Why do we need to nudge it? Why do we need literally harm people and their livelyhoods intentionally when the natural consequences and economic trends are already headed rapidly toward a energy future that has coal entirely out of the picture?

At the rate coal is leaving the overall energy picture, even if we don't meet some specific goal of being coal free by X, the amount of coal operations will be such a vanishingly small part of the carbon picture that any beneficent will be mostly immeasurably small and diffuse but the consequences for the people who get nudge will of course be likely quite acute.

This is purely religious thinking driving this and downright pagan at that; the only justification for this type of policy choice is a belief that people who use coal are sinners and sinners have to be punished to appease mother earth.

This was my thought as well.. There is a certain cache to buying a 'new' thing. Its like buying a new car, you get all the window glossy and what not; maybe its a pride thing, you will get some 'attention' from the deal ship for a time, maybe a 'free' car wash membership etc. Above all you can likely drive it off the lot that day.

However we all know you can probably find a low mileage example of a very similarly appointed vehicle with very likely identical power plant/drive line that is last years model sitting on a used lot or as a lease return or something for steep discount. It might take a little shopping to find the configuration you want.

Same thing here; I am not surprised an super premium, entry into what is still an early adopter electronics market, comes with a heavy premium attached when buying new. There were no doubt going to be a lot of folks with disposable income and not a lot sense that buy these things because, Apple, probably having never even used a VR/AR headset before only to find its 'not for them' and so sure if you are willing to wait and watch you can probably snipe one on ebay at steep discount.

This all sounds like pretty run of the mill buyers remorse to me. Really this person should take away: 1) Unless money is no object, at least understand the used market for any major purchase before you rush off to buy new. 2) As far as electronics go, its generally true it will always at least in real terms be cheaper later, 3) don't over spends on 'toys' things rarely bring us happiness for long and less so when we come to feel we scarified to much for them like loss of financial security or missing other opportunities because we were 'saving' for thing.

still at the call center then eh? No surprise why..

Hydrogen is very light, even lithium batteries are not. Fuel beats, storage in terms of efficiency unless the conversion of fuel to energy is fairly poor, as does happen to be the case with combustion engines, both internal and external.

The real question we should be asking is does end-use efficiency even matter. Remember "to cheap to meter"? If we really could find a low impact way make all the electricity we could possibly use, then we would be free to be as wasteful with it as we like in terms of doing electrolysis to make H2 and then burning that in an 18% engine.

If we could do that, then I expect an h2 drive line might very well prove lower impact than battery electric. We would then be optimizing for whatever is easier to on the environment to manufacture.

We might get there nukes; maybe -

Its entirely about this. Either the ML will be the new printing press or it won't but if it is they want to make sure the crown remains in control of it this time, and damn sure they are the royalty.

Right because of the regulations, that already exist.

Anyone actually responsible for engineering at a coal fired generating station will tell you they are running a "flue gas remediation facility" that happens to generate a little electricity as it is.

Let me first say - I think you are correct

but - I also don't think that is the only explanation. One other I think reasonably likely possibility is they are hedging. The law gives the POTUS authority to delay enforcement for some additional months if he finds there is 'progress' being made toward divestment.

Progress - is one of those squishy bits of language that can mean anything anyone wants it to mean. TikTok knows they are popular with the Biden voter, and they know an election is coming. Even thought he initial drop dead date is after the election, there isn't anything to say Biden can't announce they are being given the extension early. They might want to secure the extra time by threatening to take their ball and go home. There is not grantee they will be able to get an injunction or stay while they fight this in court, or they might simply want to secure a few extra months to see home many young Americans they can convince to become transexuals.

except that fore the most part education and the ability of the public to think critically have not changed THAT much.

Its the social media that is new, and the degree of near constant coupling to it via smart phone that is newer still.

So using a little of that 'critical thinking' clearly you are wrong and social media is very much the problem.

I would like to think the ascendant wing of the GOP is the Goldwatter wing.

