Sure, and they should expect that they're putting their jobs on the line for their cause. Without that risk, their protest isn't particularly meaningful. If they were to "win" by getting Google to cancel the contract, they'd actually have little effect because Google is almost certainly right that this contract has little to no effect on the war.

Generating headlines by getting fired from their $500k/year jobs is the most effective thing these Google employees can do for their cause. So, good for them, they succeeded!

If they expect Google's decision to generate significant public or internal backlash, though, I think they'll be disappointed.

It's a similar concept to Alternative Minimum Taxes [*], which you probably haven't experienced with your own taxes. Basically, deductions that corporations can normally claim are disallowed and then their taxes are calculated at the lower rate. If the result is more than they would pay with the higher rate and broader set of deductions, then they have to pay it rather rather than the normally-calculated amount. So it doesn't apply to all corporations, or maybe even most, but it extracts additional revenue from those that would otherwise be successful at using extensive deductions and credits (also known as "loopholes") to reduce their tax liability.

In some cases they're already committed to the behavior and won't be able to avoid the tax. But, yeah, in many cases this tax may deter the behavior rather than raise revenue. The CBO's projections try to take that into account when projecting the revenue impacts, of course. But I think the main goal of this part of the IRA is to appease populists on both sides who think stock buybacks are bad, because they don't understand how publicly-traded corporations work.

The grants will also be paid out over time, so it's more like spending money in the future that will be raised in the future.

Yeah, it's probably inflation-neutral. The IRA does contain some inflation-reducing provisions in specific areas, notably healthcare, but it's mostly revenue-neutral and inflation-neutral. I suppose you can say it's inflation-reducing compared to its previous incarnation, the Build Back Better bill, which if enacted would have increased the deficit and potentially stoked inflation.

[*] Note that AMT is slightly different in that for most taxpayers AMT is actually calculated at a higher tax rate, in addition to disallowing a lot of deductions. But AMT also allows a much larger standard deduction (with a phaseout based on income).

If we were sure that we'll never go to war with China, I'd agree. Right now we're facing a situation where we may end up in another world war, but we'll be on the side fighting against the manufacturing powerhouse. If it weren't for such strategic concerns, I'd be all for dropping all the tariffs (well, we should add some carbon tariffs) and outsourcing all the manufacturing to China. Trading electronic dollars that we invent as needed for hard goods? Hell yeah. I'll take all of that they want to give us.

But I don't think the geopolitical situation can be ignored. I'm not sure that propping up the US auto industry is the best way to maintain vehicle manufacturing capacity, but until a better alternative is proposed we should probably stick with it.

It really won't. We already know how battery degradation works. Unless they bought trucks with too-small batteries to begin with, the trucks will wear out before battery capacity drops enough to require replacement.

My point is that expanding the acronym isn't useful, except perhaps to chemists who would already know what the acronym expands to. Explaining what PFAS are is useful. And the article did that:

PFAS are a class of 15,000 chemicals used across dozens of industries to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. Though the compounds are highly effective, they are also linked to cancer, kidney disease, birth defects, decreased immunity, liver problems and a range of other serious diseases.

They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and are highly mobile once in the environment, so they continuously move through the ground, water and air. PFAS have been detected in all corners of the globe, from penguin eggs in Antarctica to polar bears in the Arctic.

So, I think the Guardian did a fine job of explaining what matters.

cool link! (at least if you disregard things I remember being cast as ancient history!)

the 8080 had at least one or two undocumented instructions that worked their way into code. IIRC, the Heathkit chess program needed a byte changed from that to a documented instruction on the Z80 to run [a one byte patch!].

And there were a pair (?) of quirks where 8085 instructions took a cycle ore or less than the the same instruction on the 8080.

