I have no doubt any company is a fan of environmentalism only in so far as it helps business. If it polishes your reputation and attracts customers, great. As soon as customers don't care, companies won't either. Same with DEI, community involvement, political affiliation, and any other side project unrelated to actually running the business. Why would one expect anything else?

To put it another way, inexpensive, reliable power is a must have. Green or renewable energy is a nice to have.

As has been discussed in the past, US government actions have a huge hand in that.

First, there's the Chicken Tax. Imported light trucks (read: "SUVs and minivans") face large tariffs. That encourages foreign manufacturers focus on conventional cars and encourages US manufacturers to sell light trucks.

Second, IIRC the CAFE standards don't include light trucks. That makes light trucks easier to build and more profitable to sell.

Thus US companies have two big incentives to focus on light trucks.

While the /. headline says "to take equity stake", TFA is silent about whether this is a grant (the original vision of the CHIPS act) or an equity investment (the Trump vision of CHIPS). I didn't find any other news reports which clarified.

I'm with you though, I'd prefer none of the above.

TFA has this comment:

What makes it especially interesting is that over "78% of these downloads came from Windows" users.

Now, that's got my attention... 780,000 Windows users don't download a 3.5 Gigabyte Linux desktop distribution if they're not giving it serious consideration.

My understanding is people download 3.5 GB games at the drop of a hat. A single Netflix movie is probably much more than 3.5 GB. I've got single CSV files that are half a gig. A gigabyte isn't large any more.

That said, I use Windows as my front-end system. I download Linux distros on a semi-regular basis, either to install on bare metal, in a WSL environment, or to install in a VM. I may spin up the desktop GUI in VNC because I have to but 99.9% of the time, I'm ssh'ing in. Granted, I'm very unlikely to pick Zorin OS, the distro that particular quote was talking about but nevertheless, just because I downloaded a distro intended as a desktop distro doesn't mean I'm using it as my primary, or any, desktop.

Replace "Windows" with "macOS" and I assert you've got most of your downloads.

You're right. I wrote "Unix desktops" which is quite ambiguous. That's a good example of how the conversation can get muddled and one needs to be very careful what terms one uses.

That said, the /. post title, the summary, and the article all make it clear we're talking about Linux users and Linux desktops (although it does mention include Android half way through and only mentions Apple in comparison to Android). I don't think that includes macOS. I'd like to see whether the survey participants thought it did because that would change how we interpret the results.

Right, same here. But most Mac users aren't using the Unix nature of macOS in any way. I would guess that 95% or more never open a shell window ever.

That said, the article was specifically talking about Linux desktops. Technically, macOS is not based on the Linux kernel so that's why it doesn't count. That doesn't seem the important part, though: how many users actually care what kernel they're running? I suspect what the survey was really trying to find is the systems using open source, non-commercial software stacks (e.g. KDE or Gnome plus GNU and Linux) as a GUI based desktop. But I'd have to read the original article to understand what the author was really trying to discover.

Yes, but TFA was a bout Linux desktop systems. I assume that means your typical laptop/deskside computers, not phones, tablets, embedded systems, or rack-mounted datacenter gear.

I spend most of my time in a WSL environment on my Windows laptop. I wonder how that would count.

Interesting. If I did a spot poll of my current work environment, Unix desktops would account for approximately 0%.

At my previous job, one with 100,000+ employees, Unix desktops would be approximately 0%. I'm only personally acquainted with one person who insisted on a Linux desktop.

Of all my friends, I can think of on who might have a Linux desktop but suspect he actually uses a Mac.

As summarized, this is a poor question. There's a world of difference between a PhD in medieval poetry, paying full freight at an Ivy versus BS in machine learning from State.

There's also a ton of difference from person to person. My master's definitely paid for itself. My nephew dropped out of a state college because he had no interest or aptitude for education. A college degree would be wasted on him as long as his career goal is professional gamer.

Right. I saw some numbers the other day (don't have them handy) about manufacturing productivity. Mean US worker value-add per hour is something like 6-8 times that of the mean Chinese worker. You could double Chinese factory productivity and it still would lag the most advanced facilities.

It would be interesting to see this as a histogram. My impression is a lot of Chinese manufacturing is (or was) small shops: no more than a dozen people in a shed. But you have to add up a lot of shops to equal the headcount and output of Shenzhen. I'd love to see the output per worker graphed against number of workers and compare that against other societies.

My thoughts exactly. It would be interesting to see an analysis of just how much that's affected the Canadian media industry. I don't know how you'd figure that out given we don't have a counterfactual. One hopes the Australians did their due diligence.

Now now. There's plenty of quality entertainment produced in Australia.

(This one is a favorite of my wife and daughters.)

Well, and that's been the gripe. If the EU marshalled its resources, it should have been able to end this tragedy in weeks. Given that it's on their border, they seem to be in a better physical position to intervene and ought to have much stronger motivation.

At least that's the complaint. TBH, I don't follow EU involvement in the conflict to say what they could or should have done.

interesting post. I do want to respond to this one point.

That's Bastiat's broken window fallacy. We don't become wealthy building weapons or (even worse) destroying things. For example, if we hadn't spend billions building the Gerald Ford, we would have those billions to spend on roads, factories, parks, data centers, any number of other things. If we didn't employ a million soldiers, they could spend their time producing goods and services for civilian uses.

It's not to say that a robust army, navy, and air force aren't important. It's just not correct to say that paying for weapons makes us better off. Weapons and soldiers are a deadweight loss to an economy.

I have no idea how you read that in what I wrote.

If I were the Russians, I'd be updating the software so that if the missile decides it needs to turn 180 degrees, it should limit it's turn to whatever the airframe can safely handle. And I'd update the software to treat location data with suspicion if the missile's position abruptly changes 10,000 miles when it had high confidence it knew where it was. And I'd update the software to fall back to dead reckoning or inertial guidance if I have reason to not trust the location receiver. This all seems pretty obvious to me and if it's obvious to me, it should be table stakes for anyone designing actual avionics.

If I were the Ukrainians, I'd be figuring out how to slowly change the missile's received position to counteract the code the Russians ought to be adding. Don't say you're in Peru, say you're 100 meters north of where you really are. Gradually increase the delta to nudge the missile to a safe impact location. That's sounds pretty tricky: you have to know where the missile is now, where it's targeted, where you want it to land, and how much you have to fool the missile to make it think it's blowing up your command post when it's really landing in Russia somewhere.

It's a game of cat and mouse. Can the Russians reliably detect spoofing? Can the Ukrainians spoof so subtly that the Russians can't detect it?