It is not okay for the executive branch to just unilaterally decide that it is not going to enforce the law. This destroys the constitutional order and it's always bad, whether we're talking about refusal to spend money as Congress authorized, refusal to enforce the Congressional order about TikTok or refusal to enforce the federal laws banning medical or recreational marijuana use.

If we want to do these things, fine, but they require congressional action, not executive fiat. If Congress is too broken to do what needs to be done, then we must fix that problem, not just allow the executive branch to tear up the Constitution.

You're using Trump's numbers, but his numbers aren't measuring tariffs. The White House's formula measures trade deficit as a fraction of imports... the other country's tariffs aren't inputs to the function. For example, Vietnams's actual tariffs on US goods are 8.1% for non-agricultural products and 17.1% for agricultural products, but his formula applies a 46% tariff on their goods because we buy a lot more from them than they buy from us. The administration will argue that trade deficits are a result of tariffs, so the tariffs are implicitly included in the calculation, and this argument isn't entirely wrong, but it is mostly wrong.

As an aside, there's a truly hilarious element of the the White House's formula: They tried to make their formula look fancy by adding a couple of sophisticated economic variables, represented in the formula with the greek letters epsilon and phi, but they picked values for those variables that multiply to 1. That is, they picked values that have no effect whatsoever. ROTFLMAO.

I suspect the epsilon/phi non-effect weirdness is because they actually used the pure balance-of-trade formula and then realized that looked simplistic so they threw in epsilon, which is an estimate how much imports will decline as tariffs increase, and phi, which is an estimate how much of the tariff cost will be passed on to buyers as price increases, to sex it up and make it look like an expression that real economists would use -- but of course had to pick values that would cause epsilon (4) and phi (1/4) to cancel each other out so as not to screw up the already-published tariffs.

"Cool" has a lot of dimensions with respect to code. It can mean "clever", which most experienced programmers learn to use as an epithet, not a compliment. It can mean "impactful" (in the sense of its effect on the world), in which case the coolness of code is largely orthogonal to its quality or other internal characteristics, since impact is mostly about time and place. It can also mean "provokes good feelings", which is more about the context of the author's life journey. I'm sure you can come up with many meanings.

In this case, I think Gates was referring to the feelings it provokes in him.

Unless the two products have different battery voltages, or even just sufficiently-different battery performance curves. Though honestly neither Ah nor Wh are what the consumer really wants to know, which is just h, because different products draw different amounts of power.

The best option, for both engineers and consumers, is for devices with internal batteries to provide hours of battery life for each of a few different usage patterns, along with watts for each usage pattern, and for external batteries to provide Wh. Most of the time, consumers shopping for a device with an internal battery would look only at the hours. When it comes time to buy an external battery for their device, then they'll want to look at the watt figures their device and the Wh figures for batteries and do a little math.

Ah is just dumb. It only kind of works because most devices in a category use the same voltage, but that extra assumption of common voltage is unnecessary and obfuscatory.

Nearly all thermostats that offer centigrade temperatures allow half-degree increments, and that is precisely because your first statement -- that humans can't appreciate or notice a 1C delta -- is completely wrong. Which is why Centigrade isn't great for human temperature use. Fahrenheit is weird, but its granularity is a very good fit for what temperature deltas humans can feel and care about. Its 10-degree increments are also quite meaningful in human terms, and its 0-100 temperatures are a good approximation of temperatures humans can live in without too much difficulty (though it would probably be ideal to shift the range by 10-15 degrees).

Does it matter that the numeric values are convenient? Not that much, really. But the fact is that they are more convenient for human comfort use than Celsius. For scientific use, Celsius is clearly superior, particularly because of the nice relationships it has with other physical quantities.

If I were King, I'd probably decide that the scientific utility of the Celsius system plus the advantages of only having one (ish; c.f. Kelvin) system make it superior to Fahrenheit... but I'd also understand that this would be a minor imposition on the users of HVAC systems.

Very true. But you forgot to add that it's a good thing they'll refuse any currency that doesn't provide an easy way to expand (and contract) the money supply. If the money supply can't expand and contract with the needs of the economy it will return us to the boom and bust business cycle that we had before we ditched precious metals. If you think the economy is cyclical and unstable now, you need to read about what it was like before we wised up and switched to debt-based fiat currency.

