Did you miss the story earlier today? iPhone 17 Air Drops Physical SIM Slot Globally, Pushing eSIM-Only Future said in the summary that 75% of phone connections are going to be eSIM by 2030. Just because a cellular device doesn't have a physical SIM card doesn't mean they can't communicate. This will make it harder to identify hardware that has undocumented cellular components, you will have to identify the actual components instead of just going "WTF is a SIM slot doing there?". It will be almost impossible to identify if the manufacturer actually is trying to hide such hardware in a SOC or something like that, the only giveaway might be the need for an antenna but those are getting smaller and smaller.

eSIM makes it much quicker and easier to swap SIMs. In fact, being able to have many eSIMs on your phone that you can quickly switch between (for example while traveling) or having multiple simultaneously active is one of its biggest benefits. It is equivalent to or better than physical SIMs in literally every way except for the ease of moving a SIM between different devices.

Oh, the guy who runs a firm investing in private capital wants you to think that there's no money to be made on public companies? Color me surprised.

Buybacks and dividends are the same from the company's standpoint. They are transferring $X to the shareholders with either method. But from the investor's POV, the buyback is better. If a company issues an investor a dividend they have to take that money right now. That means they have to recognize it as income even if they didn't want/need that income. By contrast, if the company increases the per-share price via a stock buyback then the investor can take that gain whenever they choose, rather than at the whim of the company. A dividend puts the timing of the income under the company's control where a buyback puts it under the investor's control, at least under current US tax law. That's why investors (and hence the companies they invest in) mostly prefer buybacks these days.

They can play similar games with dividends, there have been plenty of companies that continued to pay dividends right up to their bankruptcy because that's what investors expected. Don't get me wrong, there have been plenty of shenanigans with buybacks -- like the airlines doing big buybacks before COVID then begging for bailouts when their business tanked but they can do the same thing with dividends.

Thanks for answering, the animus toward buybacks puzzled me when from my perspective (as a retired person living on investments) dividends and buybacks are just two sides of the same coin. I prefer buybacks for the reason stated above, but any ROI is good and I'll take it in any form I can get it.

Why? I see this a lot but don't understand people's objection to stock buybacks. Are companies not supposed to ever return profits to their investors? If not, then why invest in that company? Sometimes a deep piggy bank is not in the best interest of a company -- they may end up just squandering it on something stupid like the metaverse or AI. I would much rather see a company return profit to its investors then watch it burn money while management flails and fails at something that is not in their core competence. I expect rsilvergun to be against stock buybacks because he is a perpetual victim so any action by anyone is designed to keep him on the bottom, but what's your specific beef with them?

It's not, that graph shows that Intel's R&D spend has been consistently rising, nearly triple what it was fifteen years ago. And that's consistent with the ever-rising cost of R&D on new process nodes. That never ends, you always need to be working on the next process node, and the costs to develop each node only ever go up.

It's also currently a wasted investment. Intel's been dumping enormous sums of money trying to develop new process nodes, but their 18A (1.8nm) node is suffering from unacceptably low yields, their 20A (2nm) node was cancelled entirely, and their 3nm node was so bad that Intel made their CPUs with TSMC 3nm instead of Intel 3nm. In fact, Intel's current generation of CPUs (Arrow Lake) are made *entirely* by TSMC. None of the active silicon uses Intel process nodes. The compute tile is TSMC 3nm, the graphics tile is TSMC 5nm, the SoC and I/O extender tiles are TSMC 6nm. Only the passive interposer is made by Intel... on a 22nm process node.

The SNES launched at $472 USD, adjusted for inflation. It also did not include a second controller. The Nintendo Switch 2 costs $449 USD, not $525. I'm not sure where your street price comes from, as the console is currently in stock for MSRP at all major Canadian retailers, and in the US, it's available for immediate shipping at MSRP from Nintendo's own website, so there's no reason that anybody would ever pay more than MSRP.

It's true that the SNES included a pack-in game for that price, and the Switch 2 price with a pack-in game is $499, which is a bit more expensive. But it's not that far off.

I think they're going too far as soon as they're making medical claims without some sort of medical certification. And on their residential product page, they specifically say that their air purifiers were "Developed to address COVID-19", and in their FAQ, they say "The powerful ISO-Aire filtration system was purpose-built to address COVID-19 and other droplet and/or airborne-based infections in healthcare settings."

They repeatedly mention the CDC on their website, and in most places just word it along the lines of the CDC recommending medical-grade HEPA filtration as a strategy. However, on their "Why Iso-Aire" page, they word it as "CDC and ASHRAE recommended in purifying the air with medical-grade HEPA filtration, a key mitigation strategy in the fight against COVID-19" which implies that their produces specifically are recommended by the CDC, which they are not.

If you look at Iso-Aire's website, they're going way beyond the definition of MERV and claiming that their products were "developed to address COVID-19". Most air purifiers will just make a claim about capturing X% of particles of Y micron size.

I did say "all the reputable ones". I've never heard of "Iso-Aire", and none of their products are available for sale in any major retailer that I can find. Or any minor retailers either, from what I can tell.

You pretty much are describing the Alternative Minimum Tax, which already exists.

I bought my air purifiers to get dust and shit out of the air, not viruses. None of the marketing on the air purifiers said anything about viruses or infections, in my experience the vast majority of air purifiers (certainly all the reputable ones) make no medical claims. At most they'll talk about what percentage of what size of particles they'll remove from the air. So what part of them is a scam?

I first read "AI 'Business Agents' Will Kill SaaS by 2030, Says Microsoft" as "AI 'Business Agents' Will Kill Us by 2030, Says Microsoft" but knew, since it was Microsoft, that it wouldn't happen.

I believe the story to which the parent is referring is this 2017 one: Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language In Creepy Preview Of Our Potential Future.

I'm not sure what your beef is here, that's exactly what they are saying. When they quote "state media" it means that's what the government is saying, that's why they use that term. I could see your complaint if they just quoted something like Russia Today without disclosing that it is state media, but that's not the case here.