From section B, existing companies appear to be required to immediately issue new stock such that the government owns half. Basically, at some magic threshold, you have to give half the company away. Seems like a good way to make the stock market crater. Also seems like a good way for AI companies to end up with hundreds of subsidiary companies with their own stock issues to keep the revenue of each individual company under that threshold.

In short, this is nuts.

Yeah, this can't work for all the reasons listed.

It's also not clear how you would even do something like that for a company like Google, where more than half the voting rights are controlled by the founders. Even if the company acquired every share that anyone puts on the market and gave them to the government, they can't compel individuals to sell their shares, so the government would never achieve a controlling interest.

And trying to do so such a mass acquisition would cause total chaos in the stock market, because it would take 17 years of investing the company's entire net profit for share buybacks, and the end result would effectively turn Google into a private company again.

This just doesn't seem well-thought-out to me. Start by passing laws requiring public companies to have at least two-thirds of their shares held by people who are not and have never been employees. Require companies to create new shares as needed until they are in compliance, spread over a maximum of... say ten years. Then tax net AI revenue at a higher rate, and use the additional funds to buy stock in those companies, if that's actually something the government wants to do. That approach actually makes sense, unlike what's proposed above (if I understand the proposal correctly).

Imagine if Toyota required all gas pumps to have a connector specific to Toyota with an authentication chip. :-D

I'm not sure how it's even possible for an iOS device to connect to an unpaired Bluetooth device unless the device is designed wrong (not asking for authentication). So for that one, I'd put at least half of the blame on the device manufacturer. On the flip side, it is mainly designed for elderly folks who usually aren't tech savvy, so I can at least understand why they might do that, so there's plenty of blame on Apple for auto-connecting without asking as well.

I would even argue that this is a potential security bug at that point. Connecting to an unknown device now gives that device the ability to send data to the iOS device in ways that would otherwise be unavailable to it. If any of those code paths contains a security vulnerability, combining that vulnerability with this auto-connect behavior creates the opportunity for literal drive-by attacks on iOS devices.

If you're a developer, please file a bug against Apple and mark it as an urgent security bug. Maybe that will get the real root cause (Apple's lack of any sort of option for asking the user before connecting to Bluetooth devices) fixed.

No, but you see, I don't want any commission on apps that aren't sold by Apple, for which Apple has no role in the creation or distribution of the app. They're not doing anything to earn that money.

The cost of developing the OS is paid for by the people buying hardware. After all, you can't sell hardware without the OS.

And while you could argue that the cost of developing the developer tools should be borne by developers (including Apple, who use those tools to building the OS, of course), Apple's rules mandating the use of their tools makes doing so problematic from an antitrust perspective. And either way, a software license that effectively takes a cut of sales on anything developed with that software is problematic at multiple levels. Nobody in their right minds would choose a product under those terms, absent some sort of monopolistic restrictions that compel such a choice.

The correct percentage is zero, with, at absolute most, some small fixed annual fee for program participation to compensate Apple for the limited overhead incurred in signing developers' keys. Any higher cost is effectively holding users' devices hostage, and is fundamentally unjust from a consumer protection perspective.

The only question is how long it takes for various countries' governments to come to the same conclusion and demand that mobile devices be liberated from compulsory profit-sharing done under the guise of "security".

iOS does the same thing. Constantly. A Bluetooth device goes out of range and the back in, and the iPhone is like "Squirrel!" and switches. But on iOS, it is even more obnoxious. I have a home phone system that can take calls from your cell phone, but only if you pick up the handset and answer the call. Otherwise, when it tries to send the call over to that Bluetooth "speaker", the handset rejects the connection request and the audio switches back to the device. But worse, it switches OFF the speakerphone mode and switches back to phone-to-the-ear mode. So not only do you completely lose five seconds of audio during the failed handshake, but you also end up not being able to hear afterwards until you manually turn the speakerphone mode back on.

