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Comment Re:Deficit spending causes inflation (Score 3, Insightful) 183

Elon is reacting because he's finally realized Trump is a grifter and anyone who befriends him ends up broke and decrepit.

See what happened to his biggest supporters from his first term - like Rudy Giuliani, or even the My Pillow guy Mike Lindell. His biggest supporters, but after they stopped being useful to Trump, Trump ditched them to fight their own wars.

Elon was useful to Trump, and now that he's stopped being so useful Trump is threatening to cut him off like he's cut off all previously-useful people. Trump uses people then dumps them.

Elon just learned that fact, and now he's scrambling to save his companies before they go the way of My Pillow. But chances are they're going to circle the drain - Trump will use the BBB as an excuse to kill subsidies to Tesla, and cuts at NASA will basically kill SpaceX.

Comment Re:I hate recipe sites (Score 1) 28

The problem is that recipes are generally non-copyrightable, so recipe sites are doing all that fluff just to have content they could claim copyright on. Just providing the recipe means users can copy it somewhere else and then that's it for the site.

So yes, they deliberately obfuscate the recipe intentionally because they don't want you to just get it and leave and never come back.

Answer In Progress did a video about recipe sites... https://youtu.be/ZvC2jtmVAMs?s...

Comment Re:Eating the seed corn (Score 1) 249

INdeed. Ant while that happens, the King sells the crown jewels to line his coffers. What a patheic showing for a nation that was once the "leader of the free world".

The USA is next on Trump's target to bankrupt. Given all the other businesses he's bankrupted over the decades, it seems fitting to bankrupt one more on the way out.

Comment Re: Apple should just cut foxconn out! (Score 1) 39

Thank you W and Obama for giving us a service oriented economy instead of manufacturing this kind of stuff. Thank you to Apple for sending jobs overseas. Thank you to Wall Street for making a few more dollars while the middle and working class struggle.

The service oriented economy is the evolution of the manufacturing economy.

There are half a million manufacturing jobs right now in the US that are waiting to be filled. No one is filling them. Trump bringing back manufacturing isn't going to help that.

You can watch Smarter Every Day, and Destin notes that there are people who have the skills, but no one to train and apprentice, and thus the skilled people cannot pass on their knowledge. That's right now today manufacturing jobs, not tomorrow's tariff "US will build baby build" jobs that Trump promises.

The service economy evolved from the manufacturing economy - this time you're making money without much resources. Thus you're offering high value stuff that's basically takes no resources, and thus is high margin and high profit. Things like tourism, the content industry (movies, music, books, etc), and others like software. High value products.

And yes, the US has trade deficits, but that's purely if you consider manufactured products. If you include services, the deficits basically disappear as the US exports more services and such than it imports in goods. (And this is a good thing because it puts US dollars into the hands of everyone worldwide who can then use those US dollars to buy US services).

It's just like how at the start of the 20th century the majority of jobs were in agriculture. This shifted to manufacturing, then shifted again to services.

High value goods are still made int he US - things like cars, trucks, aircraft, etc are all manufactured in the US. What's not manufactured are low value low margin goods - consumer products and other mass manufactured things. Sure they could, but we see what happened when they weren't (Apple was one of the last to move manufacturing away from the US - they were still making stuff in the US when Jobs took over - so those jobs were going away anyways - either by Apple shifting production, or Apple going out of business).

Oh, and guess which part of the economy Trump decided to completely trash ramming through his economic policy. And if you think the 1950s were so good, remember they were only good for a small part of the population. The rest didn't have it so well. (And if being so Euro-centric is so good, why is the US rejecting everything European? Universal health care, workers rights, vacation time, environmental awareness...).

Comment Re:do they have the USB logo on the system? (Score 4, Informative) 103

Doesn't the EU have a new standard in place that mandates All new small and medium-sized portable electronics including Laptops have a USB-C connector and must support fast charging the battery from that connector?

Yes, the Switch 2 supports USB-PD just fine - you can plug it into any compatible charger just fine.

The problem here is using a USB-C dock - the Switch 2 only works with specific docks that are authorized, and not any generic USB-C dock you can buy anywhere.

Comment OA sites and APC fees (Score 2) 33

Side note: Ironically, the linked article on nature.com about open access for journal articles is paywalled [login for "free" access, but still ...]. You only see this if you try to scroll to get the final part of the article.

