...when it's a happy announcement for most people. Biden fans on social media are pointing out "Two big Biden deliveries for the working class, same day: overtime pay required, and non-competes forbidden. Of course, the MEDIA ignore it."

The sniffiness would be more annoying if they weren't basically correct. The FTA is "Biden's FTA", much, much, much more than the DOJ is "Biden's DOJ" because of independence traditions that Biden respects. Neither change for workers would have occurred under any Republican administration. This is a very, very partisan issue and the American Democratic Party delivering the stuff they say they'll fight for.

But "overtime" is not a string of letters I can find on the Times or Post this morning. Only one mentions "The FTC" banning noncompetes, as if it would have happened under any administration; and that, in a story about a prompt lawsuit opposing it. Slashdot, above, credits "The US" for the win.

I think some recent focus groups had working people looking blank when asked if Biden has done anything for them. That's on the Democrat communications people, of course, but, man, the news media do hate to help them.

...that would both not be stories if crypto were just !@#$$ing illegal.

"A Slight Case of Sunstroke", 1958, collected in "Tales of Ten Worlds", now available at used bookstores everywhere.

The semicircular north end of a Latin American football arena is filled with soldiers given special-Army/Navy match souvenir programmes with a shiny foil backing, two feet square. Cardboard, so they can be used for fanning in the scorching sunny day. When the ref makes an unwelcome call for Army, all 10,000 flash their programmes at him, thinking he'll be blinded and replaced. Instead, he's vapourized, to everybody's embarrassment.

...that those "Class M Planets" that all look like the Vasquez Rocks of Southern California are, in actuality, vanishingly rare.

Not fit to weigh in on this one, only to comment that a lot of people might envy having those same engineering problems that first engaged you in school, still your reason to tear-hair decades on in the career.

Linus is actually farther along in his career arc than the pond scum that had to go apologize to Congress for their products this week; an apology cheerfully given, as it was not just cheap, but free. Congress has no intention of actually legislating or regulating away their oligopoly and their freedom to continue.

But Linus gets to argue about inodes this week, and sleep well, and as I understand it, still worth millions anyway, sleeping in a fine bed, eating the best of foods. He picked medium chill.
https://grist.org/living/2011-...

If you can put on panels, save money on electricity, pay off the panels, then the "solar industry" is fine. Just as "build a house, sell for more than it cost to build" remained a solid industry before and after 2008. It was the FINANCIALIZATION scheme built upon those sold, real-life, industries that fell over - just like 2008, most likely. I'm sure a lot of lying was involved, again.

Oh, my mistake was believing large newspapers that had headlines and first lines like:

Bush drops plan to break up Microsoft

The US government *unexpectedly* announced yesterday...Although most legal experts considered a break-up unlikely, few expected the government to remove the option from the negotiating table.,,"surprised and perplexed that they have done this as it seems to be contrary to the way the proceedings had unfolded. They have cut their own legs out from under them."

etc etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/te...

You write as if the DOJ had "just decided" their case was weak and they should settle. They were clearly ordered to.

If you'd like details on the much-older case of IBM and Reagan, the book "Big Blue" by Richard Thomas Delamarter told it in great detail, and how crushed a large DOJ team was by Reagan's fiat. The Microsoft case was similarly stark, to those on the inside.

Oh, right, you meant "valuable" to the investors, not to the world.

Successfully creating a monopoly, illegally defending it but getting away with that after found guilty in antitrust court when Bush ordered the case dropped, the way Reagan did for the IBM case, does create "value" for investors.

But it is rent-collection, and Keynes joked (we think) about the "euthanasia of the rentiers" needed for progress towards that 3-day week he dreamed of.

Glad to have kicked off this thread. By coincidence, we resolved the failing-appliance issue by eliminating the very idea of >$1000 kitchen "Range"; purchased what a range does modularly, so that no one failure can ruin dinner. Or the bank account:

http://brander.ca/range/

My mother-in-law is about to turn 92, but does downstairs to power-cycle the dryer (pulling the huge plug hard for arthritis) because it won't reset after a run, some chip fault. The mechanicals are fine the last 5 years of that, it's the circuit boards that blow these days, ironically - just like our old range. Twice.

