Teams works in Linux with either Firefox or Chromium.

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.

You mean the house with geothermal heating?

The house with solar installed *decades* before it was cool or fashionable?

The house that he pays a *premium* on his electric bill to promote renewable sources?

He buys from renewable sources to offset the CO2 release. Something every major corporation also does.

Is it big? Sure. Even has a heated pool! He's rich as are most people in national politics.

He used *his* money and invested in making it as green as possible.

The only potential silver lining is 'politics as usual' wasn't getting even close to solving the problem in the US. Biden's efforts were welcome but looking at the scale of the problem we face, the 'Manchin problem' held far too much back.

Trump and company will make things exponentially worse.

And the masses may need that 'worse' before starting to vote in favor of real and effective solutions. Assuming Trump doesn't bumble us into WW III.

China is installing more renewable energy every year than we have ever installed.

China has installed 20-30,000 miles of true high speed rail in just the last 20 years.

Both are massive investments in a carbon free economy.

They also installed a huge amount of coal in just the last couple of years. Plants that are *already* being idled 30% of the time b/c they have enough energy. They're also the more efficient types our 'clean coal!' morons claim are totally fine.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023...

Reality isn't all or nothing but multiple steps and *progress* towards a goal.

China is walking that walk, while the US is actively running backwards.

The North East coast will see 1-2 FEET of sea level rise if the AMOC shuts off. Why? because the 'drain' no longer drains so there's a huge pile of water that North America is rotating into.

Native American's have flood myths far starters. It's a very widespread concept.

https://mythologyworldwide.com...

Ancient flood myths are far more likely due to 2 things:

1. Floods happen everywhere
2. Baths are cleansing

Humans make up stories to explain and control societal behavior.

I suspect that they feel at least incrementally less burned in this case; since, while it wasn't obviously a good idea for a product, it at least goes somewhere: if you can make a phone functional and adequately rigid at that size; it's quite possible that there's a more sensible device size that you can still apply the miniaturized motherboard and whatever mechanical engineering you did for rigidity to; and just fill the rest of the case with battery; and there may be some other cases where the ability to get an entire SoC and supporting components into a particularly tiny area or make a thin component of a larger system quite rigid is handy.

Still doesn't really explain flaying a normal phone until it barely has a normal day's use with a totally fresh battery when you are still going to glue an entire baby spy satellite to one end of it; but some of the actual engineering is probably reusable.
The 'butterfly' keyboards, or the under-mouse charging port, by contrast, went nowhere. They tried and failed at a few iterations of keyboards that committed expensive suicide if you looked at them wrong; then just went back to allocating the extra mm or whatever once Jony was safely out of the picture; and it's not as though putting the port on the bottom rather than the front of the mouse involved any interesting capability development.

Whatever product manager thought that the 'air' would be a big seller deserves to feel bad; but the actual engineering team can probably feel OK about the odds that a future phone will look somewhat air-like if you were to remove the normally shaped case and larger battery.

That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

The problem was that you were part of that chain of obligations to, and the guy above you could grab your wife, or in the case of James II of England (James VI of Scotland), he could grab you.

China's population decline, as standards of living increase, will largely take care of the problem. China, like every nation that is now on the other side of the economic growth-population growth curve, will have to figure out how to deal with the next half century. But nothing is going to make factories less automated, and between population decline and foreign tariffs, they are only going to push automation further to fill the gap.