The talked about APCs (article processing charges) that can amount to thousands of dollars? Supposedly, OA journals make their money from authors paying these (vs. paywalling readers).

Nature talks about paying these APC for the authors (i.e. we're doing you a favor when you go with us) to reuplink to OA journals. But, what OA journals need to charge this amount if the articles have been already reviewed/vetted by nature.com et. al.?

"Pubmed Central" is the NIH's website where the article must be catalogged/published to be in compliance with the law(?). I presume there are no such APC for it.

So, if the articles are available there, why have OA sites that charge thousands? The ongoing costs are maintaining an Amazon AWS (or google cloud, azure, etc).
Or self-hosting (cost of equipment, rental of equipment cage space, internet connection, and electricity).

Or, what about arxiv.org? AFAIK, it's completely free. Ditto for plos.org

Maybe the OA sites that feel the need to charge [IMO, excessive] fees could put up torrent magnet links??? ;-)

Comment Re:SSD/HDD wear, and (Score 1) 52

Batteries are smart and if you can read out the information contained in, you can see how much wear there is.

You get stats like how many cycles they've undergone, when they were made, their design capacity, their current capacity, and a few more items.

It's the same kind of information you need to figure out how good the battery is, just like how SSDs keep track of enough information to figure out their health as well.

Liquid damage is a lot harder since that requires taking stuff apart. Apple's liquid indicators change color when they're triggered, for example. And most liquid damage indicators are obviously placed where they may encounter liquid, which is usually not in a convenient place to see them.

Comment Intel SGX is deprecated (Score 2) 36

I don't know about you, but Intel SGX is deprecated/no longer exists. It only exists in Generation 8-12 CPUs, but Generation 11 and 12 CPUs received a microcode update that disabled it because of the problems it had.

And for anyone wondering, no, it was not AMD compatible. AMD has their own protection system based on ARM TrustZone technology. (And it has nothing to do with Intel ME or the AMD equivalent).

SGX was used by the UHD Blu-Ray folks, so it also means you cannot play discs on any PC now, making UHD Blu-Ray drives somewhat obsolete. (Now, you can RIP the discs just fine as they don't need anything special.).

The reason SGX was removed was due to a massive security flaw in it that let it leak out the secrets, and Intel deemed it unfixable and phased it out by deprecating it for Gen 11 and 12 before removing it.

Comment Re:A recent experience (Score 2) 179

Most businesses can't operate if the registers are down either, cashless or not.

Most inventory systems are computerized, and registers are linked with the inventory system so additional can be ordered. At the same time, the registers track the payment method so it can keep tabs on how much cash is in the register.

Thus, if the backend server goes down, the register goes down, and cash may not be accepted.

Now, a small business might be able to go back to pen and paper recording transactions, but that can be too hard - I've seen people break out the calculator just to calculate change, so basic math skills are lacking to the point I don't think many could work without a calculator.

Comment Re: We're ready for more national firewalls (Score 1) 143

The tax was probably going to be difficult to enforce. If Trump is going to take that as a win than it was a good sacrifice to make. Once he has his thing to brag about he will concede more.

That is probably the calculus behind it. You have to remember the G7 agreed to a minimum income tax which includes a DST, just Canada and France implemented it early.

This was a huge thorn in Biden's side, and Biden himself was trying to get it rescinded. No doubt in another timeline, Kamala Harris would be challenging it because it could potentially violate the USMCA/CUSMA agreement.

Trump wants "wins". So this counts - the Trump administration has said they are resuming trade talks. Plus, Trump needs a win soon - his "we have dozens of trade deals in July" is coming up. So far, all his trade deals have been nothing more than status quo or worse for the US, so now is the time to get Trump his "win" of screwing over the US.

Comment Re:Double whammy (Score 1) 75

It won't be long for lawyers to get in on the game - that because you were driving a vehicle with a tall hood, you knew it was going to cause more damage and thus you should pay more damages to the person you hit.

Get that going a few times and the insurance industry will adjust rates appropriately so people who drive big vehicles now have to pay for significantly more liability insurance because their vehicles are more likely to cause more damage to people.

Shouldn't take more than a few years for it to be sorted out - a few legal cases by ambulance chasers, and a few changes to insurance policies and now there's a market push for smaller vehicles again.