I filed a bug about this at least five years ago and Apple still hasn't fixed it. And it pisses me off so much that if I had more free time, I'd develop my own whole f**king mobile OS just so that I could have full manual control over when the device switches sound outputs. The number of times I have wanted my device to switch automatically to Bluetooth is EXACTLY zero, because the device has no idea if earbuds are actually in my ears or headphones are on my head. It has no idea whether I'm actually in the same room as the speaker or ten feet away. It has no idea if I want to use the earbuds with my Mac or my iPhone. It has no idea if I want my device to connect to the sound system in our rehearsal room, or if one of my colleagues is about to use it with her phone. The phone should not be in control. The user should.

How hard is it to just have a f**king headphones icon at the top of the screen that the user can tap to switch to a different audio input/output, and make that button show a list of sources, including silently discovered (but not connected) Bluetooth sources, and automatically connect to the Bluetooth device in the background when you select it, and wait to change audio over to that Bluetooth device until after it has successfully connected and verified that it can actually pass audio to the device?

Hell, at this point, I'd settle for a setting that disables automatic connection to a specific Bluetooth device. We can turn off automatic association for WiFi. Why the h*** don't we have that for Bluetooth? What a**hole thought to himself, "This Bluetooth device is suddenly just barely within range; let's switch to it and see if we can make the user so angry that he throws his phone across the room so we can sell him a new phone?"

Seriously, this is something that should have been 100% solved twenty-five years ago, and sure as h*** should have been solved before companies started ripping the headphone jacks off of devices, and instead, the entire f**king industry has a user experience that can only be described as absolute garbage because nobody at any of these companies who is making bug prioritization decisions apparently has any Bluetooth gear that is paired with more than one f**king device. How is this simple and obvious design pattern still so badly broken across every major mobile platform? Why do users tolerate such actively user-hostile behavior from their devices? And why isn't fixing this s**tshow a P1/P0 bug?

I just don't get it.

Were you expecting bubbles to sink?

Yeah, pretty much.

I'm mostly an Apple user. I own a Mac. I own an iPhone. This has been true since late last century and 2007, respectively. I do not own an Apple tablet.

I was shopping for a tablet the other day to use for viewing sheet music, and the only hard requirement for that sort of thing is that it must not be significantly smaller than 8.5x11. The smallest Apple device that met that requirement was the iPad Air 13-inch for $750.

So I decided to see what sort of Android tablets existed. I ended up buying a bottom-tier Android tablet that cost just $179.98, complete with a case (which would add another $70 to the iPad price earlier. Up until the Android 17 release two days ago, it was running the latest version of Android (16), so it isn't a security disaster waiting to happen. And it costs about one fifth of what Apple's low-end tablet costs. And for what I'm doing, there's no real difference. And it's no slouch. It has 128 GB of storage, same as the Air, and 40 GB of RAM; 5x more RAM, one fifth the cost. Both have an IPS display; the Android tablet has slightly lower resolution — about two-thirds that of the iPad in each direction — but half again faster refresh rate, so no clear winner there; both are more than adequate. And a tablet that costs under $200, I don't have to care about. If I break it or lose it, it is borderline disposable. At $820 (with case), that's not even remotely true.

So despite ostensibly being an Apple guy, I've reached the point where I own at least four Android tablets that are in active use, and zero Apple tablets. If it were not for momentum, I probably would not own an iPhone, either at this point. The half decade waiting for Apple to finally adopt USB-C while cheap Android phones could share a charger with my Mac showed me that Apple cares more about profits than about delivering a quality product, and that's an epic fail from my perspective that soured my perspective on iOS in a big way.

IMO, the company needs a real direction change. I'm not saying they should build low-end garbage, but when your low end product costs almost 5x as much as the competition and isn't obviously massively better, you have a real problem. Buying a better quality product that will last longer seems to make sense up to a point, but when the difference in price is so large that you can replace it annually for about the same as the 5-year typical replacement cost for the iPad, that argument doesn't hold water, either.

So no, Mr. Cook, jacking up the prices is not inevitable. It's only inevitable if you hold up the short-term stock price as the only worthwhile metric while ignoring the fact that you're losing long-term customers by being so overpriced compared with the competition. Customer loyalty only goes so far, and I think we've passed the point where it is good enough, as demonstrated by Apple giving up and finally releasing a Crhomebook-class laptop. Here's hoping they do the same with tablets and phones.

