Is that foreign companies are now the leaders in an industry we(US) started. How far we have fallen behind in the US. And in an industry we define as essential. This is an intellectual industry, not something you happen to have in the ground like nickel or cobalt. Does not bode well for the future that we cannot educate to the standard required. And even more sadly, the key individuals at these plants are not going to be from the US. TSMC/Samsung will send over qualified people to oversee the work and ensure it is done correctly. TSMC I think sent over people to build the plants because US did not have the knowledge base to do it. I know popular here to bash Intel, but I've got my fingers crossed it will rise from the dead and manage to regain or at least be competitive. And how embarrassing that the leader(TSMC) is a small island nation of 23M. California alone has 40 and TX 30. Come Ron DeSantis, why can't FL(21M) out compete TW?

This. I've lived in Austin for awhile now. I'm trying to think of a single project (house paint, deck work, fence work, roof...) where it was not a Spanish speaking person doing the actual work. Sure the supervisor who dropped by might have spoken English. Might. The only for sure English speaker was the sales person. And even that wasn't true once where I hired a guy to rebuild my mailbox stone post that an Amazon driver mowed down. Somehow we managed to communicate enough to get it done.

Depends greatly what you hold and when. Unsurprised a vax maker would be volatile during covid. You posted it was common. I submit it is not common. You can find volatility if you want, but the majority of stocks trade on actual earnings, and those don't change day to day. Meme stocks on the other hand, like the latest crazy, djt. You can find them, they are in the news. Most stocks are boring on purpose and don't scream look at me.

I hold individual stocks. A 5% change in a day is big, at least with most companies. I just looked, I've got one at .4% down, one at .05% down, one 1.2%up, one at 1.5% up, one unchanged... You get the idea. On a day with an event, say take INTC which I don't hold, it is down 7% due to some very very bad news. I've held INTC in the past though, and a typical day at Intel is less than 1% change.

Funny you mention that. My water, electric and gas service connect fees (rates too) have gone up double digits in the past few years. Water is around 9, juice 14 and gas is a whopping 23. But fear not, juice just announced they are raising the connect fee. I guess they want to catchup to gas.

Subsidy is federal not state. My point was TX and many red states don't mind pork.

Yes, as I mentioned above. Probably the reason Gates chose TX. One of the issues with renewables is power stability. You see it in the wholesale rates. Its spring and so demand is down and sometimes production is up, way up. Wholesale rates will dip below zero. Usually when that happens the intergrid ties push power out of TX. I mean if you can use power and get paid, who wouldn't? I imagine Gates is planning on sucking up that power for carbon capture or anything. Already TX has installed a couple GWh of battery to absorb excess production and to push it back to the grid when prices go up again sometimes even the same day.

Perhaps, but TX is good with subsidies. In fact all the red states are. https://www.chooseenergy.com/d... Take a gander at the top 4 states producing wind electricity. I believe it was yesterday (wind was up, demand down) TX grid was 66% renewables.

You are describing production. I may be wrong, but I thought the problem during the big freeze was distribution. IE the PV=nRT problem. Gas is delivered at high pressure and then reduced in pressure for local distribution. Pressure goes from high to low and temperature goes down freezing the gas due to low levels of moisture in the gas. To winterize the process, I think they actually have heaters, which TX did not have. During high use periods like the big freeze, gas is pulled from storage and production is not much of an issue for short term events.

To be fair, CAN was implemented way before a car was connected to anything. In many ways similar to microcomputer OS vs mainframe. Mainframe was always multiuser, and was networked for decades before micros. As a result, OS's from micros were not very hard to attack(and still probably not as resistant as UNIX based OS's even today) because of legacy design. Really the only solution I can see is for government to step in and force manufacturers to choose between connected vehicles with a completely new hard bus or unconnected vehicles with CAN. Cost will always drive manufacturers to legacy implementations. We still have not moved to 48V power bus. Cost savings of smaller gauge copper does not justify the expense of designing new seat motors, window motors, infotainment, ... Legacy. And that is even true of EV's, where you'd think they would have jumped off 12V for that stuff. Heck EV's still have a 12V lead acid battery for that stuff. That is crazy. Can't wait until an autonomous class 6 truck goes rogue, or even a fleet of autonomous cars.

Not that hard to find. Here is an older article from 2021. https://www.stormshield.com/ne... I recall the Oldsmar incident where luckily the sodium hydroxide levels were restored before anyone was killed. And Putin just might in the future (possibly via NK) do something like this in retribution for the US support for Ukraine.

I'm from Indiana and am sometimes ashamed of some of the crap they do. I took a fortran class in 1976 in HS, they just started offering it. Keypunch machine in the class and cards were taken downtown to run and printouts returned next day. I even got a chance to go downtown to finish an extra credit program of like 700 lines(cards). It was a cool idea, as was the 2 years of chemistry I took. These things allowed me to test out of a year of calc, a semester of chem and jump into sophomore level programming my first year of college. But just like there were kids who did not take chem, or calculus, or trig, or physics, or even biology, few took fortran and for good reason. It would have been a waste of time. Just like welding would have been a waste of time for me. High school is the time where kids need to start branching into where they are going in life. Kudo's to my Indiana high school that offered the above as options, but require? How could the system have gotten dumber in 50 years?

They both (and investors) bought into the dream of self-driving autos where they could eliminate the driver cost completely. It has not panned out as planned. Their backup plan seems to be to squeeze the drivers to cost the same as an AI.

I've also noted Costco has done a few things locally. Before self-check was really self-check. Now self-check is still there but for awhile an employee actually scanned my stuff, usually with the gun as opposed to the table scanner that required the item be put on the weigh table. It was very fast, the employees could out scan almost everyone, lines moved very fast. But then they scaled back the number employees to around 1/2 the stations had an employee, but they took away the guns. Everything even stuff scanned by employees went thru the stationary scanner/weigh table. Things have slowed with the latest method. I asked an employee about it and the reason stated was theft for the removal of guns. The receipt check at the exit is still pretty lax. I suspect they are really just counting items which is pretty fast.

It is a bit of a pain to setup, I needed it to register to submit SS info if I remember right. I'm not surprised as once it is setup, it is easy to access many federal government sites such as IRS. I'm actually ok with it being difficult. Would you want it to be easy to have someone impersonate you to grab a fake tax refund in your name? I also do the PIN thing for my tax return, just as one more wall against tax fraud. One thing I found encouraging was during covid, the employee I video chatted with was in the office. ID.me did not allow their employees to work from home. I took that as they are serious about security, which I found comforting.

As to too little too late, thank lobbying efforts of TT. They paid a great deal of money to make sure congress did not allow IRS to siphon off TT's profits for a long time. A friend just saved 80 bucks doing direct file instead of TT. That same congress is intent to defang the IRS to ensure the wealthy can continue to duck audits. It had been paying pretty good dividends. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/i... They picked up 1/2B from only 1600 deadbeat millionaires. Not bad. But then only congress would think it is a good idea to neuter the account receivables department to benefit their biggest contributors.