The other net result can be that in the event of emergency-type situations (pandemics, riots, whatever) and delayed elections, you can end up with a totally defunct congress. Or, if you run out of people sleazy enough to be politicians, you end up with a totally defunct congress (because there's no one else who wants to run).

Haiti is in about that situation right now... 10 out of 30 seats filled in their Senate (which is less than a quorum, so they effectively can't do anything), and 0 out of 119 seats filled in their Chamber of Deputies. Only 3 members on their supreme court, and no President to appoint new members (and no Senate to confirm them if there was a President).

Of course, Haiti's issues go FAR beyond term limits, and really have a lot more to do with overall government corruption, high crime rates / drug gangs, and the meddling in its affairs by US/UN (everyone likes a project), but still... term limits aren't always a good thing. If you have someone who's actually doing a really good job, why would you want to change? Of course the flip side is well understood, especially with leaders like Putin who keeps extending term limits so he can stay in power.

It has to *cook* like meat, too. If I can't smoke it and have it turn out like a brisket or a flank steak or whatever, I don't want it. If I can't throw it on a searing hot grill to get the color and taste, I don't want it. If I can't render the fatty bits in a pan and then fry the meaty bits to make taco meat, I don't want it.

Basically, unless the product looks, feels, behaves, and cooks like a cow (or a chicken, or a goat, or a pig) I don't want it being substituted for those things. If it looks and tastes like a salad, that's fine, I'll carve up and cook one of the animals listed to put on top of it.

I'm not against eating insects (I've eaten roasted grubs in the South Pacific, and they were tasty), but ffs if I want grubs, I'll make a nice grub salad or something. Or a cow-based meatloaf with whole grubs in it, THAT would be an amazing thing to serve to unsuspecting guests at a dinner party. But don't try to make me eat grubs or other insects or plants as a *substitute* for goat or cow or whatever. There's a reason goat meat is > $12/lb in the US, and that's because it's DELICIOUS just the way it is, thankyouverymuch.

I couldn't agree more with your points.

When I think of how "how do we get the largest reduction in death/infection/whatever" should have been answered by CDC et al., I think of things like "freely available testing so people can make their own informed decisions to not infect others" and "provision of proper PPE to ALL health care workers from day 1." Possibly even things like "subsidized grocery delivery services, brought to you in part by the USPS" which would have made a huge difference (a couple times when I probably should have been staying home away from others, I *had* to go out because food is necessary, and all grocery delivery services were booked out for weeks, and I had no one else to do it for me... so I did what had to be done). Of course even now I can't really know if I "should have" quarantined myself, as I couldn't get tested...

The lockdowns and limitations on freedoms, crackdowns on peaceful protests about lockdowns while allowing and even encouraging race riots, etc. was always bogus and a transparent attempt at exerting undue control over the population.

The CDC is more interested in "public health" than my health.

I don't think you're wrong, but arguably that's also not the wrong approach for an agency with their charter. When a public health agency looks at the nation as a whole and says "how do we get the largest reduction in death/infection/whatever," they really have to look at it on a statistical data-driven level, not what's best for you personally.

That said I also do think they massively botched the whole COVID thing, start to finish, in both messaging and actions. Testing should have been WAY faster to ramp up, and "free" (aka taxpayer funded) for all purposes. Of course, many (most?) of the public health departments and public hospitals around the country have either been completely privatized by profit-driven corporations (or profit-driven "non-profits" like Multicare), or are in such dire straits they couldn't help much if they wanted to. They're all underfunded, understaffed, undersupplied, so we had to turn to all the commercial outfits for any kind of testing. The first time I probably had it, I couldn't even get tested because tests were only for people who were actively dying (and why were we testing them? We knew their symptoms and that they were actively dying, why not treat their symptoms and save tests for people who are still out in public as potential carriers?).

The one part you're missing is that in large swathes of the country, the heat pump is replacing other resistive heating which is far less efficient. In my old house (western WA) I replaced baseboard with a 4-room Daikin mini-split, and it was fantastic. I gained A/C in the summer, and I replaced my baseboards entirely, dramatically lowering my heating bill in the winter, because heat pumps are FAR more efficient than baseboard.

In my area, a great number of older houses don't have natural gas, so all the heating is resistive (baseboard and/or electric furnace). Going to heat pumps might put a bit of extra load on the grid in the summer (because a lot of these houses weren't built with any A/C originally), but in the winter it will significantly reduce the load on the grid.

In places where it gets *really* cold, heat pumps are generally used for the bulk of heating/cooling and then auxiliary heat (resistive or gas/oil) is used on the coldest days when the heat pump has a hard time keeping up. It's still generally a big efficiency gain over resistive or gas/oil heat alone, from what I understand, and heat pumps are pretty light on power (the entire system for my old house ran on a single 20A circuit).

It's interesting, but it's actually easier to do "voice only" with a smartphone than a feature phone these days. On smartphones, you have Google Family Link or Apple [whatever they call it, iFamily or something probably], and on PCs you can use Microsoft Family Safety. On feature phones, you have nothing unless you pay for it through the carrier, but most feature phones now also have wifi chipsets and rudimentary web browsers and such things. So if you really want to lock it down and see what a kid is doing, you really need the smart phone that can run Family Link or iSomethingSomething.

Two of those countries closest to the US that come to mind are Haiti and Mexico, where violent crime and murder rates make the US look absolutely placid.

So you haven't been there, then? People flee all sorts of places, for all sorts of reasons. Extreme poverty does not a shithole make. San Francisco is far more of a shithole than most of Haiti will ever be. Seattle is becoming that way too; Detroit, Chicago, and DC have been that way for decades.

