Totally agree with all your points. I think we can even look back before the 30% profit mandate and see game pass price increases ratcheting up as MS's AI investments grew over time.

Previously, xbox division was trying to make it as easy and as little up-front cost to start gaming with them as possible. They started bundling the hardware and gamepass into a monthly rate with a contract like cellphone providers, which is smart when you look at mobile gaming numbers.

Now it's blood from a turnip time...

If there's an emergency you go outside, unplug the car and use it because your car has plenty of range. The idea with slow charging is you are keeping the charge level on your car high enough that at any given evening, you have 60-80% of your battery ready to go for any emergency that comes up overnight.

If you drive more than 60 miles in your daily commute, you can install a level 2 charger (AKA stick a 220V outlet where the charger that came with the vehicle can reach) and get your car back to 100% every night.

The whole point is you can slow charge your car when you don't want to use it so whenever you do, it always has plenty of charge.

If this is your routine and suddenly you need to do a lot more driving, you can go to a fast charger and it's no big deal. I've had an EV I've charged primarily through slow charging at home and I've needed to go to a fast charger in my own town 3 times in 3 years.

The New London, NY police fought in court and won, even after appeal, that they can deny someone employment in the police force based on too high of an IQ:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/cour...

TFA says the cops had the picture, they showed it to the student while they were detaining him at gunpoint. Here's how the student described the photo when the cops showed it to him:

“I was just holding a Doritos bag – it was two hands and one finger out, and they said it looked like a gun,” Allen said.

Either they did a shitty job of looking at the photo or they didn't look at all.

The author isn't saying there has been no progress, his main complaint is around the PR hype machine, companies cutting away from their livestreams of launches for their CFO to talk about investor confidence, promises of hotels on the moon. That sort of thing. There were a couple good points specifically about Space X in TFA:

"SpaceX’s Starship saga is another emblem of this phenomenon. Yes, progress requires trial and error. But we must stop measuring success by launch views and splashy animation reels. When the same core systems fail in similar ways, time after time, we must ask whether this is aggressive iteration or just poorly managed ambition. Failure alone isn’t innovation. Only failure followed by measurable, demonstrable improvement is."

"It was a baffling shift, almost as if the financial narrative mattered more than the flight outcome. The same disconnect can be seen in SpaceX’s messaging. While the company routinely frames each Starship explosion as a necessary step in rapid iteration, two consecutive full-stack flights, Flight 7 and Flight 8, failed during stage separation. That’s not fast learning. That’s failing to fix a known issue but the saying they will spend their investor’s money on a more ambitious attempt. At some point, calling repeated, preventable failures “progress” ceases to be engineering — and starts to look like marketing."

Spaceballs sits nicely between cannon built around elders coming back in shimmering blue and parody based on over-commercialization removing the soul of entertainment. I sincerely hope they are getting their AI version of Mel Brooks ready because finishing his movie in the event he dies by "recasting" a crappy AI version of him for the scenes he couldn't film sounds like parody gold to me.

I really appreciate your post and stand with what you are saying. I volunteer with a local environmental nonprofit and they created a design for a trash catcher called the Trash Trout that floats on top of the water that can be installed on the streams and creeks that feed major rivers to trap the trash upstream of the major river. There was some push-back about releasing the design publicly and foregoing any licensing fees but ultimately they told the naysayers to pound sand and published a design PDF on their website because their goal is to clean up trash, not make money.

Just wanted to share an example of a group making the right call and also it's a cool, cheap design that nerds might appreciate. Link to the design doc below or you can google it if you prefer since the link is generic.

https://static1.squarespace.co...

I would suggest checking out mini-split heat pumps. You can get the best of both worlds without having to duct your whole house. I will be needing a new system in the next 5 years and was pleased to see mini-split heat pumps are available and work very efficiently. This is on the word of the people I've talked to for quotes as I'm not an HVAC tech but was curious about what options are out there.

TFS left out a few interesting details that make the story noteworthy. The salvaged RAM and SSDs absolutely do not hold up to 3-5 year newer tech but these components are new enough to used in CXE controllers for backwards compatibility and then paired with more powerful and efficient AMD Bergamo processors to keep them relevant. They are essentially making a B-team of server capacity and have created a software layer in their cloud infrastructure that will assign tasks to it that won't suffer from the sub-optimal performance.

I agree they haven't done anything groundbreaking but they have taken enough small steps in coordination towards Reduce, Reuse and Recycle to help their bottom line and the planet that I'm impressed.

A company this year unveiled a circular recycling process to break down the turbine blades, returning them to their previous materials so new blade can be made out of the same materials. It even works for blades that are already in landfills. Neat stuff!

https://www.vestas.com/en/medi...

Yes, well, that's capitalism for you.

Most Americans have no choice in insurer. And their choices are controlled by a powerful cartel that colludes to keep prices high. There is no competition in the health insurance field.

No American gives a rats ass about the "choice" of insurer. They want a choice of doctors and services, but really, and I can not stress this enough, REALLY hate all insurance companies. More than they hate the government even!

And yet, taxes have been cut again and again and again. How do you reconcile that fact with your statement that "Because the people raising taxes will never reach a point when they say "the government has enough money now, let's cut taxes"."

Seems that it's very, very easy for the government to cut taxes, at least for the rich. Why are you afraid of "the people who want to raise taxes" when those people have never actually done so? Seems you are imagining a scenario that is not just unlikely, but counter factual.

No, people want to pay for things with their taxes. The are not, in fact, idiots. They don't want predatory capitalists taking a cut, and figure, correctly, that government is more trustworthy than a man with a profit motive and no morals.

People recognize that certain endeavors are just not well served by a capitalist free market. Health care is a primary one that simply doesn't work unless heavily regulated or run by the government. You do not know what is wrong with you. You do not know how to fix it. You can not shop around for a new liver.

As it is, we are basically running health care like a for profit government, and we are getting the worst of both the public and private worlds. Health insurance amounts to a system of taxation that forces the healthy to pay for the sick, and lets a third party take a huge cut. Replace health insurance with actual government taxation and what have you lost, except for the greedy bastard trying to mark up your heart medications? Nothing.