You are partially describing Comma.ai and the OpenPilot community. Hardware is proprietary, but the software is OS. There are a few hundred models of vehicles it works with.

Minneapolis is a major city in a higher-taxed state, but note that Minnesota spending is set up in such a way that Minneapolis sees less government funding that it pays in taxes (with rural communities benefiting via getting more in spending than they pay in taxes).

I really think Roblox is missing the point.

Sure, age-verification might impede underage use of their product, but there are a lot of adults that understand the age-verification movement to be an invasion of their privacy. Whether or not this is true, "perception is reality".

The real problem is that given his rank, he would be in a position to hear things sooner than others further down the food chain. Anyone paying attention to who is doing any betting could have (or should have) asked what they might now that would cause them to place the bet they did. In this case, it boils down to an OPSEC violation, and that's illegal under any circumstance, punishable by UCMJ if not actual civilian law. The fact that the FBI are involved tells me that this guy will probably be facing UCMJ violations too (if he's lucky, court martial if he's not), and may not be a Sergeant Major any longer when the dust settles.

Curious, then, that if such a law was already passed that recently that the likes of Pelosi (and surely other members of both parties) still managed to get around it.
Congress (as a whole) acts as if their shit doesn't stink. It's high time they get reminded that it most certainly does.

I can think of four reasons ticket sales have dropped.

1. Much of what Hollywood has been putting out is crap.
2. Politicians increase taxes constantly, resulting in less disposable income for potential movie-goers.
3. Ticket costs increasing - Not much can be done there, theaters do it to compensate for the loss in sales.
4. Streaming is a thing. Why go to a theater to sit in a sticky, uncomfortable seat when one can wait a little while for the movie to hit $STREAMING_SERVICE and watch it from the comfort of one's own home?

I'm less productive. Not only do I have to deal with a noisy and distracting environment, I also have to deal with the commute taking up time that I could otherwise spend more productively. Even if it is staying 15 or 20 minutes late or starting a half hour earlier, well, that's now part of my commuting time. But if leadership wants to play stupid games, they can win stupid prizes.

Macbooks are affordable? Not compared to Windows laptops.

Right now,, I can find a Lenovo with an i5 for $650. If I wanted to go cheaper, they have an AMD Ryzen 5 for under $400.

It looks like the cheapest Mac laptop is $1000.

That's a $350-$600 difference.

That's not pocket change for many people. You are seriously underestimating how much free cash some people have.

And why should they spend more? 90% of people are just browsing the web, reading emails, and doing some light document editing. Most laptops work fine for that.

Nice, the Zenmuse L3 is $18k, the DJI Matrice 400 drone to carry it $11k. So it won't be long before surveyors and the like will be selling its services.

Rats, as an architect I was hoping it might be useful to the general construction industry, but not at 3m accuracy.

In the last tech bubble, companies were spending more on gaining and keeping employees. Employees earning more money spend more money, generally speaking. That consumption drives the economy. (It turns out, the real job creators were the average person.)

In the AI bubble, companies are holding off hiring and are not interested in retaining employees. That hurts consumption, and thus the economy isn't booming.

The rich are getting richer, but that doesn't help as much to drive the economy - they don't need the extra money, thus they are less likely to spend it. Give a person making $30k a year a $1k raise, and they'll likely find something to quickly spend it on. Maybe they'll finally fix their car. Maybe they'll buy something they need but couldn't afford before. Maybe they'll actually go out to eat for a change. That all drives the economy. But give a person making $3 million a year a $1k raise, and they don't have the same need to spend it.

Which is likely why we see the stock market booming even though the economy is mediocre. Money that's not needed is often invested.

So, you're saying it is the same successful approach as hiring a code monkey to vibe-code your first website and then when you hit a 100 users and it goes down, paying to a real developer to "fix" it?

I've seen this approach, it is very common, but that's the only thing it has going for it.

In some organizations, quickly half-assing a project pushed by management with no real world benefit is not a bad idea.

Perhaps that's why management loves AI - it gives their bad ideas good metrics. And it even BSes for them!

and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life

I hope you got a good relationship with them! My son can't even talk yet. So, right now, he's just this cute thing that runs around and causes trou^H^H^H^Hgood things to happen.