I think google divested from that business, over the past 5 years or so, to such an extent that I wish Altavista was still around.

Well, that industry must be utterly incompetent, because Texas has a well documented history of losing its collective shit whenever the temperature drops below freezing. I think it would be better if Texas abstained from lecturing anyone on how to deal with extreme weather events.

I don't know when was the last time, but the US fines European companies all the time, for all sorts of things, even things they do outside the US. For example, in 2024 they find SAP, a German software company, for a bribery scheme that took place in Panama (http://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024-4). The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits companies that do business in the US from bribing officials anywhere in the world. At least the EU sticks to fining companies for shit they do in the EU,.

They are sub-optimal for sure, but not compared to what the rest of us get through private insurance.

Europe has plenty of meth-heads too, yet public transportation there does not suck. The public transportation in the US sucks because the government doesn't want to do what is necessary to overcome the cold start problem. To be useful, a mass transit needs to have a lot of busses. If you have to wait 30 minutes for a bus, nobody will use it. But to have a lot of busses you need a lot of riders to cover the cost. The only way to break this vicious cycle is for the government to subsidize it heavily in the beginning. This is culturally acceptable in Europe, but not in the US.

No, it does not renew. If it renewed, I would need to sign again every month. It is no different than my contract with the phone company. One contract, that lasts for as long as I keep paying my bill, or until I cancel it. What you are describing is something similar to an apartment lease: a fixed term contract with a set expiration date specified in the contract. Nextflix is most definitely not like that (at least not in the US)

I don't know about Italian Netflix contracts, but my US one does not expire after 30 days. There is no clause in the contract that says that. In fact the contract makes it pretty clear that it lasts until I cancel, and that if I stop making the monthly payments I am in breach.

I only have one Outlook, and it is very bleak.

Bell Labs invented the transistor because the low hanging fruit of vacuum tubes had dried up. Some low hanging fruit is always dried up. That never stopped progress. There wasn't a single thing that made Bell Labs work, it was a combination of factors, of which the most important where reliable funding, job stability, and technical corporate leadership. As a government regulated utility, Bell Systems had very stable revenue and profit, so they could plan R&D activities for 20 years ahead, and they did. They hired the best graduates directly from university campuses and offered them a credible prospect of retiring from Bell 40 years later. They had no MBAs in the upper echelons. Haakon Romnes and John deButts, who were CEOs through the 60s and 70s, were both electrical engineers. The people immediately under them were also engineers. When a CEO retired, they simply promoted one of these business people with technical backgrounds, who had been with the company for several decades. By contrast, Jonh Stankey, the current CEO of AT&T has a BBA and an MBA,. He probably doesn't understand how electricity works.

How exactly do you finance the manufacturing of physical items, like glasses and VR goggles, with unrealized capital gains?

None of your clothes have buttons? Or seams stitched with synthetic thread for durability?

This sounds like significantly more effort than writing the code by hand.

Maybe you shouldn't love your coffee paraphernalia so hard. You should try a more tender kind of love, instead of this "50 shades of brown" thing you've been doing so far.

Aquatic life in the Seine? That's a funny one.

As America's favorite nazi (Werner von Braun) once said, "the human brain is still the best supercomputer that can be mass produced using only unskilled labor."