Obviously pious concerns about fraud are...not...the motivating force here; but I'm curious where on the scale from 'secondary but real' to 'frankly absurd' the burner-powered fraudsters actually live.

It's not like bad prepaid phones are expensive; but, especially if you are actually burning them with any frequency, they aren't really cheap unless you are doing some sort of scamming rather more lucrative than spamming people about nonexistent aftermarket warranties with sub 1% response rates. Are actual SIMs, or even actual phones, remotely competitive with the VOIP equivalent of bulletproof hosting if you want an in to the phone network?

In a similar vein; what's the breakdown of phone-using criminals between people who actually go to the counter and pay cash, where the FCC now wants them carded, vs. the various PO box companies that tend to show up on weird phone charges? It's not a surprise that they are running with the excuse; but the idea that telcom enabled crime is actually substantially the domain of something as clunky as burner phones/SIMs, rather than more efficient services that nobody cares enough to chase down, seems very implausible.

That's one perspective. Another is that while the US shouldered the cost of defense for much of the world, the US got a lot of goodwill for that, and that goodwill and other aspects of its reputation helped to build and extend a massive, decades-long economic expansion that outpaced the rest of the wealthy world. There's a good argument to be made that being the world's superpower was expensive, but came with an enormous ROI that justified every penny of it and more.

It also provided the more-concrete benefit that the western world bought a lot of their weapons from the US defense industry, which helped to keep it strong and able to provide US needs (somewhat... our actual defense manufacturing capability has been gradually eroding for a long time because Pax Americana was so strong that no one needed to expend our munitions at scale, so we lost the ability to build them at scale).

That's likely all gone now. Europe is re-arming, and they're not going to be buying American weapons if they can avoid it, because in part they're arming against us. The Greenland threats did not go unnoticed. Trump has turned us from a global, mostly beneficent superpower into a regional bully, able to push around the likes of Venezuela (though apparently not to cause a regime change), but struggling with a low-middling power like Iran.

Breaking GPS won't break digital maps. They'll still work just fine, and will be up to date. The devices just won't be able to identify your current location, you'll have to work that out from context, the way you do on a paper map.

Or not... our smart devices use other signals in addition to GPS, to help address the fact that GPS requires a relatively clear view of the sky, and that's not always available.

Circa 2010 I navigated halfway across the country using Google Maps running on an iPod Touch. The device didn't have a GPS receiver, but I didn't even realize that for quite a while because its database of known Wifi locations was able to give me reasonable location data most of the time. Once I understood that constraint I was able to use it quite effectively. I expect that the databases of fixed Wifi and BLE beacon locations have gotten much more extensive and effective over the last 15 years.

I inadvertently repeated the experiment about four years ago. I bought an iPad to use for navigation while sailing, not realizing that Apple only includes a GPS receiver in tablets that have a cellular modem. I spent a little time experimenting with the Navionics app on land, making sure it would work for me, and it worked just fine around town and even in the moderately-rural area where I live (I have to admit this testing was cursory). Then when I got a few miles offshore, the stupid thing stopped updating its location. I decided it must be faulty and switched to using the app on my Pixel phone to double-check my location, still using the iPad's larger screen for charts (including using the charts with azimuths to visible reference points to calculate my location -- a good habit when navigating in coastal waters, to maintain the skills).

When I got home I mentioned the situation to a friend who is a private pilot and uses an iPad for navigation while flying. He asked me whether my iPad had cellular data and explained that Apple uses a single-chip solution for GPSr and modem, so an Apple device has both or neither, and told me to exchange it for the more expensive iPad. I exchanged it for a Samsung tablet because it pissed me off that Apple would even make a smart device without a GPS receiver.

Anyway, my point is that if the GPS network went out, your digital navigation might not even notice for a while. And even if you lost location service entirely, you'd still have maps. Maybe if there's a massive EMP that knocks out all electronics you'll get use of your paper maps. Though you'll probably have to do it on foot or on a bicycle.

And reading comprehension is not your strong suit.

