All about trying to beat China?

I don't think that's true. Basically all missions are "low earth orbit", unless you create a GIANT rocket... like the Saturn V. The US did this for the Apollo mission; however, even though they have the blueprints, the rockets literally cannot be made any more because it was designed for a different workforce with different skills.

There's also many advances in computing and engine technology to incorporate. And getting all correct is hard.

The Soviets were never able to create a rocket comparable to the Saturn V. They tried, it blew up spectacularly, and ended their space program. It was "cowboy engineering"... not the cautious incremental stuff that NASA did with Saturn V.

China is building the Long March 9 and Long March 10 rocket systems, and that's awesome. However, NASA is building the capability because they do not have it at all, and they want it for Mars/Asteroid/Moonbase missions. There's genuine interest in the USA to do this.

I assume the Chinese will do a much better job than the soviets, and actually get their rockets working. They're way behind NASA though. The first SLS mission is targeted for Feb/2026. The first Long March mission is expected to be 5-10 years later (!). So hardly a competition for who gets there first.

How dare amazon NOT employ people.

Do coral reefs really matter though? Sure, it's a milestone, but not an existential one.

Yes, they absolutely do matter, and yes it is potentially an existential one. Coral reefs are the most biodiverse part of the seas and are the source of many of the ocean nutrients that get carried around the globe on currents like the AMOC, so they play an essential part in the overall ocean food chain that many people rely on to survive. Removing the coral reefs from those people's food chains would be akin to the impact of removing Alfalfa from the US food chain that ultimately leads to all that beef and dairy produce.

Also, if their primary food source is unable to support them, they're not likely to stay put and starve for the greater good, are they? Where do you think they are going to start marching towards?

The AMOC relies on a cycling of warmer water in the tropics and cooler water in the Arctic Circle to generate the circulatory current. The warm water flows north, cools and sinks below the thermocline, then flows back to the tropics. It is not a loop on the surface like tidal flows, but rather a loop in an elongated cross sectional view that stretches right around the Indian and Southern Oceans as well as the Atlantic and is, in effect, a gigantic natural heat pump moving energy from the tropics to the North Atlantic ocean. The basic idea behind the potential shutdown of the flow is that as the temperature differential declines, so does the energy in the system, resulting a slowdown of the current and, ultimately (if taken to a logical conclusion), it stopping altogether - just as a heat pump would once the temperatures on either side have the pump have equalised.

In terms of impact, there's a bit more to it than that to do with variations in salinity between different parts of the ocean, which in turn being compounded with the inflow of fresh water from the melting Arctic ice cap and (mostly) Greenland's glaciers, that it also bring nutrients essential for the supporting the marine life in the Atlantic, plays a key part in sequestering the vast amounts of CO2 the ocean captures into the deep ocean (which is a whole other feedback loop). Even if it doesn't stop altogether, but only slows significantly, the impact on the entire biosphere, and especially around the North Atlantic, is going to be profound.

It would actually be quite wrong to just say "funded by taxpayer!!". It's funded by a central EU funding pot, yes, but that pot is fed from more than the individual taxpayers titheing money to their governments, which then use it to pay their EU dues. Both the EU's central pot, and the individual state's exchequer, will are supplied by more than the taxpayer and will include investment returns (that money isn't just sitting in a vault around doing nothing until it's needed), fines including the multi-billion $ ones levied against Apple/Google/Meta/Microsoft, etc., the sale of criminal assets seized through disgorgement like Bitcoin and tangible goods such as cars and properties, foreign visa fees, and customs fees, just for starters.

There's almost certainly a full breakdown of the sources on Europa.eu if you wanted to go and look for it; pretty much all of the EU's operational processes and finances are in the public domain.

They could, but how do you determine which role is which? A global company like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, can't realistically operate entirely from the US - plenty of jurisdictions requires a larger companies maintain a regional office to operate in them, and even without that you often need local expertise in various fields, especially those with a financial/legal bent, and obviously for things like logistics, sales, and marketing (which can be a whole minefield of PR screwups if you don't understand the nuances of local culture) too. Overseas offices therefore are not going away without inflicting massive damage on the US's global companies.

