Jesus Christ man, does anything in your day not somehow involve thinking about Trump?

Checks are a last vestige of a higher trust society.

I work for a European firm and they (their auditors) despise checks and can't comprehend how America can be so backward as to still use them.

Ironically we just had a customer involved in seven-digit fraud payments ...which couldn't have happened without electronic payments. Had they been "allowed" to pay us in checks like they used to, it simply couldn't have happened.

I'm not sure listing another random rule that allows the German state to arrest people is a "win".

In a way this is good news.
Seriously.

If Russia expected to win this conflict, it's unlikely even they are dumb enough to cause major nuclear leaks in territory they expect to hold.

It's possible this is a clue that they DON'T expect to do so, and we've advanced to the "well if I can't have it nobody can" scorched earth stage, which is very Russian.

Trump says thanks for letting him live free in there.

... For our elected officials, that is.

> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

"There are serious effects now"
Really?

As far as I can tell, the "current serious effects" are always handwavy either wrong or framing-dependent bullshit like:
1) "there's a drought in California" (entirely disregarding that we happen to have settled it in an extremely wet phase, while for the last 1000+ years the US SW has been much drier for *centuries* at a time), or
2) every time it rains in Charleston "global warming is making hurricanes worse" or "...more frequent" or both (both of which have been repeatedly debunked as an artifact of our North-Atlantic-Data focus, in regards to both 'severe' storms and total hurricane energy, EITHER in the NAtl or globally), or
3) the 'look at all the people that die from heat!' (invariably after a hot week in summer; again routinely and repeatedly debunked by statistics that show 6-10x more people die from cold than heat whether we're talking regionally or global scales).

So please, elaborate these 'serious effects NOW'? What did I miss? The 'sinking islands' that aren't actually sinking?

Steve Lehto has a good video about this.

In Michigan the Lemon Law applies to problems that 'reduce the value to the consumer'.

Some people are attempting to return their cars over these popup ads. IIRC it was GM that was much more aggressive but I might have that detail wrong.

This pattern keeps re-emerging.

Online payment systems want your bank login details.

Facebook was infamous for scraping your IMAP account for contact information.

etc.

The implications for security are so severe I wouldn't mind if this were illegal, but certainly it should be legal for banks or cell providers to terminate online accounts of people who share their credentials, no matter if - or especially if - they are with other large corporations. How many times has T-Mobile been hacked in the past two years?

If an account holder wanted to download a data export and upload that to another provider I don't really care so much. It's the near mandatory sharing of credentials that is just such a terrible habit to normalize.

And yes, greybeards, we know you've never heard of apartment rental agencies only accepting Venmo for rent.

> So you can drive it but you cannot look at it?

Is there a difference between riding on a rocket and giving Russia the technical knowledge to build a thousand of them?

Personally I think Russia could figure it out if they wanted to but that's not why the rules are in place.

> Was he just being a rocket geek?

90% likely but the 10% difference is why there are rules that cannot be broken.

He signed up for obeying the rules, so it was a dumb move.

> "conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!" ... or the Planet will die in Hellfire!

( "you may be in a psyop when..." )

FWIW I replaced the warm white LED's in one quarter of my rooms with incandescents last week. Turns out current LED's contribute to diabetes.

It's been 20 years since I switched to CFL's and LED's and I was genuinely surprised how different (and really good) it feels to sit under a 200W incandescent.

The crazy thing is 20 years ago my lighting usage was over 2KW for my house whereas my entire house is now 1.4KW, typically, but the electricity bill has quadrupled while the usage fell in half so really it's an 8x.

Hence my investment in solar infrastructure. The society is collapsing in slow-mo; the AI datacenters are just exacerbating the problem of not being able to scale. They framed Nixon for impeachment over Project Independence, so this isn't an accident.

If this were a factory that needed huge amounts of water but there wasn't enough water for the factory the permit would simply be denied.

Notice how AI, datacenters, and electricity gets a special exception to the societal norms.

Partially it's the transhumanists who have a religious fervor in bringing about their AGI God, but part of it is just dumb bureaucrats who can't understand how anything, including Econ 101, works. Or they're just bribed, which happens to be a highly profitable technique.