My point was that the other part of your comment, "They just regurgitate random stuff they found on the Internet", is clearly false.

Basically any service you can think of only costs as much as it does because there are limits to how much quality and reliability it actually promises. Electrical utilities tend to keep the grid pretty stable most of the time; if you want better than that you end up talking to Eaton or similar and running increasingly involved onsite equipment; just as people who want internet access to be very reliable rather than mostly reliable end up buying redundant links.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are cases where it would make sense for the utility to operate and sell the additional reliability, rather than the customer DIYing it, whether because there are grid topology things they can do to get the result more effectively or just because they have greater experience with alarming AC gear; but that would be a tier above the standard offering, not a concession that it's reasonable to run the entire grid at the level of the worst-case customers.

You could get into the same argument about water. Hospitals and precision chemistry applications often have fairly elaborate onsite setups to provide sterile or ultra low ion water for their particular requirements because that's not the standard to which utility water is normally held. In theory you could shuffle around ownership and responsibility for the additional processing steps, and in some cases it might even make sense; but it's not terribly compelling to run the entire water system as though it is being piped into a burn ward or a chip fab; and, at least in agricultural areas, there's often another tier below the 'standard' for non-potable irrigation where you can worry less about microbe counts and whether there's matching sewer capacity because it's just getting sprayed on fields.

"Lots" and "one that is widely accepted" are not the same thing at all, which is my point. There's no point in discussing intelligence without first nailing down which definition the interlocutors are using.

Also, nearly all of the definitions are extremely fuzzy.

Indeed.

The claim you made was not about whether machines can currently perform like a brain, nor about complexity. The claim you made is that the human brain cannot be simulated by a Turing machine, which is a much, much stronger claim.

So I repeat, why do you think that?

38 of the 50 US states are "one-party consent" states, which means that as long as one person present (e.g. the person wearing the glasses) is aware of the recording, it's legal. Roughly half of countries around the world either allow any party to a conversation to record it without telling the rest, or don't have any restrictions at all.

Since there's no clear definition of what "intelligent" means, much less one that is widely accepted, that's a pointless argument.

You clearly have not used them much. Try using an LLM (one of the top commercial models, e.g. Claude Opus 4.7) to debug code that has never been on the Internet. I don't think anyone knows what "intelligent" means, so arguing that point is a waste of time, but LLMs clearly can observe results, reason about them, form hypotheses, devise ways to test those hypotheses, perform the tests, evaluate and reason about the results, etc.

My guess is that the face blurring happens on the car, before the data is even uploaded to Waymo, as a way to protect the privacy of random passersby from Waymo and Waymo employees. They likely never had possession of imagery with unblurred exterior faces, so there was no way they could provide it.

There's no way that Waymo is just defying a court order.

Why do you think that?

I suspect it's a straightforward incentives problem. If you can get away with making it the grid's problem there's not much incentive to pay for more expensive facility power setups. Presumably this is why ERCOT is testing current and prospective customers and making noise about it; and why there are at least some standards for how ill-behaved a load can be while still being allowed to hook up; with some awkward interactions between very large sites that also have the ability to shut down rapidly at relatively low cost. If you are 'mining' crypto you presumably prefer the gear to be online because it is depreciating by the minute regardless; but the risk and inconvenience of shutting it down and booting it up again isn't particularly dramatic compared to having to cold start an aluminum smelter or something.

I'm sure that there are worse options, probably being actively considered since this is no longer getting them what they want; but an opaque 'public/private partnership' slush fund that spends its time slathering a thin layer of dubious military justification on random projects seems like a very, very, dodgy way of doing things.

SMRs that utilize 1950's designs and require intense operational oversight and maintenance could never be economical. SMRs that use better, safer designs that can safely operate with no active operational oversight and little or no maintenance, which can function without intervention and without refueling for 20-30 years, then be inexpensively disposed-of and replaced, and which can be manufactured in large quantities to bring the unit cost down, promise to be very economical.

Will the new designs actually achieve all of those goals? On paper it looks good. Whether that theory will translate into practice is something that can only be discovered by trying.