That's fair, also who knows, maybe their Falcon 9 clone will actually be good. Would be cool if the EU made a starship competitor too.

To answer your question, no I did not auggest Ariane was doomed to fail. It's nowhere in the post. Any other strawmen you want me to reply to?

I think you are confusing ArianeGroup with ESA. ESA will be fine if they launch on cheaper craft. It's like with NASA, are they be worse off if they focus on science instead of rockets that companies can do cheaper? Let ESA focus on landers, probes, satellites, etc.

Nobody can compete with SpaceX. Not NASA, not Boeing, certainly not little Ariane. Ariane can sell their Ariane 6 launchers as fast as they can make them, they don't seem to have any issues but if they focused on reusable crafts 10 years ago, you really think they'd be competitive now? I doubt it. Ariane is owned by Airbus and Safran which are doing fine.

So while it did no damage at all to the CCP or Xi Jinping, we now gave them legit arguments to further crack down on information access and we also gave the russians to go 'whatabout' on any interference they do. Nice job guys.

They named a government service after a movie?

Netherlands has reduced its natural gas 'drilling' with over 30 percent in recent years. Not sure what more people want from us. Gas use went down massively too - largely because of Russia.

I would consult your legal department before ignoring such a ban. If it comes out at any time, you think your company would have your back or they would just let you take the fall in a multi million dollar lawsuit?

They got purchased by big banking. First Citizen Bank and HSBC got SVB for dimes on the dollar. (in the case of HSBC for cents on the million dollars). The big banks like the ones that now own SVB continued to run one of the best years ever while SVB is now just another severed head in the trophy room. A logo on some of their buildings.

SVB ran their company indeed like a Silicon Valley Startup: no idea what they were doing, predatory business tactics, and then criminal levels of negligence. SVB owners are lucky they got away with all of their work just wiped out of the face of the earth instead of being in prison.

It is really insane SVB managed to bankrupt themselves using AAA bonds. It's a case study in what happens when you let clowns run a bank.

That's what they are trying to do, but the US is trying to stop it.

Well if the US makes their request I'm sure they will be happy to buy their goods elsewhere. In fact look up the FX-05 Xiuhcoatl while you are at it. I assume you are aware that US arms aid and sales to Mexico aren't exactly charity? Both serve US interests.

The US has food import/exports disputes with countries all over the world, including Canada

One of the most commonly eaten foods of all things yes. You don't get why they would focus on common crops?

Regulations are not 'almost non-existent' in Mexico at all, but enforcement is lacking. They are working on improving both regulation and enforcement. Glyphosate and GM corn are under investigation in various parts of the world. This is one of those elements where mexican regulations go further than the US.

Mexico would be really happy if the US stopped importing fentanyl from criminals inside their borders

I bet that eventually we will find out that Signal is ran by one of the intelligence agencies. They do everything they can to give the 'image' of being completely private, while also collecting and verifying your phone number to link to your account. The phone system of course being something completely controlled by and monitored by the government.

If you were going to create a super private messaging platform, at what point would you be collecting phone numbers from users?

Matter of time before these tech giants operate their own nuclear power plants. They will need the Uranium-235 anyway for their weapons programmes for when they secede from the US.

Companies that are able to hire in more places and offer flexibility of how people work are going to win. Flexible work places perform markedly higher on both employee satisfaction and performance. If you are a highly sought after worker, everything being equal, would you pick a place that forces you to be in your cage every day, or one that allows you to work at the office or at home as you see fit? Well turns out highly skilled people prefer the latter so much they will take lower pay for it.

Then we have seen the results come in and Restricted-To-Office (RTO) offices have markedly lower business and productivity performance.

So not only are they having do settle for lesser employees, and have good employees run off to greener pastures that treat them like humans instead of cage-monkeys, they also are underperforming.

Companies survive if they adapt to the planet they live in. And companies that stay behind die. Clock is ticking on RTO companies. Once a company realizes that their competitors have zoomed passed them it's usually too late to start moving.

I actually said image, not photo. They explicitly distinguish between image and photo too: "what's most important to understand is that the machines do not take or store any photos or images"

You can argue that a video feed like one processes with opencv is not a sequence of images, I guess? I would disagree but you could. Still would make their statement misleading at least.