Well the car companies gotta do something, they've all (in the US) lost billions trying to convert to EVs....and no one in the US wants them.

They overshot the perceived demand...and have to retool to go back to ICE to keep selling cars/trucks in the US.

Something has to give with losses like that.

What a weird ... hey, wait, I think I figured it out!

You're looking at it from the point of view of the bank robber, aren't you? (Instead of from the point of view of all the people who didn't rob the bank but still somehow had their locations leaked to the government.)

Did I guess right?

Interesting....I've never heard of such a thing,,...a minum energy building....?

LOL...I doubt I'd survive there long...my tube amps alone likely would have me thrown out of such an abode...

You can't just hang a window AC unit out of one of your windows?

That's easy, does't require any apt. Modifications....

Thank you good answer.

We do not want "mob rule" here in the US...and if we didn't use the EC to more proportionally allocate vote weighting....then basically NYC and California for the most part would dictate who was president....and ignore the vast middle of the US.

Here in the US, you are a citizen of your state first and then of the United States....the state is what affects your life the most directly...and each state is diverse in its population climate, land types and laws....so they need to be more represented on a state level by the president...the Congress has a house with proportionate representations as a part of this too.

Most of us do NOT want a national ID.

If it can misused, it WILL be misused and we all know that...at least to date we do.

The US has a single centralised government with a single currency, Europe is not.

You've partially right....we have a single currency, but we do NOT have just a single centralized government.

The Federal govt. is and is supposed to be somewhat weak...and its few enumerated powers are in the US constitution....

The real power that actually governs the people for the most part, resides in the individual states. That's how we have VERY varying laws in many respects.....there are some cases the SCOTUS has had to take over the years, mostly on equal rights, etc....to establish that are constitutionally the same across states, but for the most part, everything that affects a citizens' life daily is governed by the laws of the state they reside in....so, financial laws, tax laws (state and local)...etc can all vary by state.

Most states have sales taxes..some do not. Some do not have income tax and others do...some states require car inspections annually, some to not and even those that do, vary in what they check..most do not check emissions if I recall correctly....

So, the US has. Federal govt that manages the currency....and is a singular face to the world....but internallly it's largely a mishmash of state laws that change as you cross state borders...

The US - within living memory - used to be a high trust society.

Of course, no, it wasn't perfect but I grew up in MN. You could leave your car running outside a Target on a bitterly cold January day and it wouldn't get stolen. In the small town I grew up in, it was pretty common to 'run a tab' at the local grocery so if you needed to stop and get stuff but turned out you forgot your wallet, etc they'd just note your name and the amount and you'd come back in (usually as soon as you could, as it was embarrassing) and pay off your tab.

But then...the Somalis came along with millions of other illegal and legal migrants from LOW trust societies.....and helped ruin this.

It's easier to be a high trust society when the member of the society are more homogenious , and live and think alike largely.

Then why did the US give up paying in cash?

Err....we still pay in cash over here....I actually try to do MOST of my local domestic shopping in cash.

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."

There's no way to interpret these costs, that nobody is ever going to be willing to pay, as a reminder that soon these companies are going to be bankrupt.

Every time I see an AI story like this, it makes me realize I really have no idea what the AI bubble hardware is actually like, and how it might be used after auction.

A few months from now you might find yourself at an auction where 4TB of faster-than-anything-you-have RAM might be for sale for $80, but of course it won't be in the usual DIMMs that any of your existing mobos can use, will it? What will it be, and how do we best exploit it?

Remember decades ago we had a hurricane and power was out for about 5 days. The streets were a mess.. trees and power lines down everywhere. Yet when you picked up the phone there was still tone and the green backlight still lit up.

Certainly NOT for Katrina.

Hell for at least a MONTH after Katrina, no matter where you were in the US you could not receive a phone call if you had a NOLA 504 phone number.

But for some reason texts would work.....so, I learned how to text then.

Phones were dead in the city for awhile for the one that came through LA 1-2 years ago....phones were out at east a few days if I recall..?

exactly. so why is it a problem if people choose to pay through their nose for techno-fetish or status symbols?

Using Apple products ceased to be any sort of "status symbol"....LONG ago....no one generally gives it a 2nd glance if someone is using something apple branded....

I use left as change things quickly, break things, tear down Chesterton 's Fence, taking big chances, and right as gradually careful change, thinking about why things exist before destroying them, and be averse to risk. Trump is left of FDR in that view.

Republicans lost two presidential elections, 2008 & 2012, due to running conservative candidates. So they gave up and became a further-left party. Now Obama looks like a relative conservative .. but Clinton & Harris look conservative _too_.

Voters are insisting on left-wing presidents, with the exception of Biden because the initial leftist shock of Trump pt1 was too much to absorb.