What self hosted solutions have you been looking at?

I've used TTRSS ever since Google Reader went away, however long ago that was. Works like a champ, and there are one or two Android clients that talk to it.

This is the economist view, but it's really not true. Companies are made of people, and people make decisions for all sorts of reasons, almost none of them purely financial even when the justifications are argued in financial terms. In this particular case, Steve Jobs was a UX purist who made all sorts of decisions on the basis of his taste for elegance and simplicity, even when they didn't make much financial sense. Most of his worst ideas were stopped by the people around him -- often with financial arguments -- but many weren't.

The "homo economicus" model is useful, but don't confuse it with reality.

I was traveling last week and missed it, so this is cool.

I don't think it counts as a dupe unless the original is still on the first couple of pages.

The president is the boss of the executive branch, and he has to be able to give orders to them to tell them how to do their jobs. Of course, those orders should only be about how they're supposed to go about executing the law, as defined by Congress and the Constitution. The problem isn't the ability of the boss to give orders, that's as it must be, the problem is that Trump is giving orders that tell the executive branch to do things that that exceed and sometimes defy the laws defined by Congress and the Constitution.

When that happens, it's the responsibility of the other two branches to rein him in or remove him. The courts are mostly trying to do their job to rein him in but their ability is limited. The intention is that when the executive gets out of control, Congress should give him the boot. Instead, the GOP leadership in Congress is cheering him on.

To be more precise, it's backed by the enforceability of debt contracts, i.e. the judicial and executive branches of the nation state. But that's only what makes sure the value is provided, what actually backs fiat currency is someone's legally-binding promise to do some sort of productive work. Fiat money is created by banks when they issue loans (including but definitely not limited to the Federal Reserve bank), so every dollar created is balanced by a dollar of debt that is created at the same time, and when the debt is paid off, the dollar ceases to exist.

Suppose you want to build a new house. You go to the bank and borrow, say, $1M. Many people think the bank loans you $1M that they have sitting in their (virtual) vault, money that was deposited by people with savings accounts at the bank, but that's not true. What happens is that the bank invents $1M to lend to you. It's not quite that simple (but note that we've abandoned fractional reserve lending; there are no reserve requirements any more), but we'll gloss over the irrelevant complexities. The core point is, the bank creates (a) $1M and (b) a mortgage contract, which offset one another. $1M came into existence, but there's a promise to repay, and therefore destroy, that money.

You pay the money to the construction company, who pays it to their workers and suppliers and investors, and they build you a house. You move in and all is good, except now you have an obligation to apply your labor for the next 30 years to generate value so you can make your monthly mortgage payments.

That is what backs fiat currency: The future labor of borrowers. The exact nature of the labor is undefined, of course, but that doesn't make the labor itself any less of a very real, very productive (by definition!) asset, and it is that productive asset that gives the currency its intrinsic value. And, of course, the legal system is backing the contracts, so you can't just decide you don't want to pay, not without significant negative consequences. That's just one of a number of crucial roles the government plays. Another is the laws that mandate that all debts public and private be denominated in and payable with the nation's currency.

Obviously, crypto assets (they really aren't currencies; even ignoring their lack of intrinsic value, they suck as currencies) have nothing remotely comparable to that sort of solid foundation. Less obviously, so-called "hard" currencies don't either. The classic hard currency, gold, does have a little intrinsic value because it's pretty and has some useful physical properties, but the vast majority of its value is "pure magical thought". It has that value only because everyone believes it does, but there's nothing behind that belief but tradition, not even anything as abstract as contractual obligations. Unlike fiat currencies.

The phone number thing has nothing to do with tracking, it's about account recovery. IMO, they should offer an option to skip it that makes you promise repeatedly that if you ever forget your password, or if your account is ever taken over, that you'll give up and make a new account instead of demanding some other way to prove your identity and recover your account. "I promise to take responsibility for maintaining access to this account and will never ask Google to reset my forgotten/stolen password".

Probably people would still pester them for a way to get their account back, though.

Why female?

Why hasn't that already happened, then? It's not like the market force in question are new.

Top 10 US states by manufacturing jobs:

1. California (D)
2. Texas (R)
3. Ohio (R)
4. Illinois (D)
5. Michigan (split)
6. Pennsylvania (split)
7. New York (D)
8. Indiana (R)
9. Wisconsin (split)
10. North Carolina (split)

The R / D / split designations above describe the current state government, "split" meaning that control is divided between the parties. So of the top 10, three are Republican-controlled, three are Democrat-controlled and four are divided (though the Michigan split is a very recent phenomenon; Michigan has been quite blue for a long time).