And most of the push to larger vehicles isn't CAFE or whatever. It's car companies - big vehicles are simply more profitable. They could sell you an econobox for $15,000, but they'd really rather you buy the F950 for $150,000 instead. That monster truck probably makes about 4 econoboxes worth of profit. I did NOT say make 4 times as much profit as the econobox. I said 4 econoboxes worth of profit. Probably 20 times the profit of the econobox.

Comment Re:Many Times (Score 1) 11

You also often do it as you're older and wiser and know that sometimes, the problem will solve itself as well.

A tough problem at work? Putting it aside and suddenly the next day it's no longer a problem because it's been made moot.

It helps avoid a lot of wasted effort. Experience will help tell you which problems you need to tackle immediately, which ones you need to put aside for the "aha" moment, and which ones you need to put aside because it'll disappear in a week's time.

Comment Re:ISDN (Score 1) 68

The problem IPv6 is solving isn't a problem today, because the problem IPv6 is solving is no longer workable.

People hated NAT because it puts up a basic stateful firewall between endpoints. And we needed that because we don't have enough IPv4 addresses.

IPv6 was to preserve that end to end connectivity, and not have to do all sorts of hacky workarounds like FTP proxies, port forwarding and other such things like STUN. It was also to make IPSec practical and workable.

But how much of that is true now? You don't see FTP proxies anymore - because PASV mode, but also because no one uses FTP anymore. It's either FTPS, or SFTP (ftp secure, which uses TLS over the FTP connection, breaking the gateway, or secure FTP, a protocol working over SSH).

End to end connectivity is broken because no one would consider putting up anything on the Internet without putting it behind a firewall. So all the nasty IPv4 hacks have to be preserved on IPv6.

We've also gone higher on the stack - where a lot of things happen over HTTPS and now we have firewalls that inspect way up the network stack.

The fundamental reason for having IPv6 got broken over a decade ago, and people stopped bothering because it had no benefits over what exists now.

It still has use - it does have a larger address space, but that's the only benefit it added. So it's popular on sites that have so many devices that they exceed the IPv4 private address space.

That's the reason IPv6 isn't the primary protocol, despite being around for over 3 decades now.

In a way, you can see it as the electrification of cars - EV owners are the new IPv6 adopters. We've been running out of oil for about the same amount of time, but we've also been getting better at extracting harder to extract oil (at increased cost - we aren't getting $1/gallon gas anymore despite it not being all that long ago).

Also, IPv6 purists are just nasty to work behind. IPv6 would replace everything you need - no need for DHCP, NAT, etc anymore i IPv6 does it all. Of course, that attitude dismisses why someone might want DHCP, or NAT, and yes, DHCPv6 and NATv6 exist for those reasons, but the purists hated them for existing and for ignoring very real issues for why one might want to have them.

That, and the music and movie industry should be pushing for IPv6 more heavily because it destroys a key argument in the lawsuits - that the person using the IP address is the guilty party. With everything having independent IPv6 addresses, it's far easier to go after the pirates because they're likely the sole user of a computing device with that IP address. Not an entire family behind a single IPv4 address, when you can have every kid's phone having a unique IP so you can sue just the kid.

Comment Re:China still build stuff (Score 1) 78

It's not because they build stuff. The US builds lots of stuff.

The problem is more cultural than anything else - the Chinese simply believe in education and an educated workforce. The US, well, has pretty much gone the other way, where intellectualism is seen as a major drawback.

So China celebrates their nerds, geeks, and other bookish people. The US celebrates their celebrities and sports heroes.

It reflects on politics too - being an intelligent person is considered bad compared to one with a lot of charisma or such. Just think back to any recent election where the main talking point has been how "XXX candidate has degrees from MIT, Harvard, ... but what does he know about the REAL WORLD (insert scary music)".

That's basically been the thing since the US had an actor be President and it's only declined since. And likely made worse because people think Musk is an engineer and smart, when in reality, not so much (he was lucky. He got rich by cashing in on Paypal. Everything else is stolen credit - Tesla he pushed out the founders, SpaceX he did the same - they weren't created by him, just small companies that only grew by his celebrity).

Plenty of US companies need talent - but you'll find that talent is often in immigrants who come over to apply their knowledge and grow US companies.

Face it, it's all about celebrity in the US nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the biggest growing categories of job is "content creator" (unbrella term - we all know it means YouTuber, TikToker, Instagrammer, etc). Being smart isn't seen as a positive in America -

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