In the world of dynamically assigned resourcing there's always an ability to shutdown everything everywhere at once. Not one major tech company has to date not had a major global outage (typically short) caused by some configuration snafu which replicated across the globe.

Because American tech giants keep coming in and buying out any European tech initiative and shutting it down to eliminate competition.

Why aren't you a member of the billionaire ruling class yet? Hint: it's because they are stacking the deck against you, just like any tech giant does to a not giant regardless of where they are from.

Posted from my Finish made OS,

What has an update broken for you recently? What "workflow" do you have on your phone that is breaking? I'm genuinely curious here, because 99% of the time I apply an update and can't even figure out if anything has changed at all (mainly because I hit the skip button when the popup asks if I would like a tour of new features).

Except that isn't solved by a wired connection. The context switching problem remains using wires as well. The OP postulates a scenario where a Bluetooth device being on doesn't mean it should be used, the same scenario exists for a wired device, cable in but doesn't mean it should be used.

In fact it's clear that Bluetooth here is copying the previous behaviour of the wired devices.

That is a very strange situation. The number of times I've wanted to switch to Bluetooth is exactly 100%, because my headphones and earbuds aren't on unless they are on my head and I find auto-switching a godsend.

Not that I'm gaslighting, I fully support the idea of this being a toggle feature so it can accommodate everyone. But really I find your complaint perplexing.

So deny a right to education? Look someone will always benefit from something more than you, does that mean you should be locked out of doing said thing through an insurmountable paywall?

You're almost right there. Scholarships are a great idea, we should give them to *everyone*. Education should be available to *everyone* who wishes to pursue it without financially crippling them.

It's not up to a college to make you money. It's up to a college to get you a degree. If that degree renders you unemployable that has nothing to do with the college or quality of education you received.

False. Given that student loans can't be discharged through bankruptcy it's one of the lowest risk loans out there. It's a loan that follows the person for life and turns into a nice paycheck.

That's a good one. Though even if you do argue that students need to go into debt, the question is why this has anything to do with private lending. Why isn't this a standard government loan, indexed purely to inflation and recovered via taxation of income like in many other countries?

You can say what you want, but your conditions of employment depend on what you say. Say baby-killing Satanists are bad and expect to get fired if you work for a Satanist. It's really as simple as that.

The company I currently work for make it clear I could get fired for expressing any opinion about the company publicly (good or bad), beyond directing people to official press releases. I am still allowed to say what I want, and my company is allowed to fire me for it. It's as easy as that.

Revenues have nothing to do with engineering effort. For example: it is far more complex to design a train, and its a far lower volume production than a car. The fact that the revenue is tiny doesn't change how many people are involved in R&D.

That's funny. You just lumped together two of the things I pointed out were separate. Why did you do that? BYD's battery division is far bigger than their car division, always has been, and it's a division that has nothing to do with cars (historically their cars were gasoline vehicles, despite what the west thinks BYD is).

There was no woosh there. Just the air moving between your ears.

Because they don't know where the small sources of waste are, and it takes time to fix them. If you need an immediate reduction right this second, the only thing you can do is surgical cuts, which means laying people off. Fixing the small sources of waste has to be an ongoing process that continues forever, and most of the interesting fixes actually cost *more* money in the short term to save money in the long term.

They might, if it happens to be at the end of the year when they do the cuts, and if that spending happens to be enough, but most of the time when this happens, they're looking for 30% cuts, not 1%. And finding thousands of fractional-percent cuts takes too long.

Not really, no. Inflation changes the value of the dollar. That means the government's debt also becomes less expensive every year, assuming all else is equal. And inflation causes increases in income, both for businesses and individuals, which means revenue should be increasing roughly proportionally. If it isn't, then that means the tax code is failing to properly capture percentages of actual gains, and this is something that needs to be fixed structurally.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, treasury revenue is going up, at least on average. From 2015 to 2025, tax revenue increased by 18.3%. Meanwhile, assuming Gemini isn't gaslighting me, the U.S. population increased by only about 6.6% in that time. So not only is revenue increasing after adjusting for inflation, it is also increasing relative to the population size after adjusting for inflation.

I can't tell you why service seems to always be getting worse. Maybe it is because we're spending rapidly increasing amounts of money on the most inefficient healthcare system in the first world, driven by a combination of lack of a public option or single payer system, poor auditing of payments, massively delayed payments that cause small healthcare providers to struggle to survive and force consolidation into giant regional monopolies, and probably a lot of other things that I don't know about because I don't work in that field.

