The price may not have been a check. The government was telling them who the boss is. It is morally suspect to shake down business like this; however, maybe Dario really was a pain in the a**. It's hard to know what really happened here.

China is a famously closed ecosystem. Li Keqiang -- a CPP provincial secretary -- candidly said in 2007 that CCP numbers are "man-made and therefore unreliable". on. People interested in measuring China's economy use proxies, which has become an academic cottage industry. In 2020, China famously cut its population by 200 million (!!!) people.

Anyone who takes Chinese numbers at face value is foolish, because the CCP doesn't do that themselves.

Almost all GM cars are built in China. GM basically gave all their technology away for the privilege of doing this. My guess is that these new Chinese cars will be reliable.

The CCPs model is "State Capitalism", which is a far cry from free markets. It's really a variant of socialism; however, that term is overloaded, so we use the term "State Capitalism" for the variant of socialism where the government has the "commanding heights".

The West does massive of amount of government funded R&D. Eg., the NIH, and the NSF.

Precisely. The CCP has relied on widespread financial repression of its citizens to build an impressive industrial base. The key question is this: if Chinese citizens do not exchange exports for imports, then what is the point? It is economically incoherent. China will accrue a massive amount of foreign currency, and then what? Bathe in it while it deflates away?

Economic imbalances have a funny way of correcting themselves eventually. When this happens, China will discover that foreigners can moderate their appetites or find alternatives. The same cannot be said for factories and their workers.

Excellent analysis from economics professor Patrick Boyle.

It's important we dress our astronauts smart and classy, for when we find aliens. We want to give a good first impression when we shake their tentacle.

<blockquote>Seizing names just makes it harder to find sites, but if users are expecting to have to find the current site name, then it starts to get more futile.</blockquote>

And then helpful Wikipedia editors conveniently document for posterity the current site name, so users always know where to look.

Why would it be illegal to give them a discount? I understand not wanting to undermine the relationship with the other vendors, but illegal?

Why would you want to forbid them? Who are you, the hostname police?

This cannot be legal in the EU, right? Or even if only one of your employees works remotely from EU?

Well it's an answer; no one said the answer is correct.

How good are mitigations to speculative execution attacks (Spectre, Meltdown) on the new Apple processors?

Do they beat Intel in this respect, too?

Microsoft is rebranding every one of their products "Copilot", so at this point it seems hard to avoid using it.

Can someone ELI5 what they are trying to build? Is it something similar to Android's verified boot + attestation or Play Integrity?