If any president, regardless of party, declares a national emergency and that the only way to stop it is to block imports of something that we critically must have and cannot produce in adequate quantities for our country to not fall apart horribly, we will question that president's judgment, intellect, and/or character, because at least one of the three almost certainly must be compromised in some way to reach such a flawed decision.

Look, it's really simple. The word emergency means that something A. is sudden and unexpected, and B. must be dealt with right now, or else the consequences will be immediate and severe. This is not an emergency.

The U.S. power grid requires large quantities this hardware continually, both for expansion and repairs, on an ongoing basis. Not having adequate quantities is a national emergency with immediate implications for the country. Not having the manufacturing infrastructure to build critical power infrastructure hardware in this country could *eventually* be a national emergency if, for example, China decides to declare war on the U.S., but right now, it is just a long-term *risk* of *future* national emergency, not an actual emergency, because doing nothing will not necessarily cause immediate harm to the country.

You can't solve a long-term and likely mostly hypothetical risk to the country by creating an *immediate* national emergency. You can't put the entire country in *more* short-term, medium-term, and potentially long-term peril in the hopes that it somehow causes people to reduce some future risk that might never even materialize.

Basically, this policy is the import/export equivalent of saying, "My neighbor might steal my car someday, so I'm going to push my car off a cliff so he can't take it away from me in the future. Sure, I'll lose my job because I can't get to work, but having a car that he can steal is an emergency." See how stupid that is?

Worse, if this were an actual emergency (e.g. if China invaded Taiwan and the U.S. decided to shut down all imports from China in retaliation), there would still be a bigger problem, which is that it will take years to build the infrastructure to make the hardware needed in the United States.

What this means is that unless the emergency is so severe that every party agrees to maintain the ban, the minute the next president takes office, the policy will immediately be overturned in the name of national security, and it will no longer be financially viable to keep building those plants, and they won't ever get finished. Moreover, in the absence of such an exigent threat, the companies know that this is the case, and will drag their heels as much as possible before they even start building anything, so at best, all he will get in the next two years are a bunch of promises that will be soon broken.

So a policy like this cannot realistically have a positive impact on anything. If he had done it in the first year of his first term in office, it might have produced some success, but at this point, it's almost a decade too late.

That said, if he doesn't stop those imports, then companies might build wind turbines off the coast that he'll have to look at, so I can see why banning those imports could be an emergency for the president, and thus a "national emergency". [rolls eyes]

I've heard some pretty sad excuses for AI slop (Shunned at a Funeral) but some very clever uses for it too (Amelia). "The best thing the government did...was invent me!"

As long as they're honest about it being AI I'll decide what I want to listen to. It's hard for it to show any creativity, but creativity is sorely lacking in all current music.

...laura

My thought as well.

Sure enough,

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Duck...

most of us don't need it.

"OLAP". Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time.

Obviously NYT is just about narrative construction but it would be nice to know some figures like:

* what is that in percentage of researchers?
* and grants
* how many are typical in a year?
* what is the net in each direction for this time period?
* and for a typical year

I happen to know rwo researchers who got a position in Canada and several Canadians who got positions at US schools. That just seems normal from my limited perspective but maybe it's just because I feed them Molson and poutine so they keep coming around.

Remember, numbers given without percentages and percentages given withouts without numbers are always propaganda.

This has been your Defense against the Dark Arts class for today. Do your homework.

Saved from Claude by /.'s perl4 text handling.

Ooh. I've always wanted to be a Geocities warlock. Or is that Geocities Warlock(tm)?

But seriously, loving the irony of Elon's petulant rebranding coming back to bite him in the a**.

The fact that twitter.com still exists as a redirect actually strengthens and weakens their claim to abandonment. A mere URL with no content does not generally qualify as use in commerce. And the existence of that redirect without Twitter branding on the resulting site makes it clear that abandonment is willful, because it indicates that the old name is no longer intended to be used, and that they don't have any future product plans with that name (because otherwise they would have a landing page saying that the new Twitter was coming soon).

