You are confusing manufacturing *having* environmental costs with it being *all* the environmental costs.

You are confusing environmental with economic costs.

Of course over 90% of the launch weight of a reusable rocket is fuel, so reusing the rocket part doesn't save much in terms of environmental costs.

"Fixing" performance problems this way seems to be baked into Microsoft corporate culture.

No. Because human effort is what is being promoted and protected by copyright. You can see this by asking yourself the same questions, but with a "work" that is created by an algorithm. None of that machine generated stuff would be copyrightable, because a human didn't labor to create it.

Now as to humans copying other human works, this is sometimes allowable and sometimes not. There's a fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary line you must cross between that takes you from "mere" copying and creating a "transformative" work. Again this line exists because copyright was designed, not according to some kind of abstract model of intellectual "property", but as a pragmatic measure to incentivize human effort. In effect, you're allowed to copy as long as you're not too lazy about it.

Clearly training AI on human works then regurgitating stuff that resembles it doesn't fit into this framework at all.

I'm sure that the right kind of person could learn a lot of useful stuff in an MBA program. Maybe that guy who worked his way up from the shop floor would be a good candidate.

An interesting thing about Boeing was that is that it became famous as a company with an engineering-oriented culture under a *lawyer* CEO. He'd worked as a corporate attorney for Boeing, spent a few years on the board, when he was offered the job of CEO, *which he refused*, insisting Boeing needed a leader with more of an engineering background. The board insisted, he accepted the job and led Boeing into an era of engineering excellence.

This suggests that the leader doesn't have to have a technical background, what he needs is enough humility to respect people with technical expertise. Engineering *should* teach you that, but as we saw with Ocean Gate being an engineer doesn't make anyone humble. Likewise it may be that what we dislike about MBAs isn't the particular training they receive, but the kind of person who gets attracted to an MBA program.

I have no idea what she wants, nor do I care. What I do care is that an NDA provision is being used to silence public reports of corporate misconduct. Those reports may be untrue, but quashing them outright shouldn't be an enforceable contract provision under the public policy principle. The arbiters even forbade her to talk to *lawmakers*, which definitely is a public policy violation.

This shows you what bullshit employee contract arbitration by an arbiter chosen by the employer is.

It doesn't matter if we don't care about the specific alleged misdeeds. It doesn't even matter if she is lying through her teeth. A corporation should not be able to put itself in a position where accusations of misconduct can't be lodged against them by employees. If it succeeds at that, there is no limit to the wrongs it can commit on employees and on the public. If she is lying, well, that's what a defamation suit is for. Understandably, Facebook would prefer their hand-picked arbitration firm handle this, but with eighty billion dollars on hand they can well afford to fund the mother of all defamation suits.

IF you publish a book and you want it to be read, you have to promote it. If Jesus died in the 1980s, St Mark would be on the Rogan podcast today.

Well, yes they're concerned about public opinion. That's why they put so much effort into controlling it. This is true of all authoritarian regimes, they are afraid of negative public sentiment, however they have a lot more leeway than a democratic government in how to deal with that.

Well, I think we're mostly on the same page here. Free trade really did deliver on its promise of super-cheap consumer goods, but it had other, undesirable, and in-hindsight-foreseeable consequences that we foolishly ignored.

Even allowing that we should "re-shore" many of those jobs that went overseas, we shouldn't make the same mistake of making a sudden radical change in direction because we have a particular and desirable policy goal in mind. Businesses, workers, and consumers need some modicum of stability to function. That's not incompatible with change, but it is incompatible with trying to reverse the effects of thirty years of policy you regret overnight.

Oooh, OS-9 was interesting. I worked for a company that developed software for Unix System III (then V), and a computer manufacturer gave us an 6809 based OS/9 system to see if we could port our software -- not that we promised to do that, they just shipped us the machine and asked. To tell you the truth I think they were desperate; there was so much going on at the time and 68000 based Unix systems were starting to come onto the market with a flat 32 bit address space.

For what it was, which was a machine based on an 8 bit processor with a 16 bit address bus, it was incredible. I would dearly have loved to have kept that machine as a home computer. It blew away anything Intel based at the time, which was around 1984. We probably could have ported our software, although the OS was different enough it would have been a major headache. The problem was nobody was going to buy a business system built on OS-9 on a 6809 when 68000 baed Unix machines were on the market. I understand OS-9 had somewhat more success in the industrial control market.

Well, that's the direction they're taking things, but we've got a long way to go still. It's a real advantage to China in a situation like this that it doesn't have something like a Congressional election every two years.

Sure, it's 20% of the whole world economy. That doesn't make up for the impact of losing export markets on investors in domestic projects, which is what we're talking about here. Especially as presumably the "conservative" government isn't going to be subsidizing battery uses for things like renewables or even EVs.

There are rare instances of trade wars working out for one side, but this won't be one of them. In the 80s, the US conducted two trade wars against Japan, over autos and semiconductors which were settled on US terms. So on the surface this was a success for the US, just at the time we began to engage with China and encourage China to engage in international trade. In retrospect less of a zero sum resolution to the Japan dispute -- one that didn't permanently weaken a key ally in the region -- might have been a good idea.

In this case, I think the US is better positioned to weather a trade war than China is. China is in a parlous state; as huge as the economy is, it has multiple hair-raising structural problems: a real estate bubble that just won't go away; eye-watering debt loads by corporations and local governments; foreign technological dependencies that it just can't shake; inefficient state owned enterprises; party meddling and endemic corruption and favoritism; and, oh, God, the fuse burning down on the mother of all demographic time bombs.

If the only thing that mattered about a trade war was "winning", then this might be the time to have a trade war against China. What it is not, as you point out, is a time to have a trade war against *everyone*. That is a thing so monumentally stupid nobody has ever attempted it before. And even if we do win the war against China like we did against Japan, we might not like the results of pushing an economy that size further into peril.

And who will you sell those batteries to?

Let's allow for the sake of argument a trade war with a major trading partner might turn out well for us. But it's not *China* we're playing this game with. It's *everyone*.