Depending on what state you're in, a third party vote may 1) have absolutely zero chance of any impact whatsoever on the results, and 2) will show dissatisfaction with both of the "major party" candidates offered to us.

California, for instance, is a winner-take-all state, and so heavily Democrat that Biden (or anyone whatsoever with a "D" after their name on the ballot) could put on devil horns, paint his face red, and affect a Bela Lugosi laugh, and he'd still get over 60% of the vote.

I always threatened to write in Cthulhu as "the lesser evil", but usually ended up voting Libertarian as a "plague on both your parties" vote. (Yeah, the LP is ... problematic ... in several respects. Still, it registers a "neither of those turkeys" vote.)

Now, in a state somewhat more plausibly in play... My voting will probably look a lot like Dick's in that "Third Rock from the Sun" episode.

I recall your presentation at the Hackers Conference years ago showing the home-made radar gun you made to log the excessive speed of maniacs racing down your street, to show city council the need for speed bumps. I (like everyone else) was wondering about your dashing back and forth in front of the stage... then noticed your radar gun (on the Macintosh screen you had set up, IIRC) was clocking your speed as you did it. Nice demo.

Good times.

A friend of mine working at "one of those places" stamped his waste basket with some of those stamps.

I think I recall it was required that the waste basket be burned.

Would you object to a school library stocking the likes of The Turner Diaries?

Yes?

Then get over yourself and this tendentious prattle about "banned books".

Some books (and The Turner Diaries is bodaciously one of them) should not be stocked in school libraries.

Based on what evidence? Faith in Musk?

Over one billion miles driven using FSD.

Looking that that graph is should be obvious where it is going, and how soon.

The last I heard about the taxi idea, they mentioned they were considering letting people send out their cars as taxis when not in use, and thus owning a Tesla could actually make you money.

That does depend on true self driving to work but it seems like they are pretty close now.

A fact which renders these trackers completely useless as anti-theft devices

Not really, even if a thief is alerted something is being tracked if they can't find the tracker they will throw out the object they stole... which you can then recover. and also potentially get video evidence from around where it was dumped to ID the thief if they still have something from your backpack...

I have a hidden compartment in my backpack where I often put cash so I very much would be happy to recover even just the empty backpack without contents.

Or if you had an AirTag hidden in a car they might just ditch the car rather than take it to a chop shop, and you can at least find where it was ditched.

Also did you forget "unintentional theft" exists, where for example an airline rather than flying your bags to your destination, takes them elsewhere... and when that happens sometimes they have no clue where the bags are. If you have a tracker, you can tell them what city and facility your bags are in, and even play a sound to help locate them.

AirTags (and the new Android form) are incredibly useful even with tracking detection abilities, you are really missing out on this super cheap insurance and recovery aid.

Got it, thanks - good to know!

I guess since it considers it an "unknown tracker" it would only warn you about it, not feed back to Apple information about that AirTag location.

Didn't see this mentioned in the summary, when support for this launches does this mean Android will also warn you if an AirTag is tracking you? Which would mean it helps with the recognition network being larger for both tracking devices.

Or has Android already supported detecting AirTags tracking?

There is a famous investment quote that goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

If you join in the pack shorting something like this, you open yourself up to the possibility some kind of irrational buying flood comes in and wipes you out.

Remember that these days very few stocks are actually priced according to value, so it doesn't seem like a Trump based stock would be any exception.

I bought an AirPods Pro, received a *case* instead.

Returned by Amazon denied my return since I didn't send back what I had ordered.

Tried to reverse the charge on my Amazon credit card, Amazon denied it and refused to reverse the charge.

So I was just out of luck on that one. However since then I buy pretty much anywhere but Amazon if at all possible, even if I pay more. And I cancelled Prime. In the end I guess it was a cheap way to learn the lesson you cannot trust Amazon in any way.

Production requires people, competence, infrastructure and preconditions from the political, social and economic environment. High-tech production is not feasible anymore outside of East Asia. Your guess about the "why" is as good as mine, but it is not, otherwise companies would have done that. But they aren't.

And you see the lower levels of tech currently collapsing in the West, too, if you look at Boeing in the US and high-speed rail projects in the EU. We cannot do this anymore.

If you want to get a feeling for "why", look at the sheer numbers of college graduates for each disciplines and study fields in the West compared to East Asia. Western college students graduate in totally different fields than their Eastern counterparts. And the fields so many the Western students graduate in are unrelated to technology, but social. Social sciences in the West have consumed and cannibalized everything. And producing nanoscale semiconductors requires ALL the technology, from all technical fields, at their maximum.

Imagine plotting a graph for this, with "N = number of different genders recognized by ivy league graduates" on the X axis and "P = percentage of all chips with best = smallest scale manufactured on US soil" and maybe you'll recognize a trend. The US does marketing and brainwashing really really really well, and probably military, too, but not much else.

It'd be like a FOREX trader moving ~$2.25B USD.
Unsure if the impact on FOREX would be as pronounced as it was on BTC, but I bet it'd be something

Only 3 billion USD? Not even a quiver of movement.

Total M2 money supply - 20,783 billion

National debt? Rising at 1 trillion every 100 days, or 100 billion per day.

With so many dollars sloshing around you'd have to go into serious numbers to even have it be felt.

When companies repeatedly shaft early adopters, then there will be no early adopters left at some point and the company fails.That's what pre-2010 non-clown-world was.

But our current times have enough idiots to always by the latest and greatest, so companies don't need to try anymore. Marketing has fully superseded engineering.

Look at Boeing, if you doubt that.

No, no. Nothing needs to be sent back to the servers. That doesn't mean it won't be.

It does if Apple says it does, because they actually have a track record of stuff not going back to servers if you don't want it to.

If they say they aren't collecting your data? They're lying.

Maybe you are incapable of running a traffic proxy to verify but many are not. Apple does keep their word on this.