I always hated having to buy 4 different standards each referencing the next about some requirement for my key pad that I must have, only to find buried in the 4 document that my correction button had to be yellow. I generally avoided any standard that required payment to implement, even if the standard claimed to be open (looking at you Connected Standards Alliance).

The more general problem for society is allowing existing groups to govern who can join or practice in their field. Hair stylists should not be able to restrict who is able to cut hair. Doctors should not be policing themselves. A Law society, run by lawyers, definitely shouldn't be the ones you have to complain to about a problem lawyer. Here is a good libertarian take on it: https://reason.com/2022/03/21/...

Public and private debt in China is 300% of GDP. The USA this is 122% with government debt being 105% of GDP. The US debt has accumulated over decades while, due to the massive in crease in Chinese GDP in the last 5 decades most of the debt is recent. The Chinese economy still makes the wrong things. The biggest example is how many dwellings they build that can't be sold profitably. The workforce is f#@ked with Chinese women able to retire at 50. Their birth rate dropped below replacement in 1990. Currently 3 people retire for every 2 that enter the workforce and it will get much worse in 10 years.

China is what happens when you aggressively mess with supply and demand. They are a warning to all socialists especially those socialists pretend conservatives (Farm subsides, rent control, military spending, restrictions on medical supplies, guilds I mean licensing bodies, ...)

Tesla did not take 9 years to sell a car profitably. Tesla was founded in 2003 and could sell a roadster at a profit in 2009. Tesla's first profitable quarter was first quarter 2013. The difference is Tesla was sinking all their money into expanding and designing new products. Now if Chinese auto makers are still selling the physical cars at a loss then that is a big problem for them. For us, the consumers, it's like someone giving you free money.

How would you have funded and created SpaceX? It was funded by Musk, he took the lion share of the risk. There were other investors but they invested because Musk had already invested. Most of the initial funding was his, if the company partially fails, he loses his investment first. When he was worth 100B what would you have done? How would you have divided up that wealth such that there would still have been an incentive and money to create SpaceX? Or would you have taken the wealth when he was worth only 1B? What would you have done with the wealth that is Tesla?

If you are a reasonable liberal or social democrat how would you have created these new things? And if you don't create them please tell me how society as a whole would be better off?

I care that capital is well used. I don't care if it is a government, an AI, a committee or a single person who makes the decisions on how to allocate capital. Musk has demonstrated that he is better than anyone else in the world at using capital. If he becomes a 10 Trillionaire then that would be good for society as a whole. Musk doesn't eat more calories than me, he doesn't have 1000x as many homes as me. His personal consumption is comparable to the average person. His wealth benefits society at large a million times more than it does him. Him being worth 100x more than what he is worth today would be a gain to society.

Imagine if we blocked him being worth more than 100 million, we wouldn't have ecommerce between strangers - Paypal reduced the stranger fraud problem to a level low enough for paypal to insure transactions. If we set the limit to 1B then Tesla would have gone bankrupt and SpaceX wouldn't exist. Starlink wouldn't exist. The boring company wouldn't exist. And what would we have traded this for? What would society have gotten in return? Some people would feel better?

Musk has risked almost every penny he has on multiple occasions. He has created, commercialized or drastically improved four things (five if you count the boring company). The 1T of his wealth benefits society in the products we all consume, the environmental gains (he was the first to mass produce electric cars profitably), the jobs he has created and the taxes paid by him, his companies and his workers. Do you see any socialists doing any of these things? This is one capitalistic person. He's done more for the environment than any green party. He's created more wealth and better jobs than all communists combined.

Oh but one person shouldn't have that much power. We need socialists to own the capital and make decisions. Think about how incompetent your local government is at doing, well everything. My city takes 12 years to open a dog park in an open field, $16000 to put in a speed bump, $80 per injection at their safe injection site and $40,000 per bike in their ride share program. I'm sure that's about average for any socialists.

I've worked at companies committing the fraud and at companies that have had supply chain fraud and in both cases the fraudsters got away for a long time. At the company committing the fraud no one outside of management knew. I figured it out because I automated a sanity check on our product that I ran every morning. To do this I created my own tests and found a little over 1/3rd failed. This made no sense to me because we had a test team. Turns out the test team was explicitly not testing things even though we had claimed to the investors that we had this functionality. In the end I got fired for not being a team player.

At another company a suppliers part was completely unreliable with random failures. I got the blame for the failures for 2 years before management finally set up a test of 200 of the parts and then watched them fail on average one every 10 minutes. If validation is inconvenient it won't get done.

We need to put a fair market price on water. If I want to water my lawn I should pay for it. If a farmer is growing alfalfa because if he doesn't use all his water rights for the year he loses them that's stupidity. Farming uses far more water than anything else in some states (and hydro dams don't consume water). We gave farmers rights to the water. That's their property even if the total rights we granted was more than the water in the rivers. If society wants to take that property back we can pay them. I'm sure we can pay them more for their water than what they get for alfalfa or almonds.

