That's an age old argument that doesn't hold water.

Yes - foreign automakers have plants here. They employee hourly workers, and some engineers to keep it running. The majority of the engineering, design, and testing (the hard stuff) for foreign automakers happens in foreign countries. That's where the profits go.

So, yes, a some Toyotas are made here. But the engineering expertise is mostly overseas. Where do you want those nice white collar engineering and management jobs? China? Or here?

I bet the Chinese programmers are pretty good. Let's be honest - programming isn't exactly cutting-edge science. Variables. Classes. Methods. Basic software engineering at this point. Bread-and-butter stuff nowadays. And the programming industry in China is heavily bankrolled by the Chinese government, so they've basically taxed their citizens in order to throw hordes of money and people at the problem to develop the designs as fast as possible. No surprise they've made quick progress. Why shouldn't we leverage their work, especially for something that totally isn't at the cutting edge any more? Answer: Because if you want to have ANY jobs left in the Western World it's time to start rejecting slave labor wages and 108 hour+ work weeks along with living IN the factory that China manages. And once you lose the ability to manufacture and support the basics, you quickly lose the impetus to have the advanced development here either. You might have a little design studio where they paint pretty pictures of new models before they send them to the Chinese to make.

And shortly thereafter, the Chinese take that too.

Wake up. Look at how many foreign cars are in your parking lots folks. Those 'industry experts' they are quoting are almost certainly only worried about short term profits. After all, that's what our higher education teaches all those MBA's.

"space-x" astronauts? I They are goddamn NASA astronauts.

Don't say anything in the work place that you don't want repeated. Don't say anything embarrassing. Don't say anything sarcastic.

In summation, if you are in a professional work place, you need to act like a professional at all times. If you can't, you may be in the wrong profession.

At this point, you are an absolute idiot if you don't realize that Trump gave high earners an enormous tax break and is placing the burden of that on the lowest paid class in our society in the form of tariffs. Even those tariffs will not fully pay for the insane debt he has summarily created, but our future generations certainly will be. DOGE was a joke, and the savings they generated amounted to nothing. Especially after all the litigation and 'oops have your jobs back' that ended up after they realized they had fired critical personnel. DOGE was nothing but a hidden-in-plain-sight way of firing dissenters and dumping organizations that he wanted gone. Our country is the laughingstock of the world. We no longer have countries that call us friends. At best, we are a slightly challenged older brother who throws his weight around when he doesn't get what he wants. Trump has finished putting the last nail in the American century.

Disagreed. He's right on customer service. An AI customer service bot, done correctly, can be a much better end experience for the customer. The question here is, are they CHEAPER than the currently option? That costing is complicated, and it really starts on how the AI companies price each query. As far as doctors? He's full of shit. How does an AI check your reflexes, feel for growths under the skin, etc. Perhaps, given all the same data, an AI is correct more often than a doctor. But GETTING that data still requires expertise and tools that AI's don't have. So... yeah.... full of shit there. But what do you expect? He's trying to grow his business and justify the insane pay rates of the AI engineers they are hiring, along with trying to pay off the stupid high energy and infrastructure costs required by AI.

What - you really thought he was endosing crypto so hard because he thought it was a good idea for America? He sees it as one more way to get shady money laundered and into his accounts. It used to be Russia and Deutsche Bank. Now it'll be untraceable crypto. For just $100 you can get a gold MAGA hat made in China! Donate now! You're a hero! Donations in bitcoin plz.

What a load of tripe.

NASA continues to run groundbreaking missions. "Competition" from the private sector is nothing more than the private sector taking space technology from Nasa, then getting huge government kickbacks (SpaceEx), and using that.

There is no 'competition' in space without the government kickbacks, and the reason THAT is happening is pretty simple: Corporate Welfare.

I'm not the person you replied to, but the Fairphone 5 meets their specification list.

As a side note, everything the parent asked for is common on older phones. Asking for them all together is not like asking for unrealistic / unicorn options.

A 512 MB module cost $100-$200 in 2006. Sold in an $1000 machine. 10% of the cost.

And now a macbook air costs order of magnitude the same, but the RAM they're putting in it.... $10-20 (1-2% of the cost).

I wonder if that difference in cost is going to some other part of the machine or into margins?

(I know Apple don't pay retail prices for their RAM, which is what I quoted here, the actual percentage of cost will be lower)

You want me to do busywork so Apple doesn't have to pay an extra $10 for memory on a thousand dollar machine?

That's because, for now, they have what people want. But as the streaming services see them as a threat they will remove their content from google and remove stations as well. I used google TV because it was the only way for me to easily watch the NFL, and it had everything else as a package. That's exactly why I only use shitty services like netflix, paramount, apple TV et. al. for a month at a time. They've stratified themselves so heavily that each only has a show or two that I want to watch.

It has been an open secret in the cryptography community that Hal Finney was the designer of BitCoin from the very start. Hal died in 2014. Or at least he was frozen in liquid nitrogen so not talking either way.

Besides being the first person to be involved in BTC who didn't hide behind a pseudonym, Hal published a paper that describes essentially the whole BitCoin scheme two years before BTC was launched. And Hal never once accused Satoshi of stealing his work.

The reason Hal had to hide behind Satoshi is simple: The Harber Stornetta patent didn't expire until about 9 months after BTC launched. That covers the notion of the hash chain. There is absolutely no way anyone working in the field did not know about that patent or its imminent expiry. Hal certainly did because I discussed it with him before BTC was launched.

So the big question is why BTC was launched when it was, why not wait 9 months to have free and clear title? Well, Hal got his terminal ALS diagnosis a few weeks prior: He was a man in a hurry.

Having launched prematurely, Hal had to wait six years after the original expiry of the patent term to avoid a lawsuit over the rights to BTC from Surety. He died before that happened.

Oh and I have absolutely no doubt Hal mined the genesis blocks straight into the bit bucket. The key fingerprint is probably the hash of some English language phrase.

The real inventor of BitCoin wrote a paper describing the architecture two years earlier under his own name, Hal Finney. He got a terminal diagnosis of ALS a few months before he launched the BitCoin service, the pseudonym being necessary at the time because of the Haber-Stornetta patent on the BlockChain.

No, Hal, did not keep the coins. He invented BitCoin because he was a crank with weird ideas about inflation, not to get rich. Mining the coins and keeping them would have been a betrayal of his principles.

The proof of this is given by the fact that Hal did not in fact get rich from BTC despite being the ''second' person to join the project. Nor did Hal ever complain that Satoshi took the credit for what was very clearly his work. If Hal had been just another person coming along, there would have been every reason to keep the cash.

And we do in fact know Hal ran mining servers from the start and that he ended up in serious financial trouble due to his ALS. The freezing his head thing came from donations.

Craig Wright does seem to be the last of the three early advocates alive but that doesn't make him Satoshi. Wright has never shown the slightest sign of being the sort of person who builds such a thing and in any case, Hal's name is on the much earlier paper.

Actually, it's not that hard for ANYONE to do that....