Perhaps they could establish a payment network for them or otherwise make them actually useful. File and pay your taxes for you.

They are buying up property IN CHINA, which is again just numerical garbage. They pretend their homes are worth $2 trillion instead of $1 trillon. Trade imbalance still exists.

To buy property out of China, that would be undoing the trade imbalance. But China hates when their citizens buy property out of China. They call it corruption.

The USPS is also pretty crap about it. They regularly just don't bother to add new addresses to their databases for months or sometimes even years. At work we're having to use an alternate address for a multi story residence with dozens of units because of this. It's really quite irritating. Their address validation system is also shit. They will tell you for example that an address has an invalid secondary (unit number type, e.g. suite/apartment/whatever) but then won't tell you what the correct one is even though they have to know in order to tell you that the one you used is invalid. And this is when you PAY for validation! I don't know how much of this is due to DeJoy but it's shit.

We don't need more military. In fact we need less.

The reason for the existence of the second amendment was to not need a standing militia. We DEFINITELY don't need both things.

Did they actually get it? I only saw it was proposed.

Will farmers actually get it? Farm subsidies are mostly claimed by large corporations.

Someone buys a computer from China. They get a computer.

China gets some money. Used to be a bunch of paper. Now it's a numerical notation in a bank.

Sounds to me like the guy with the computer made out like a bandit and the idiots looking at numerical notations are fools.

Yeah, I know they can trade those numbers for other stuff - that's called undoing the trade imbalance.

So how exactly is China supposed to be benefitting without undoing the trade unbalance?

They can't.

They are understaffing on purpose not only despite the requirements, but because of their desire to not meet them.

This kind of thing can lead to insolvency crises which can affect you.

"If Beijing wanted, they could just send the PLA to occupy Siberia, and Putin couldn't do a thing about it"

China is not stupid enough to tip their hand. They will continue preying on Russia by doing sleazy business with them (like selling them the tires that got their advance stuck in the mud) as long as they can first.

The network hardware usually lasts longer than the servers unless you get unlucky. For example if you bought a Cisco Catalyst 5000 then you only had max 5 years before you probably got rid of it due to y2k issues. (The switches WOULD keep working after y2k, but logging of dates wouldn't work correctly.)

Yeah, that's how it works.

Sure. But is it wrong to refuse to do business with a regressive country? Should a nation be forced to do business with a nation whose goals run counter to their ideals?

1) the US promised to protect Ukraine if they gave up nukes
2) Russia still has nukes

Well I'm not an expert on this, but search results say "Monero, Ravencoin, Vertcoin, and Grin" are all still good to mine with CPU or GPU. Also there's no reason they couldn't introduce another coin or ten.

I've been meaning to move to Home Assistant for years, but most examples are like yours and I'm not sure if my seemingly simple use case is covered. Would you mind providing some additional insight?

My use case is to get off of my Alexa devices. The main feature I want is voice control of the lights. As far as which smart bulbs are supported, I'm comfortable dealing with that (I know half of mine are unsupported by Home Assistant and will need replaced). So my biggest question is, what's the easiest way to add voice support for basic control of lighting groups (ex. "Turn off the living room lights", "Turn on the bedroom", "Set the kitchen lights to 50%", etc..)? Might be nice if I could convert my existing Alexa devices into remote speaker+mics for Home Assistant, but I'm hoping there are better solutions (and hope they're affordable).

Most of the features I use are very basic Alexa features, but my normal use of them is via voice, so that has to be integrated:
* Time (What time is it? What is the today's date?)
* Timers (Set a timer for 3 minutes. Remind me in 40 minutes to get the laundry.)
* Weather (What's the weather? What's the weather tomorrow? What's the (current) temperature?)
* Music (Play White Stripes on Pandora. Pause. Resume. Set volume to 5. Raise volume. Lower volume.)

All the cool home automation features you listed are things I don't own yet. I could see adding some of those and growing my system once it's going, but I don't have any immediate need for them (apartment life plays a part there). I can't foresee myself building this out just for those sort of automations (ex. I can hear my smoke detectors from anywhere in the apartment, just look at my thermometers, have no thermostat (steam heat), etc..). But I also loathe these Alexa devices cause I can't get them to just do their job without butting in and suggesting bullshit in follow ups and ads, and I don't need all my dumb timer requests sent to the cloud just for speech-to-text.

Your numbers are wrong.
Netflix offered $27 and change per share.
Paramount offered $30 per share. That is about 10% more.

You need to read the article, not just the summary.

My concern is that the companies that bought them to run LLMs will become miners themselves to try to recoup some of the costs.