James Taranto is a genius. I wish he was still writing daily.

Hope there were no straws on the ship that fell into the ocean.

Who knew?

No one can know if a vaccine will help them, harm them, or do nothing either way. Consequently, it is up to each person to make their own choice. No one should tell you to take or or not. This is the problem with some aspect of modern medicine. If something improves conditions for a small numbers but we cannot identify to whom it will help, we are stuck applying treatments to large numbers of people. For example, if a treatment improves outcomes by 100% (3 out of 10,000 die vs. 6 out of 10,000 die) but no one can identify the unique characteristics that helped those 3, then we have to treat all 10,000. That is expensive and unnecessarily risky for those 9997 people; AND it gives false hope to the 3 it doesn't help. This is why freedom of conscience is so important. I got COVID before vax were available. It was nothing despite being overweight and over 45. Why was it nothing for me? Know one can say. Since we cannot, we can only recommend or not recommend based on statistics. That isn't very helpful because everyone knows they are not a statistic. Until we can more precisely target treatments, we end up treating people (and shaming people) unnecessarily.

If they are losing money now, it is because they expect to be able to recover it eventually. Prices will rise and people will get frustrated like they did with cable.

Everyone needs to ask themselves if they should be afraid of getting covid. I had it. It was hardly even a cold for me. Having gotten it (before vaccines were available) made me wonder why I was afraid for so long. I suspect the data we have access to doesn't allow us to make rational choices. Instead, we are forced to weigh probabilities based on anecdotes and averages. At this point, we should be able to have a website where we can enter our vitals and see the real risk. I suspect most people would be shocked to find out how little they have to fear.

Everyone needs to ask themselves if they should be afraid of getting covid. I had it. It was hardly even a cold for me. Having gotten it (before vaccines were available) made me wonder why I was afraid for so long. I suspect the data we have access to doesn't allow us to make rational choices. Instead, we are forced to weigh probabilities based on anecdotes and averages. At this point, we should be able to have a website where we can enter our vitals and see the real risk. I suspect most people would be shocked to find out how little they have to fear.

I refuse to watch any Pirates of the Caribbean movies because I cannot understand the main character at all. Not sure it is a mixing problem.

Finally, the year of the Linux desktop!

This is the exact same as the Chinese (CCP) economic model. Sell at a loss until the rest go under.

Free speech for me, but no for thee.

If you are not well, stay home! I really believe that people who don't feel well, but don't want to miss out or be bored at home are driving the infections.

I have GFBR in my home. I get 1G to all wired ports in my home. I have a mesh network that gives me >500Mbps. I never saturate the link despite having many users in my home. Netflix 4k needs 25Mbps per screen. How many 4k's can you watch? What other service demands so much throughput? Latency is a huge benefit of GFBR. I see 1ms ping times wired, but wireless goes up to about 7ms. Other technologies have 20ms+. But I'm doubtful most users would benefit from this improvement. So, let's not spend too much money for too little benefit.

As long as these vendors think they can offer something that others cannot, they will continue to protect their IP so they can get paid above the market rate.

I think the reasons are different than you mention: 1) Chinese and Indian students are significantly filtered, so that only the very top students can apply to US schools. 2) In order to stay in the US, it is beneficial for foreigners to have advanced degrees; US citizens do not need the advanced degree to stay. 3) The demand for engineers is high, so many US-born graduates leave school as soon as they can earn a living.