Where exactly does supporting 3 people on $133k/year count as 'upper middle class'? You could be doing a lot worse, and many are; but that's not just tons of money in a HCOL area; and that's also lower than twice the median salary for full time employees with bachelor's degrees; so you are calling either a single income household doing a bit better than median or a dual income one doing worse 'upper middle class'; which seems pretty ambitious.

It's hard to train a cow to keep its cellphone charged; so you can see why you need something to keep their tracking collars topped up.

Realistically, the status quo has arguably outrun the dystopia there. Your phone already does far more than anything you could get into the power envelope of a bracelet or embedded chip implant, and if for some reason you've raised enough eyebrows that you'd be hauled in for an RFID read DNA is a pretty indelible identifier.

It's not 100% ironclad; but penetration is broad enough that you've basically got the majority carrying highly fingerprintable RF beacons and the minority standing out for their relative radio silence and attempts to deal in cash. Expensive and uncomfortable ankle trackers are good business and feel nice and punitive, just to remind the wrong sort of people we aren't happy with them; but you don't really need to impose a surveillance society when it will build itself for you.

My (admittedly anecdotal from the totally unscientific sample of random stuff I've had reason to work on) impression is that some 'shared' BMC ports had oddities related to network controller sideband interface speeds, since NC-SI is what the BMC is depending on if the NIC is on someone else's PCIe root. It's not like the BMC actually needs a faster link for much(normal management traffic probably doesn't fill 10mb and mounting virtual media may be literally once-in-a-lifetime) so the actual speed of the NC-SI interface was not a burning priority; but it left things up to the NIC whether it would support remaining at gigabit speeds and just quietly slipping the trickle of shared traffic in(presumably slightly more complex; but seems to be what the newer ones do) or if it would knock the link rate down visibly to simplify the case.

You see little echoes of similar behavior elsewhere. The intel desktop and laptop NICs that support 'vPRO' will be GB or 2.5GB when the system is on; but quietly drop back to 10 or 10/100 when it is off and it's just the management engine listening. Some enterprise vendor USB docks do similar things; looks like a normal USB NIC when the OS is up; but drops to a lower speed and operates quietly over, I think, some sort of oddball vendor-defined messages if one of their systems is plugged in but off.

Yes, a fair voicing of "opinions" on labor conditions between one human and one globe-spanning immortal megacorporation. Very fair.

Only true for goods and services where there is perfectly inelastic demand, which kind of doesn't exist. Even demand for fuel is somewhat elastic. Health care has about the least elastic demand. Junk from Amazon has highly elastic demand.

This would certainly happen to a large degree, otherwise Amazon could price themselves out of competitiveness fairly easily.

If you make your money by owning rather than by working, that's true. Higher wages reduce business owners' income, at least in the short term. So next time someone has that opinion, find out what they do for a living. They'll probably say they "run" something.

I assume that, as an exercise, getting 5 simultaneous introductions working makes for a better paper; but is there a reason why you would want that in practice? Especially if there is any wobble in the ratios either randomly, across generations, or in the presence of certain environmental conditions that tweak the plant's metabolism one way or another that sounds like it would be a real pain in the ass to have to re-balance (and, if different patients are deemed to need different combinations even a perfectly stable plant is going to need re-balancing of the outputs) vs. very specifically going for a specific target output per-plant(or e. coli or yeast or whatever is easiest to bioreactor) and then just mixing to taste after purification. Is there some advantage I'm not seeing?

I realize that there are cases where some plant-sourced pharmacological effect looks like it is actually driven not by the identified 'active ingredient'; but by dozens or hundreds of assorted things, and in that case you just have to live with the complexity if you get better results with that than with purified isolates; but if you are deliberately engineering for very specific outputs why a mix of 5?

That would add the requirement for the central repository as infrastructure which is probably not worth it bandwidth/storage-wise when so many gaming PCs are likely to be online at any time, but the possibility of a malware vector (or some kind of sabotage, maybe people would try to DoS a game by sharing corrupted compiled shaders as a form of protest) is worth considering with or without it.

BOINC protects against errors or sabotage in their distributed computing system by having 2 random different users both run the same task and ensuring that the results from both match before accepting the result. This requires centralized infrastructure, but a duplicated work verification system like this could work. Imagine the centralized system acts as a trusted private torrent tracker, only verifying a shader and making it publicly accessible once multiple uploads match. That would make uploading invalid shaders almost impossible since a group would need to conspire to do it with exclusive earliest-possible access to the game/driver/hardware combo.

Those aren't reasons for everyone to be compiling on their own. In a BitTorrent-like system nobody would be "keeping" shaders they aren't using, just sharing shaders they've compiled because they're using them. If nobody's ever done it before for the hardware/driver combination then you fall back to compilation and then share your results so others can benefit and the same work doesn't have to be done again.

Plus most users are probably on one of the latest driver versions so there would be far more hardware than driver variation.

Just like how WaPo eventually went from an assurance that nothing would change to blocking an endorsement of Kamala Harris to no longer publishing any opinions that were insufficiently pro-"free market" for Bezos' taste:

https://www.ms.now/opinion/msn...

On a related note I thought the idea of an IT staffer having time to play CoD at work was a laughably retro idea. In the post-pandemic era anyone who still has an IT job is being worked to the bone.

Yep, The Island and Altered Carbon (also an excellent TV series) were the first two works of sci-fi that came to mind, but Altered Carbon is a much closer match where the clones were brainless vs. The Island (if I say any more it'd be a major spoiler for sure, even mentioning that it contains the concept is a bit of a spoiler).

Immunology, presumably.

The only donor bodies that aren't going to treat the transplant as an act of war are clones or heavily immunosuppressed; and it's probably more plausible to assume that you'll be able to clone a human like a sheep than assume that you'll be making some fundamental breakthroughs in immunology to deal more elegantly with unmatched hosts.

I can see the utility of having spare organs in certain emergencies; but how much life extension would you actually get even if the sort of neurosurgery involved in removing a brain and reattaching it to a new host's spinal cord were viable? Is the theory that the assorted ghastly flavors of neurodegeneration are actually to be blamed on older organs and everything will be fine; or is this just a very expensive way to ensure that you skip the various ways peripheral organs can kill you and are assured to be the spryest patient in the dementia ward?