I'm not sure why you are working so hard to ignore it; but what has people up in arms isn't the abstract question of how productive capitalism is; that question has been more or less decisively settled; but over the question of which 'we', exactly, would see the output.

Those numbers look less good; both in terms of their present state and what direction all the trendlines point in.

It's extra tricky to tell a satisfying story in the American context; both because the period of heavy industrial employment looks particularly good in hindsight because it coincided with both most of the foreign competition borrowing a lot of American money to set their own industrial base on fire and because it coincided with the last period of vaguely plausible external communists, which inclined the plutocrats of the day not to push their luck too hard; but the same general problem sets in in general: there's an easy feel-good story to tell about going from children with bloated bellies and flies, too mired in (sub)subsistence agriculture to even be market participants any useful sense; to going through the bit of industrialization that is kind of downer but at least generates something resembling a middle class; to what happens after that: where the storyteller may not exactly be lying about the wondrous state of the GPD and all(though, with the percentage of it that's financial sector you are inclined to doubt); but they simply aren't talking about the fact that no matter how well "we" are doing real wages and real costs of living just seem to be wiggling toward one another in deeply concerning ways and all 'innovation' and 'efficiency' have to show me is that I could totally buy an 80 inch TV when my parents would have had to put a 20 inch CRT on layaway; but when it comes to the things that actually cost money, like a house, or a doctor, or 4 years of school I'm hilariously worse off than they were and everyone's got a pointed finger and no answers.

Sure, if "we" all got the GDP divided by the population I'm sure "we" would all be happy about how the invisible hand was doing a bang-up job. Tell us more. But if you are sufficiently ignorant, whether by some amazing feat of avoidance or by sheer stubbornness, to think that it's actually that, not the actual nature of the distribution, and its change over time; then I think you have nothing useful to tell us here.

Sure, North Koreans and mud farmers are starving for want of capitalism; go forth and preach the good word; but don't pretend that having a good story for zero to 10k is a terribly transferrable skill when speaking to those who ended up poorer(or richer on paper but oddly unable to afford more of anything except transistorized toys, than their parents) or watching their children on the path to being so; it either reflects badly on your own intelligence or is an insult to that of your audience.

It's because inflation made booze too expensive.

They have to pick and choose which scientific instruments and/or heaters to shut off if they want enough power to run instruments at any one time as the power fades. And if some instruments get too cold, they may stop working. I believe they rotate the heater on some instruments/computers/transmitters to spread the risk.

But they are going have to switch off more instruments and heaters over time as the RTG gradually cools.

So how much longer can the Voyager's systems live as the power drops...

Nobody knows. They will probably be forced to experiment with instrument and heater rotation (on/off) until the very last instrument stops working either from lack of power, or being too cold to function (or cracks from cold). It's possible the transmitter will be the last instrument running, but the craft will otherwise be "blind".

They might still set some nice transmission distance records even without science measurements. Then again mere existence (signal) is a scientific instrument: it means there's no Truman-Show-like wall that far out, physical or plasmoid.

I'm not claiming it was necessarily done for good intentions.

Don't be silly.

Social media provides that service far faster and more effectively, and it not only doesn't cost anything, people actually pay to use it. The same thing happened before social media, but back then the memetic evolution had to happen in chain letters or xeroxed papers passed around the office, which was much slower, less effective and harder to observe.

Except that the allegedly simplified solutions aren't simple at all, in fact they're dramatically more complicated. Believing in hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin in spite of the consensus of the medical community requires the believer to assume a massive conspiracy. Not just any conspiracy, either, but one that is either deeply evil (if COVID is a real danger and the conspiracy is trying to suppress cheap and effective treatments, thereby causing large numbers of unnecessary deaths to no purpose) or simply unexplainable (if COVID isn't a real danger and the conspiracy wants to make people think it is to obtain some sort of vague "control" with no apparent purpose or end game).

These conspiracy ideas don't stand up to even the mildest scrutiny, but believing them is required for the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin stories to make sense.

