Yep. Municipal power is a natural thing to do - it is a situation where the locals are about as close to fully aligned with one another as they get - everyone wants reliable, cheap power and responsive service when you need it. So you make a captive company with a charter that keeps it aligned with its customers instead of Wall St. You don't take silly risks because you're not chasing infinite growth, customers gets decent rates, the area gets some decent local jobs out of it. Everyone except the predators are happy. If only other all local problems had such great solutions.

But, ohhh, booga-booga, that's communism. (Please just ignore Trump seizing the means of production.)

Learn to read.

There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. Cell phones are different because they're considered private communications despite using public airwaves.

There have been attempts to get precedent that automated, continuous monitoring is qualitatively different than a cop standing outside watching you, with unfortunately mixed results.

Mostly correct. I'd just add the average LEO doesn't care about catching criminals, either, if it takes too much effort.

Going beyond today, this is a long-running theme in US constitutional law. Before the colonial rebellion, King George was a big fan of "writs of assistance". These were effectively licenses for thugs to search or interrogate anyone at any time in pursuit of a crime (or "crime"), and of course anyone subject to such abuse hated it. So that's where the 4th Amendment came from - we do warrants, but you have to name with specificity what/who you want to investigate as well as why and under what authority, and get a judge to agree.

Authoritarians, thugs and control freaks have been trying to reinvent them ever since.

One famous case from before the digital era was Stanford v. Texas (1965). Texas, being extremely Texan, passed the Suppression Act, which made writings, photos, etc. "concerned with" the Texas Communist Party contraband subject to 20 year prison terms. The Supreme Court unanimously held the warrant was an unconstitutional general warrant.

Opposing general warrants is as American as apple pie, opposing kings and displaying amazing senses of entitlement.

The democrats crying is pure bullshit here. They wanted this to

A. This is nonsense on stilts. Name one elected Dem who promoted this.

B. Even shitbags like Cruz are saying this is illegal.

This benefits everyone's donors.

C. You seem to believe only elected politicians matter. What about the actual, you know, citizens who pay these government workers?

where they'll defend all the anti-human rights shit that happened to no end

Weird how selective you are about which humans and which rights.

I completely agree. Waymo has a lot of work to do.

And it isn't just passenger safety - those things are a menace during civil emergencies. There needs to be both a lot of work put in to contextually proper response to exceptional circumstances - from what should be easy stuff like "don't block fire trucks or drive over fire hoses" on through figuring out how to safely get out of the way when power goes out. For reference, right now we're at the point where they still confuse themselves.

Of course if you also intentionally cripple them by omitting multiple available, useful sensory modalities, climbing that capability hill will be that much harder, and you'll obviously never get the same safety in some high-salience situations like a kid running out from behind a parked car if you aren't running something that can "see" behind it.

I'm assuming you mean they were binned with fewer cores.

I guess they are "slightly defective" in the same way an Epyc 9115 is a slightly defective 9965.

A long time ago, I worked as a small-business IT consultant. (I recovered, thanks.) A few of them were deeply frustrated application designers.

Usually they wanted an Excel spreadsheet as an application. "Just like this, except users can't mess with this part." (Readers: it was never "just like that".) I could usually build them a web version of what they kinda wanted, but what they really wanted was "their thing".

I'm pretty sure this is "Satya's thing". He made a pretty in the fashionable version of what "excel development" has become. And because he lives in Microsoft-land, all the weird bullshit huge enterprises require in general and Microsoft's weird bullshit in particular is normal to him, he thinks everyone lives that kind of life.

And that's why he's surprised nobody cares about his shiny report thing.

This is Piggie leaving Americans exposed to foreign attack during a war.

He's already been denying emergency funds to states that didn't vote for him.

Now he's literally spreading propaganda about the source of a foreign attack against US citizens. Blue states are on their own, without the tools they'd need to actually act like a sovereign being attacked.

