Oh, and just to add one more thing . Some network protocols just fundamentally can't work under NAT. Ex: FTP. So party of the reason this seems to worn is because we changed the way we design protocols to be NAt compatible. That's dumb. The Internet should just work.

I work for a company that makes large industrial machines. Some of the machines are, themselves, networks. They have motors and sensors and encoders and PID controllers and more. But too many of those devices assume ipv4, as do the corporate networks they live behind. So we have to assign all the embedded devices IPv4 addresses that don't conflict with the corporate s network, then apply NAT. It is overcomplicated, and so I can't remotely monitor the devices. To solve this there are a gzillion 3rd-party companies each with their own tools and APIs for remote monitoring.

Each device ought to be able to assign itself a unique IPv6 address and we could talk straight to it. Instead we go through a myriad of 3rd-party NAT hacks to get there.

A firewall is fine. Multiple levels for firewall is fine. Multiple levels of firewall each one rewriting the IP address is a nightmare. Often time today teams assume NAT is a firewall feature, when in reality firewall don't need NAT to function. It's just a hack.

We have made it work, but it is costing us dearly. End-to-end addressability is fundamental to the original design of the internet. It enables any two nodes to communicate directly without needing a third party to broker the connection. For example, decades ago two people could play a video game over the internet without needing a 3rd-party server. IPv4 exhaustion and widespread use of NAT broke the model, handing control over to centralized services. So today, my cell phone can't ping your cell phone without going through someone else.

The Internet went from a democratic self-healing system to one where big corporations dictate what protocols we can use to connect.

Us old farts pine from the old days. Today's network engineers are fine with corporate control because they don't know anything else. Time will tell how big of a problem this really is.

Perhaps governments that want the citizens and corporations to police speech should provide a webapi like https://gov.br/IsAcceptablePos... that returns true or false, so we all know what is okay and what is not.

I suppose, but that's nothing like the world we live in. In our world, food is abundant at never-before-seen levels. Agricultural productivity has not only matched but significantly exceeded population growth. Unless climate change or some catastrophic event has large negative impacts on food production, directly or indirectly, it seems unlikely that the human race will ever again experience significant food scarcity.

I think it's more likely that approximation is necessary to complex, higher-level thinking, and that produces a certain form of error which is therefore inherent in all intelligences capable of it. This can be improved by adding subsystems that compute more precisely, just as humans do, using processes and equipment to augment their intellectual abilities, ranging from complex computation engines to pencil and paper (Einstein said "My pencil and me are smarter than me").

If they're still using VMWare's licensed software, are they a former customer? I think the answer depends on the details of the license and purchase agreements.

I think they'd argue that the audit is a condition of the license to use the software, which the customer already agreed to and which was not tied to an ongoing support contract. Depending on the details of the license agreement, this could pass legal muster.

It still seems like a stupid move on the part of Broadcom, alienating their customer base in the hope of extracting a few more fees. I wonder if they've decided that their virtualization business is soon going to be eaten up by OSS anyway, so they have to get what they can while they can.

This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

You need to actually look at the data here. Much of US healthcare is non-profit, at least on the provider side, and the for-profit provider institutions don't make that much money. People naturally then assume it's the insurance companies that are making out like bandits, except they're all publicly-traded so we can see exactly what their profit margins are and they don't remotely explain the high cost of healthcare. At worst, the for-profit model adds 5%, and there's no real reason to expect it to add even that. In most industries, for-profit is more efficient than non-profit, because it turns out that the competitive drive for profits drives costs down.

Again, look at actual numbers. What you'll find is that this explains basically nothing. Yeah, they have high salaries; take those and spread them across the patient base and you're talking about maybe 0.001% of healthcare costs -- and then only if you assume that these high salaries represent a pure loss, that an administrator getting paid a tiny fraction of that would the job just as well. If you assume that at least part of those high salaries are payment for services rendered, then the CEO salary overhead is even smaller.

Again, the pharmaceuticals are publicly-traded and they break out what they spend on advertising. Is is a lot in absolute terms? Yes. Is it a lot relative to the total amount of money we're talking about? No.

