For those who live in the USA and never leave it - and I'm American and live in the USA so I am most definitely allowed to make that comment - they only care about the cost to fly. Everything else is negotiable. In other countries, there are nowhere near the number of airlines the USA has. Many countries have one major carrier and maybe there are a crappy regional carrier or two and that's it. Consolidation to survive is inevitable. Earlier in this century the USA had 6 major airlines, and that isn't counting Southwest as a "major" airline, and they had to consolidate down to 3 to survive. We need fewer low cost carriers. The government should have allowed Sprint (a bad airline) to merge with JetBlue (a good airline) because there's no room for them both in the market right now and JetBlue is going to be the survivor. I'm not really seeing how Spirit can survive more than 2-3 years. A liquidation bankruptcy seems like the eventual end down the road whereas if the merger had been allowed, maybe many jobs could have been saved.

I wish I had mod points to give you. I am a T-Mobile customer and I honestly expect that between now and 6 months from now they'll admit that the hackers got every bit of personal information T-Mobile had on their customers.

Another reason is that some if not all developing countries have really weak legal systems. I can't imagine anybody actually outsourcing to Russia any more, but the legal system there is extremely corrupt and if a foreign company tried to sue a Russian citizen in a Russian court, it wouldn't be difficult for the citizen to bribe the court to throw out the case. I've heard similar stories about India and how there are never any repercussions for Indian citizens who steal and sell information from foreign companies they work for.

It's hidden behind a paywall unfortunately so there's no point in providing a link, but within the past 4-6 weeks or so, the online sports website The Athletic did a profile of a guy who lost everything by sports gambling. He went into a lot of detail on what happened and his thought process during the gambling. He basically believed that he couldn't lose so when he did, he kept placing riskier and higher money bets to try to get back his losses. At times he did win, but that just fueled his belief that he could win his losses back. He got loans from reputable banks and credit unions to cover his losses and provide more money to gamble with. For example, let's say he's got $12,000 worth of losses. He'd just apply for a credit union loan for, say, $18,000 to cover the $12,000 losses and have $6000 to gamble with. And then if he loses the $6000, he gets a loan from a different bank or credit union for $25,000 to pay off the previous loan and still have some money to gamble with. It seemed to never occur to him that he could actually get worse off. Addiction is terrible and it often leads people in its grasp to make irrational decisions. It doesn't help that many gambling apps have celebrities pitch them or commercials without celebrities where the commercial implies that you simply can't lose at sports gambling and everybody around you is making money at it and able to offer you advice to help you win. See that guy in front of you at the grocery store check out line? He probably knows how many 3 point shots Miami is likely to hit tonight in their NBA game vs. Boston. They leave you with the impression that if you aren't gambling, you're passing up free money you could make gambling. For Americans, the late Pete Rose is an example of how addictive and destructive sports gambling can be. He got a life time ban from his sport and is ineligible to be elected to the baseball Hall Of Fame because he gambled on the sport while playing and managing in it. His ban allowed him to apply for forgiveness and reinstatement and his last appeal a few years ago ended with the ban continuing with the MLB commissioner stating that Rose was told in no uncertain terms that he had to stop all gambling on everything to have any chance at reinstatement and they could easily prove that he continued to gamble on various sports including MLB anyway. That's how addiction is.

Career (30+ years) IT guy here. I don't turn off computers in my house (currently have 2) unless I'm going out of town as I don't need to access them remotely. One of them is a Windoze box and it will install critical patches at night and reboot, but generally speaking if I'm in town, my computers are up. People act like the power costs for leaving them running all the time are astronomical, but they really aren't. Only in the summer do I ever pay $100 or more for electricity in a month.

Although I live in a large US metro area, my home town is a small town and I have a lot of friends on Facebook who still live there. They post all the time and I see their concerns. I think these 3 things played a role in Trump's win.
1) The economy or the perception that it's truly terrible and Trump can magically (somehow) turn it around. I don't know any former classmates who lost their jobs that live in my home town, but you would think that things are unbelievably terrible for them. They bitch non-stop about the price of gasoline, even though most of them drive maybe 10 miles a day at most. The bitch about the price of groceries, yet somehow they still have food. They are terrified of electric cars, yet as I said before, most drive 10 miles or less a day.
2) Biden letting a huge number of immigrants into the USA to apply for asylum is a far far bigger negative against the Democrats than anybody in the Democratic Party seems to realize. It is kind of crazy how many small town people, who have zero interaction with immigrants, are terrified of them. And the Dems don't get that the people who are actually most opposed to all immigration are the immigrants themselves. It's truly shocking how many legal immigrants or their kids want to close the door so nobody can follow them.
3) I'm not sure it played a big role, but there were really effective commercials that quoted Harris as saying the USA should pay for criminals to have free transgender surgeries. I looked into this and this has actually been US policy since 2019 and Trump was president then. But seeing her advocate for this from something she said maybe 3-4 years ago makes her look extremely out of touch. It looks like she will be the first candidate against Trump to lose the popular vote and it won't be close. This isn't a Reagan vs. Mondale defeat but it's a bad one for the Dems. Hard to see where they go from here.