Yes, we are cutting off our investor class from cheap labour options. Engagement with China for 50 years brought many lowers prices, larger markets, new products to improve our material wealth. But, that's the same period were most of us got no net improvement to our overall lives worth mentioning: it all went to the top. Cheaper prices on appliances and clothing had to be spent on housing and medicine instead.

The real price of "Roger and Me" globalization was that the middle class lost any reason to care about the "benefits of trade".

Niklaus.

Call him by value: enormous.

Well, if you have to have multiple stations, then your weight per watt - and solar-cell costs per watt - just tripled or whatever.

About that weight: never mind "normal" solar panels that are 10kg/m2 at minimum. "Thin Film" are wikipedia'd at 7-10 oz. Let's say 5 oz in future, to allow for progress. That's 1.3kg/m2. (that means squared, tiring to type ^ all the time).

And let's drop launch costs to $1000/kg, I want to be sporting. So $1300/m2 in space. 1M m2/km2, so 1.3Billion/km2
We will wave away reaction mass needed to rotate a km2 every 24 hours, maybe you can gyroscope it - and need little orbital maintenance at 35,000km; handwave away.

More sportingness: I'll give them 45% efficiency with my FutureCell technology! 1380 W/m2 X 0.45 = 621 W/m2 = 621 MW/km2

More futuretech! Currently the loss in conversion, transmission and rectification is about 50%, I'll up it to 66%, so 410 MW power plant, 7x24 power, is yours, for just $1.3B CAPEX.

Continuing the use of 2nd-person plural for the entrepreneur: YOU'RE FUCKED.

At least if the upcoming 400MW geothermal plant created with fracking techniques repurposed, comes in at less than $1.3B. That's also 7x24, which is about your only advantage over four 400MW on-earth solar plants with balancing storage.

Oh, crap I forgot the cost of the actual million m2 of thin-film cells, which is probably no lower than the regular earthbound cells at $1/watt. And the cost of the rectenna farm. And the microwave converter upstairs; and the maser. And THEIR launch costs!

This came up years ago on /. and I stopped to look up the papers on losses from
a) electricity to microwaves
b) loss in transmission
c) microwaves to electricity ...and they add up to over 50%. So, ground-based loses 75% (dark half the time, and half more lost unless you expensively point the panel at the sun all the time, then there's weather.)

So, space-based produces 2X as much power for the same acreage of cells.

If you can launch 100 km^2 into space for the expense of where you were going to put 200 km^2 on the ground where the rectenna would have been, you can break even.

As the price of solar cells drops, this gets LESS likely.

I suspect this to be bullshit, but hey, global warming: "I'll piss on sparkplug if just might work", do a test. My bet is on it failing.

Amen. I was a serious, array-formula-snob, loved-my-little-macros, Excel maven, the office guru, and I can't recall anything in 2007 that really made Excel better than 2003, and after 2007 it was all downhill. (Particularly the switch from MDI to SDI with 2010 screwed all my .XLA add-on macro dialogues, no way around it, tell me that's "backwards compatible".)

There was just nuthin' that was likely to come up in business-management, most science work, engineering work, medical work, that Excel 2003 couldn't do. If only the profit motive did not insist that they continue making shit up.

It sounds nuts that oil is subsidized, but it is. For the same reason as farm subsidies: those enable everybody to eat cheaply, and the farmers to compete with other subsidized farmers. Cheap oil means cheap industry and domestic energy.

Subsidies could be dropped if targeted supports would help those who need it, or are needed to keep an industry going. (We've always had "purple gas" for farmers).

But subsidies could be lowered if everybody agreed to the same cuts. That's what frightens them.

Of course, they are also blind, apparently, to just being overrun by a genuine alternative. They can't really believe it, or they'd be investing tens of billions in geothermal and wind.