Government will buy people food and healthcare if they are poor enough. Saves businesses a lot of money!

when I can't schmooze my way on a private get (G550 last time), then I would fly commercial on the cheapest fastest flight I can get. Especially when flying domestically where sitting on a plane for 4-5 hours isn't the worst part of the trip, it's the airports. And paying more and still having to get naked body scan pictures taken of my wife seems like a pointless way to spend extra money.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

My banks site won't work in Firefox. Oddly it says it does, I have not tried on Windows. Maybe it would on Windows but I don't know why that should make a difference.

Yeah,

I kinda like Disney+, my family and I do watch quite a bit of content on it. It has gone down hill some though. I don't really pay for the ad tier it is bundled with my wife's mobile plan (so yes I do pay for it) but that bundle includes other features/services/tethering rules we want and is still the most economic to get them, at least without completely switching carriers.

I don't think I'd be a subscriber if we had to pay 'full rate'

$20 for ad free
$15 for w/ads

Would free be
$0 w/MOAR Ads!

Or would it be a limited selection of content, stuff comes out first on the paid subs levels?

Something even more aggravating and dickish like the first 8 episodes of whatever free, but oh look you have to subscribe to get episodes 9 and 10?

Regardless of what youtube and Tubi etc might be doing there is psychology in play here that I expect is going to leave either subscribers or would-be subscribers feeling resentful about the model.

They are counting some combination of legitimate risk, FUD, and protectionism to ultimately protect them from the Chinese models.

The reality is at some point in the not to distant future it will be cheaper to put enough AI accelerator hardware in workstations to give most folks using Claude/Claude code and similar a perfectly acceptable degree of performance. It always goes this way - it is never cheaper put hardware behind the glass when it can go under the desk long term. The only reasons to do it usual boil down to management and wanting to do something more bleeding edge that hasnt filtered to commodity hardware yet.

Of course for online applications that need to scale, and for complex engineering or very large data volume tasks, sure "Cloud AI" and certainly for anyone who needs to train a model. However the idea these guys are going to get individuals and business to keep paying $200 for tokens to use some desktop AI assistant is unrealistic, and down goes the datacenter volume requirements along with that.

Again I am not saying there isnt a new industry / space here or that it is all a bubble but the current Anthropic/OpenAI/Grok business model persisting for a whole lot longer does not appear to me anyway to that it fits the patter of the last 25 years of White-Collar-targeted IT systems.

Let me caveat that I also think the sorts of people making big investments in Data Centers are not stupid and at least see this as a likely outcome as well, presumably they believe they can sell the space/capacity to other users for other applications. If so why not charge the Anthropics of the world with the VC money huge premiums to rush build outs while you can get them? As long the assets are still marketable after that business drops off, it is a win!

As much as I want to say, it might be useful to have Web Based E-mail interface that will work in a basic / legacy browser, I don't know this is really true.

Not much of the web works at all if you try to use it with anything not Chromium or Apple-Webkit from less than five years ago. YMMV with recent Mozilla engines.

The few places where I can see someone maybe wanting to use this are the very places that people definitely should be isolating from all things Internet, especially not exposing it to e-mail content, which even if restricted to being from the local domain could still contain something malicious accidentally forwarded.

I can certainly understand why people would want / maybe just like or prefer a range of other legacy mail client. I mean if you handle a lot of mail and have been using Pegasus or something for the last 30 years and its all muscle memory, sure I get it. Moving from OWA-lite to OWA though probably isnt much bother for most people. At some point it makes sense to drop software likely very few folks are using.

RFS is dead. Like his wife.

Seems redundant, I already use a private terminal at SFO (and a few other airports). Maybe it isn't fancy but the staff returned my rental car for me. Flying privately is super convenient compared to commercial carriers.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

What could possibly go wrong?

Apple is becoming more MS every day.

A sign that civilization is in decline.

Exactly my concern here.

There is enough wiggle room from them to mark arguments like 'oh well software tools sure we trust our company stores to hold on to them but um trade secrets we can't leave that stuff with just anyone with a set a wrenches and coveralls'

So they ship and require to ship back some 300lbs of server equipment and the fee is $800 every time.. Force any independent shops to go back to court.. Will Deere lose again probably, but in the mean time they still lock out anyone not willing to fight about it, and still have any owner who needs his tractor fixed yesterday (which for commercial farmers all of them) by the short ones.

It will be interesting to see how impactful this judgement really is in practice. Which ultimately will probably come down to the judges own relative apathy or aversion to corporate BS.

I'm not going to carry water for trillion dollar corporations that rake in record profits every year through subtle and not-so-subtle anti-competitive practices.

The users currently get a walled garden system. With Apple locking other markets out almost entirely. And Google playing whack-o-mole with user-installed open source markets and subtle limitations for OEMs that want to maintain capability with Play store but also run their own store and own search partner.

The current market is not consumer friendly. And doing nothing is not going to change that.