Slightly over half of states have usury laws that limit credit card interest rates, BUT federal law specifies that the rates a bank can charge are limited by the state where the bank's headquarters is located, not where its customers are. This is why most credit card issuers are incorporated in a small number of states (e.g. Delaware) that don't have any limits. As a result, credit card rates are limited by competitive and similar factors, not regulations.

I notice that Microsoft's "Purview" also provides encrypted email for Outlook, but also only to entities with a subscription. So... this is really just Gmail catching up with Outlook.

I doubt there's any technology to license here. I'm sure it's just leveraging ownership of a widely-used platform to provide a feature on that platform. Any other email platform with both servers and clients could provide the same, within its garden. Crossing those garden boundaries is where this problem gets impossible to solve.

So, nothing to do with email encryption, i.e. just confirmation bias.

You did say "biggest", and it can't be bigger than existential threats with even moderate probability.

Also, I disagree that climate change might collapse Western societies. Western societies are actually the ones best equipped to protect themselves from it... and from the waves of refugees from regions that aren't so well off.

Agreed. However, I think nuclear war is less likely to end humanity than AI, though civilization probably wouldn't survive. Einstein's quote about WW IV comes to mind.

AI has a roadmap, we just don't know the timeframe (could be months, is more likely at least a few years, almost certainly isn't more than a decade or three), and don't know if some deus ex machina might save us. Though I think that last possibility is very unlikely.

Nuclear war, sadly, is looking dramatically more likely. With Trump making threatening noises against NATO allies, it's clear that Europe can no longer count on the US nuclear umbrella, which means that France and the UK will need to change the strategic focus of their nuclear forces from invasion deterrence to regional defense, which means increasing their weapons stockpiles and developing their own delivery systems. It also means they'll begin helping other EU states to acquire nuclear weapons. That will break the non-proliferation detente that has mostly held, almost certainly encouraging lots of non-NATO countries to acquire and build up their own nuclear forces.

That argument would be more compelling if they were displacing some existing widely-used email encryption standard, or if the idea of standardized email encryption were new and easy to build and deploy. The fact is that the last few decades have thoroughly demonstrated that open, easy to use and secure email is a "pick any two" case: You can have open and secure but hard to use (e.g. PGP, S/MIME), open and easy to use but not secure (normal email) or easy to use and secure but not open (what Gmail is launching).

If you think it's really feasible to get all three characteristics, by all means please build and launch it! The world needs it.

Also, it's worth noting that Gmail has attempted encrypted email at least twice before, once based on PGP and once based on S/MIME, neither of which have been successful. Actually, ISTR there were two different PGP-based attempts, one that decrypted messages in the cloud and one that did it in the web client.

This project isn't an attempt to co-opt open standards, it's admission that Google can't make open standards work in this case, so it's better to deploy something that Google's corporate customers need even if it's not everything we would all want.

Because easy-to-use secure email offends you? Or because you already think that independent of this announcement and your confirmation bias is kicking in?

I have no idea how this is implemented, but to a first approximation that doesn't need to be the case. Google already has infrastructure in place to enable securely syncing secrets between end-user browsers without making those secrets available to Google, so Gmail could enable encrypted email that Google itself cannot decrypt or read.

That said, since all of the code to do the encryption and decryption will be served to the clients by Gmail, Google will always have the power to subvert the security if it wants. Depending on the details it's not completely impossible that it could be structured so that the relevant code all has to be pre-published on a transparency log, so that Google couldn't push code that compromises the security without possibly getting caught.

Or it's possible that Google just has all the keys. I think Google's business goals would be better served by being able to prove that they don't have the keys, though.

It's not. Climate change is a threat to our wealth and has the potential to reduce human population by a non-trivial percentage, but it doesn't really threaten us with extinction, unlike some other threats. For a good overview of existential threats to humanity (including climate change) I recommend The Precipice.

Although they're doing a lot of damage, they really don't rate on the scale of threats to humanity. They're part of a global ongoing decline in democracy which is very harmful but not existential -- and far easier to reverse than climate change.

Just maintaining progress and not having to waste a lot of money on climate mitigation would kind of naturally take care of that. If you look at first Lamborghini, in 1964, and compare its performance to what you can get for a middling new car price now... other than status, I'll bet you'd rather have the modern middling-priced new car.