That's $100 BILLION ... with 'B', not Million.

A website works fine without RECORDING the clicks. It's the difference between

"The user clicked X; do Y" and
"Record the fact that the user clicked X; now do Y".

Who at GAO is getting the axe for delivering bad news?

I shoot with Canon (R5, R6ii) and Sony (A7r3) mirrorless bodies and I have a Samsung S25+ that I regularly forget has any value as a camera at all. I've made efforts to add smartphones to the work that I do, but even with contemporary flagship devices and a willingness to shoot in LOG format for use in big-boy editing software, it's a lot more work to deal with output from a phone than to use a proper camera. Low-light performance is poor at best and shutter lag is a real thing on phones even when they're just being used for photos. The phone is fine for anything I don't care about, but since I do want output of a certain quality, I'd far rather have a big-boy sensor and a fast aperture lens for my projects.

With regard to people shooting professional cinema projects on smartphones, do please go watch behind the scenes footage. Overwhelmingly, you'll see that they're still using tens of thousands of dollars worth of lighting and production assistance to make that workable. Put a couple 36" beauty dishes with 500W continuous sources just out of frame and I think you'll see that even at 30 year old Kodak DC290 will take amazing pictures.

With regard to fixed-lens pocket cameras, the appeal is most often in something that's pocket friendly and dedicated purpose, even if that purpose is just "I know I'm going to be shooting a lot, so I'd rather drain the battery of this thing rather than kill my phone's battery while I'm walking around." You can get to roughly the same place with a smaller Sony full frame body (e.g. A7C R) or a Pansonic/OM Digital MFT camera and a pancake lens, but by the time you buy in to either platform, you've probably spent hundreds or thousands of dollars anyway. It's all well and good to say that you don't need such a thing, but pocket cameras definitely have better sensors that anything in the action-cam class of product that probably represent the cheapest dedicated portable cameras available otherwise.

Fuji's GFX line have larger-than-full-frame sensors that sometimes get called Medium Format. Given the limitations of Fuji's lens ecosystem, you're almost definitely a professional portrait or nature photographer if you're buying one, and since the only competition they have in that space are Leica and Hasselblad bodies that ALSO cost north of US$8000, this isn't a huge deal. Fuji is actually a bargain in comparison.

But lenses and cameras have seen prices raised across the board. None of the pricing is out of line from Tariff policy, but it does mean that I'm not buying any new gear until someone sane gets back in charge of trade policy in the USA.

This would lead to situations where someone getting a raise could potentially lose money. It should be first x amount of income is tax free. Next x amount of income is taxed at this higher rate. After that, income between x and y is taxed at this rate. And any income beyond that is taxed at this rate. This is how it currently works, although tons of people don't understand that and are convinced that them getting a small raise will lower their take home income.

This could still very easily be implemented. Income $100,000/year, tax rate is 0. Income between $100,000-$149,000 tax rate is 5%, etc...

"But what about deductions for children/mortgage interest/etc?" Also a simple fix, raise the income brackets substantially, so the first $100k or so isn't taxed at all. This would help tons of people struggling currently. Of course there'd still need to be a way to deal with things like capital gains, and I'd also argue that wealth sitting in an account above a ridiculously high limit should also be heavily taxed. But this would likely be far more efficient and fair than the shit show we've currently got ourselves into.

I agree with your other points.

While we're on a pipe dream, throw in a UBI for EVERYONE that isn't subject to tax. Use taxes on AI and automation that's replaced workers to fund that. This would then be able to replace things like welfare and SNAP benefits, greatly reducing the amount of fraud (Not that this is all that huge of a deal now) and overhead that we're currently using to administer the existing programs.

They're certainly better at hardware. For years I had flagship Samsungs, a few of the Pixel models, even the Nexus (Which wasn't necessarily a flagship, but was the reference model for what an Android phone should be). Without fail, every single one of them crapped out shortly after the warranty expired. Things like bootloops that would brick the device, or they just would decide to not turn on one day. And I had one of the Samsungs that were known for catching fire, that was fun. I couldn't take it on trips with me because they were banned on aircraft, ships and even trains.

Apple certainly has their issues, and I much preferred Android to iOS, but not one of mine or my wife or kids' iphones have ever just stopped working, even the ones that are several years old and been passed down to the kids.

So now egg prices will come down? And thankfully I'm on a few medications, I heard I'm going to start getting paid for buying those too.

Anyone who voted for, or supports this clown is an idiot.

Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.

That's a bold strategy for a company who's trying to sell a mediocre Android phone as comparable to iPhone 16 and Pixel 9.

Somewhat unrelated, but I finally made the switch (back) to a Linux desktop several months ago. It seems like Cloudflare ALWAYS flags me for the "Are you human" test now. Same with Google's captcha.

I'm sure there's probably data backing this up, but would a Linux user agent really flag these systems as being more likely to be a bot? It's annoying as shit.

I watch dogs (primarily overnight--most for 3-7 days but some 1 day and some >7d) via Rover. I make around $1500/month (pre-1099) and after their ~20% cut (of which most people give back to me in tips).

I WFH so the largely passive income is nice. I wouldn't have found as many people w/o a platform to do the heavy lifting for me in finding new dogs.

I am not advocating that we need to have these sorts of things in the market, but it does make for nice extra cash. YMMV.

Well,
I know about a (good no idea?) developer who had a lot of money.
He paid "online gamers" to harvest items for him in an online game.

Because he thought (and told so in public): "I love that game, and when I play it the 5h a week while I have time, I want to play it by the most potential".

Using an LLM for coding is more or less the same.

If you have to write 100 lines of code that you have clearly in your mind, and takes 3h to do right, but an LLM can spit it out in 30 seconds ... does that make you a bad coder? Using an LLM I mean? I would say your boss calls you a good coder, haha!

Focus the energy on any point of the planet - when the time is right.
And get away with it ...

How do you know? Who's checking?
Stupid question.

I am the one checking. Which was pretty clear from my previous post. /FACEPALM

What was your point?

Oh, you agree that "leaking" was tackled 100 years ago?