", they're all part of the paternalistic view that you're protecting and providing for your people. Father's job is to feed, house, and keep the kids safe. Part of that is disciplining and setting rules that they have to follow, for their own good. With a few exceptions, this is No Bueno is most of North America, but again, Europe isn't America. It has a considerably different mindset.

Did you even RTFA?

"Our analysis takes advantage of administrative data from a large, urban, public college system "

The analysts are from Columbia, a private Ivy League school. Not the students. Since they're NYC based, the students they were studying were almost certainly from the public City University of New York system. Not at all hard to get into, and no need for "nepo baby" admissions.

There was a movie called Kill the Irishman, starring the late great Ray Stevenson, that had a similar plot point: Danny Greene borrows money from the Mob to start a restaurant. The courier tasked with delivering the cash decides to take it and buy heroin with it, re-sell it at a profit, and keep the difference for himself. Except the sellers are Feds in a honeypot scheme. The money is gone, the Mob demands Greene pay them back, he refuses, so the order goes out to "kill the Irishman".

It's over.

Microsoft could be making a killing on ex-VMware customers if they would just improve their management tools on Hyper-V. That keeps a lot of enterprise customers away. MS's management software for VM's is barebones compared to what VMware offers. But Broadcom seems determined to dare their customers to leave. They're pretty arrogant because they're confident most of their customers will pay the bigger bill instead of jumping to a far-less feature-rich solution.

l think this comment wins the thread.

The time has come for a European University CSE department group to reverse-engineer HDMI 2.1 and publish a compatible implementation on Github.

There's a solid history of this category of work going back 30 years.

They have certain legal protections for compatibility and public interest work.

This 1990's licensing model is antiquated and obsolete.

IEEE and ITU have abdicated their responsibility so sombody like Valve needs to do for transport spec what AV1 did for codecs and linux did for operating systems.

"A rising tide lifts all boats" is common among free marketeers and communists but opposed by fascists.

> Is there a huge difference between a criminal organization and a multinational corporation?

Yes, huge difference.

The common-law criminals running corporations get statutory protection from liability for the crimes they commit under corporate letterhead.

A regular mafia has individual liability.

It's a bit of both. They really think AI will eat those jobs, and they're almost certainly right. It's just a matter of getting the timeline, and better to be early than late on big defining trends.

The glorified scripting that we're calling AI, along with other automation and robotics, is going to end entire categories of jobs, with nothing visibly in sight to replace them. Unless you can get governments to mandate make-work positions, there's really no way to stop the waves of layoffs that are coming.

With the exception of Fox and the WSJ (and maybe Rogan), that list has nowhere near the reach or audience numbers as even the worst rated MS-Now program. For every thing you list there, there's at least one and usually more left-wing equivalents. And all of that is beside the point, because...

Uh, who is doing that? The whole point of the parent post was his assertion that conservatives are buying "all the media". It's a horseshit assertion, just like "Republicans claim they have no media presence".

Holy shit, you're either delusional or that's the most Stalinesque piece of spin I've seen in years. In what alternate fuckin' reality do you live in where Republicans have dominated the Big 3, NPR, Newspapers, wire services, etc etc etc?

What? Please give me an example of "all the news media". Even if Paramount would get WB and properties, and even if you count CBS as "Pro-Trump" now... which is laughable on its face... ABC, NBC, PBS, MS-Now, The New York Times, and the vast majority of city newspapers and wire services are in no way, shape or form owned by, or friendly to, conservatives. Add to that the considerable influence of magazines... Politico, etc... and any notion that "conservatives are buying up all the news" is farcical.