Old age is only bad because you were moronic through childhood and adulthood, resulting in a body that couldn't handle old age.

Sorry, I have no sympathy for your self-inflicted issues.

Because any medical system worthy of the name treats everyone to the highest standard they can.

Of course, that raises some serious questions about whether the system the US has is worthy of being called "medical"

Steve Jobs had too much ego to consider anything outside of the stuff he did (hence the panic over the web) but Apple learning from BeOS (and possibly Plan9 as well) would probably not have hurt.

And the climate has the deciding vote, yes. No nation has immunity from the consequences. Britain has just gone through a heatwave hotter than the most severe summer on record. In May. This matters - a lot - because most of our water comes from snowpacks formed during the winter. We are in for a really bad summer and it is likely we'll suffer significant deaths from both running out of water and - after summer breaks - the inevitable catastrophic floods that will follow.

I doubt anywhere in Europe will fare better.

Russia has expended all its resources (and those of several other nations) on an incredibly stupid war and therefore has nothing to put in place to handle any climate emergency they might suffer. Of course, it's also possible that one of the reactors in Ukraine will explode. If the prevailing winds are blowing into Russia at the time, that could be really inconvenient.

It's hard to tell if the global stupidity is priceless or worthless. Depends on how many can survive it.

Then why didn't they work collectively to put someone on the ballot they could vote for? I mean, let's face it - the two top parties manage around 50% of the vote in each election out of 60% of the people. So they only really have support from 30% of the nation each. Your alternative has the potential to win 40% of the people, pushing both the alternatives so far out of the picture that both parties will be forced to choose between oblivion or reality.

But you don't.

Why?

It's not about money, the 40% who aren't voting aren't voting less because of how much each side spends. All you need is to be known. And lots of people manage that daily.

So what is it about? It's about the fact that what you're saying is nothing but excuses and you know it.There isn't an option that 40% of the nation will like, because 100% of the nation is determined to hate anyone different to them.

Well, I'm sure governments get better rates. But yes, it's likely a nationalism thing. Stripe, being American and Adyen being European. People are dropping American tech when they can switch, and I'm guessing the UK contract was up.

And while they may be expensive, it's probably cheaper since they can handle card payments online without having to do all the PCI security stuff.

Not just that, but subscriptions have probably hurt as well because it's a lot harder to audit when everyone is subscribing and now you're paying per user, not per computer.

After all, you can buy Microsoft Office outright for $400, and it's good on one PC. Or you can subscribe to M365 and now you can use it on 5 PCs - 1 of which may be a user's personal home computer, and 5 mobile devices or tablets. And 4 PCs is basically an IT department's allocation of computers for a person - they can have a desktop and a laptop. Their next desktop and laptop on replacement will consume 4 licenses temporarily and they have their home PC license. Then when the user returns their old desktop and laptop, those licenses are recycled and that user has 2 free computer licenses again.

And yes, Trump basically screwed over the US tech companies again because until then, thoughts to switch to altenratives were just murmurs and no one really did anything for decades. But now in the space of a year, everyone is switching to sovereign systems, or even worse, open-source. Everyone threatened it to get better licensing, but now it's actually happening.

No, they are not too depleted. Cars are very power hungry - the average 4 banger with 150 horsepower has over 100kW on tap - which would drain the vast majority of EV batteries in somehwere between half an hour and an hour. Meanwhile, the average house consumes about 1-1.5kW on average per day.

Even the largest grid scale storage only really capable of doing 1MW. And those installations are much larger than 10 EV batteries.

Just because a used EV battery can't supply its 100kW peak doesn't mean it can't be remade as a grid scale pack where it can peak at 10kW. That's why used EV batteries are being reused as grid scale or home scale batteries - 10kW is plenty for peak household in many instances, and even home scale batteries are usually only 20kWh or so (which is less than 1/5th of a large EV battery pack).

Used EV batteries simply can't supply the peak power anymore - their internal impedance increases as they grow old. But they can supply lower power levels for a number of years after. This could mean an EV battery pack gets 30+ years of use - the first half as an EV, the second half as grid scale or home scale battery.