Nixon was were things started to go wrong and we are going to put it right; by moving to the right.

And in all likelihood the current leadership will be 'proven right' in terms of profitability. Its not like Boeing can actually fail no matter how many of their plans fall out of the sky. They are TBTF/Strategically_Important dear old Uncle Sam will step in a save them somehow no matter what. Sure if things get embarrassing enough some of the top dogs are send off with their severance packages (large enough to completely alter the life of anyone commenting here) so what do they care as individuals?

You want to crank the cynicism all the way to 11 - They have made the right call. Pumping the stock so they could sell off the options over the years, and converting the value of the company to cash dividends was and likely remains a lot more valuable than trying to build a competitive or even safe aircraft; at least as far as anyone with interest more significant than exposure via some mutual fund someplace, or handful of shares in trading account.

The ghost writers have gone along with it and I think really shot themselves in the foot.

We are still getting new Tom Clancy novels. Sure you can look below the line any see who actually wrote it but that isn't the big bold letters on the cover. This is true for a lot of the popular "air port series", I guess Lee Child is actually still writing his own books.

How are new authors supposed to make a name for themselves when marketing all goes to guys already in the ground. The authors actually writing those books have more or less allowed themselves to be comoditized and just wait for the LLMs to come for them...

I don't fundamentally disagree. The thing is Azure is to big and complex with to many cooks in the kitchen for there being really any hope of getting it right.

Microsoft absolutely needs to have a hard, delete after-N policy, and then start writing very specific exceptions around certain critical components of Azure infrastructure. The Federal government should be 'beta-testing' the could with the rest of Industry. Azure / Office 365 are good examples of to much to fast at to high a value.

No its 100x worse than that. Its probably coming from the coal plant in another state like the story about all the Data Centers near DC.

They need to Coal power (because coal keeps the lights on) because the renables don't cut it; they suck for super dense constant base loads. However since the green morons decided to make it impossible to burn coal near by the grid operators and generation people are tearing up more of the WV mountains and cutting up the valleys on Northen VA to run more transmission lines.

Study after study has shown the importance of large UNBROKEN areas of habitat for wildlife. Slicing up what little we have left on the Eastern half the US to run more high voltage lines is terribly short sighted and stupid. Wind and Solar might be low carbon but as gird solutions they aint green!

So much this. The Intel lobby practically just burnt down congress, (it sure as-f**k looks like they blackmailed the speaker of the House) to defeat having to even get a warrant for spying from their special FISA court, when the 'F' (foreign) part is deeply in question.

That does suggest to me its time to 'trust them' more and just hand over the keys to all communications privacy. They basically finished throwing a tantrum and screaming about how they can't do their jobs AND respect the Constitutional rights of the public.

Yes I realize this is the EU but come on right after spooks ram rod the privacy shredding 702 thru congress suddenly the issue comes to the fore other side the Atlantic... right like the 5-eyes cool kids are not coordinating their abuse of democracy..

Actually they were extremely careful and slowly wormed their way into a maintainer ship position via sock-puppets and astroturfing where they could insert code with perhaps less scrutiny than say trying to trojan some pull request. Then they put most of the payload in some binary material that ships with the software rather than source codes someone would likely feed to some SAST tool or otherwise audit effectively as part of due diligence. They did this over a long span of time and did legitimate maintenance work as well.

  All and all its worrying that it happened but it also suggest the overall pipeline and checks and balances as far as what makes it to a general release in the major Linux distributions is 'really pretty solid'. Someone put a good deal of analysis and long term effort into backdooring the big distros and it still failed. As you say perhaps one of the reasons it failed was because they saw their window of opportunity closing and had to do move quicker leading to the performance issue the Microsoft engineer noticed.

There again this is case where 'many eyes' really should be credited, and of course Freund who actually found it; more so than anything Microsoft the organization was/is doing. He wasn't doing security specific work, and he's just a good engineer that happened to be in the right place to spot a problem!