The context remains the same; greed is greed the world over. And greed, left unchecked, can never, ever, be satisfied with what it has; it only wants more.

But you're fooling yourself if you think that corruption is limited to countries without rule of law. For example, the Philippines has a constitution; it has rule of law; but it is a very corrupt country. And you're truly fooling yourself if you think corruption doesn't exist in the United States; they just have a different way of facilitating it. For example, politicians get bought out every day by corporations that "donate" to political action committees in exchange for the passage of legislation favorable to their business operations. And this current administration isn't making any attempt to hide the corruption; before our very eyes, Venezuela's president was kidnapped and replaced with a leader more favorable to providing the United States with exclusive oil contracts. Trump himself said that he didn't notify Congress about the operation, but he did notify oil companies. And you know they didn't get that information for free.

In the US, we do exploit child labor. We've just outsourced it to other countries, to give corporations plausible deniability that they have no knowledge of the exploitation, despite how well known it is. If you're buying anything with a Lithium Ion battery, then you, in America, are paying for cobalt mined by children in the Congo. If you're buying any chocolate, then you, in America, are paying for chocolate harvested in the coastal West Africa region picked by children. And if you really want to enlighten yourself, feel free to look through the entire list our government has on goods we buy produced by child labor here.

And I'm trying very hard to tell you, many people don't have the choice you think they do. You naively believe that everyone working fast food is a teenager finding a starting job? Have you even been to a McDonalds in the last ten years? Many, many fast food workers are working double-shifts or multiple jobs just to make ends meet. But don't just take my word for it. Take your pick of good reporting that has documented the struggles of real people who are stuck, and listen to their reasons as to why it hasn't worked for them to escape where they're stuck.

I'm glad we have something to agree about with the Farm Bill. But don't just throw the baby out with the bath water on it. A lot of it is necessary to provide food stability for the country. But there is a lot of pork and waste that has become baked into the bill, and a lot of both rural and corporate America that is now trapped in dependency on its government welfare. Which means that, if you do throw the baby out with the bath water, it would so greatly disrupt food production in this country, it would lead to drastic food shortages and upheaval.

My experiences with Reddit and Discord are similarly useless. I do believe there is some good stuff on both websites, but the volume of chaff is overwhelming and the search functions are deficient. Sometimes better luck from an outside search, but still disappointing more often than not.

I used to be interested in why, but mostly lost interest. Speculations that Reddit has been forced into some sort of defensive crouch and presumptive filtering by spammers, while Discord is just living up to its branding. Or perhaps Discord is too game-centric and my gaming days are mostly too far behind me?

Mod parent funnier.

Just joking. The YOB already proved that even casinos can go bankrupt. (But why did you feed the vacuous sock puppet and propagate its vacuous Subject?)

I have a new joke about the most despicable man in the world, but I hear food coming. Perhaps later...

Very constructive response and cable suspicions have been haunting me, though buying test equipment (beyond the cheap multi-meter I already own) seems too expensive an approach. But it makes me wonder about a service that might be offered in shops that have the battery pack sales or rental. Maybe next to that they could have a little device were you pay a buck to have it test your USB C cable? Maybe gamify it by letting you test as many cables as you can plug in and out in a minute? I have several "suspicious" ones around here.

Interesting and somewhat relevant. But one of my AC adapters is quite large. I'd have to dig around for the specs, but I think it was 2 amps. I haven't tried it with all of the devices involved, but I don't ever recall seeing any "slow charging" problems before I switched it to the USB C cables. (Actually that is a statement I think I could make broadly about lots of AC adapters and with various USB connections including micro and mini. I think I'm down to my last mini device and only one or two micros. However I also think it's possible the older devices would conceal "slow charging" even if that's the current status of the DC input.)

Actually I studied some electrical engineering a long time ago so I know that AC is not DC, but if the AC adapter is unhappy with the power it is receiving, then the output DC may be affected. Especially in the case of less expensive AC adapters, of which I have too many. Also too many cables of various lengths.

You're also wrong about the device. Quite a new smart phone. However it is possible that my usage pattern has "troubled" it.

Perhaps you could ask more politely to see if any of the details are relevant to what you actually know?

Wow. An AC that actually had a valid point? Will miracles never cease? But why was AC too afraid to put a handle on it? Maybe it's also a legitimate use of anonymity? Could it be that FP is from a Microsoft insider who has had access to the actual numbers of who profits from spam?

However I think it's not likely that the scamming spammers voluntarily share much loot with their accomplices in high places. Microsoft's profits would be derivative from "volume" that helps sell more ads. I sure would like to compare the relevant figures for YouTube and LinkedIn, but that would require me to be a triple insider (instead of one of the ultimate outsiders). ["It's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer" is really about Buddhist-style detachment leading to clarity?]

