Of course the carriers want to get rid of the old hard lines. Its physical stuff they have to maintain rather than just bill. On the other hand, when the next disaster hits its likely that the land lines will be the only stuff working. Certainly has been my experience during large scale power failures. Its not just the communications pafh... even IP phones using fibre can do that. Its the central office power that keeps things working. And having the towers be the first thing to drop out when power goes down is not encouraging. Maybe if they worried a bit more about the robustness of their services rather than just the margins...

I deplore these sorts of things, but the reality is that they have been savagely and repeatedly attacked by the US and Israel and have had a lot of damage inflicted on their country. Measures of control are clear attempts by them to reduce the threat and generate some funding to rebuild. And hopefully there will be no more, but given the players and the complete lack of adults in the room, the danger of a Gotterdammerung moment for the Middle east still hangs over the world. And if they had actually had a weapons program, would any of this have happened?

An interesting theory but hiding a demographic detail. Participation in the arts passively and actively is not uniform across all socioeconomic groups but tends to cluster around certain economic and cultural groups. We think one needs early exposure and the resources to become involved -- suggesting perhaps that these folk have a bit more control over their lives leading to lower stress. Have artists and musicians in the family and have seen up close the struggles -- but also the rewards of creating and enjoying the creation of others. Personally, perhaps more exposure as part of the education process might make us all better peoplea. But the question might be which is the tail and which the dog?

The ones I love are the animated ones where there is text printed on the frames and the automatic comments textify the spoken portions. Its entertainment on its own, the mangling of proper names are even random so the same botched rendering hardly ever repeats. An entertainment all by itself. I routinely play youtube at 1.5x, tried 2.0 but the speach compression totally fails at that rate. Just watching stuff for entertainment so really dont care about the accuracy. I prefer words in a row to hearing a talking head... hate falling asleep waiting for them to get to the point. Used to be better, the new and improved would be painful if I cared.

Sure do. All the time -- and I buy Thinkpads specifically because of their repairability and the availability of good service documentation. Have replaced display panels, keyboards and a motherboard. Memory expansions, disk drive swaps are routine. I try to get a 10 year life out of my equipment where possible.

My science teacher and I were the guests of Bell Labs in, I think, 1965, before I graduated high school. Still remember the computer memory with a gas laser burning spots on a chilled slab of material. Might have been a great place to work if my life had let me go down that path. Still have the pictures someplace their publicist took. Memories...

An effective open market depends on accurate and reliable information being available to all participants. The myth is that exists in a form accessible to all -- the reality is that insider information is not publicly available to all, why using it to profit is still (mostly) considered a crime. Quarterly earnings reports are marketing products, not an audit. It is the rare company that does not fine tune what it reports. And emotion rather than analytics drives most investment decisions. My initial reaction to this was 'oh good, maybe they can focus more on growing the business'... but that seems unlikely. Just buys more time for the regretable sacrifices to making the numbers to show up. The spin will continue regardless.

This is increasingly like a cartoon I saw years ago. Kid telling his Dad that when he grew up he wanted to go into organized crime. Without missing a beat his Dad asked 'which... government or private sector'? Makes one wonder if the Chinese are playing catchup with the other big players... Russia, USA, Israel, etc. Everybody seems to be doing it and there is, sadly, no authoritative place one could turn to discrimiate the real from the fake. Thought is that how can any organized society, economy, etc hold together without reliable information?

Remember my Cobol class -- first program failed to compile due to a missing period. All the rest compiled and ran correctly first time. 'perform unnatural-act varying position until husband comes home'... Was a fun thing to code in. And the rigid structure made it easy to parse when a few years later I had to write a tool that would parse embedded SQL expressions in it for conversion to another DML.

Glad that the products of combustion are declining thanks to EVs... We will ignore the effects of the occasional thermal runaway. But EVs, from what I have read, are much heavier than their ICE equivalents and as such have much greater tire wear. And tire particulates are a major contributor to the fine particuates that are a significant driver of urban health problems. So... fixed one problem, made a different one worse. Personally, I would rather take the train -- but in North America that option has been largely eliminated, unlike elsewhere in the developed world.

Reminds me of a prototype laser storage system I saw in 1965 during a guided tour of the Bell labs in Murray Hill. It used lasers to burn spots on a slab of optical material, dont recall any performance or capacity specs -- been a long time. Sure any patents are long expired, but then so is the Murray Hill labs.

For a short while, sure. But who will be available to replenish their wine cellars?

History is well populated by traces of civilizations brought low by climate change, possibly including the moment when the entire human population was reduced to perhaps 1000 individuals (i.e., we almost didn't make it). So it is interesting thatthere was much rejoicing that almost the entire collection of climate change efforts, such as they were, have been eliminated by the current administration. Strange that -- almost as though MAGA meant 'make america go away'. Now I have never been one to think that a move towards electric cars and houses was going to do much to move the climate change needle into reverse. But over time there was the hope that moving away from hard hit areas and other defensive moves would moderate the impact. But refusing to do anything until the crisis is upon us does nothing but maximize the costs of survival -- sort of what has happened to FEMA. These sorts of weather extremes are already part of reality, even in the US. With the melting of the polar ice, permafrost thawing and signs that the atlantic current that warms Europe is diminishing, unpleasant new realities seem inevitable. Wonder if the species will survive this time?

There is a famous quote from early last century where a Supreme Court judge observed that he did not mind paying taxes because that is how we buy civilization. The money to pay for war, welfare and education has to come from somewhere. And if the superrich are given a free ride then it is the working poor (the rest of us) that are told to sacrifice to pay for bombing Iran... or Minneapolis. That everything seems to be falling apart from neglect and chronic underfunding should underscore the problems of letting the fox supervise the hen house. Trickle down has never ever worked... since it was first proposed by Hoovers economic advisors. But we still seem to believe them. Meanwhile, the old child killers and cripplers are staging a comeback...

Maybe so, but the king has little regard for any agreement he made previously. Thats the problem -- business needs predictability to make long term investments. And agreements as zero sum games are not appealing to any thoughtful leader. Why Carney refers to this as a rupture -- under Trump the US is pulling back from pretty much everything constructive it ever did. As for the vehical plan, it makes sense to recognize that moving from one technology to another will take time and require a bunch of infrastructure investment. Besides, doubt that the current crop of EVs represent mature technologies. Charge capacity, recharge time, cold weather behavior, etc... lots of loose ends.