The EU is about to pass the digital safety act where the OS (including Linux) will have to verify your identity on log-in. To do this, since all things PC are American, including OS, the Netherlands will sell to an American company DigiID and Mijn Overheid, the software we use to do our taxes and much more.

So, all of you EU cheerleaders here...pathetic and uninformed you are....pathetic!

The most concerning part should be that the utility isn't auditing it's service. The most basic check is to compare water pumped or otherwise brought into the system against water usage billed to customers. Those two numbers should be equal, any discrepancy indicates leaks or other unaccounted-for draws. Any discrepancy should also be relatively stable, with any large variations correlated to known main breaks. You especially audit things immediately after a major change like bringing smart meters on-line to catch problems like this.

You're looking at Detroit automakers, who have gotten complacent after numerous bailouts, with the rest of the US, where this really isn't happening. For an apples-to-apples comparison:

https://evmagazine.com/news/ho...

It's also noteworthy that the last American car to do as well internationally as the Tesla Model Y was the Ford Model T. It also turns out that Tesla has been reclaiming ground previously lost to BYD, including in China. The Canadian government is currently having to rethink things after Tesla began importing its Chinese made Model 3 Premium, selling it for $29,000 there to take advantage of the fact that Canada elevated China to most favored nation status, virtually eliminating tariffs while benefiting from Chinese labor. Canada's government is anticipating that Tesla will take a majority of the import cap before BYD has a chance to sell anything at all, which isn't sitting well with them.

https://electrek.co/2026/05/01...

Nah I'm pretty sure this is him:

https://assets.teenvogue.com/p...

Those are just the analysts that you cherry-picked. Here's why you picked poorly:

Your "analysts" have been saying this since Starlink was at 2 million active terminals. And the simple reason for that is basically this: It isn't a simple matter of "do you have access to wired internet?", chiefly because a lot of that wired internet is basically dogshit. Before Starlink, slashdot routinely ran pieces about how cable ISPs wouldn't serve areas that they told the FCC that they served, basically to prevent funding going towards rival broadband services, especially fiber, and somebody would have to pay insane prices just to get the last mile connection added where the ISP already said it was. These guys always had DSL access, but it was crap. Even when these guys have cable, it's still usually crap.

More importantly though, for their claims to be accurate, then we should have already seen Starlink's growth stagnate by now. But as a matter of fact, exactly the opposite has been happening:

https://www.reuters.com/busine...

Another critical thing you're missing is that Starlink isn't done increasing its total aggregate bandwidth. Not even close, really. You're also assuming that the demand for Starlink only exists for residential broadband, which is also a very bad assumption.

This article is about Rocket Lab, who is seeing increased demand just for launch services, and only launch services. That isn't hype, it's actual growth in a market that basically didn't exist until about 8 years ago.

That isn't what he said, moreover, he's working under the assumption that there will be no more significant growth in all things related to space. He could be right, he could be wrong. Prior to podcasting, he was a hedge fund manager. I don't know about his record in particular, but hedge fund managers are notorious for underperforming indexes, especially the S&P.

He's talking about the NASDAQ-100 index fund, not the NASDAQ exchange. S&P-500 is making a similar rule change. The people who run these indexes, aka index providers, don't make their decisions on a whim, rather they're quite calculated. In fact, people like Patrick Doyle pay these guys big money just to have access to the decisions that they make, which is exactly how S&P makes its money. Maybe he's got better ideas about how they'll perform than the S&P does, but people who say they do...rarely ever do. As for whether this rule change is right or wrong, I have no idea, but the fact that two indices are doing it suggests that it could be the right call.

This is exactly the problem you're having: Your decision-making is entirely based on emotion. You clearly don't even understand about 75% of what you're talking about, rather you're just listening to whatever it is you want to hear while pretending the rest either doesn't exist or is "fake news". People who invest this way lose their money. Your emotion in this case is likely focused squarely on Elon, so for example, you're probably not aware (or just plain denying) that Tesla has gained EV market share in the US, China, and broadly in Europe over the last year. Sales in the US are down, largely due to the loss of tax incentives, but Tesla still remains quite profitable even here. Is the stock overvalued? Without a doubt. But that doesn't change the fact that your nonstop shouting about Tesla not being able to profit without the government incentives, which probably came from some of your cherry-picked analysts, has already proven to be very wrong, and the numbers reflect that. If you were betting actual money against Tesla, again based on emotion, you would have lost this particular bet.

I started at $145k (which by the way, I only asked for $130k, and they countered with $145k, go figure) back in 2022 for just the base salary. Shares pushed that up to $209k. But just only thinking about base pay, $145k in 2022 dollars translates to roughly $163k today. Nevertheless, base pay has since risen to $175k, which is well ahead of the rate of inflation. The actual amount on my W2 has since risen basically on an exponential curve, due to the RSUs appreciating in value. Which is unfortunate, because if I had known then what I know now, I would have chosen stock options instead of RSUs, and kept my W2 income as low as possible.