But either way, if I can buy an Android tablet for a fifth the cost of an iPad that has 5x as much RAM as an iPad, any claims that RAM price increases justify a price increase warrant very little credence. It just isn't believable. The stockholders might eat it up, but your customers are already looking at alternatives. This is why iPad sales have been in continuous decline for years. Crank up the iPhone price enough, and you'll likely see the same thing happening there.

Not smart. Just saying.

Nah. There are plenty of small businesses whose CEOs are normal people. Same with most nonprofit CEOs. I guarantee you won't find very many local arts organizations whose CEOs are psychopaths, for example.

The real problem, IMO, is that corporations are allowed to grow so big that only lunatics are able to run them.

Sorry, I just realized that was worded ambiguously. I meant that it has two-thirds the population of any of those three countries individually. So I should have worded that as:

Mea culpa.

What? Canada's population *density* is much lower than the rest of the EU, but in terms of actual population, you're off by almost an order of magnitude. Canada has about 9.2% of the population of the EU.

Canada has about two-thirds the population of France, the U.K., and Italy, or about half the population of Germany. Canada has more population than any single country in Europe other than Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Ukraine. With UK now out of the EU and Ukraine not yet in it, that would make Canada the fourth largest country in the EU if it joined. (And even if Ukraine joined, they're within the margin of error of having the same population as Canada.)

So if your argument holds true for Canada, it also holds true for the entire EU.

You might want to rethink your position here. Just saying. I'm not saying Canada should join the EU, since being the only country that's not even remotely in Europe might result in lesser treatment, but if that happens, the reason won't be because their population is too small.

Why do you think they would stop in their tracks every time there's a power or cell tower outage?

Yes, there have been some issues with widespread power outages causing the cars to get confused because things don't look right, but that's a bug, not expected behavior.

And although they won't have fares if they have no cell service, there's no reason to expect them to stop being able to drive. They will do whatever they normally do when they have no fare — find a place to park. Other than for learning about pickups and dropoffs, robotaxis use cellular networks only when they break down, to request remote driving assistance (i.e. relatively rarely).

Oh, yeah, I just realized that this is an expense on the Roku side, so the taxes would cancel out. Ugh.

Then yes, you're correct that there's no possible way for consolidating two businesses to save money without direct job loss, other than perhaps reducing payouts to external companies for things that they both do (e.g. accountants).

The biggest problem with advertising as a funding mechanism is that it creates incentives to *make the content worse*. It's no longer "what can I present that will help the user". It's "what can I present that will attract advertisers and keep the user spending time where I can further target them". There's the tracking thing, too, of course, and the scam propagation, and whatever else. As well as just the raw annoyance.

There's no incentive for anybody improve "bad ads" as long as they believe bad ads still work. Even if they *had* an incentive, it's not obvious how either the people producing the ads *or* the people serving them would actually do it. The producers are presumably already placing the ads they think are most likely to meet *their* goals. And as for the servers, they have very little leverage, because, in the end, their business is "you pay me to show the user whatever you want the user to see".

Sure, subscriptions suck. So come up with an alternative, say a truly privacy-preserving micropayment system. That's doable nowadays in a way it would *not* have been in the late 1990s... but it won't happen as long as it's possible to keep leaning on advertising. Nobody wants to be the first mover on something like that or eat the development costs alone. Advertising needs to die so that something better has space to grow.

It may not have been in the spec, but if it was widely known that the chip could do it, then it very well could be the case that people purchased the chip because of that, in which case the company unjustly benefitted from the widespread belief that it was supported, and is now seeking to further unjustly benefit by forcing those buyers to spend more money if they want to keep that feature.

Their failure to explicitly make clear that this was a bug and fix it in a timely manner is at least potentially an implied representation that could be subject to promissory estoppel.

In other words, they're probably doing something that violates the law, but we won't know for sure unless someone cares enough to sue over it.