So their statement is that the US government is overreaching in regulatory requirements and their response is to lay off 20% of the workforce. That sounds like a plan typical of the brainpower behind the crypto industry.

They don't seem to be actually holding back storage options on the iMac unless your desire is for something extremely large. I haven't taken apart one of the newer iMacs, but I can tell you that for Intel based models, although Apple strongly discouraged doing it, it was possible to open them up and replace the manufacturer supplied disk drive. Adding external storage via USB or Lightning is possible. Now memory is another story. I don't think they are purposely "castrating" it as you say so much as their chip design simply doesn't allow for more than 32 GB of memory for some design reason. As best I can tell, and I only did a quick look into this, the Mac Pros that support more memory actually run on Intel chips.

For those who don't know, SCMP has been the biggest English language newspaper in Hong Kong for a long time. It was a pretty reliable source until recent changes in the law made damn near everything that doesn't kiss China's ass a crime against the state. It's just a shill for the CCP now. I don't trust them for anything. One of their main opinion writers gets paid to write a daily column on how much America sucks, how Hong Kong is freer than it ever was in the past, and all glories to the CCP, the savior of Hong Kong. So yeah, anything they post about how China did something great should be suspect.

I've got an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X CPU and it also isn't supported for Windows 11. As best I can tell the CPU requirements are fairly arbitrary and I imagine my CPU can actually run it, but the real issue is that Windows 11 requires disk encryption and forcing this onto faster CPUs was a way to make it not suck as bad.

Both China and Russia like to make all sorts of claims about how great they are. I always ask the question - Does it really make sense if they truly did what they claimed to do that they announced it to the world? Almost always, the answer is "No".

Yeah. I know. I flew on Delta Airlines domestically this month. They told us to put our devices in airplane mode for take off and landing, but at all other times we were not only free to use them, they strongly encouraged us to use their free wi-fi. The in-flight entertainment system had more choices if you were willing to connect to wi-fi. For example, maybe you got all the episodes of a season of a streaming TV show vs. only 5 if you didn't connect. It seems like Delta and other airlines want some of your personal info that they can only get when you use their wi-fi.

So I used to work for a US based Fortune 500 company. My severance agreement may still be in effect, so I am not going to name them to be safe. But I can tell you this about them. They are in the bottom half of the Fortune 500. Although they are an international company, the vast majority of their business comes from the USA and Canada.

So this company, who I will call Acme-X, used to make us all do mandatory internal training every year. You had a list of online training you had to complete and a deadline to finish them in with the threat of termination hanging over your head if you missed the deadline. Every year we got bribery training. They really drilled it into us that not only could you as an Acme-X employee never, ever bribe someone to get business, you couldn't even give jobs to friends of foreign government officials to get business. So about 13 years ago, I had a girlfriend who was from China and she said to me "Did you know your company has an office in Shanghai?" I had no idea about that. So I looked it up on an internal website and sure enough, we did. It seems that maybe in the late 2000s, Acme-X bought out some Chinese company based in Shanghai to get a foothold in the Chinese market. It never really worked out. The impression I got was that doing business in China was so dishonest that there was no real way Acme-X could grow the business they bought or get new business going through them without paying bribes, and the training we employees got encouraged us to rat out people who were paying bribes, so they simply firewalled this Shanghai based business from the entire rest of the company. The Shanghai employees got no access to US based systems. We didn't use their employees for anything. And when we had company wide meetings via Zoom like technology, they never participated and weren't even invited to attend. My former employer still owns this office in Shanghai, but I have no idea why. I guess they can't give up the hope that maybe one day things will change in China and they can do legit business there.

BioNTech is a German company but they do sell vaccines in the USA. They got approved to sell a new COVID vaccine in the USA very recently. I'm guessing that the FDA is dragging their feet on approving trials, as they often do, because "people might die" if they have a bad reaction to the vaccine. Well, people are certainly going to die, at least some of them, if their lung cancer doesn't respond well to available US treatments, but stuff like that has never swayed the FDA in the past. They probably will approve it for US trials, but it might be 2-3 years from now.

Judge Ada Brown was appointed by Trump, so that for sure shows you that she passed the fealty to the Republican Party and its ideals test to get nominated in the first place.