Of course, your bootstrap firmware is where things like CPU microcode are often held (to be applied at boot time), so if you want to address CPU vulnerabilities guess what... that means updating your bootstrap (BIOS/UEFI) firmware.

Your bootstrap firmware also talks on the network - iSCSI boot? PXE boot? NVMe boot (well, hopefully one day really soon)? What if there's a security vuln in one of those boot protocols that needs to be updated? The ability to do diskless (network) boot is a really valuable thing, and if it means one has to update their bootstrap firmware once in a while to handle it securely, that doesn't seem to be a bad tradeoff.

If you think in the context of a home PC or laptop, sure, fine, never update anything. If it's working, it's working, and very likely might not be a need to change (though in the case of a laptop sometimes important things like battery life bugs are addressed in that same firmware). In the context of servers? Manufacturers release updates for good reasons, and it pays to read the release notes and see which updates are important/applicable for a given environment. A default attitude of "we don't update firmware if it's working" is a really easy way to get into really bad places.

there is a difference between an operating system and a firmware

Are you so sure about that? What are the differences? Let's look at a BMC... it runs a "firmware." That firmware is a small embedded operating system with network access, ability to send commands directly to hardware, ability to intercept the boot process, etc. Are you claiming the BMC firmware shouldn't ever need to be updated because it's "not an operating system"? Or, let's take an EFI/UEFI system... again, firmware... but wait.. it runs an embedded OS, in some cases Linux. It can run code, interact with hardware, write to hardware, has network access... what, in your world, makes that less important to get updates than the operating system? Or, what about Intel's ME, which is update via firmware updates? That's another small embedded OS, with network access, ability to interface with hardware, run executable code, etc... should that not be updated when it has a security issue, because it's "firmware, and you literally should never need to update that." Or what about the NIC? It sits on the network, and receives network traffic, and talks to the rest of the system (likely even through RDMA, where it's talking directly into system memory). It has also had vulnerabilities in the past, everything from DOS type issues, to full remote code execution exploits. But wait... that's just firmware, why the hell would you ever consider updating that, just to fix a pesky security vulnerability? Or what about CPUs, surely those shouldn't ever need a firmware update.... unless they were made by AMD or Intel in the last 10 years, and are susceptible to any number of side-channel attacks.

I could go on, but the horse is already a pink mist.

I haven't been to El Salvador, but I've been to Haiti several times. It is NOT a "shithole country." It *is* a country with a lot of poverty and a lot of strife, but also a lot of beauty, talent, and exceedingly kind and friendly people.

It's a country that has been held in an oppressed state, primarily by the French but also by a lot of American democrats (notably the Clintons did quite a number on the country when they "helped"). It's also a country that has been held hostage by Vodou in so many ways it's appalling. I've known of people killing and eating their own relatives because a Vodou priest said that was the way to gain strength; the Vodou priests/priestesses have the strongest hold over the people when the people are kept in a state of poverty, and many in Haiti who have been liberated from Vodou believe this is one of the primary reasons the country is as impoverished as it is (not to mention, again, the French... until very recently, Haiti was paying the French for their "stolen property," the Haitian slaves who revolted to form the country).

Calling Haiti a "shithole country" is likely racist (non-Blacks in Haiti are pretty much a statistical anomaly), but it's most certainly ignorant and bigoted.

You're right, 20,000 is far too low. The actual number if you assume 10 different types of components with 5 potential firmware versions each would be 9,765,625 permutations. Thanks for catching that.

You seem to be wanting to make the same point I made, I think. If a company doesn't test firmware, and simply accepts what the mfg sends them, instead of normalizing to a known set of firmware, their solution is garbage. I've known people who wouldn't update disk firmware even after the manufacturer said "the firmware we shipped has a known bug that WILL kill your drive." Those people have no business being near production systems.

You also mis-read the bit about power supplies... I've seen a PSU bug that throttled the CPU when there was a power blip (think... upstream provider UPS maintenance) and then *kept it significantly throttled* until the server was rebooted. Tell me you wouldn't update that firmware once the bug was found? If your entire datacenter starts throttling at once because the DC provider does a UPS maintenance and your PSUs have buggy firmware, and it stays throttled until you reboot every damn machine, that *IS* potentially a major incident.

What the hell. You literally should never need to update your operating system. Why would you do that?

Oh wait.. because updates are released to fix bugs, including security issues, and compatibility issues, and sometimes even bring features you want to make use of. In the case of firmware, also because some firmware can't be downgraded, and you don't want 20 different versions of firmware running on the same type of component spread across your datacenter, each with its own peculiarities.

I do have professional driver training (rally driving, specifically, along with commercial vehicle), and it has been proven time and again (and is even documented in the user manuals that come with cars) that cars stop better (in a shorter distance) without ABS in certain conditions (most notably snowy/icy conditions). The entire role of ABS is to make it so a driver can steer while braking; it has little to nothing to do with stopping in a shorter distance. If a driver is driving correctly there should be little to no mixing of brake and steering inputs, unless it's adding of a bit of brake to initiate weight transfer onto the front axle, to help get the back end to come around to where it's wanted. In low-traction situations, the steering wheel is a "suggestion input device" and the only real effect of ABS is to nullify the suggestion.

On more than one occasion I have stopped well past the stop line in snowy/icy conditions due to ABS, where I would have stopped easily by the line if it had not kicked in to "help." I pulled the ABS fuse in whichever vehicle I was driving shortly after each instance, and didn't have that issue again.