If you complete MAGA's ultimate goal and get rid of, say, all the Indian H1Bs since TCS dominates the sector, that you'd realistically have to offshore the task of producing any Hindi localisation and region specific coding, because - you guessed it - you almost certainly won't be find enough native US citizens that also have both the required knowledge of Hindi and can also code. Even if you can recruit enough Hindi speaking coders in the US, given every other big tech company will need to be doing the same thing, you also need to repeat that for lots of other localisations with even smaller potential labour pools too.

That means you demonstrably need an overseas development team that deals with it, and if that can't economically be H1Bs in the US then it's going to be TCS or whoever else's workers in India, or whichever other outsourcing company and country's office you put them in. So, by a neccessity driven by the demands of Wall Street to prioritise value and return a profit, now you've got a development team of foreign labour based in an office somewhere outside the US. Surely it's not up to "the party of small government" (LOL) to dictate what tasks a private enterprise can and cannot do with their staff unless it's some kind of national security matter? If not, then they can tell them to work on whatever else they want, including all the coding that might have been done by H1Bs *or* US citizens based on their offices the US. If so, then there are some well known systems of government where that level of control is the norm; absolute monarchies/dictatorships, facism, and communism, and I think we can safely rule out MAGA going down the communism route...

"Distracting" is probably the whole point. Look at the cool video, and not the UI disaster that is the rest of Windows 11. I guess you could also set it to a clip of Homer Simpson thinking of clowns when Marge is talking to him and switch to desktop to accurately mirror your state of mind in a typical Teams call? Can it play the audio too? $deity help the poor bastard that forgets to lock their screen when they leave their desk and falls victim to the very obvious office jape that this affords if so (HR are probably going to rolling up their sleeves and rubbing hands in glee when they hear about this).

But really, WTF asked for this? Other than the kind of user that has all that garish dynamic aRGB lighting on their "rig" or Microsoft got trolled by 4Chan, I got nothin.

Even if you assume full RTO (which won't happen), at $100,000 per H1-B, you're only going to need a reasonably low number of people in the team to setup a remote office for the entire team and ship a manager out there to oversee them - or just outsource that role too.

Fairly obviously, this almost certainly won't result in many thousands of H1-Bs each paying $100k to the US government each year; it'll result in many thousands of jobs that would have been paying US taxes on their wages, and then paying for accommodation, a car, for leisure, and whatever else into the US economy paying their taxes and spending their wages in wherever the new (or expanded overseas) office is instead.

Smart countries will be making setting up offices and bringing those outsourced workers in much easier right now, but I'd also expect some buildings in India are going to see their "Tata Consulting" logo get one from Amazon, Microsoft or whoever alongside it too.

[To answer your question, the figures typically come from CDNs and major websites doing browser data analysis so, while there's quite a bit of wiggle room, they are going to at least be in the ballpark and definiltely not orders of magnitude out.] Personally, I think people are being too simplistic about the stats and likely outcomes and, arguably, focusing too much on entirely the wrong issue.

I totally agree on your main point; 7-8 years is a good run for a specific major release of an OS, or any other software application. You might not like the decision, but Microsoft announced the end of official support some years ago and that we're now approaching that deadline is just BAU and not something anyone should really have an issue with. They're not taking Windows 10 off you (yet?), but they are making it clear that if you continue to run it you're doing so at your own risk from next month. Pretty much everyone, including the FOSS community, does this with older versions at some point. It's been done countless times before, and will be done countless times in the future - in that light, singling out this one specific example isn't a particularly sound argument, is it?

Whatever the percentage of Win10 holdouts is (I've seen recent figures closer to 50%), it's highly unlikely to be entirely down to "lack of TPM". Windows 11 is a privacy raping UI/UX nightmare, so I suspect a large majority of those Windows 10 holdouts have hardware that actually could run Windows 11 just fine, but are actively choosing not to do so. When many of them inevitably get compromised (which they will), it's going to be interesting to see who gets the blame for that - and the fallout from whatever the resulting botnets are used for - in the media, but that's another topic for another day. There will also be another fraction who simply don't know or don't care; the OS is part of the hardware purchase, and if the hardware is working fine then there's no reason to change anything, and they'll only upgrade when things break (likely due to overworked fans packing up after the CPU has been running flat out for several months as part of some botnet or other). Given most users performance needs have hit a plateau, that could be quite a large fraction, and will naturally decline over time. Finally, you'll have the fraction that understand the issue and have legacy hardware, but can't / won't upgrade because of other user-specific reasons - e.g. they just can't afford it right now.