If I wanted to, I could transfer to Texas and gain a bonus on top of my existing base pay. The real estate out there is dirt cheap, making it a real win financially, but the land in Texas is so...desolate... Florida is my top choice, and I think I can finally get it, but haven't seized the opportunity yet because I still need to stay in LA for the time being, entirely because of its (relatively close) proximity to Phoenix.

Regardless, there are plenty of opportunities well beyond the LA/SF/NYC/Seattle regions. The real question, as always, remains: What do you bring to the table?

I think it's both. I've personally gotten a lot of use out of claude recently just for quickly getting started with somebody else's code (we weren't even allowed to use it a month ago even if we wanted to, which I didn't until I was specifically asked to use it.) E.g. ask it a question like "where is X done?" or "where should start for working on Y?". I don't ask it to make any direct changes. Basically the kind of stuff you do with a knowledge transfer, only you don't have access to the original developer(s) to do pair coding with (in this case, an open source library that I needed to modify) I think it's quite good for that.

Once I asked it to look for possible optimizations that I may have missed in a custom lz77 implementation I wrote, and it made a bunch of changes, only one of them actually made sense and yielded a tiny speed increase. The rest of them were just "this might make more sense" type of changes that actually broke the implementation (made it incompatible) without improving anything. For example, it reversed the order of the mask bits in each mask byte from right to left, to left to right, which is just dumb when the whole point of right to left was specifically for compatibility, and doesn't do a god damn thing to make the code run any faster. Still has a ways to go for making code changes IMO.

I can't speak for all of these companies, but in the case of Amazon, I think this is why management wants it:

https://archive.is/20260122220...

Perhaps you should try Canada.

I make a lot more than that, and my commute is about 30 minutes (probably shouldn't also mention that my employer provides free ev charging, so my commute in my cheap, salvaged Tesla costs zero anyways.) I couldn't tell you what the place I live in is worth, but anybody who looked at it would tell you it isn't worth anywhere close to that. It's probably more common than you think.

You're thinking silicon valley, or at the very least, silicon valley companies. Which are interesting because they (e.g. Google) tend to reduce your pay based on where you live. Fortunately, I don't work for one of those, nor would I live anywhere nearly as fucking cold as silicon valley.

Anyways, you're probably thinking of Canada's real estate pricing. Somehow, Canada figured out how to be 3x worse than California on residential real estate without even having the benefit of socal weather. Wildlings pay a lot for those igloos.

The difference is that electric cars and trucks primarily charge overnight, when the demand for electricity is low.

You don't need to improve the grid capacity to serve people charging when you have excess capacity available.

I'm not going to deny most anti-social media and too much screen time is bad for humans, especially kids. The suggestion you make to have kids spend more time outside is great -- although it is difficult to implement if all the other kids they might play with are inside, and if parents nowadays face arrest for "neglect" if they encourage their children to learn independence outside the home. See the book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder" and "In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness" for example.

All that said, there is a deeper issue here, which is that robotics and other automation including AI are changing the very nature of our economy, and "modern" schools were invented in Prussia in the 1800s for a very specific purpose of making most people into obedient cannon fodder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Underground History of American Education: Chapter 7 The :Russian Connection
https://archive.org/details/Jo...
"John Gatto Prussian Education"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
      The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte â" one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
      In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling. ...
      Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it's not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. ..."

And to do that, modern school teachers mainly teach seven lessons:
https://www.informationliberat...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well. ..."

But do we still need to shape children to become compliant Prussians? As I wrote in 2007:
"Why educational technology has failed schools"
https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
        "... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
        But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. ...
        Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [See John Taylor Gatto's writing on that.] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit? ...
          But then, with so much produced for so little effort [thanks to a post-industrial information age productivity], perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)? ...
    But then is compulsory schooling [designed mainly to turn human beings into compliant robots] really needed when people live in such a [post-industrial] way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ..."

The robot goes rogue. It goes on a killing spree. It replies: "You're complete right. I agree. Now let me try again." And goes on another killing spree.

The sticky note under the keyboard or in a desk drawer is actually pretty secure. Most attacks are remote, they've no way to read that note. The social-engineering attacks don't target people who'd go to your desk either, they either target you directly (you already know your password) or support people who don't need to know your password to give them access.

I have to ask, are these platforms even trying to secure their systems anymore? Because I keep seeing of more and more of these breaches, involving more and more platforms, and the attacks are less and less sophisticated. I hear companies talk and talk about security, yet their day-to-day practices require their employees and contractors to violate practically every good security practice and treat the red flags of an attack as normal company practice instead.

Occam's Razor no longer applies, because at this level malice and incompetence are indistinguishable.