It's surprising that the suicided whistleblower didn't leave an insurance file.

Or did he?

> Isn't capitalism great?

Capitalism doesn't let you buy laws, that's Corporatism, a subset of Fascism, which is in turn a subset of Socialism.

A proper Capitalist systems speaks to economics, not poltiics.

Reconstruction US, Post-Mao China, Post-Soviet Russia all embraced capitalist economics to lift the vast majority of their population out of abject poverty.

Societies which did the opposite mostly killed their middle class ans then half the population starved to death.

This one is rather significant.

I wonder which private repos were made public. This could be the main prize. Industrial espionage ops?

Having lived through the Dot-Bomb it's basically the same.

You're not going to get a valuation bubble without a hype bubble. And nobody is buying companies for that much who have zero infrastructure. And the stock price is what they use to buy the infrastructure.

These are inextricably linked, not separate phenomena.

This is what Austrian Economists call the 'malinvestment' part of the business cycle. It's caused by artificially cheap money (not set by a market) and will unavoidably be cleared.

Our Orwell is so strong the eggheads artificially setting the price of money call themselves "The Open Market Committee". Because an open market in lending rates is de facto prohibited.

They don't have to do this but most "journalists" are hacks that engage in Access Journalism (which is a type of bribery).

They aren't hard-driving gumshoe drunks like the legendary journalists of yore who sought to speak truth to power. They're mostly stenographers for the rich and powerful now (yay, journalism school!)

It will be interesting to see if any leave out of principle. I doubt more than 10% will. You can pretty much distrust any stories from the ones who stay.

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

Remember - the Federation reserved the Death Penalty for making AI Androids.

Noonian Soong had to exile himself to a remote planet outside Federation control to work on Data and Lore (and his sexbot...).

They needed people to be able to have jobs *that* badly.

Which ... stop sending redshirts outside the ship with magnetic boots in a radiation storm, OK? They could have at least had some astromech droids. Sheesh!

I recently got a "plastic" target that changes color and the holes mostly self-heal if you don't use a hollow-point.

Good for plinking but they do wear out eventually.

I didn't even know this material existed before a buddy told me they were on Amazon. Amazing times, for sure.

Heck, I picked up some 100-lb test fishing line the other day that is some sort of braided heavy-chain polyethylene that is 11 times stronger than steel wire at the same size. The company made mechanical spinnerets to mimic spiders' to get it to work.

Again, I had no idea until a buddy told me it was $20 on Amazon.

Wild.

Back in the day we'd install wild boards that would upgrade the Mac CPU's by a generation or two, add FPU's, etc.

All of this depended on the systems being too expensive to replace or buy new except once in a blue moon.

At $600 which is probably $200 in 1986 money, it's a bit harder to be mad.

Those systems were probably $10K in 2025 dollars. Heck, a few were $10K in 1986 dollars.

*nerd alert*

The original script had The Matrix running in parallel on all the human brains.

Studio execs said that was too confusing and that they should be batteries.

Also Neo is seen on the Nebuchadnezzar with hundreds of acupuncture-looking needles with wires to get his muscles working while he's in a coma.

Writers should have been left alone (a story old as time).

The Earth has frequently been much warmer than it is today and coral reefs grew much faster then.

Perhaps they have a fine point to make but the implications fly in the face of established evidence.

And not shaky evidence - you can go vacation on huge islands made of these old reefs, from when the oceans were higher.

You can go visit Chazy Fossil Reef today and see coral fossils 480 million years old, from when Northern Vermont was a tropical marine environment.

These data aren't disputed in the field.

Well, this is direction not to buy certain hardware components in order to favor domestic manufacturers. The Tiktok case was direction to divest a social media supplier to avoid secret, illegal foreign influence campaigns or transfers of personal data.

I'm just an engineer, but the two seem pretty different to me.

Throw up a cursive CAPTCHA.