They were slop during the Jobs era... it's just taken some people this long to realise it.

Jobs was insanely good at selling sub-par things.

Boom Supersonic was always a scam to get investor cash.

The fundamental problems of supersonic air travel remain the same as they were when Concorde first took flight. I wasn't the crash that killed the Concorde but economics. Only 20 airframes were ever built, only 14 of them production airframes. The last one was built in 1979 and last flew in 2003 when the type was retired (the accident of AF4590 was in 2000, so they kept flying for 3 years afterwards) which meant the youngest airframe was 23 years old at time of retirement. With no new airframes they were going to be phased out at some point.

The problems the Concorde suffered was very high operational costs and a relatively short range. They were so expensive to run that a huge premium needed to be paid for every seat just to cover the running costs and had a range of only 4,500 miles which given the FCCs restrictions on commercial supersonic flights limited them to Atlantic routes only (pretty much only London/Paris to New York). To fly further they needed to do fuel stops which ate into the time saving from supersonic flights.

Supersonic aircraft are just as inefficient as they were back in the 70s and just as expensive to build. So the same economics that killed Concorde 20 years ago are there to kill Boom today. I think investors are finally realising this so Boom has moved onto a new scam.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha....

Oh you're serious.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... wheeze...

There is far too much money involved here. They won't just pull the plug because they'll have to pay a little tax. Hell, if they weren't so hell bent on avoid tax in the first place by using various overseas tax havens this kind of thing wouldn't even need to be considered. Seeing as they can hide their profits that easily by just shifting it to a tax friendly regime, taxing them at the point of use becomes the best method even if it's more expensive and less efficient (but they can only blame themselves for it).

Yep, it's just a few people stuck in a luddite past where they have to adjust a clock twice a year and whinge bitterly about it.

Whether DST is useful depends on latitude, up here in the cold north the difference between summer and winter is 8 hours of daylight and that's for Southern England, in Scotland it's worse. For somewhere like Spain where there's considerably less difference it's not as much of a problem.

In the UK, with DST the hours of daylight in June are 4 AM to 11 PM (the UK does not have a night in the two weeks of midsummer, it gets dark but still technically twilight) whilst in December it's 8 AM to 4 PM. So if we adopted permanent GMT the sun would rise at 3 AM in summer (when everyone is still asleep) or if we adopted permanent BST (GMT+1) the sun wouldn't rise until 9 AM in winter (meaning you'd be going to and from work in the dark, not just home from work in the dark).

Given the prevalence of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) in the UK, if the working stiffs never got to see any sunlight in the winter months it would be detrimental.

Also, now we're in the 21st century, most clocks can adjust themselves and having to change the one manual clock in my life twice a year means that it rarely drifts more than a few minutes from the ones connected to a time server (one year I was lazy and just left it as I've the minimal intelligence required to subtract one hour to get the actual time and it had drifted over 10 minutes from other clocks by next summer).

If we or the US got rid of daylight savings, I guarantee you that the same people complaining about changing the clocks will be complaining that the sun is up too early or too late by the next summer/winter.

Spanish sleeping habits predated Franco by quite a bit, it's mainly due to the weather in Spain being quite hot during midday and early afternoon.

As for Franco and Hitler, Hitler desperately wanted Spain to join the war but the Spanish were rebuilding their armed forces badly after the Spanish Civil War (which ended just a few months before the outbreak of WWII) but the real coup was British Intelligence. Franco was concerned that if Spain joined the war they'd be completely reliant on Germany for material and defence, which would make Spain effectively a vassal state to Nazi Germany and as much as he liked Fascism, he knew that would end badly for him. the SOE (Special Operations Executive) and SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, later MI6) worked to keep Spain neutral during WWII by playing on Franco's paranoia intimating that Spain would be immediately invaded if they joined the axis and the remnants taken over by Germany.

So fearful was Franco of being deposed that when he discovered the British SanMigel intelligence network thanks to the Gestapo, he negotiated with the British to allow them to continue as long as they did not act against Franco's regime.

There was a battleground in Spain in WWII but hardly a shot was fired on it because it was between British and German spies. It was a decidedly one sided battle at that, we fed the Germans so much bad intelligence that they simply believed, not the least of which was Operation Mincemeat and the German intelligence leaders in Spain were so incompetent that they were practically working for us, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was so effective at keeping Spain out of the war British intelligence thought he might be trying to be a double agent (he wasn't but was executed in 1944 for anti-Nazi resistance).

Everything must die, one of the few constants of the universe.

As for the internet, it's due for a change, it needs to mature as it's gotten old enough that acting like a 12 yr old doesn't cut it any more. It's been in our lives 30 years now since the Eternal September, that means it's now an every day part of out lives as the diffusion of innovation is complete, even the laggards have caught up, this means we can't pretend it can survive as a wild west where everyone can do what they want as you're going to get powerful parties attempting to control it anyway and without laws and regulations, well just look at what we have, hate preachers, lies and disinformation, peddlers of fake cure-alls... I mean it's not like we saw the same things with other technologies.

The internet is going to change, like it or not, you can either be the Luddite and reject the modernisation with your "hurr durr mah freeze peach" or you can be a part of it and help ensure that the internet stays a useful resource. If you want to pretend that a laissez faire approach will work, you'll guarantee that the worst monopolists like Elon Musk, the Ellisons, Murdoch, et al. will end up in control of the internet and they won't tolerate any speech they don't agree with.

That's the good thing about Sir Patrick Stewart, he was a serious actor that also loved to make us laugh, he was on quite a few British comedies including Ricky Gervais' Extras. He was never above taking the mick out of himself.

The difference is that the rich people expect their gambling losses to be covered by the taxpayer.

Imagine the outrage if someone poor who plays pokies/FOBTs/One Armed Bandits expected the government to pick up the bill for his bad gambling choices.

No problems... the financial regulations that financial businesses adhere to are designed to ensure that risks are sufficiently managed to the point where a serious loss cannot cause undue harm to customers... Let me just check where Binance is regulated... oh... oh dear... it's Abu Dhabi.

Which is an unfair comparison as people in developing countries often devise new uses for junk we throw away, that coke bottle can be turned into a water purifier. Devices made from discarded PET plastics are being used to create clean drinking in Africa.

AI execs on the other hand couldn't tell what's useful from their sisters left tit. Hence they're trying to sell the tit.

People just don't think of their own security. My mum is in hospital a lot these days so I've been running errands, this means paying bills as most of them are not set up to be done online so I now know her PIN because one of those bills was take $100 out of card A and put it on card B. She didn't even think twice about giving me the PIN (and it's a stupidly obvious number that gets given out a lot).

Fair enough that it's my mum... but people just don't think of security at all. In fact most complain about it. I've had to stop my sister from telling me her PIN in a crowded shopping centre before.

Just look at how many people donate to Trump whilst he screws them over.

We may end up having a shortage of many things, fuel, food, housing... but one thing we'll never run short on are morons. PT Barnum was quite the optimist to think there was only 1 sucker born every minute.

Most aren't affected, those that are, are just folding it wrong.

Are my servers on Alpha Centauri IIC are not fine then?

Will it be better if I relocated them to Wolf 359?

Commander Brainworm will just declare the germs to be helpful... eliminating the threat and any evidence to the contrary is fake nooz.