The missing piece to this puzzle is that the believers started with the belief in the big conspiracy. Not in that precise form, of course, but they started with a belief in some big, amorphous intention of elites to keep the average Joe down (somehow). So the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin mini-conspiracies could not only easily ride on the already-believed big conspiracy, in an anti-logical but very real way served to provide evidence of and shape for the big conspiracy. Thus the mini-conspiracy is appealing because it feels like it validates and supports the assumed big conspiracy, in large part by making it more concrete. The conspiracies swirling around COVID response allowed believers to put a specific face -- Dr. Anthony Fauci -- on at least one part of the big conspiracy, for example.

That neither part is true, nor even makes any sense, doesn't matter. The combination of both feels more true than either alone.

Totally not true. I mean, yes, if they are working for an employer, they are presumably paid under the table, because they don't have the proper documentation to fill out a W-9, but that doesn't mean that none of them report their earnings and pay taxes. Paying taxes regularly can count in your favor if you get caught and are about to be deported, for one thing, so some of them do.

In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022 ($59.4 billion of which was in the form of federal taxes).

Mind you, if there are 12 million, that's only about $5k per person in taxes, but that's basically the taxes on ~$55k of income per undocumented immigrant. So claims that they mostly don't pay taxes are at best questionable.

And tourists. And students. And...

And with the exception of tourists, all of these people potentially pay income taxes, just with an individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) instead of a SSN.

I guess in Windows, it still works through iTunes. On the Mac, iPhone management moved from iTunes into Finder five years ago (Catalina).

I'm not sure how else you would do it, though, other than perhaps SMB. It's not like Apple could plausibly expose the internal storage as a USB mass storage endpoint, because you can't realistically mount a single block storage volume from two operating systems simultaneously. Things would get hosed rather quickly if you tried to do that. And you probably don't want to shut down your iPhone into DFU mode (no receiving calls or texts, etc.) just so you can add files, so mounting it as an external USB volume is pretty much a non-starter.

I guess an ideal solution, since it already provides a USB network interface endpoint for personal hotspot purposes, would be for it to also allow SMB over that interface. But that still requires installing drivers that are probably installed as part of installing iTunes, so I'm not sure if you'd be able to avoid installing iTunes even if they did that. :-)

Addendum: this is in regard to the 10 year Federal census. Any other counts are managed by states or private orgs.

The US Constitution mandates counting everyone, not just citizens, and the SCOTUS has upheld that.

We Californians merely tell the rest of the country that so they don't move here and make traffic worse. It worked for a few years.

Better yet, design the protocol correctly so that this isn't an issue.

AirPlay shouldn't need to "give them data about users' homes." It should just be a DNS service discovery record with the name of the TV set or whatever. Connecting should involve an initial handshake involving a device (TV) certificate signed by a trusted authority (presumably Apple), followed by a key exchange, and there should be no information transferred other than the name of the TV, which by virtue of the fact that there are *already* DNS service discovery records for AirPlay, is information that Meta already has if they want it, just by browsing for DNS-SD records.

AirDrop should provide only the name of the device that the incoming files are coming from and the files themselves. It should be 100% anonymous by design, using ECDH for key exchange or some more-quantum-computing-safe equivalent. Any other approach would be fundamentally flawed.

If that's not the way these things work, then the problem is the design. If it is, then their claims that it will be some huge privacy nightmare are absurd. Either way, the problem isn't that making things compatible creates risk for users. The problem is that Apple doesn't want to do so.

And it's a huge pain in the a**. I wanted to set up a simple way to use an Android large-screen tablet as a sheet music reader for an electronic organ, and to be able to use AirDrop to send stuff from my Mac and my iPhone. Unfortunately, Android doesn't support AirDrop, and I can't use an iOS device because Apple doesn't *make* 23-inch iPads for any amount of money. (And no, buying two iPad Pro 13" devices and putting them side by side for $2k+ isn't a realistic alternative to spending $400 for that Android tablet.) So in my case, the Apple users are getting a substandard experience because they can't be easily made compatible with Android.

Incompatibility doesn't benefit Apple. It hurts their users. What Apple sees as a competitive advantage, I see as a sh**ty user experience. And Apple really needs to relearn that.

I don't think anyone considers motorcycles to be bicycles. Sounds like you flagged a false positive early on in the evaluation process, so the machine had to test you further to see how strongly your worldview aligns with the rest of humanity.

Gesundheit!

You're joking right? You have Tesla's CEO in a leadership position. If you really think there won't be a push for more EVs under the next administration, you're kidding yourself. :-)