There was a little of that, but I think they really wanted to be part of the industry and figured that their effectively unlimited bank account would make that relatively easy. Almost out of the gate, GFiber was complaining about the amounts of red tape that incumbents were imposing, ranging from high fees to use existing poles to to arguments over easements to lawsuits over trivial and even frivolous claims. They lobbied city, county, state, and federal governments to do everything they could to block Google, threatening to withdraw from markets even before Google started building out, potentially leaving people without any high-speed internet for years as a way to threaten government officials who wanted to keep their jobs with losing them due to angry constituents.

I've seen cameras installed in gyms to monitor the exercise floor. There's no reason they wouldn't be, and multiple reasons to have them, including showing customers misusing equipment, harassing other customers, or starting fights. They're not installed in the locker rooms, but the main floor is perfectly fine.

They're also perfectly within their rights to ban customer recording devices, including smart glasses.

Grumman and McDonnell Douglas were saved from bankruptcy by mergers. It is very likely that other companies like Martin Marietta would have gone bankrupt post-Cold War save for mergers. Five major defense contractors were left out of around 50 previous major contractors. OpenAI may not go bankrupt, but that doesn't mean its independent future is secure.

OpenAI is already facing serious headwinds. Its 2025 revenue was only $13 billion, but it expects 2030 revenue to be around $280 billion. Two years ago, it expected to invest $1.3 trillion in data centers, hardware, and model training, but a few weeks ago, that was cut to $600 million. It's losing money on most of its subscriptions, even the $200 Pro level. Its early technology edge is fading, with Anthropic and Google competing for the top spot. It had to push out ChatGPT 5.2 earlier than planned, and that wasn't much of an upgrade over 5.1. They're still by far the most popular AI brand, but that doesn't mean permanent success.

Permanent recordings raise questions about two-party consent. If a microphone can pick up the worker's voice, there's a good chance it can pick up the customer's voice, too. There are around a dozen states that do not allow recording without the consent of all those who might say something.

Solar panels worked, but many of the wind turbines were offline. However, this was known, planned, and communicated well in advance. The other plants were expected to make up for it, but they failed. As I just mentioned in another comment, there are lawsuits claiming that many plants were unavailable because they were taken offline for maintenance just before the blizzard arrived as part of a conspiracy to spike energy prices.

Lawsuits were filed in 2024 and 2025 alleging market manipulation by intentionally bringing down power plants for maintenance triggered the blackout, rather than a lack of regulation mandating winterized plants. While some plants did go offline for a lack of winterization (most notably to me the failure to insulate a sensor on a short section of pipe, taking half of the South Texas Project Nuclear Power Plant offline), the lawsuits claim that the blackouts were a conspiracy to raise prices, similar to what Enron did in California around the turn of the century. Back then, rolling blackouts became common, and it was blamed on the weather or infrastructure. Ultimately, it came out that Enron was deliberately taking plants offline to reduce supply and force prices up.

Social Security and Medicare monies already have their own trust funds that cannot be directly taken. The money is sent to the Treasury in return for special bonds available only to those programs, boosting the sizes of the trust funds over time. If it just sat there, they would be in even worse trouble than they already are. Also, there is no income cap on the Medicare tax.

I'm all for removing the cap on wages taxed for Social Security, though.

The ancient mainframe code is also holding back improvements. Banks in other countries that got a much later start on computerizing everything have much more advanced methods of moving money around for the average person. I still have to write 2-3 checks every year for places that make it extra difficult to use credit cards. I have to pay "convenience fees" to send money via ACH for property taxes and a few other things. Adding a PIN to debit and credit cards was a massive lift for US banks because old code had to be modified to support it.

I'm not saying that the old code should be replaced for sake of replacing old code. Sometimes it works just fine. But it was also written in another era, and finding the people who are willing to work on it and get a federal government salary is really difficult. And maybe rewriting it so that it can scale better and not require million-dollar machines from IBM to run them would be a good idea.

The IRS runs heavily on ancient technology. I wish it were better, but moving people who know how those ancient systems work is asking for trouble.

But with this group, that might be the point. Make the IRS dysfunctional so it can be scaled back, or at least so that they're spending so much time cleaning up messes that they're not doing audits of the most complex taxpayers.

The apostles who knew Jesus didn't write letters, or at least any that survived. There's a very strong chance that most or even all except Matthew were illiterate, which was common at the time. (As a tax collector, Matthew would have needed to read and write.) Paul wrote letters, as did someone claiming to be Paul. But there are no known, confirmed surviving writings from any of the apostles who personally knew Jesus. The Gospel of Luke may have been written or at least dictated by Luke, but we have no way to know for sure. It was likely edited in some fashion, possibly with the first two chapters added by someone else. In addition, there are some significant variations in certain phrases between some of the earliest versions. In any case, the earliest known fragments are from the mid- to late-second century CE, so there are several decades between the deaths of the apostles and the earliest versions we have of the gospels in which editing could have taken place.

The government shouldn't have ownership of any company except in extreme instances such as what happened with the Great Recession where certain companies completely collapsing would bring too many others down, and then only long enough to stabilize it and get it back in private hands. Now, every time Intel gets a government contract, there's going to be questions about whether it was a fair competition. Every time they get a grant, there will be questions about favoritism. Every time the board bends to government demands, there will be questions about improper influence. TARP made me extremely uncomfortable in how many companies it had the government buy into, but it was also designed to be short-term. The Intel acquisition, even as a minority share, was clearly not meant to be short-term.

Qualcomm needs to be kept away from Intel. If they get it, I'm sure they'll soon start to wind down x86 development and production in favor of their ARM chips, which will put far too much of the overall chip industry under one roof. It could also put AMD at risk, and potentially mean that one company eventually controls virtually all US chip design and manufacturing.

Fish is definitely something they've been working on for developing scaffolding. There was a paper last year by Kang, et. al, "Development of cultivated fish meat: Advances in cellular agriculture, biomaterials, and scaffolding techniques," that summarized the current state of the art.

Your jest isn't really that biting. A quarter-pounder with cheese at McDonald's is $5.49 for just the burger. A medium drink is another $1.79. The quarter-pounder meal is $8.69. Yeah, you get fries with it, but the number you came up with isn't all that expensive compared to actual fast food.

They're not growing fat *yet*. There is research going into scaffolding for multiple tissue types, including fat. That research may ultimately also benefit human health, because scaffolding for multiple tissues is a major challenge in cloning organs.

I live in Texas. They just straight up banned it. Companies can technically still research it, and they can serve it as part of the research, but they can't scale up to production, making even the research mostly pointless.