An AI can only summarize and infer on what has already been written. At the moment it can't make phone calls, it can't go out to a site to verify the details. It can fact check and get the math correct better than any journalist outside the sports pages has in the last 40 years*.

If an AI is replacing a journalist they weren't a good journalist to start with.

*It has always been a pet peeve of mine that the sports writers can do statistics, budgets and basic math so much better than all the other journalists including economists and the finance section. Heck, the sports pages can have rational discussions about spending and budget decisions.

I know most people who oppose daylight savings aren't selfish assholes but many of the comments come across that way.

You live in a society, you have to synchronize your time with others. Many activities will start sooner in the summer than in the winter. Particularly if you live between about 35 and 50 degrees North - 80% of the western worlds GDP. If you decide to start your work early and you don't work with others that's fine. But what if you work with others? What if you have kids you need to drop off at school? If you are doing construction and start banging at 6am outside my house Monday morning I'm going to be pissed.

The majority of us want to get up earlier in the summer than winter. A one hour jump sucks but we need to synchronize across our society. Daylight savings does this. No one has come up with a better way.

But these regulations don't help the environment in any way. They do the opposite. No where in the legislation do they talk about BPA or other softeners. This legislation is pure virtue signaling and it will cause the substitution by industry to more environmental damaging processes.

I've spent 15+ years trying to make the electrical grid greener. We can do it today with minimal changes or investment and save rich people lots of money we just need to kill a lot of "environmentalists" first so that we can be allowed to do the easy stuff.

And if the bug is unique and you are the first one to submit it you get your money back plus a small reward.

Most "security researchers" are crap. They use automated tools to find issues they don't understand. They can't classify their bug, check if it has been patched or see if it is a duplicate. They report things like buffer overflows that that 4GB + 12 bytes on systems with only 2GB of memory. Or denial of service attacks on wireless networks that require the bad actor to be continuously transmitting.

Plastic is more "environmental" than glass and aluminum over its short lifetime. Aluminum requires mining and lots of energy in its production. Sure it can be economically recycled but only because of its relative high cost. For storing liquids plastic is always going to win. Glass can be reused a few times but again, the energy costs in collecting, cleaning, melting, etc push its over all cost higher than plastic. Other alternatives are worse as they breakdown at the wrong time and make somewhat durable products disposable

So what environmental problem are the environmentalists trying to solve?
Is it landfill space - most landfill is construction waste and the lack of landfill space is mostly a NYMBY problem. Besides plastic can be burned for electricity and it burns cleaner than the coal. As long as we are burning coal any alternative is a bonus.
Is it the fossil fuel used to make the plastic? Again not a significant amount is used in disposable plastic verses electricity generation.
Is it litter - maybe work on this as a social issue. Also, as long as half of south east Asia is using their rivers as garbage disposal then maybe incentivize them to have garbage collection.
Is it they want to feel good about recycling - go plant a tree or some other worthless gesture.

There is a high correlation between a products cost and its energy inputs. If something is cheaper over its lifetime, it is likely more environmentally friendly.

Think about the swing voters. The ones that there is a chance they will vote for either party. To them the Dems run sane, well spoke, somewhat reasonable candidates. The Republicans have pretty much abandoned reality in the eyes of this group. That makes the Democrats the default ruling party and the Republicans the party of dissent. Elections are for the Democrats to lose. To an outsider the idea that the Democrats are at a 50% equilibrium in voter support makes no sense.

The dynamics though are the Republicans are a united party and as the party of dissent they don't have to meet the same standards as the Democrats. The Democrats are an umbrella of often conflicting factions. The Republicans say nasty things and do even worse to people who are unlikely to ever vote for them.
The Democrats regularly do things to alienate segments of the voting population that could vote for them. Every job application in the USA asks if you are some other race than white, if you identify as a sex other than male. Democrats regularly pick fights with landlords, owners of businesses, or the wealthy. They support policies that disadvantage cis women athletes. They regularly pass virtue signaling legislation that hurts the economy (the Republicans do this more but no one expects better from the Republicans). The Democrats made promises to both sides in the Palestinian Israeli conflict, two groups that already supported them and alienated both.

Every time Republican incompetence pushes the Democrats above 50% the Democrats figure out a new group to be singled out and alienated.

Fraud for commercial gain. Microsoft is getting advertising and exposure for their product. That exposure surely would cost tens of thousands of dollars if you were to pay the developers to add that line. I seriously doubt an employee did this on their own "without review, notification, or documentation." I think jail time for corporate employees doing shit like this should be a last resort but at this point I don't really see any other good options.