It's actually why battery recycling is in its infancy - there's simply very little in the way of getting sufficient batteries for recycling.

More importantly: Capitalism is an ECONOMY and market system. It is NOT a blueprint for a society. You can run your commerce and trade as capitalism, when you run your SOCIETY along capitalism principles you end up... essentially with the USA.

This is the part that is constantly forgotten. As a society, we have values that are not represented well within capitalism. But for some reason, we dumb shits think that we can treat everything as a market and apply capitalism to it and that will magically solve problems. But in education, just as one random example, the goal of it all is educated adults as output. It is not maximizing profit. Same for the prison system, the healthcare system and two dozen others.

It's greed, pure and simple.

Making a good product is possible. KEEPING making good products for decades is hard. Even more importantly: You will have hits and misses. Which, for a quarterly-result-bonus oriented manager is a no-no. Subscription models mean plannable revenue streams. Then all you need to do is negotiate your bonus package so that the already existing subscriptions will provide and you're home free and can already order your 2nd yacht.

It's also that Texas has basically no worker protections at all, so anything scummy you want to do with your employees you can do. Too hot? You can force them to keep working. If they drop dead, well, a token amount.

You want to lay off half the workforce? Go right ahead, you don't have to do anything about it or even give any money. Just toss their ass onto the sidewalk and be done with it.

You know, got to avoid the whole situation that happened in Korea.

Usually the comparisons boil down to the screen and the build feel. The Dell is likely made of plastic - and probably will feel plasticky when handled. The MacBook Neo is made of metal, and it feels very nice indeed. Sure plastic probably has better qualities, but it'll just feel like cheap plastic which people dislike.

And then there's the screen - many comparisons show the Neo screen to be bright, vivid and all around something nice to look at. Most cheap laptop screen s are dim and not very stunning. It's a screen. Granted, the Neo loses a bit of battery life because the brighter screen can consume more power, but it's a screen that's probably going to be quite nice in the shade outside. (of course you can always dim it down as needed, but having excess brightness is a nicety).

The keyboards are typical - generally decent

Basically, the reason PC makers are fearing the Neo is because it's a $600 laptop that feels like a more expensive laptop. Apple could've cut corners and used plastic to cut down on costs, but they didn't so you end up with a laptop that feels solid.

The information is inconvenient to Trump.
It is well known he does not like reading reports so the management should have send him easy to digest video's, preferably presented by an ex-Fox News person.

This is "victory" because the Dems like the environment, so stopping anyone from knowing about it is ergo "beating the Dems".

Same reason the Republicans were all about demolishing the ACA (an act written by a Republican and then edited by Republicans because the Democrat proposals weren't acceptable to them). The ACA was voted on by Dems and therefore had to be destroyed, the fact that it has led to many Americans being without any healthcare at all and more than a few dying as a result is considered an acceptable price to pay for killing something Democrats voted for.

"Victory" is not about doing anything worthwhile, it's about "owning the Dems".

Of course they colluded with foreign powers. However, it's irrelevant. Since the legalisation of corruption (Trump abolished any enforcement of corruption laws), the US has slid from an already disastrous level of corruption into total degeneracy. It will take years, maybe decades, simply to root out all of the evil that is now in place and by then those who committed treason will either be safely overseas, or their records will have been "accidentally" destroyed, making any investigation impossible.

I would point out, though, that the countries the GOP has historically strong ties with also have extraordinarily high levels of corruption - and have done for a long time - and nobody bothers to do anything about it. This is what Trump is relying on. Once corruption at this level is normalised, everyone just accepts it and moves on.

Worse, I just don't see any serious will to fix the issue amongst any of the other political groups in the US. The Democrats aren't being honest with themselves over why they lost in 2024, and have swung so far to the right themselves that Ronald Reagan would have considered them right-wing extremists.

This is something voters can fix, but almost half of Americans have totally disengaged at this point and the other half believes themselves so powerless that (to use a Douglas Adamsism) they're only concerned with preventing the wrong lizard from being elected.