The dropping marriage rate has little if anything to do with marriage being particularly unfair to one of the partners and more to do with the absence of the social pressure of decades and centuries past. The children of the 60s/70s didn't grow up believing that marriage was essential, and didn't require it of their children (at least not at the level of prior generations). What we're seeing now is much closer to the "voluntary" marriage rate, though we're going to need to adjust our culture to basically treat marriage as just another lifestyle choice of some minority of the population. Most adults at any one time will not be married, in fact the majority probably never will get married, that's their choice. Far more of us (all people) are free to pick a path in life rather than having it decided by tradition, that's a good thing in my book.

We also have a legacy of women being socialized to believe they are not adults until they are married. This is part of a whole culture encouraging girls to "grow up to be princesses with a dream wedding" instead of say, an astronaut or a ship's captain. It was still a strong part of the culture when millennials were children, the Alphas might be spared the burden. Wedding costs have become absolutely ridiculous as a result of this.

As for the impact on De Beers, who cares? They built an empire on blood, lies, and theft. I hope anyone working there feels properly compensated for selling their soul.

What VMWare is doing for cloud infrastructure is no longer nearly as complicated as it was when they started. It is, however, very security sensitive, as demonstrated by the recent ESXi patches for end-of-support versions to address buffer overflows in the USB drivers (i.e. take over the host by plugging in an evil USB key).

We need an open source project to take on the task so that the code can be properly vetted. Obviously you're still going to need a business to create certified plans for some of the government/secure industry work, but the core code needs to be visible to all, which will also neatly prevent this problem from re-occurring.

In the medium term I'd expect Broadcom will be forced to back down. Almost nothing in the EU happens in the "short term".

Or, I suppose the EU could do nothing and watch a bunch of datacenters get sold to AWS at fire sale prices.

They better call out California, there's tonnes of ancient gas pipes and storage facilities, plus we still have active oil mines. With PG&E running the residential delivery lines in the northern half of the state, there's really no telling how much might be leaking from various points of the system, or how high the bonuses for reporting in-range numbers might be.

That said, a large scale mine probably leaks way more than a residential development ever could. Wouldn't surprise me if some poorly regulated industrial consumers could hit high numbers, though.

No, the D&D community continues to produce content for WotC for free, thus increasing WotC's revenue, profit and customer base (at minimum it's free marketing), and likely benefitting the creativity of their own employees.

WotC wanted to slaughter the golden goose for tonight's dinner, they've likely been saved from destroying their own company. Of course, this whole fiasco will likely empower rivals, WotC will lose community trust, and Paizo seems well positioned to be the new steward/representative of the community.

Because many datacenters either rent space or virtual machines to customers. In the case of renting space, datacenters are going to have to prepare for customers upgrading their servers. In the case of renting VMs, that's mostly about number of cores and amount of RAM per rack, CPU speed might be better for the customer but it doesn't move the needle that much on price, especially as not all workloads are CPU bound.

Even large enterprises that are still running their own DCs are finding that they are essentially "renting" VMs to internal teams. Higher performance per core at the cost of more power is only beneficial if you're still properly vertically integrated. Some DCs are, most aren't.

Gold is used in manufacturing. Granted, the price isn't correlated with its industrial value, but it would have a greater value by weight than a stack of 100s even if it wasn't traded as a pseudo-currency. (That doesn't mean anyone should by gold, like I said, the price isn't correlated with its actual useful value).

In theory crypto is just a currency that is controlled by a private entity (or group of entities) rather than a government or central bank. However, most people don't treat it as a currency because it's so insulated from government intervention that it doesn't have the reliability or fraud controls to function as an effective currency.

Here's a fascinating thought though: if all crypto is banned, what stops the stablecoin mantainers from just walking away with the hard currency reserves? If stablecoins are banned then the contracts behind them are invalid, and the holders of those coins have no rights to the reserves.

A cop stopped you at gunpoint, searched you, and stole your cash? Pretty sure that's called a mugging, if it happened in NY you probably had the legal right to use deadly force to stop the robbery.

My mistake, in my head there's little difference between a root key and a CA, but in this context it's huge.

Backup generators probably aren't something we can just get rid of, but the existing ones are dependent on the hydrocarbon mining industry (which we need to shut down), so it makes sense to fix the dependency problem.

If we're not talking about a lot of ammonia that needs to be generated (presuming that if it's "rounding error" for climate change we're not talking about massive amounts of fuel used annually for this) then this seems like a potentially useful way to build backup generators that burn ammonia instead of methane or petroleum distillates.

