Define "effective". Musk is great at self promotion but if you looked at the details, he just made everything worse.

No he did not. What he exposed is that he does not understand basics of things. For example, Musk claimed there were fraud in the Social Security Administration because he found "duplicate SSNs". What he exposed out is he does not understand basics of data and a fact table can have duplicate foreign keys . . . because it is a fact table. It would be like me claiming there is "MASSIVE FRAUD" in my companies sales data because there are duplicate Customer IDs.

What he proved is he is an idiot. What you proved is you believed him without looking at details.

Will it have excess capacity that Amazon will lease? If no, then this cable has zero effect on Europe and North America. That was my point. I simply did not understand why the OP would have objections to a private companies building something that affects no one else.

Except there are alternatives. A developer can sell their game on Epic Games, Steam, GOG, Microsoft, etc. Now Steam is the behemoth and if a developer decides to ignore Steam, that will greatly affect sales. Developers that feel they need to sell on Steam because it has the largest majority of potential customers is very different than "nobody can offer an alternative".

It literally does. One of the characteristics of a monopoly is lack of substitutes:

Common sense would dictate that if a consumer can get a suitable alternative then there is less of a monopoly. The keyword is "suitable". If there is a butter monopoly, can consumers substitute margarine or other products? Most of the time yes. In this case, a consumer can buy the exact game somewhere else.

Market power is not the one and only criteria for monopoly.

By definition of their share and control of the market, Steam is a monopoly. However, people seem not to differentiate legal and illegal monopolies. Many monopolies are allowed to exist as long as they do not engage in illegal behavior which would warrant antitrust action.

The only thing that might garner scrutiny is the price parity clause that Steam allegedly imposes so that games are not cheaper on other game stores. I however do not know the details or whether this clause even exists. I do know that Steam imposes price parity when it comes to Steam keys since it is their keys that 3rd parties are using and selling.

So basically the only reason you can think of why she didn't win, is because she is a she and she is not white?

You might need a little more nuance in your analysis.

He said exactly what he was going to do, and they voted for it. You aren't then allowed to say "oh my goodness, we had no idea that THIS is what he was going to do" - half the electorate saw it and voted against it. If 75 million people figured it out, what's wrong with the 77 million that couldn't?

VP Harris was saying what he was going to do, according to the Project 2025 manifesto. They were going to take a wrecking ball to government services writ large. And that's exactly what happened.

Trump himself was saying what he was going to do when it comes to the worst abuses we've seen to the rule of law: the mass deporation thuggery, the illegal recissions of approved Congressional spending LAWS, the constitutionally illegal here-today gone-tomorrow tariffs, the un-nuanced hamfisted cuts to government causing even less efficiency, the ridiculous tax breaks we can't afford to people that don't need them, etc. There should be no surprises here if anyone actually listened to the words coming from his mouth.

And somehow Trump voters are shocked that what he said he was going to do, is what he's doing. Not exactly the smartest folk if they are surprised by any of this, are they?

Vote better. Don't vote for the guy telling you he really wants to fuck you over to benefit his rich friends at your expense.

When a collection of people decide to self-identify as deplorable shitbags that would like to starve people in order to gain political power, they might get a few nasty things said about them.

Don't want to be demonized? Stop using cruelty as leverage in politics.

Let's do a little Occam's Razor analysis of your theory:

Which is more probable:
- Democrats have entered into a half-century spanning "we hope we're right" conspiracy to do a double fake-out on apparently easily manipulated Republicans to bitch and moan about debt and deficits for the last 50 years (and not doing anything about it while in power until *this year*) while temporarily speaking to the needs of impoverished and working class people until they eventually unravel the entire global economy into a collapsed twisted flaming wreckage of human civilization;

- Democrats are trying to prevent impoverished and working class people from having massive cost-of-living increases that will cause tens of millions of people to decide "do I buy my medicine or food this week" so that incredibly rich people can have a few pennies on each tax dollar back that they, by definition, do not need.

I think I know which one is more probable.

Well, the "very unpleasant people" have already taken over and now control the US Mint presses. Do you really think they aren't going to fire up those presses to their own advantage, after seeing that they have no problem putting tens of millions of people into starvation risk to save a few bucks on their own taxes?

This administration has no moral center. Stop acting like they do - they're literally using hunger as a political weapon.

Yes they have.

Try to keep up.

Also, why do you get to decide what her name is? I'm pretty sure that self-determination is one of those core values we share as Americans, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. If she wants to have a last name of Occasio-Cortez, that's her decision - not yours.

Jesus H. Christ.

So we should be congratulating the guy who sews division at every chance he gets for reluctantly continuing to nominate a singular Democrat to head an agency with no political clout whatsoever?

All this does is prove that the label "billionaire" means more than either political party label to this President, which should come as news to absolutely nobody.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed that over time Amazon's search feature has enshitified. If that's the correct verb. It used to be fairly good. These days, nah, unless I'm looking for a book or other product from Amazon directly, as a search for the marketplace it's crap.

And since it used to be better, something must be responsible for that. Greed, most likely.

Not 99% but definitely some of the most useful ones. And yes, stack traces are one of the things that only Linux users send you without an explicit request.

And the advantage of debugging a (this specific exception) error in (this specific file) on (that specific line) over a "hey, the game crashed when I jumped out of the car" bug report cannot be overstated.

This is what I was thinking - RAM guys have been stacking chips for a hell of a long time. First as actual package stacks on the DIMM - I remember seeing some very dense modules in the DDR2 days with stacked packages; and then as you correctly point out: Samsung has been layering dies inside the package for years as a microscopic version of stacking chip packages.

It's also why DIMMs have heat spreaders on them now.