Key point: none of the people in those groups - probably the majority of that 40-50% - are going to be sending their old PCs to landfill any time soon, and certainly not all in one go on October 14th.

The real issue here is that Microsoft has arbitrarily decided - for the financial benefit of themselves and their hardware/advertising partners - to try and force an unnecessary hardware and OS/"telemetry" upgrade, rather than simply put a banner in the setup process starting with something along the lines of "This hardware lacks critical security functionality and your data may be at increased risk...". We know beyond a doubt that this is an entirely arbitrary hardware requirement decision because of all the workarounds posted online showing how to get Windows 11 running on hardware it supposedly doesn't support. That is pretty much textbook abuse of a monopolistic position in the market, and that's the tack PIRG (and the likes of the DoJ, FTC, EU, etc.) probably should be taking; force Microsoft to remove the arbitrary restriction but make it clear that if you don't have TPM 2.0, that's on you. If you understand what TPM actually does, then you probably also have at least a basic clue about PC/network security and will realise that is pretty much zero additional risk outside of some corporate environments.

Yes, there will still be holdouts, just as there still are on even older software releases and Windows version, but at that point it's entirely on them. They've either chosen the Windows 11 path, with all that entails, or they've chosen some other option (trying to secure a Windows version <11, Linux, Mac, whatever) with all that entails. As long as is not a monoculture with a common failure mode, we should be fine with that.

The massive distortions in the real estate market have stemmed from the wall of money created by decades of near-zero interest rates. This has driven serious malinvestment.

Was that capitalist? Well, the money supply is indirectly controlled by the Fed, which -- due to political pressure -- attempts to iron out the business cycle by creating walls of money every time it looks like things are getting choppy.

One could argue -- and I would agree -- that this is better than the pure unfettered capitalist alternative, which would see bank failures and people's life savings wiped out for no fault of their own. However, as a consequence, we get this absurd malinvestment problem.

There's more to this. You might ask, why doesn't the Fed just set the interest rate higher, so that people really need to have a productive use for money before they go buy up a bunch of houses? That hits at the heart of the stated goal to create persistent low levels of inflation, which allows the government (and debtors everywhere) to debase their debts. Because otherwise people wouldn't borrow as much money to drive economic growth. I find this nonsensical, because we loosening capital requirements creates precisely the malinvestment we want to stop. However, it's the government likes the ability to continuously debase its debt.

So it's not capitalism, and it's absolutely the result of policy choices, and it doesn't have to be this way. But it is because it suits the needs of powerful people in society.

Communists countries found ways to incentivize people to work. It's just that people ended up doing all the wrong things (in aggregate), and the system became hopelessly byzantine and corrupt. They really needed prices as a signalling mechanism for demand and scarcity. There's a great book on this by an economist. Socialism, the failed idea that never dies. Niemietz spends most of the time talking about the history of how people talk about socialism, but there's sections of the book specifically dedicated to a clear explanation of why it always must fail, and why it always must turn authoritarian. There's a short counter-factual story at the end, where East Germany is a non-authoritarian communist state, with precisely zero human rights abuses, and how the system of socialist incentives lead to complete dysfunction.

Indeed, complete with the "lost decade" that turned out to be 30 years of no-growth, and an aging population causing deflation. Except in China the problems are larger in scope, and the gradients are steeper. I'm not saying that China is going away. I mean, Japan is still there. It's just that the narrative changed on Japan, and it will change on China too.

In this video, university professor Patrick Boyle explains how short sighted pension plans destroyed the American auto industry. Once you look at the math, it's pretty obvious.

The misallocation of resources does have some benefits. It's still a misallocation, and thus, by definition, overall a problem.

Housing prices in the USA are set by the rate of interest (which sets mortgage serviceability), and the ability to build. As interest rates go up, housing prices go down. And houses are cheaper in red states that have fewer building restrictions, but still have, nonetheless, good job markets.

People made huge amounts of money off of housing in the USA, because interest rates slowly decreased from the 1980s until just a few years ago. Every time the interest rate was cut, incumbent home owners laughed all the way to the bank.

Those days are _done_. Interest rates bounded off near 0%, and we're staring down the barrel of sustained inflation. Nobody is going to make a fortune off of sitting on real estate for several decades.

If you want to buy a house, move some place where supply meets demand, making houses a little more expensive than the cost to build. There are many such places in the USA.