There is no single or even leading theory of macroeconomics, but there are several strong schools and some agreed upon basics and underlying mechanisms. Whenever a technology person starts fulminating about "national debt" and "our national debt will bankrupt us", with us being the United States, it tells me they know nothing of macroeconomics, the leading theories of national debt, or the role of the US national debt in light of the role of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

tl;dr: technobabble baloney

Bosch dishwashers have had the best capability/cost ratio on the US market for 15 years, since Maytag went down the enshittification tube. Everyone who had them recommends them to their friends, and every appliance review site ends up recommending at least one Bosch in their top 3 rating. Mieles are good - I think they are still designed and built by the same team that builds Miele laboratory dishwashers - but they are more expensive and hard to find in most of the US. Based on the reasonable amount of research done the Bosch was an equally reasonable choice - except it turned out the company has started its higher end models down the enshittification tube as well. Hard to know that based on past good experience until it happens.

Sorry, this is slashdot - if you are portraying those times; you forgot the obligatory "but information wants to be free" rationalization and a three paragraph rant about how artists in the Renaissance didn't need copyrights because they did it for the art and the fact half their work were portraits of the Pope was totally a coincidence.

No, it was mainly there was more money in play and worth the technological and bureaucratic battle. CDs and Multimedia PCs brought a larger mainstream market ("look mom, its not for games, I really need this video card and soundblaster 32 to use Encarta for my homework"). Suddenly a smaller percentage of customers engaging "piracy" was a much larger loss of estimated revenue - made it worth industrial investment.

Many older consoles had their own nefarious DRM for the same reason, and they did not even have to worry about the easy access to backup tools in an open platform.

You do not even have to RTFA, its in the summary - taxpayers are not in the hook because this is paid by the California State Protocol Foundation which is an independently funded 501(c)3 nonprofit which has been around for *decades* and used by both republican and democrat administrations

That is not necessarily a good thing, if the business donations rather than taxpayers are paying for easier access to the executive is that business contributing their share to the cost of representative democracy based on the priorities of elected officials or businesses buying privileged access to lobby the executive via indirect donations?

Not Californian and I have no clue whether I should exit 405 for Mulholland, but printing money is not the problem here: if I was a business I'd want to know why exactly I didn't get a phone, and if I was in a union I'd want to know who in the union has a similar burner phone.

Who is the chicken and who is the egg and who is paying for brunch?

I realized the linked post about a very complex technology in an article is intended for a general audience but even by that standard it is very confused.

Chip scale atomic clocks have been commercially available for 20 years

https://www.nist.gov/noac/tech...

and continue to improve in accuracy, durability, and reliability. Reading some of the commercial supplier listings to the point just before they stop and say "DOD customers call your sales rep" it appears that there are CSACs designed and qualified to be fired inside artillery shells so I think we can conclude they can be made pretty tough.

I think the article is trying to say that what is needed is an atomic clock that would fit in an aircraft electronics rack that also has the accuracy of a cold atom fountain clock, which is the current NIST/NPL/NRC standard. To which laboratories around the world say, please, bring it on. And all the national labs have been working on such for quite a while, not only NPL.

Brexit was an additional anvil on the pony's back, but the basic problems were not rebuilding the heavy industrial economy into a high-tech industrial economy (the US hasn't been totally successful at this but has done much better than England*) and transferring most of their wealth into the financialization center of the City. The latter is the most devastating long-term: whatever financialization and investment capital run by the 0.5% touches it destroys. And it touched most of England.

[*] yes, I do mean England not the UK. Scotland and Wales have their own problems and of course also suffer when England it damaged, but the worse effects are in English. Northern Ireland was doing OK until Brexit destroyed its value as and import/export coordinator.

Well of course you will push the button. Gravity is desire. The Worm-in-waiting loves you, just push the button.

Mozilla can issue as many blog posts and "clarifications" as it likes; only the text of the EUA matters.

It seems ridiculous and invasive on the face of it but I'm guessing Mozilla's lawyers are looking at the UK Online Safety Act, similar bills introduced into US state legislatures with a non-zero chance of enactment, and talk in the US Congress of repealing Section 230 and telling their executives that the operation of the browser - which by nature does see and pass all the information the user exchanges to/from the rest of the world - could be construed as being an accessory to violation of those laws and upcoming laws. A more extreme version of photosharing sites needing some sort of license to your work to be able to display it.

No, you see for supply and demand trends you have to be *accurate*.

That is not a requirement for AI today.

The fact we are even thinking in terms of groups and commands and "configuring" those is what I mean this feels like being an audiophile in the 90s. It wasn't bad but you had to be an active hobbyist (or hire professionals): understand the tech and setup *exactly* what you want and replace tech periodically etc.

Today random people buy some Sonos-like speakers and it either sounds great for them or they buy something else - price-aside it requires less personal investment than your microwave.

Ideal home automation could be transparent and adaptive to the needs of multiple tenants, instead of moving "the fight for the thermostat" to whoever is configuring the rules.

But you are correct - I'm not sure if anyone is asking for these features *from Alexa* at this point. Even the home automation thing is something they could do, but they could very well do IFTTT by voice as you imply which would be hilariously awful.

Alexa used to be very good at being one very useful thing - a voice-activated smart speaker + alarm clock - which is not very profitable, and this is just the latest attempt by amzn to transform it into something else, *anything else*.

If they do this right this could lower the barrier of entry for smart homes to be useful in the mainstream (vs the enthusiast side). Which is one of those perpetual promises of Alexa-like devices that has never gotten quite there... Setting up smarthome automation is still like being an audiophile in the 90s

Home automation is one area where Alexa as an interface still makes sense - if their LLMM can make the routine setup *automomous* you never sit down and "setup the routines". Give Alexa a prompt with general requirements (keep temp X, lights off by Y, music volume Z) and spontaneous feedback to tune the rules itself. Put to use all the inevitable "goddamnit Alexa" to autocorrect when the rules are slightly wrong. It'd basically be a DevinAI for a coding space small enough it actually makes sense.

The rest are demo features - the type of use case that you can show in a demo / ads, and earns some PM a promotion and no one uses after the first week and the feature owner never improves because they move on. Alexa is full of those, because thats how Amazon product development works.

I'm cautiously optimistic, in that they will add a bunch of useless stuff but maybe the basic voice commands will be tolerably usable again.

" purchases from certain folks like car dealers because they'll lower prices for people who look poor."

Car dealers are notorious for figuring out ways to squeeze poor people for anywhere from 50% to 500% more than they charge people who obviously have the money and resources to fight back.

No, we are back on the extreme political pendulum and these folks will be out of sync when it swings left

the next plutocrat aiming for regulatory capture will back some liberal Hollywood actor/actress to deliver Universal Income but will be teleported to Europa by Dr Manhattan before he can take over the government