PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

no problem.

But an export ban is not. And it's often said that the power to tax is the power to destroy... it turns out that works both ways. If you can ban exports, you can accept a fee in exchange for not banning them, which is effectively a tax. Not sure if it would hold up in court, but it turns out that nobody willing to challenge it will have standing.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

If you're an individual you declare bankruptcy, if you're the US government you print another deck, a.k.a raise the debt limit.

Cryptocurrency is specifically intended for the use of people who don't want Xi, Putin, Trump, Modi or God-help-you von der Leyen deciding how and where they put and use their money. If govenments couldn't resist using the monetary system for spying on and controlling their citizens, crypto wouldn't have much of a draw.

This isn't just about GPUs, though; it's about all the hardware. Servers are typically used much longer than 3 years. I expect networking hardware lasts at least as long as the servers. Maybe you're burning out the AI training and inference stuff in a couple of years, but the other stuff lasts much longer.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

Another step on the Penrose staircase, anyway.

When are the /. editors (and the press in general) going to stop paying attention to this phony company?

What does this add over a simple RF control? All I want is to be able to open and close my door from my car and inside the garage. Turning the light on separately is a nice to have (which I do have), but I don't see any reason to network this.

Obviously putting it on the cloud is an even worse idea.

This is how we got Uber and Lyft, and they may not be perfect but they're better than what we had before (crappy taxis if you're lucky, nothing in many places)