But I retain my delusions about solutions. I think the money could be chased and reduced. Even easier with modern AI. Think of the numbers this way: LOTS of spam reaching LOTS of people who hate spam, but only a TINY number of suckers who are actually conned into sending money. If 10% of the spam haters wanted to help interfere with the money, then they would vastly overwhelm the limited supply of suckers. Actually I think the return numbers for spam are tiny fractions of 1%, so that means 1% of spam haters actively involved in the fight against spam would already greatly outnumber the suckers.

But how to make it convenient to be active against spam? I keep fantasizing about a spam-analysis website. Basically an iterative analysis where you paste in some spam (or even a link to spam) and then you help the website (with it's own AI) to analyze the scam and target the best countermeasures. Humans need to be in the loop, and that's actually the scamming spammers' Achilles heel. They can't obfuscate too much or the human suckers can't figure how and where to send the money. (Of course such a website must always be open to "Other" responses as the spammers try new scams and as the targeting stats change.)

And yet the problems just become more pervasive. Today's interesting example is a Japanese book about banking. From my "convenient to read" stack, it's actually a manga targeting Japanese children, but I was distinctly surprised when Chapter 5 introduced the kids to fraudsters and identity theft. The magic piggy bank that has been helping the protagonist learn about banking is suddenly replaced with a criminal piggy bank who tries to steal the child's new year's money (in its fancy decorative envelope). Initially it tries to talk the child into a bad investment in a fake company, but then the good piggy bank shows up, tears off the bad piggy bank's disguise, and it becomes a physical battle for the envelope. (I'm right in the middle now, so I can't tell you how it comes out, but the bad guy seemed to be winning in the last frame I saw...)

The point is: it is not an invasion until they actually invade.

He can say so all he wants, but at the moment Venezuela is under control of the existing government, under the vice president. There are no US troops in the country. What we have seen in Venezuela is, for lack of a better word, a special military operation, with the intent to extract Maduro, not to occupy or subjugate the country by military force.

Discord is fine when it's just video and chat. The problem is that gaming communities, modders and (worse) companies have started to use Discord for things that it isn't: a discussion forum, a help desk system, a knowledge management platform. It is ridiculously bad at all of those, mainly because content is invisible unless you join that particular Discord community, and the content is not indexed by Google. Inside Discord, there is no search across communities either, and the limited search function they have is terrible.

More and more, I see information and discussions disappear off websites and forums, and end up on Discord, never to be found again.

I, too, am dubious if there is a niche for this kind of product, but you also touched (twice) on the power topic. I think that may be a more important problem than it seems. So I'll throw this question out here:

Is anyone else noticing "slow charging" problems with USB C devices? In my case that's smartphones and a Chromebook. It seems to be getting worse over the months. Initially I suspected the cables, especially the connectors, but I've swapped too many cables to support that hypothesis and I think there must be something else going on. Perhaps low voltage? Possibly aggravated by the frequency? The local voltage is only 100V at 50Hz, but maybe that's pushing the envelope for USB C? I thought (or hoped?) modern AC adapters were too smart (or too simple?) to persistently fail? Or conceivably some fundamental design problem affecting the current limits for USB C?

I do find it confusing, yes. What's the difference between the iPad and the iPad Air? Why is the one with the 'Air' monicker not the lightest and why is the Air not the Mini? What's with the Apple Pencil support being so strange, both in model and functionality? What is a 'Liquid Retina Display' vs an 'Ultra Retina XDR' display?

I believe iPadOS 26 may have sorted this recently, but even within the range when I was looking maybe a year/18 months ago you got different software functionality too, within the same model variation, purely based on screen size. Why could I run Stage Manager on one but not the other? In fact, what the hell is Stage Manager and why can't I just float a window? All this 'amazing' multitasking - yeah, I've been doing this that since the Amiga Workbench days thank you, nothing new except the weird insistence that it's somehow tied to screen layouts.

, As I say, I think iPadOS 26 has cleaned a bit of the functionality side up so some of my complaints on the OS side are now a little out of date, but I was literally standing in the shop with money to burn and I walked out since I was too confused and knew I'd always think I'd missed out somehow. These days I'm not so fussed about one anyway, though I do look in once in a while. I bought the original, iPad 2 and "the new iPad" (ridiculous name). Haven't bought any since, still have my iPad 2 but barely charge it - useful for a few hardware synths I have once in a blue moon.

Agreeing with you and pointing out their worse offender - the iPad range. I have absolutely no idea the differences between their products there, it makes very little sense to me. And I've been using Apple products for 40 years.

Feels like the new Amelio era to me - ship what we've got in the parts bin and call it a strategy. Too many products.

Not a great fortune. But large enough that I still suspect crime at the corporate level... Care to offer any details about what your company did to pay the CTO so well? Also curious why you were in such a hurry to retire.

(Not that I should complain. As things turned out, I certainly could have worked for another 10 years, but I was actually surprised by how smoothly I was able to shift my lifestyle. Work was the center for so many years...)