The pattern that I see is that the blue states generate most of the new ideas and products and manufacturing naturally springs up around them, then over time manufacturing of now-established products gets moved to red states for the reasons you pointed out. This is an ongoing process that keeps the manufacturing output relatively balanced over time -- but keeps the blue states richer and maintains their dominant position in US GDP.

Also, it's worth noting that the federal minimum wage is irrelevant these days; market prices have risen above it. Even in low-income states unskilled jobs pay more than the federal minimum wage. (To me, this isn't an argument that the minimum wage needs to be raised, it's an argument that it should be abolished and that we should trust the labor market to set wages.)

Do you also not know how percentages work?

I drive an Ioniq 5, and my wife drives a PHEV. She got a PHEV so that we could do the old 'well, for long road trips where we don't want to bother charging.....'

We never take it on long road trips, because fast charging is a solved issue.

We're already there. The average city commuter can easily just do a single fast charge once a week, and unlike a gas car, you can just find a charger that's near something else you'd be doing anyway, like at a grocery store, mall, or down town, and your total 'charging time,' defined as 'the amount of time you, personally, have to devote to the process once you roll up to the dispenser' is 'thirty seconds to plug the car in and tap your payment card' and 'thirty seconds to unplug the car and close the charging port.'

The twenty minutes the *car* spends charging is not time *you* are spending charging. You're doing something else while the car charges. Pumping gas might 'only' take five minutes instead of twenty, but that's five minutes that *you* personally are spending.

If I'm understanding the article correctly, the conference room window mitigation wouldn't work against this. It doesn't rely on vibrations of the windows. Instead, you'd just need a piece of paper inside the room, lit by ordinary lamps. As long as the light reflecting off the paper could pass through the windows unmodified (i.e. the windows provide clear visibility) the white noise vibrations of the windows would have no effect.

On the other hand, lightweight curtains that blocked the view through the window would stop this technique, but probably wouldn't significantly reduce what was detectable from a laser bounced off the windows (assuming no white noise).

I think we're talking past one another. I'll try to be clearer.

Sure, but that's not the point. The point is that Android does prevent most users from using anything other than Play. Not by actually blocking them from using other app stores but by simply not offering the option. And that's a good thing, because most users have no idea how to decide whether or not something is safe.

I think perhaps the confusion here is because you and I are looking at this from different directions. You seem to be looking at it from the perspective of what you or I might want to choose. I'm looking at it from the perspective of an engineer whose job is to keep 3B users safe, most of whom have no idea how to make judgments about what is safe and what isn't. Keeping them within the fenced garden (it's a low fence, but still a fence) allows them to do what they want without taking much risk. The fact that the fence is easily stepped over preserves the freedom of more clueful and/or adventurous users to take greater risks. I think this has been a good balance.

I'm pretty sure that the ability to allow unknown sources is required by the Android compliance definition document, and that a manufacturer who disables it is not allowed to call their device Android, or to pre-install the Google apps or Play.

Until Epic decides that they want their store to be able to install and update as seamlessly as Play can, and gets a court to order that. Still, your point is valid, there is still some friction for other stores. Is it enough? I guess we'll find out. Will it be allowed to remain? I guess we'll find that out, too.

goo.gl links are a significant abuse vector, so Google has to maintain a non-trivial team to monitor and mitigate the abuse. I'll bet there are several full-time employees working on that, and that the total annual cost is seven figures.

Even if it weren't an abuse vector, the nature of Google's internal development processes mean that no service can be left completely unstaffed. The environment and libraries are constantly evolving, and all the services require constant attention to prevent bit rot. A fraction of one engineer would probably be enough for something like goo.gl if it weren't abused, but that's still six figures per year, not pennies.

This isn't true for the vast majority of Android users. To a first approximation, all Android users are using devices that have "unknown sources" disabled, so they can only get stuff from Play. Of course, it's trivial to find out how to enable unknown sources and install stuff from other places and I'd expect that nearly all slashdotters who use Android have at least experimented with that, even if they don't use f-droid or whatever on a regular basis. But slashdotters are not remotely a good representative sample of Android users.

If you're talking about desktop/laptop software, sure... but most Android users don't use a desktop or a laptop and are accustomed to expecting that anything they can install is safe. And even among those who do use a non-mobile device, people expect mobile devices to be safer, because they are. This court ruling may change that, to some degree. The result will probably be good for Apple, since Android insecurity will drive people to the safety of Apple's walled garden.