I can print to my Bambu printer locally by using LAN only or an SD card, not sure why you think I need their cloud to print at all.

Also https://orca-slicer.com/ is not offline, some kind of a fork of it is offline.

Completely disagree. 100% disagree. If I need something that my printer from Bambu cannot do I will get another printer. For what I need it though it is great and keeps me from *wasting* time. My time is what is important to me more than money.

Are you under the impression that horse races aren't, occasionally, rigged? That the 'insiders' bet based on insights they get from owners, trainers, stable hands, and jockeys?

How is this any different from the outcome at local horse race tracks that offer gambling?

I like their products. I just want printing without fuss and without having to learn every detail about leveling, etc. Their product works for me and I do not care about its openness, it is about as important for what I need it as my headphones being open sourced (not at all). So this product is for my use case, not for people who want to control every aspect of their printer and every software feature.

IF they decide to make it prohibitively expensive to operate their hardware, then I will go back to a less capable hardware kit.

I think you're being a bit aggressive in your HIPPA explaination.

They aren't sharing specific, identity-revealing medical information about anyone.

Knowing that a user visited a website for pregnant, low-income DACA participants doesn't confirm the user is pregnant, low-income, or enrolled in DACA.

It's like saying by observing someone walk into an abortion clinic that violates HIPPA because now I know they are pregnant. I can prove no such thing from that visit - they could work at the clinic, they could be going in with someone that is pregnant, or they could be going to the clinic for any of the plethora of non-abortion related treatments and tests.

To violate HIPPA you need to have sufficient identity information to identify an individual and reveal their personal medical info. That's simplified, but knowing a person looked for information on a website doesn't *prove* anything.

As this story is about healthcare exchanges, you might have a hard time finding a printed application form.

I don't think they support a model where:

- you send in your demographic info,
- they send you a list of choices based on your information,
- you mail them your selection from the list provided,
- they send you a confirmation letter in the mail.

I don't think the open-enrollment window is long enough to facilitate that interaction.

A reasonable explanation/theory, but based on the ab-so-lute-ly ludicrous money spent to create these federally-funded websites, why were they relying on, as you describe them , "automated site builder tools"?

The time and cost involved reminded of the story around the build-out of Xerox PARC - they started with nothing, had to invent their workstations and invent a means to network those machines, then design and build the physical servers the sites ran on...

Bottom line, including tools to capture metrics around usage is a perfectly valid thing to include in these sites, but using a "free" tool that harvests user data on a gov't website is a big no-no!

New Orleans and a whole bunch of other cities around the world...

So they pump water out of the water table below the city, and it flows thru pipes under the city, which are broken, so the water returns to (ultimately) the water table...right?

I got an Idea. How about locating and deleting data centers that host these things? Deleting them from existance.

What is that, former Math teachers?

What are you talking about? Did you get distracted halfway through typing that and lose your thought? What do you mean "Randomly charge customers pass through"?

I hate to point this out to you but poor people, by definition, don't have money - they are poor. And the poor don't pay taxes (at least not in America) - the lower 47% of income tax filers (and as a reminder, more than half of Americans don't even file income taxes) either pay zero net income taxes or collect a refund in excess of any monies withheld from their paycheck. A person with no debt and $1,000 in their bank account has a greater net worth than something like 20% of all Americans COMBINED.

In NYC the top 2% of earners pay 48% of all collected city income taxes, yet only take in 20% of all the income in the state... Please, for everyone's sake, when you want to complain about the rich not paying "their fair share" have the decency to explain what your definition of "fair share" and explain why one person's "fair share" is different from someone else's "fair share".

Only 12 out of 25 CEO even plan to apply for tariff refunds? Why would a CEO choose not to seek reimbursement for tariffs they paid previously?

That doesn't sound right.

As for the "none intend to lower prices in response" comment, why would they?

First off, half the CEOs aren't even planning on requesting the tariff refunds, so why would they lower prices? As for the other half of the CEOs, let's understand what we are talking about:

a) Tariffs were only charged for a defined period, a fraction of a year, if you will,
b) Tariffs were charged at a fraction of the imported value of a good - not retail or "market" price

So let's say I was subject to a tariff for, say, 6 months (half a year), and I was assessed a 20% tariff on my imported goods, and the imported items had a 100% markup between import value and consumer price - that would mean if I were to fold the refund back into lowering prices, it would mean a 5% drop for the consumer for one year of sales, that's it. (The math looks like this - 6 months of 20% tariff equals one year of 10% tariff, and since that 10% is before the 100% markup in price, the customer only sees a 5% savings.) That short-term 5% savings will quickly be eaten up by inflation, and then when prices bounce back to market levels, the customer will feel taken advantage of, complaining about over-sized price increases.

It's easier to just absorb the windfall, let the stock value nudge up a little, and maybe put off the next price increase for, say, another quarter.

Ransomware would completely die out, if people simply refused to pay. No profit to be had, criminals would spend their time elsewhere.

As encouragement, paying ransom should simply be illegal, with severe personal penalties for any administrator or managers who approves such a payment.

Your comment about administrators is absolutely right.

I'm in Europe, where the problem is less pronounced. Still, over the last 20 years, the ratio of non-teaching staff to teaching staff has gone from 2:3 to 3:2. Those numbers don't look dramatic, but consider: It used to be that 100 teaching staff had 66 admin staff. Now that same 100 teaching staff have 150 admin staff, so 2.5 times as many. Not that our teaching loads have been reduced - much the contrary - our classes are now larger. You have to fund the bloat somehow.

I am reminded of the famous quote: "The bureacracy is expanding, to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy."