Unlimited corporate and billionaire money going to re-election funds is a significant factor as well. The ultra wealthy can avoid paying any taxes at all by borrowing money against their stock holdings until they die; the loan is then settled without much taxation on the heirs.

These people are all about balancing the budget until they get in charge, then it's just more spending on what THEY want. Same story with states rights / local authority.

Those older lines have to go somewhere. Often a Chinese company will buy them up and keep turning out chips on the older larger process.

Depends on the size of them. Small ones are definitely for charging up phones on the go, or I've seen people use them on the couch if there is no convenient outlet. The big power banks are not the same. They are rivaling gasoline generators in power output. For around the same price as a 2000w gas generator you can get a power bank big enough to run a fridge for 8 hours. They have obvious disadvantages too, but for people who don't have the capacity to operate a gasoline generator it's a very convenient solution.

Intel spent a whopping $30.2 billion over the study period. With that sum, the U.S. chipmaker couldâ(TM)ve given each of its 124,800 employees a $48,000 bonus every year from 2019 to 2023, or increased their R&D budget over this period by at least 30.2 billion. Intel is in line to receive as much as $8.5 billion in CHIPS subsidies â" the most of any firm. https://ips-dc.org/report-maxi...

I believe the Russian war of aggression has a part in this. The US has been leading the charge in driving oil prices down to deprive Russia of oil revenue. There are also domestic reasons for keeping had prices low, and Venezuela relates to immigration efforts, but the war is an element which is definitely on the board too.

Costco's business model depends on having their customers visit as little as possible. Many aspects of the customer experience are affected. The parking lots are huge and time consuming to navigate, they move things around the store randomly, the number of stores they build never quite meets demand so the stores are usually packed, packages are often very large even for families, etc. They don't want you visiting often, that costs them money, so the customer experience is intentionally crap. That's why you felt like a commodity- it's because of intentional choices to make the customer hesitate to visit more often.

What sort of innocent activities would one use a flipper or pi at an inauguration? I can't think of any which would be reasonably "required" or "necessary". Let's also keep in mind that many other probably-innocuous items such as large purses, big camera lenses, and other kinds of homemade-looking electronic devices are frequently banned from this sort of event.

I think it can be said that the US has a lot of experience in fighting actual terrorists. The one thing learned, which should be obvious, is that you should try to avoid killing innocent people, as their brothers and cousins will understandably have grievances and some will take up violence. The more innocents are killed the more this spreads. The Israeli government takes the opposite of a reasonable strategy, having no regard for Palestinian life, or any respect for their other neighbors. They make more enemies with every bomb dropped.

The world also has 100 years of experience that air campaigns against a population never "break the will of the people". This has basically never worked, not with Germany (twice), Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, or any other place where it has been tried. It almost always has the opposite result, hardening the resolve of the people to resist.

Israel will never find peace or "victory" with their strategies, because they don't work.

Here it is https://megnut.com/2007/05/16/...

Some recipe sites also jumped into generative ai fairly quickly as well. Generative AI is great for recipes. A couple of years ago someone gathered lots of recipes for chocolate chip cookies, took the average in Excel, and won a chocolate chip cookie baking competition. This is essentially what generative ai does when generating recipes, and they are generally decent.

I worry this will result in a "This product may cause cancer in California" sort of outcome. Label it as AI just in case. I've already seen the AI tag on a few videos which were arguably edited only using conventional methods. One of them had only been sped up.

I was taught in university that of you were going to design something and it didn't look a bit like other solutions on the market, you better have good reasons and be able to explain yourself.

Paypal was never prohibited from becoming a bank. They remained not-a-bank because they believed it was a more profitable arrangement. They have now apparently changed their mind, and in my view they're many years late in that decision. Other startup financial services companies have been nipping at their heels harder and faster in the last couple years. Recent politics and are mentioned in the same story but it can not be concluded that these are directly related.

I've watched my kids play Roblox for extended periods, and I even join them for an hour every now and then. I didn't see anything particularly alarming, at all. I'm sure it happens but it seems very rare.