I'm quite happy with my CTEK battery charger so far (12V charger for car batteries).

Companies misbehaving should come with consequences. Personally, I put a 10-20 years boycott on seriously unethical conduct.
For instance, any company that participated in the mid-2010s diesel emissions fraud cannot expect to sell a new car to me before the mid-2030. An I'm aware that will reduce my options quite a bit.

Thanks for the info. In my case, though, I got what I expected:
A cheap way of using two extra USB 2.0 ports to plug in something like a printer.

There is certainly a race to the bottom, and part of that are the reviews. Some are obviously paid for by the seller, and they appeared to use the cheapest supplier too.
A while ago, I bough a cheap Chinese slot bracket for my computer and looked at the reviews. A lot of the "reviews" were not even for the same product. In one, for instance, someone complained about receiving the wrong motion detector.
The whole thing felt like the email spam I often get, where it seems the seller is content if you look at their site at all. Even if the topic of the spam has nothing to do with the web site, and their chance of selling something is negligible.

Sometimes they have to go down either way, the lining of the hearth erodes over time. Then repairs are necessary. if you google for "blast furnace campaign", you will find a few articles that describe the problem.
It might take a long time until all steel furnaces are retrofitted though, if you do it only when a rebuild is needed anyway. The articles I found hint at campaign durations over ten years.

There is a huge range of efficiency measured in operations per watt/hour over the same architecture. Chips running at higher clock rates tend to use disproportionately more power, while providing more absolute performance.
So compact and energy efficient vs. maximum performance is mostly a choice of the manufacturer. Both Intel and AMD have CPUs in the 15W class, in AMD's case even with semi-decent graphics performance.
Currently, the typical desktop is more of a power hog, but Intel/AMD could produce boards for the desktop with power-efficient laptop hardware.

About the underutilized factories, that is a problem which has hit other hardware makers with own factories before. When AMD's Bulldozer did not sell well, they ended up selling their foundry business. The new company is known as Global Foundries.

And what about mandated "extra features"?

Being from Germany, I can only speculate about the US, but here we had mandatory insulation standards creep up over the decades. And recently obligatory installation of photovoiltaics on new construction. All of these will increase work compared to simple masonry and some plaster on top, without increasing square footage built.

Moderation after the fact and if someone reports the problematic content should be enough. If the law makers are sensible, they will not demand the impossible.
German law for instance requires social networks to delete "obviously illegal" content within 24 hours after they learned about it. Only if they get more than 100 complaints per year they have to create a complaint handling system. There are still disputes about unwanted side effects, but this should not be impossible.

To extend your cafe example:
If the proposed changes to 47 USC 230 happen, then if you throw out the pro-segregation assholes, you also have to throw out the drug dealers as soon as you notice them. Alternatively, you can ignore all of them (no moderation at all).

It would be reasonable to make an exception here. As in, moderation you are required to do by law does not suspend your legal immunity for the rest. So if Joe Schmoe posts kiddie porn, you have to remove it. But you can allow posts by Donald the Nazi without getting into legal trouble. Come to think of it, content that is legal under the First Amendment should not get you into legal trouble anyway.

This is less about the relationship between user and social media and more about what we allow the media to do while giving them legal immunity for it. If social media choose what "content to carry" aka blocking content they don't like, this is a form of editorial control. Making them liable for what is left seems reasonable.

And currently some of them are also using algorithms to push the type of content to users they have shown interest in before. This can be a very useful thing, but also push more potentially harmful content to people who are susceptible to it. Such as pushing more pro-bulimia content to anorexic girls. The best non-paywalled source I could find is about the testimony of Frances Haugen about Facebook recommendation algorithms:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036519/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-algorithms/.

Some people have suggested that social media should act more like common carriers if they want to have immunity for content their users post. I support that. It would ensure they have to be either more consequent in allowing free speech, or more careful about what they promote.

Both with the Soundblaster Live and the Audigy, Windows software support ended long before the hardware was broken or hardware wise no longer compatible. There were some hacks and inofficial driver packages, but I did not have much luck with these.

Eventually, I got both running under Linux though. Which became easier in the sense of less tinkering required over the years. Today, if you install a new (x)Ubuntu version the Audigy at least will run without any extra configuration needed.

But you have to find it first. 90% of YouTube content is still crap, just like most TV. The advantage of YouTube is that you can find the 10% eventually and stick to those channels.

I took a quick look, and Neuro-Sama is a not very good chatbot. Not really newsworthy. I was bored or I would not even have checked it out.

As long as they add enough of it, it would be fine for me. My desktop has 32GB of ECC RAM, and I expect this to be enough for the next 10 years, as technological progress has slowed down somewhat.
The memory came in two modules for 95 Euro each (summer 2022), so making a laptop with 32 GB instead of 16GB should be doable for an extra $100.

I'd expect that the US would send a few aircraft carriers and try to sink any invasion troops before they reach Taiwan. Not sure if they would send ground troops.
The smaller Taiwanese islands close to the Chinese mainland would probably not be defendable against China. These would fall quickly.