IMO, X clawing back the Twitter trademark should be rather difficult for them at this point, famous or not, barring concrete documentation created prior to the 3-year limit showing future plans to reintroduce the mark in the very near future.

In relative terms, they're marking it up more. But ask yourself which hurts people's pocketbooks more: the $110 that the cheap Android tablet maker takes as profit or the $400 that Apple takes? Consumers don't care about percents. They care about dollars. And Apple's profit margin on their tablets is almost 4x that of their cheapest competition.

Alternatively that's three spare tablets for when the first one breaks. As soon as you're more than 2x the price of the cheapest competition, unless users absolutely have to have the capabilities of the expensive one, a lot of stuff like build quality ceases to matter, etc.

Have you tried doing carnivore for thirty days?

I did the beef / tallow / salt only thing a couple years ago and it gets old very fast but the metabolic changes hit fast after about 15 days.

Surprisingly it was cheaper than a regular grocery bill (not counting labor for roasting).

Probably a bit better with a CGM but I only had test strips.

I dropped 15 lbs which wasn't my primary goal but could have kept it up if I needed to lose more weight.

Watch the video of the EMT's loading the ambulance at his home.

If they were any more non-rushed they would have had time for a card game.

If there were even the faintest pulse they would have screamed out of there with sirens blazing.

But TPTB didn't want Massie running in a special election.

Day by day the populous is realizing that "Democracy does not exist".

I wrote a compiler for an ObjC-like language (with less brackets), which can produce binaries for any of {Mac, Windows, Linux, WASM, Arm A9 (Zynq), m68k or 6502} running on any of {Mac, Windows, Linux}. So you can produce a dev-signed Mac binary on a Linux box. I’m just going through extending that output range to mobile {Android, iOS} and I’ll release it as open source.

The compiler docs for the language (xc) are at https://compile-xc.org/ - feel free to browse.

I didn’t think getting the signing working for Mac/iOS was terribly hard.

I think a two party democratic system is terrible and it should be easier to create new parties. The current two should likely be split.

My reasoning is that a democratic system should not be treated as a sports game of two teams. There are plenty of views and we need variety of representation, not to simply fall in line with the two options available or be treated as an outsider.

MacOS lets you run unsigned software too, you just need to remove the quarantine flag on anything you've downloaded if it's not been notarized.

For someone who is technically competent this is a very minor hurdle and only needs to be done when you initially download. Anyone who is not capable of doing this probably shouldn't be running random downloaded binaries as they're likely not capable of verifying that those binaries are not malicious.

I was in the market for a tablet a couple of months ago because I needed something for reading sheet music.

Cheapest 13" Apple Tablet: $949

The generic Android tablet I bought instead: $179.99

I'm not saying they aren't being impact by memory prices, but they're either incompetent at supply chain management or they're milking this for much higher profits. Either way, there's a reason why this Mac and iPhone user uses 4 Android tablets and zero Apple tablets.

At this point, if I weren't locked into the Apple platform by the software I use, I'd probably be looking for alternatives on the Mac side as well. The prices have simply become absurd when compared with the rest of the industry. It actually seems worse now than in the beleaguered period when everything was custom hardware assembled by hand.

Case in point, I was seriously considering upgrading my M1 Max MacBook Pro, which cost me about $6k when I bought it. The base model of MBP ostensibly starts at $2999, but to get 8 TB of storage (which I could add externally for just $900), between all the forced upgrades that I don't care about and the whopping $3,000 for the SSD upgrade, the price leaps to a jaw-dropping $7,549, or $4,550 total just to get $900 worth of extra storage. And really, less than that, because an 8 TB SSD would give you 9 TB of storage, and that's only 8.

Apple pricing is just plain nuts now. I mean, it was painfully high before, but even as a software engineer, I'm having trouble justifying the cost of staying on the Mac platform now, with a 25% increase in prices since 2020, and I think even higher increases for some configurations.

:frowns:

I thought Chrome devs went hard on fuzzing API's after the timing attacks went big ... circa 2020.

Back to the drawing board.