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.

“The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones. The Oil Age will not end because the world runs out of oil.” - Former Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani

The world will one day stop burning oil. We can likely guess today how much will actually be consumed in the next 50 years and the UAE knows that number is less than the current developed reserves. Anyone who doesn't sell their oil soon isn't going to sell it at all. And soon everyone will realize it. The price will drop to the marginal cost of the lowest producer needed to fulfil the worlds need. This might be as low as $15/barrel. The smart producer will sell as much as they can as soon as they can as the price craters.
Anyone developing new oil production or infrastructures is an ...

By being a lapdog to Putin he forced Europe to wean itself of Russian gas
By attacking Iran he's made oil more expensive and also unreliable accelerating the rest of the worlds movement away from it
By being a totally unreliable trading partner and trashing the integrated North American auto industry he's made it politically possible for Canada and Mexico to import Chinese electric cars. In putting an oil embargo on Cuba he's forced Cuba to move to solar and wind. If Cuba survives it will serve as an example to the developing world on how to transition.

Think about that for a second. Trump is a spiteful, easily fooled moron but he beat the Democrats twice. His party beat the Democrats in the presidency, the senate and the house. And he didn't win because of the crazy, religious, uneducated, white men. They were always going to vote for him. He won because the Democrats systematically alienated the swing voters. Trump mostly picks fights with people who would never vote for him. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is about to alienate anyone owns a business. Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion laws alienate young men. Vindictive rent controls alienate landlords. The Democrats, are always at a 50% support equilibrium. The more crazy the Republicans are, the more embolden the insane parts of the Democrats are to permanently alienate a group of voters that might vote for them. And worse, the Democrats then, instead of trying to win those voters back, call those voters names and demonize them. Many Fox news Republicans couldn't find reality with a map but you can still have a conversation about topics you disagree with them about. Try doing that with most Democrats.

Most large companies suck at innovating. They don't get crushed by smaller companies mainly because small companies don't have the money to navigate regulations and large supply chains. I might be able to build a better widget and have a contract manufacturer make it for less than the large established companies because I'm using newer cheaper parts that use less power. What I can't do is sell in volume around the world because I can't meet the explicit and implicit regulations. Meeting the explicit regulations is hard enough but my sales channels also have regulations that cause them to create even more rules for me to pass. Some devices are going to be so cheap or they will require so much time to diagnose that they aren't worth fixing even if the required part is only pennies. I have no idea when a part will become obsolete. When it does, I rework my design to use a newer part. Adding a right to repair for many things will require me to make my device more robust and to store replacement parts. Since I don't know what parts might be needed I'm likely going to store way to many parts. The robustness adds to my design time and costs. None of these things will make my device more attractive. For most of my devices, even if a non-trivial number of my devices are repaired, the extra plastics in my device and the stored parts will lead to far more e-waste.

Look around small towns in rust belt USA. 100 years ago they used to be filled with small companies that could make a wide variety of fairly complicated things. They could make them and ship and sell them all over the world. If you look at the founders of these companies, the founders often were not that old.

In general, in the west, we are incapable of building large projects* but in the case of nuclear we passed a lot of safety legislation that didn't add to safety but drove up costs and slowed construction. Many "environmental" groups lobbied for laws in bad faith, not to make nuclear safer but expressly to stop it. Legislators took the easy way out and approved legislation to appease groups that were never going to be appease with anything short of banning nuclear. Three Mile island demonstrated that 60s nuclear was safe. In the late 60s coal mines were going bankrupt. The "environmentalist" saved coal and in the process helped doom us to global warming.

*My city, Ottawa Canada, is taking 12 years to build a dog park in an open field. Government and competence is something only my grand parents experienced.

We see this architecture problem often. Data that shouldn't be stored is passed to some other process that doesn't know it isn't to be stored. Often it is with secrets, keys or the graphical display of a password. We see untrusted data scrubbed by one app to not do anything bad to that app but then the data or data derived from it is passed to another app that trusts it completely. Many of our systems are evolutions of years or decades of code piled on top of one another. What might have been an understandable architecture 15 years ago has likely morphed into a scrambled mess of data being passed around. Good for Apple to fix this since in many systems I've worked on this type of problem wouldn't have an owner or someone who would even take responsibility for fixing it.

He was good at introducing ambitious people to established well connected people. He was good at introducing rich people to talented people with ideas. He was good at enabling companies to get audiences with politicians writing legislation that affected those companies (he helped facilitate regulator capture). He helped lubricate the wheels of commerce between countries. If you were rich and needed something Epstein likely had a friend who owed him a favor who could help you.

So yes, lots of people dealt with Epstein who were not into his sexual exploitations. Some knew, some avoided knowing, and some ignored it. However guilt by association has a few problems. The USA has been involved in some very questionable military adventures. Is every US tax payer guilty for funding that military? If you sign a contract with a man in a Hugo Boss suit are you a Nazi sympathizer? If you use Starlink at your cottage do you agree with everything Musk says?

I think this is more about virtue signaling than anything else. It is a way for some people to claim they are morally superior to Gates or Trump.