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.

At least they are installing renewables as fast as they can.

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.

Why? I ship a lot. It's almost always faster and cheaper to ship by USPS than UPS or FEDEX. For-profit services are always worse quality that government services. They have to be, in order to make a profit.

No, it's how you get mens rea for the felony murder rule. You didn't carry the gun with the intent to kill, only to intimidate, but you still had a guilty mind, and if you then used the gun to kill someone in the heat of the moment, there's your mens rea.

And remember that actual cause does not mean literally pulling the trigger. At least in the U.S., the courts apply a "but for" test. If the event would not have happened without the previous event, then the previous event is considered the actual, not proximate cause. The police would not have shot the other person but for the perpetrator pointing a gun at someone (and possibly shooting at the police).

IMO, that's not meaningfully different than involuntary manslaughter convictions for allowing unsafe working conditions at a construction site or leaving your loaded gun out where a child can take it, both of which have happened.

True, but only momentarily. At the end of the first depreciation cycle, assuming purchasing of hardware is not accelerating, you're depreciating 5x as much hardware over 5x the time, and your momentary bubble in the stock price is gone.

And even if hardware purchasing is growing right now, eventually, that will flatten out, and the above will be true.

The only real question should be whether the depreciation rate is reasonable. If you're still getting substantial use out of the hardware after five years, then depreciating it over 3 years is questionable.

Also, the more slowly you depreciate it, the less you save on taxes each year. Faster depreciation is beneficial if you think the tax rate will go down and you will lose the benefit of that depreciation. Slower depreciation is beneficial if you think the tax rate will go up and you will benefit more from depreciating it later. So this may also mean that these companies are expecting corporate income taxes to go up. Make of that what you will.

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.

You needed a handbook for that?

Anyone who ever went to a business meeting could've told you that.

By my experience, it takes only 4 things to make a meeting productive: a) someone is in charge of the meeting and moderation, b) that someone had time to prepare, c) everyone in the meeting has received an agenda with enough lead time to have read it and (if necessary) prepare their part, at least a bit and finally d) there is at least a simple protocol of the meeting for those who couldn't attend, those who dozed off in the middle, and those who claim next week that something else was agreed on.

The DCL isn't mandatory though. Home Assistant only needs it for device firmware updates, but it's always going to be the case that those come from the internet.

Their battery tech is a years ahead of everyone else, from the basic chemistry to the manufacturing process.

In my experience, with only rare exceptions, the limit should be three. More than three, and you are likely involving people working on multiple projects who don't really need to know what the people on other projects are doing beyond what an email every few months would provide.

Those rare exceptions are situations where you have a meeting of managers in an org or similar with each other, where everybody is working towards the same goals, and they're planning towards those goals.

Or the way I usually describe it is that the usefulness of a meeting with n participants is one over the square of n minus 2 for all values of n greater than 2.