I'll stop here, but the same applies to everything else you mention. Yes, there is some waste due to the for-profit model, but it actually isn't that big. Our drug costs are high because we fund most of the research, because we can afford to. If we found a way to stop doing that, a lot of drug research would stop. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is something you have to decide. Personally, I think we get a lot of value for that money.

It feels like you should be able to point to just one thing and say "That's why healthcare is expensive in the US!" but you can't, really. The root cause is actually a lot of different things, and most of them have their roots in regulation (and, specifically, the way in which we regulate), rather than in a for-profit model.

If you want to make US healthcare both very cheap and very good, but only for those who can afford it, you should do the hard-eyed libertarian thing and go full-on for-profit, including removing the legal requirements that doctors treat people who can't pay, and eliminating Medicaid and Medicare and all of the complexity and cost they add. Also, make competition nationwide -- make provider and insurer licensing federal so states can't impose different requirements, and set up nationwide medical and nursing licensure processes that eliminate the ability of the AMA to artificially restrict supply. Quality would go up and competition would drive cost down for probably 70% of Americans. The other 30%, however, would be screwed, hard. Well, maybe 20%, or 15%, because prices would come down, making healthcare more affordable for everyone but free for no one.

But because we as a society will not leave the poor completely without care (not even free ER visits), the libertarian pure-market approach won't work. So, instead, we should go the other way and offer a national single payer option. This would not make healthcare cheaper by itself, but it would enable regulatory pressure to begin chipping away at all of the many sources of high prices. It wouldn't ultimately make healthcare as efficient, cheap or good as a pure market-based approach, and likely wouldn't make it as cheap as what other countries pay, but it's the best we're likely to actually achieve.

Look, this isn't complicated.

1. If you're going to claim you know what people should do to be healthy, you should have both formal education and experience in the space.

2. If you're going to be an administrator over a health organization, formal education and experience in healthcare are a very good idea, but what you really need is to know how to be a good administrator.

RFK Jr. wants and claims to be able to do #1, but lacks the knowledge, skills or experience to do so.

If RFK Jr. wanted and claimed to be able to do #2, that would be fine. He's maybe a little out of his depth in such a large and important organization, but if he could bury his ego and work hard at it, he could probably do it reasonably well. But the overriding requirement to do it well is to listen to his subordinates, who are experts in the field, while he's a lawyer with no medical or scientific training. But obviously he won't do that, because he thinks he does know better than the experts, i.e. he is trying do do #1, which he isn't qualified to do.

True, though note that Google does have all the data needed to brute force that password, so make sure it has plenty of entropy. I recommend "correct horse battery staple".

Yeah, but then you have to drive an ICE, which sucks. Slow, noisy and smelly.

True, but if the EVs have decent range (say, 300 miles), a reasonable commute (say, 40 miles) and there's a fast charger in the area, it's easy enough to make sure you never get into a situation where an overnight power outage will keep you from getting to work. Just hit the fast charger whenever you're out and about and your remaining range has dropped below 100 miles, just long enough to get it back above 100 miles, which will only take 2-3 minutes This won't happen often for most people, less often than they have to visit a gas station now.

If there's a multi-day outage this becomes more problematic, but we're well outside of what's common now.

L1 charging even works fine for a lot of people, especially if there's an L3 fast charger in the area for occasional use. If your car is home 12 hours per day, on average, you can put in 50 miles of range per day with an ordinary 120V 15A outlet. That's 350 miles per week, which exceeds the 280 miles per week the average American drives. A sequence of heavier-than-average driving days could leave your battery low, which is why it's helpful to have access to a fast charger, though it won't normally be needed.

If you can also plug in at work (e.g. if you WFH)... L1 becomes all you actually need.

This was less true a few years ago when EV batteries were smaller. I got an L2 charger because I was driving a Nissan Leaf with only ~80 miles of range, which means it had little to no buffer to handle extra errands or whatever. If I wanted to go out to dinner after work I needed significant range added in the 2-3 hours between getting home and going out, but if your car has 300+ miles of range, that's not an issue.

Pretty close. They don't really have batteries, mostly they run directly off the generators and have very large radiators (just large fan-cooled resistors) to deal with excess power (like when braking when the traction motors are acting as generators). The drive-train's the same though, and the amount of traction they can get despite being steel wheels on steel rails says lots about how effective the results are.