They only apply Enron standards to protesters and rioters, not corporate execs.

Worse case is the complex total back door hidden in the A5+ gpu silicon that Kaspersky responsibly disclosed.

100% deliberate and not engineering code. Apple was able to patch in a block - for this one that we know about.

It's believed NSA used this backdoor to spy on Tucker Carlson's Signal messages. If they will spy on an American journalist they will spy on SK military generals any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

SK knows what's up and if anyone at Samsung betrays them they have means and methods.

It's true you're paying about the same for a AA battery in the hardware store than you were 30 years ago, if you account for inflation. However a 1990s AA battery would have a capacity of around 800 mAH whereas a modern AA battery offers 2000 mAH or more for the same (adjusted for inflastion) price. So while it *looks* like you're paying more for batteries, you're not if you account for inflation. If you actually look at the number of batteries you to buy over the course of time to power some device, you're actually paying less than 1/3 the price *for the stored energy you get*.

In any case we're not talking about the primary (non-rechargeable batteries) you are buying in the hardware store. We're talking secondary (rechargeable) batteries. In secondary cells the price/per capacity deflation is dramatic. The cost of kWH of lithium ion battery went down by 92% since 2000 [source]. Projections are grid storage costs will continue to drop at dramatic, albeit at somewhat lower rates, so we'll see a cost reduction of about one half in the next seven years [source].

Note this is a conservative projection of of lithium ion technology's evolution. There are multiple promising technologies in the pipeline that could significantly beat this projection. Some of these technologies (e.g. molten metal batteries) promise to be an order of magnitude cheaper if the bugs can get ironed out.

One more: since you can't upgrade later for $150 you have to pay $450 more up front if you'll ever want more.

Better to buy no-name OEM from Taiwan at this point than big American brands.

I'm so glad I got off the Apple bandwagon when they started ignoring the Mac for iPhone.

I actually had linux running on my MBP for a while before buying a PC laptop to when it was time to upgrade.

Every convenience feature is potential spyware when they could have done it cryptographically secure from the beginning.

I actually had a good chat with on-staff cryptographers back in the 90's. This one gal was a genius at elliptic curves

Those were the days.

I use rsync and syncthing to do those.

I happen to generate all my scripts out of puppet modules with reflection but for just a few devices you can absolutely roll it by hand.

> Sure it sucks, but it isn't dire.

Dropping the kids off at McDonald's at 7am in a snowstorm is indeed dire.

These providers usually have enforced monopolies which always come with wealth redistribution.

Fix all of the above problems before dunking on poor families subject to these policies.

Some of these comments make no sense in the reality that remote schooling is now mandatary and enforced by law.

Kids in poor families who need to be on Zoom 6 hours a day do not have other options claimed here.

Unemployment meetings, seniors' telehealth, etc. all fit similar patterns. There is often no choice given.

Fix those maybe before claiming that a 1GB cap is plenty.

> Wait. Why on earth are you using an account for television.

So you can watch your YouTube videos on your TV?

Cut off the pharmaceuticals for a few years and we'll have all-new politicians.

War doesn't always start with a clear-headed, cold-blooded weighing of national interests. In fact I'd say that's the more the exception than the rule. Historically it's quite common for a country to start a war that in retrospect looks stupid from the standpoint of national interests.

Of course peaceful initiatives can be just as badly thought ought. We quite *deliberately* chose to tie our economy to China; I remember this quite distinctly. Although nobody anticipated the speed or completeness of the interdependency that would folow, everybody understood that we were choosing to head that way. The argument was a purely ideological one, whether interdependency per se was a *good* thing. And, as far as it goes, the argument was sound. If you don't nitpick too much, it worked out just as planned.

The thing that we really didn't put much thought into was *who it was we were choosing to become interdependent with*. China is, not to put too fine a point on it, an unstable and very dangerous powder keg. There is no rule of law; laws are enforced selectively by officials tied to an unaccountable and unrestrainable political party. There is no freedom of information, which means among other things you don't get economic data you can trust. The system is prone to sudden, opaque power shifts and the emergence of strong men who are legally, and sometimes politically unrestrained with respect to policy and military affairs.

And now we'd really like a little more distance from that powder keg, but our interdependence is the main thing that's stabilizing the situation. At least in the short term, until somebody does something that, in restrospect, will look really stupid. Which is inevitable, eventually.

Presumably critters evolved to deal with noises that naturally and regularly occur in their native habitats.

This doesn't mean that natural noises that aren't regularly part of their normal habitat can't harm them. It's possible that animals whose range naturally overlaps the periodical cicadas do get harmed by that noise, but the harm is not significant enough to exert selective evolutionary pressure.

So natural isn't necessarily benign. Nor, do I think, is *unnatural* necessarily harmful. But dose does makes the poison, and cars do make a *lot* of noise. It's pretty well established that humans overexposed to car noise can develop health problems like cardiovascular disease. Since CVD mainly kills and disables people after their reproductive years, don't expect populations to evolve a biological tolerance for car noise though.

He's moving some assets into US companies because they're innovative. Fair enough.

He thinks they're innovative because they've got more hustle. OK. That's almost circular.

He thinks they've got more hustle because Americans work longer hours. That doesn't follow at all.

Sometimes you work longer hours because the boss forces you to, and you are giving him as little for the time as possible. Sometimes you work longer hours because you're disorganized, bad at planning and managing your time. I've seen that often enough. If hours worked equals hustle equal innovation, he should be putting his money into Cambodia, where workers put in 40% more hours per year than Americans. Sweden and Switzerland rank higher than the US in the Global Innovation Index, even though people in those countries work a *lot* less.

Innovation for a country is multifactorial. Wealth and education matter. Attractiveness to foreign investment; rule of law; those are really important things where America excels. Even sheer size makes a difference; being part of a massive integrated market is a huge boost to both the US and the EU. Sure, work ethic matters, but work *hours* is a lousy proxy for that. In some countries people put in six hours of honest hard toil each day then go home. Do they have less work ethic than a country where people spend ten hours a day at work but much of that "lying flat"?

If it works for them, are they wrong?

Except as labor standards drop, your choice is another job that does the same thing. About 17% of American workers don't have fixed hours or guaranteed workdays, which makes planning for work/life balance a farce, and the old standby of getting a second job to make ends meet is impossible.

73% of young Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 20% of whom have no savings at all and many of them have to spend 50% of their income on housing. This means they don't really have the ability to quit their job and look for another job where working conditions exceed the minimum legally allowable standards. Which is why legally enforced minimum standards are important. We need those young people to step up and start making babies.

Fertility rates have dropped in the US from roughly replacement (2.1 children/woman) to a catstrophically low 1.6. The US population would already be contracting were it not for immigration. Now a lot of this is social changes -- women choosing to delay childbearing to start a career. But consider South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.8. They're a much more conservative society than we are so it's not changes in attitudes that's driving that. The reason their fertility rate is so low is that they take people in their prime childbearing years and work them like dogs, in return for little prospect of economic security.

Don't you think if those young Koreans would quit their job and choose a higher paying job that gives them more leisure time if they could?

When I started working in the 1980s, getting your first job was like stepping onto an escalator that would carry you up to higher economic status. It's not like that now for the youngest generation of workers; it's more like stepping onto a treadmill. When we start to look to that generation to replenish the US population, our fertility rate is going to sink like a rock. The only way to keep the country running will be to open the immigration floodgates.