A normal liberal would cry about if it wasn't his side in the bed. Likewise, the conservatives who are currently complaining about this particular spate of collusion would not be doing so if it were their side.

I'm old....I my mid 40s anyway....and used to much prefer phone support for things. I usually found that the immediate back and forth helped the support person understand what I needed much faster.

But I don't now. I think that is due to the combination of what you describe: low skill types falling through to the phones. But it is also due to companies requiring those people to layer other crap on top of the conversation. There is now almost always some sort of sales pitch the caller has to sit through before getting to their actual problem. Do you know we have other services you can subscribe to? or You can save lots of money if you bundle a bunch of crap you don't want!.

I don't blame talented people for not wanting to be part of that. And it has made the prospect of having to use phone support very unappealing. A lot of companies have moved cancellations to phone only so they can make their customers sit through absurd pitches and intentionally slow down the process to get them to change their minds. No one who has options wants to do that for a living.

If you are referring to the US' strategic petroleum reserve, at its peak it held about 650MM barrels and it sits just below 400 now. The US consumes about 20MM barrels a day, so the entire reserve would last only about 20 days. Emptying the entire thing wouldn't make much difference to the price in the short term, and would be disastrous in the long term.

If you are referring to further development of the oil we have under the ground, that would be a good long term strategy but politically tough to pull off.

I was a Pro Tour cyclist and far more than the top 10 to 20 were doping.

To me the "wrong angle" is caring what Tim Cook himself thinks about it (or other CEOs).

Most CEOs are likely quite good at thinking about how to manipulate the financial side of a company to improve the results, or at least the reporting of the results, but beyond their position as mouthpieces through which the collective thoughts of a company can flow why should we care what they think? There are plenty of examples of CEOs lampooning new tech that are hilarious in retrospect.

Not that I think anyone wants the Metaverse....

I was a Pro Tour cyclist for a couple of years when the Discovery team (Johan Bruyneel & Lance Armstrong's team) was dominating and your reasoning here reminds me of what I was hearing then.

Those of us who spent large portions of our lives competing knew their performance was not possible without doping but it was nearly impossible to convince a lay person of same. The story was simply too appealing, and the evidence almost entirely circumstantial, so the whole ruse was able to continue for a very long time.

The requirement is 2 days and has been that way since the SEC lowered in from 3 in 2017.

I donâ(TM)t find it hard to imagine at all. When that movement started, most media outlets and college campuses and the like were controlled by conservatives, or at least people to the right of those protesting. Students werenâ(TM)t really committed to the idea of Free Speech, they just wanted to say the things they wanted to say. Now that people on the left have control of those institutions, it is people on the right who are complaining about censorship. Just like before, these people are not actually committed to the idea of Free Speech. And just like leftists are censoring them, theyâ(TM)ll do the same when they gain power.

I think you are wrong about that.

People who are given high level credentials aren't necessarily more security aware than the average person. I've known loads of people who had access to useful data who didn't know much at all about how domain security works, or even user level security. Same for people who have access to financial information or even the ability to move money around.

Getting value from a device like this isn't limited to cracking a security professional's machine, or even an IT professional's.

A button for every feature in the car would be terrible, simply due to the clutter. The less often a feature is accessed the more likely it is to be a good fit for being on a screen. The complaint here is that designers have moved all features to screens even ones that are used at least once every time the vehicle is used.

A good example is the crutchfield.com site, which is well known for being good at identifying what aftermarket audio fits what vehicle. One of the questions their wizard will ask in the process of doing that is "do you want a knob for your volume control?". This is a somewhat new thing which I expect was done because a large number of their customers asked for radios with that, versus every other radio feature. It is for sure one feature that is highly likely to be interacted with multiple times during a drive and a dedicated rooting knob is an absolute requirement for me. Versus physical up/down buttons, up/down touch panels, on screen, etc.

So the nav goes on the massive screen and so do the camera inputs. Radio volume, climate control fan speed, defrost, mirror adjustments, seat adjustments, turn signals, steering wheel adjustment, lights...robablt other stuff I am not thinking of...need physical controls.

Yes you can. You bring the outputs from the knobs and buttons back to a computer, which watches them and adjusts outputs.

We've been doing this in industrial applications, bringing buttons back to PLCs, for many years.

Alternatively, people involved with designing security could recognize that when security measures and human nature collide, human nature eventually wins. Every single time. And by the very nature of this sort of thing it only takes the one time for there to be a problem.

MFA itself was born from that and nobody competent thought "this MFA thing has solved security exploits forever". This is an always has been an arms race.

Thank you for reinforcing my point.

At the moment, casual aircraft use is available to many people. Middle classish up to "rich folks", yet no one has successfully bought out the FAA to remove licensing, or safety rules for pilots. I don't see how the availability of a plane that folds and has good taxi characteristics is going to make that happen.

Why wouldn't it? Despite long term existence of "rich people" the FAA has successfully regulated flying in the US. Licenses are still required and no one can just zoom around the skies without one.

The closest anyone has come to doing what you imagine are ultralight aircraft operators, like the powered parachutes I see around the small airport near me. They can be flown without a license under 14 C.F.R. 103 but they still have to be operated safely, not over congested areas, etc. So far "rich people" have not bought out the FAA regs on them and started menacing all us normals. "Rich people" tend to buy small twin engine planes, get licensed, then fly them for a year or two before dying in a crash.

I agree with you that many of the functions that have been moved to screen really should stay on physical controls. Most of the climate control, radio volume, mute, cruise control, lights, etc etc. All the things frequently changed while driving.

But there is an art to even that and the car companies regularly botch it. For example, the fan speed for the climate control should just be a single dial. I was just in a rental Kia sedan they instead had done it with two separate buttons, one higher one lower, and rather than labels right on the buttons they'd put a little LED screen above them that lit up a graphic of a larger fan and a smaller fan. In bright light, because of the angle of the screen and it being dim, it took more attention than a "turn clockwise for more air" dial would have. By itself this is no big deal but it was repeated dozens of times and that all adds up.

On top of that there are things that are much better done with screens. The dash of my 2012 Toyota is currently blinking the check engine, traction control, and some other light I don't know what the symbol means. It is doing this because the sensor on the transmission output shaft is having an issue, which I know because I hooked up a OBD reader and googled the long text for the code it found. It would be better if a screen could have skipped over all the middle steps and just displayed a drawing of the transmission, highlighted the sensor, and indicated nothing was going to blow up and I could keep driving but my shifts would be rougher until I replaced it. Then I could click Ok and we could all move on. As opposed to having 3 blinking lights in the center of my frequently looked at speedometer for however long the current supply chain takes to get me that sensor.