MAGAts need to remember this when President AOC forcibly desegregates the South again. Motherfuckers are going to be lucky we still let them be part of the country - I'm increasingly OK with building a wall at the northern Texas border at this point. (You're such big bad he-men? Enjoy negotiating with Mexico as a tiny neighbor.)

You seem to be asserting sovereign nations other than the US are in the wrong to control what is bought and sold in their countries.

I assume you think the US should also tariff up against Israel for failing to import more pork?

As a practical matter, more tariffs will chase EU customers off faster while punishing American companies. That's just giving them more object lessons in why the US is a dangerously unreliable partner while making sure business owners get their noses rubbed in it - a sure-fire way to convince an influential block of otherwise fairly small-c conservative voters the EU is doing the right thing.

It amazes me how many people seem to not understand very basic things about how people work. Inch-deep mile-wide grievance is a hell of a drug.

(And let's not even get in to however the fuck you think "recoup[ing] the funds" via tariffs would work. After Americans are taxed more on EU products, you think Google is going to get that money? How? What's the legal mechanism? And what does any of that have to do with an EU fine?)

That's the problem with winning. You become The Man.

That isn't just semantics. Your interests change - you become more (small-c) conservative, defensive measures become much more important, etc. because the next incremental customer is worth much less than keeping what you have. And the risk is real - everyone wants to be king.

In Apple's case, there's also that it is now a fully post-Jobs company, and Jobs was uniquely responsible for what Apple was. His remaining influence is in the heads of the graybeards who worked with him and is otherwise ceremonial. And Jobs was "counterculture", to some extent. It was more than PR - it was his personality. It is why for istance they yielded the enterprise market to Windows - he not only didn't give a shit about device management or directory service permissions or stuff like that, he considered that somewhere between distracting from and hostile to making "insanely great" devices. That was all tempered through business demands, but he really did refuse to do a lot of "normal" things that are considered table stakes today. Jobs was a strange CEO.

Cook is not. Cook is very good at his job, but he's not the type to "leave money on the table" by refusing to build something he doesn't personally care about. And at their size, it is harder for them to resist losing focus, especially without Job's unique mix of arrogance, talent, poker face, assholishness, focus and charisma.

I don't think it is possible to have a $trillion+ company that isn't exploitive. As they get bigger, they take the shape and characteristics of the system in which they're embedded.

You want non-shitty companies, grow them somewhere that doesn't reward them for doing shitty things.

Sounds a lot like remote-disable devices for cars, so the repo man has an easier job.

When those first came out, some of them allowed the car to drive, but would honk the horn to shame the driver, but now I think they all just disable the engine. Imagining the Apple version of that is entertaining... it could chose your emoji for you, blast Nickelback when it detects you're in church, or start sending your photos to random contacts until you pay up.

Sell me something and leave me alone is my preferred model.

They only time I can imagine renting something like a phone or computer is for a specific purpose, and only if there's an early out clause that would result in lower costs than a purchase. Like renting a phone for an international vacation to avoid the risk of brownshirts imaging your actual phone at the border. Otherwise it makes more sense to buy it outright and sell it afterwards.

But basically, if there is an option that doesn't result in a monthly payment or emails that I have to pay attention to, I will take that option. I guess I'm not a relationship kinda guy, at least when it comes to legal fictions.

See what Naked Face-Eating Man can do to the interior of a MechaHitlerMobile before it can get cops to respond.

How long before someone leaves an alligator or python in one?

Partly true.

Completely correct about court decisions coupled with legislation mean that the US asserts data sovereignty but will not honor it.

But Europe only grumbled about that until the US selected a geriatric grifter for executive and started providing object lessons in why that wasn't just a theoretic risk.

Honestly, so far this is going easier than Europe could have hoped. I'm sure Piggie will notice at some point and start running his yap and throwing around more tariffs, providing more demonstration as to exactly why Europe has to migrate data somewhere safe. But he's incompetent and impulsive enough that they have a window in which to migrate before he takes his last dump and some more competent fascist ends up in charge.