Yes, ammonia (or rather the hydrogen input) is industrially produced from methane, but if you've got enough excess solar power you can also produce it via electrolysis of water. If I'm remembering my chemistry correctly the waste output of that and the Haber process should be oxygen instead of CO2 and whatever impurities are in your methane source.

Also, I bet we stop mining hydrocarbons long before we stop producing ammonia, it's way too important to agriculture. However, if there's a big move towards indoor/vertical farming then agricultural ammonia usage per person may drop significantly in industrialized nations since less will evaporate during the application process.

There is a DNS record for that, but currently only the CAs themselves check it (which sort of makes it the honor system). If you have a CA DNS record and it doesn't list the CA you're requesting a cert from, the CA is supposed to refuse to issue the cert.

I think the problem with using DNS for this is that you could just MITM the DNS as well, unless you're using DNSSEC, which uses... certificate authorities. One would think you could have a more restricted list of CAs for DNSSEC, but a lot of libraries don't have good support for different levels of trust for CAs, and a lot of domains don't have CA records so you'd need to use both systems in parallel.

If we're assuming a future where DNSSEC is widely deployed and supported, I don't know why you'd use CAs for TLS anymore, just put the server cert (or your private CA's cert) in a DNS record. No more need for an external CAs outside of DNSSEC. It's not like this is the first time we've realized there are inherent issues with trusting hundreds of organizations to sign TLS certs.

You're not required to provide your email address for Square transactions. These are usually point-of-sale where you're interacting with a kiosk and swiping/tapping/dipping your card. Email and phone number ("for receipt"/really so they can sell it) are optional.

Square sells the email addresses directly to their customers. I know this because The Organic Coup in San Francisco got my email address from Square years ago. They claimed I must have entered it on their kiosk, yet at the time Organic Coup had an employee working the kiosk, you couldn't interact with it at all - but I had used the same card with Square at another merchant and entered my email address to receive the receipt.

Square at the time claimed they didn't give out customer email addresses, but Organic Coup confirmed that's how they got it (Square's support team thanked me for telling them - didn't bother apologizing for lying about their privacy practices). Organic Coup were using their own marketing app (Marketo) to send emails to customers and had a list called "Square Users" or something. Unsubscribing didn't work either - my email just got copied to another Organic Coup mailing list and I kept getting spammed.

I had Square delete the info for my card and I have never given them my email address again. I guess I thought other people knew they were a data broker.

Pig slaughtering scam

If the cable company could charge you more and get away with it, why wouldn't they be doing that already? You really think the marketing campaign "we got fined a billion dollars for fraud and murder so we're raising prices" is going to move the demand curve? If cable companies added X% profit to their costs and charged that then cable internet would be about 80% cheaper. Instead, like any sane capitalist, cable companies charge as much as they think they can, even creating custom pricing models to try to extract as much money out of each market segment as possible.

A nuclear reactor produces no power when it is being refueled, solar produces no power between dusk and dawn.

If I need 1GW of power to run a municipality, neither 1GW worth of renewables nor 1GW worth of nuclear will cut it. Either way I have to overbuild to get 99% availability.

Nuclear is expensive in terms of time, space, and capital. It's built in large chunks and has serious unsolved waste issues (for any type of plant likely to be approved by any government in the next 10 years). That makes it very hard to justify building new nuclear plants.

Solar and wind are also expensive in terms of space and capital, but can be built in much smaller chunks, which makes it easier to get the cash. They may have waste problems, but people aren't deathly afraid of the waste from solar and wind farms.

What we really need is good, cheap, storage - we haven't figured it out yet. In the meantime, we can keep building more wind and solar so that we've got plenty of power to dump into the storage when we do figure it out, while running the existing old tech power plants into the ground. Any investor putting money into a fossil fuel plant with a 20+ year lifespan is an idiot, the plant will be rendered uneconomical by a massive over-supply of wind and solar before the it reaches the end of its design life. Even a guaranteed price for power is vulnerable if the plant is shut down by new regulations (which will easily pass if the fossil fuel plant is producing unneeded, dirty, overpriced fuel).

We'll need the excess wind and solar capacity eventually, we've got stoves, heaters, and vehicles that all need to switch to the electrical grid. We're also going to need to deploy better power networks to enable temporary power use (food trucks, construction, etc.) without running on-site generators.This is all obvious and inevitable, if it's going to be crushingly expensive then we probably shouldn't spend money on crushingly expensive nuclear plants.