In the 1980's one of the things that came out of the changes Demming brought to the U.S. auto industry under the quality improvement efforts at that time was a reduction in part count. Back then, dealers made all of their money at the time of the car sale. Today cars are sold at little to negative profit so that the dealers can make money in many other irritating ways. So, your car has a different board for controlling the passenger window on the left and right and crazy unnecessarily different parts like that. The goal is to make it not profitable for an aftermarket vendor like AutoZone to carry all of these part and thereby create a dealership monopoly. They also change these parts across model years to further fragment the market. My wife's car has 5 circuit boards scattered around her tailgate that are all related to the opening and closing of the tailgate.

Their insane current focus on "branding" over U/X is a perfect example of "deep organizational dysfunction". The people in charge are focused on the wrong things and it shows. The "Windows App" which is their replacement for Remote Desktop ... which was their replacement for Remote Desktop :/ (yes there are 2) is a perfect example of this insanity.

It would make far more sense for the state to require consumer devices to support an Always-VPN mode and then the state supply a "Family VPN" that parents can opt into for free. Then the state makes providing adult content via the state's "Family VPN" against the law. Then all the adult content providers have to do blacklist some well-known IPs. Many consumer devices already support this mode, all common operating systems can already be configured this way. This doesn't require a fundamental change to any OS, just configuration.

The cost for lab-grown beef has dropped from a ridiculous 1,000,000X to 8X that of farm beef. It is not that no one wants to eat it, it is that no one wants to eat it at the current prices. The price needs to be less, not more than farm beef. The price curve is falling fast enough that farm producers are trying to get protectionist, but with modern shipping capabilities, only one state has to allow this for it to be everywhere if it is cheap enough.

14 years, with the option to renew for one additional 14year term IF the author was still alive at the end of the first term.

The relative cost of distribution has gone nothing but down since the Copyright Act of 1790, yet the copyright term has always increased to the current ridiculous life of the author + 70 years. Seriously WTF?

So Stallman is right. The law we have today is what Disney and friends corruptly paid our Congress critters to enact, and does not reflect what the will of the citizens -- which it if we were an actual democracy. The current law is the product of abject corruption and should be ignored. Everything produced before 1998 should be free of DRM and widely available.

Yeah, he certainly isn't going to get an attorney to work on contingency after this. He should have filed the suit, not thrown a temper tantrum that harmed the company we an executive for. Now an attorney is going to cost him more than he is ever likely to get if he won and that is a big big IF at this point.

Sure desalinization costs 10X to produce. But the same distribution overhead applies regardless of the source which is $1.20 to $3.00 per 1000 gallons. So even if your ground water costs $0.50/1,000 to obtain your household at the tap cost is $1.40 to $3.20. Compare that to $3.75 per 1000 gallons for desalination and your at-the-tap cost is $4.95 to $6.75 ... so 3X to 2X, not 10X and the more costly the infrastructure, the less the impact. The golf courses of Cabo San Lucas are watered with desalinated water ... it just cannot be that egregiously expensive. A lot of municipal well water in Florida is desalinated because of saltwater intrusion into the aquifer.

How can one not have doomerism when every executive is telling their shareholders that AI is going to allow them to cut jobs? And worse they are pre-emptively canning people at the end of each quarter before the truth of their assertions can be validated because this drives up their stock price and their bonuses?

They had a successful game studio until their owner made short-term decisions to sell off its key assets. Now they are free of this corporate foolishness, why not stick together and start an independent studio? It might be a few months before they get their first contract, but I would think they could be in demand if they can get over the initial hump.

Deep-rooted trees not only do better in droughts, but they help all of the other trees to better too which is one of the reasons to mix up the species. But none of "beech, firs, and sycamore" are deep-rooting hardwoods. Sycamores are an improvement, but there should be some deeper rooting trees on the list like oaks.

Next year's measles numbers will be even "better". Polio is showing up in wastewater in some of the few places where this surveillance is done. Welcome to the 1950s. If we keep this up, preventable childhood disease deaths could rise from 3 last year to take the crown from the over 1200 gun deaths of children a year in the U.S. in a few years thanks to the power of exponentials.

Many here seem to not understand that tolls are NOT a form of taxation. Predation is a much better term. In many cases, roads originally paid for by the state are being transformed into tolls roads for "maintenance support" and being turned into private property. The tolls go to the new owners, not the state. The private corporations do not set the tolls fees to recoup the maintenance costs. They set the toll fees at the value that maximizes their profits: optimize(vehicles_using(t)*fee_charged(t)) ... which is why you see fees changing depending on the time of day.

If the money was going to the state, then this might be reasonable, but instead this is just another symptom of late-stage capitalism where we are cannibalizing our infrastructure to pass wealth to political cronies.

Borrowing at 9.25% to build an AI data center is dumber than borrowing at the same rate to plant wheat. Providing compute for AI is going to be a brutally competitive low margin business. Borrowing $2.35 billion at 9.25% versus 5.5% Applied Digital is going to be paying $4 million a month more to service their debt than potential competitors for the same number of teraflops of compute. That is a huge disadvantage which they cannot "make up in volume". The same thing that happened to storage pricing is going to happen to AI compute: https://ourworldindata.org/gra... -- note that is a log scale on the left! These data centers are not going to get more valuable with time and they may lose value even faster.

So far investors have been pretty dumb about distinguishing between 1) AI companies that are actually creating AI technology, 2) Companies that are using the technology 3) Companies providing commodity infrastructure for the technology. But they seem to finally be catching on.

China is very good at stealing IP and absolutely lousy at protecting stolen IP. It won't be long before everyone interested in long range rockets, including countries like Iran will be building their own Starship knockoffs.

A big part of how China is moving so fast technologically is the advent of LLMs have turned the petabytes of data, emails, etc that they have stolen from western companies into usable information. They can load up corpus of content stolen from a chip producer and ask the question: "What issues arose when transitioning to ultraviolet lithography and what were the engineering changes that resolved those issues?". They can skip over many of the issues that previous companies had to work through the hard way.