The Z80 executed some instructions in less cycles than the 8080 (but wasn't there one that took an extra cycle for some reason?

it was slow, but could be extremely low power compared to the others, and was silly-rich with registers. 16 general purpose 16 bit registers, iirc. (or pairs of eight bit). And ISTR that you could use all but one or two for program counter and reference (a pair of four bit registers [P & X ?] that pointed to which 16 bit to use]

Also, significantly more radiation resistant than the others of the time (or was that another version? Even so, its design should have been more resistant).

My first computer was a wire-wrapped 1802 . . .

My guess would be that 24 bit address space for the MMU, and that this worked better with the Z80.

There were ways to extend the 6809 space by a couple of bits, but not by eight.

The greater abundance of registers on the Z80--including an entire second set of the 8080 registers, which could be toggled between--sounds like a likely reason. IIRC, the 6809 didn't have any extra data registers as compared to the 6800.

hawk

Per- And Polyfluorinated Substances. Did that help?

With 65,502 bytes left over.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Not flat, 10% increase. Some of that increase may be due to more dual-income households, but we were already pretty well along that transition by 1999.

Let's do that: GDP per capita of the UK: $46k. GDP per capita of China: $12k. But maybe China does better at distributing the wealth? Nope. UK Gini coefficient: 35, China, 47 (higher is more inequality). Until recently China had phenomenal growth rates, but that's only because (a) they started from a very depressed level and (b) they mostly abandoned socialism. As Xi is reasserting more socialist policies their growth engine has largely stopped and their growth rate is currently below that of the UK. It's still positive at the moment, but if Xi continues what he's doing, it will likely go negative.

Socialism -- not social democracy, which is a thoroughly capitalist economy that accepts high but strongly progressive taxation to fund a strong safety net -- consistently drives economies into the toilet whenever applied on any scale larger than a kibbutz. Without fail, every time.

>Of course the VTOL development division can be a completely discrete
>entity from the commercial jet manufacturing side of the business.

[nods]

Yes, ind of like they separate the doors and airframes now . . .

you're both halfway there.

you strap the toast *to* the cat, and it not only can't land, thus elevating, but spins, generating free energy!

I don't think this is true. If you enable emergency mode video recording you have to enter your PIN to end the recording, but biometrics will still unlock the lockscreen. While the recording is going, hit the power button to activate the lockscreen, which will be unlockable with biometrics. You can also swipe up from the bottom (assuming gesture navigation) and switch to other apps. The device is not locked and not in lockdown mode while in emergency mode.

What you can do is press power and volume up to bring up the power menu, and then tap the "Lockdown" icon. That will lock the device and disable biometric authentication.

If you really, really want to lock it down, power the device down, or reboot it and don't log in. Android's disk encryption scheme uses your PIN/pattern/password ("lockscreen knowledge factor", or LSKF) along with keys stored in secure hardware to derive the disk encryption keys. It would make for a long post to go into all of the details, but given the hardware-enforced brute force mitigation,if the attacker gets a device in this state it's extremely difficult to decrypt any of the credential-encrypted data on the device without your LSKF. This is particularly true on devices that implement "StrongBox" (all Pixels, some Samsungs, some others). Android StrongBox moves some crucial functionality, including LSKF authentication and LSKF brute force resistance, into a separate hardened, lab-certified[*] security processor with its own internal storage, a "secure element".

Of course, note that appellate courts in the US have split on whether or not your LSKF can be compelled. Some have ruled that unless the PIN/pattern/password is itself incriminating, it's no different than compelling the combination to a safe, which has long been held to be constitutional.

[*] For anyone interested in the details, the required certification is Common Criteria EAL 4+ (5+ is recommended, and common, many devices meet 6+), using protection profile 0084 for the hardware and equivalent "high attack potential" evaluation for the software, plus AVA_VAN.5 penetration testing, all performed in a nationally-accredited security testing lab. While certification isn't a guarantee of security (nothing is), the required certification applies the highest level of scrutiny you can get for commercially-available devices. Apple also uses a similarly-certified SE in their devices, but it's not clear whether they use it for LSKF authentication, or whether they use their (uncertified) Secure Enclave.