That's fine, but it doesn't matter who does, because congress explicitly didn't give them this power. It's not a matter of debate (the debate already happened) and it doesn't matter who appointed the person who doesn't have the power to do this.

All I'm saying is that jamming is illegal so it's not an improvement over just cutting them down, which is illegal. It seems to me to make sense only either to just cut them down, or render them temporarily inoperative with a bag which might be legally better than cutting them down.

Which government? The US (relevant as it's where Google is located) does its best to do everything through contractors. It would have to be through some international body, like the United Nations. I can't imagine that not slowing development to a crawl and leading to some other corporate browser taking over and creating the same problem all over again.

There are some motherboards which will let you use DDR4 with an AM4 processor, and AM4 processors have made sort of a comeback with AMD bringing back production of some higher end parts which remain competitive.

Though I actually built this as the AM5 stuff drove down the prices rather than going back and doing it, I run a 5900X (12C24T 3.7-4.8 GHz) and it remains a beast given the costs. I use 4x CP16G4DFRA32A.C8FF for 64GB dual channel, and the mainboard is an ASRock B550M PG Riptide. It's been absolutely solid, though ASRock has had some lemons and the RGB on this board is lousy.

At work I run Windows 11 on 4GB. If I leave it running for more than a few days then office windows stop drawing correctly, and don't even get me started on Acrobat.

I own a 2C4T Zen+ laptop which came with 4GB, I was able to get a matching SODIMM on ebay for about $15 and it's also dual channel which is especially nice for a unified memory machine. It's running Devuan with KDE and it's absolutely fine for any task I'd want to do on it. But it would cover my needs for Windows, too. 4GB doesn't, and didn't with Linux either.

My desktop has 64GB. This is the first time I've ever built a computer which appreciated.

Good and bad parts alike are made in China. Nobody seems really clear on what exactly happened with the capacitors, which frankly makes me believe the corporate espionage story since it's the most nefarious presented so far and muddy waters primarily benefit those trying to hide something in the river. The scope of that particular problem hasn't repeated since, so clearly it was an exceptional circumstance.

It's not a failure for the market side of the equation, because we're captive. It's a failure for the consumer side. Alas, despite understanding that they are consumers, and that corporations are legal fictions whose very existence is allegedly in the interest of The People, there is very little will to force them to actually serve our interests before then going on to serve their own. This is in the name of "freedom" but somehow giving more rights to corporations doesn't seem to ever result in actually increasing net freedom.

Actively jamming radio signals is a violation of federal law. It's not necessary, as you point out a mylar bag should do the job. If it doesn't there's a variety of types of foil-lined bags, or you could easily make bags with aluminum screen mesh. The camera is the primary tracking problem though, that's the principal sensor. Audio is also a problem but not on the same level.

The 4 GWh per year makes sense. The factory will produce 4 GWh of batteries every year. So if each battery is (pulling a number out of my butt) 10 KWh, the factory will build four million of them per year, or about 11,000 per day (assuming 365 days per year operation).

As for the translation to households... I can't make anything sensible out of that number. I'll note that you (inadvertently, I'm sure) multiplied the number of claimed households by a million, but if we drop that down to the claimed 4M households, that means each household gets 1 kWh of the capacity, which is enough to run the average house for about 45 minutes of average consumption... so that's not "overnight" storage for solar generation, but it's more than you need for grid stabilization. Dunno. My best guess is that they were going for how many houses you could run for a month on that much storage and just screwed up the arithmetic by three orders of magnitude (one SI scaling factor).

The $71M figure is to build a factory that manufactures sodium-ion batteries, 4 GWh of them per year.

Nah. It's just like every previous innovation-driven boom (railroads, oil, telecoms...) the growth and buildout phase generates incredible new wealth, highly concentrated (Vanderbilt, Stanford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.), . Then there are several decades of adaptation and adoption, during which the benefits accrue to the population broadly. This doesn't decrease the wealth of those who got crazy rich during the boom, but their wealth stops growing rapidly and they just become the new "old money". Then the next innovation creates a new crop of winners and the cycle repeats.

We're really just completing the adoption and adaptation phase of the personal computer revolution, and maybe a third of the way through the adoption and adaptation of the Internet revolution (the dot-com boom).

This claim ignores the fact that each new boom creates an entirely new set of winners, nearly all of whom actually came from humble-to-moderate beginnings. The wealth isn't staying in one "ossified" caste, indeed it's the exact opposite of ossification. Of course, as I said above, the wealth of those winners doesn't decline during the adaptation phase, but the the wealth generated by the newly-realized productivity gains does accrue broadly -- and in fact those "winners" never actually had as much wealth as they appeared to, because their paper wealth was primarily composed of the market's projection of their slice of their company's slice of the broad future gains.

In the end, the tide does raise all boats. The US has been getting steadily wealthier -- at every quintile -- for decades. There have been some dips at each recession, but the trend line is clear. Look at the real median household income and the net worth of by the bottom 50%. Granted that inequality has risen... that's to be expected during and for the first decade or two after an innovation-driven economic boom, and we've had multiple, in quick succession. But the actual numbers show that the tide is lifting all boats -- though the boats of the big winners have rocket engines attached.

There is one very large caveat that we're dealing with right now, which is housing prices. Due to a combination of factors -- mostly dominated by increases in square footage per person and quality of amenities that we've become accustomed to accepting as the baseline, but also including excessive building restrictions and a minor real estate bubble caused by the pandemic and low interest rates, then compounded by rising interest rates needed to combat the post-pandemic inflation -- right now that increased income and wealth isn't enough for many to buy the homes they'd like. Wages continue rising and housing prices in much of the country are actually falling a little, so over the next few years that will likely equalize out, but right now it's painful for many. But that pain is generating a pessimistic view of the state of the economy and individual incomes that simply doesn't match reality.

There definitely is a risk right now that this could all go badly if the new winners are allowed to engage in extensive regulatory capture. That's how market-proof monopolies are built, by capturing and directing government power. If we can avoid that, though, and just let the market continue to work, the general wealth increase will continue.

Well, unless the AI singularity hits. It's impossible to know what things will look like on the other side of that.

Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist. Okay, have a nice day, I'm out.

What you say is true... but basically all of the other president have actually been pretty smart people. There are some who clearly aren't as smart as others, but I can't think of any who were as dumb as Trump.

Selection, not coincidence. He's the right kind of grifter, with the right kind of personality. He's really not very smart, though. If he were actually smart he wouldn't shoot himself in the foot with such regularity.

Yes, Donald Trump is stupid, and yes he knows exactly how to play to his base. These things are only incompatible if you think it requires intelligence and strategy to play to his base. It doesn't. He just does what he does and it happens to resonate with them, most of the time at least.