When you end up having hyperinflation of your medical insurance costs, it eats a bigger and bigger piece of every other part of the budget. And the federal government is not immune to that.

There are probably other reasons as well. That's just the first one that comes to mind.

This is moot, because as you can see from the chart, inflation-adjusted revenue increased rather rapidly during that same period.

Well, I think Trump would be immediately stopped by the courts, too. Probably faster than they stopped Biden, since they've very reasonably gotten intensely skeptical of almost everything this administration does.

Partisanship aside, presidents really should obey the law. If the law is bad, the solution is to change it, not to break it. Yes, that means we need a functioning Congress, something we haven't had for quite some time, but that's still no reason to break the law.

Maybe a percent or two, but with a budget is big enough, that's still a lot of money that could be used for something else.

The point is not that any of these things individually will result in big gains. The point is that there are a lot of different small inefficiencies that add up to a bigger inefficiency.

For example, for some reason, when the IRS sent out their findings for tax exempt status, a group that I work with never got the determination letter. And the IRS had no straightforward mechanism to resend the letter. Fixing it involved hundreds of phone calls before we reached a person who could help, and then waiting for someone to print it and mail it to us. All of this stuff should be in electronic records, and it should have been trivial for us to directly get a new copy electronically from their computer systems without requiring a person at the IRS to intervene.

Every time a person has to do something because a computer lacks code to do it, that is an example of government waste. It probably isn't worth fixing all of them, because sufficiently rare things could take decades to recover the cost of coding them, but that doesn't mean that someone shouldn't triage them, catalog them, prioritize them so that the scope is fully understood, because when you do that, you may find other people coming in later and saying, "If you do that, it will save me time on related task [x]," and that might then turn out to push it into "implement this ASAP" territory. Without documenting the state of things, those discoveries won't ever get made, and nothing will improve.

And the IRS has multiple incompatible login systems that use different credentials, multiple sites that expose different parts of the same access to information about your business/charity, etc. all of which have to be maintained, resulting in massive levels of redundancy, not to mention causing massive confusion for anyone who ever has to access them, wondering why it says they don't have an account even though they had to have one to fill out previous IRS paperwork. Replacing them with different views into the same data (with access right limits, presumably) in the same online system would likely save significant money, both in terms of software maintenance costs and server operation costs.

And how much auditor time could be saved if they trained AI models on previous audits and used that as a starting point for flagging suspicious returns and/or filtering suspicious returns flagged by existing automation? I don't have any idea, but I would not be surprised if that approach eventually produced meaningful long-term savings.

And every time they send out tax forms, what manual processes have to happen to distribute advance copies to companies like TurboTax, and how much time would be saved if we had a centralized, modern electronic version of all of the forms, rather than PDFs, with an open source implementation, complete with code to populate one form from another, etc.? Maybe it would cost more initially, but would save money in some other areas, like making it easier for auditors to recompute the taxes after fixing errors in data entry. I'm not sure, but these are the sorts of efficiency wins that should be looked at.

So in that one division alone, there are glaringly obvious inefficiencies that, if fixed, could result in considerable cost reduction. Similarly, every time you deal with someone at the Social Security Administration or (at the state level) the DMV and they tell you that the computer system is down and they'll try again in a minute, that's an example of government waste. It's a system that isn't working correctly, which as a result, wastes the time of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of government workers on an ongoing basis.

There's no reason to believe any other part of the government is any better. Government IT is known for being disastrously slow at modernization, and it costs taxpayers a lot of money because our government doesn't spend the money to bring those systems up to date in a timely manner.

These are just some examples that are obvious from the outside looking in; there are probably many less obvious examples that would be obvious to someone who works there every day. And that's the point. The people at the top can't see what wastes the time of the people at the bottom, because they don't have visibility into their minute-by-minute activities (and even if they could, they would have a hard time filtering the flood of data into something useful). So you have to drive efficiency from the bottom up, and our government does not do this, so we can never really know whether that inefficiency adds up to half a percent or ten percent.

We can't get a complete picture without going to the people at the bottom of the org chart and asking them what could be done to make them more efficient, what could reduce waste, etc. It's a relatively easy low-hanging-fruit task, so we should do this. :-)

I hope that makes my position clearer.

Indeed, truth and accuracy is important to me, and I think it should be important to everyone. It baffles me that so many people don't seem to care about whether what they believe or say is true. I recognize that those people who care are often in the minority, but that just makes it harder to understand, not easier.