It's less of a nationalism thing and more of a national security thing. The US has demonstrated that it's an unreliable partner.

When it comes to government, you have wholesale, then you've got wholesale, then you've got government wholesale. They're probably getting transactions for pennies compared to the extortionate rates that small business pay (this is why companies rarely advertise their rates, at least the full rates rather only the headline rates that are at best, obfuscating the actual costs, small business get raped by the card machines) The UK is generally pretty good at managing their suppliers, when you find out how little the NHS is paying for medication, often less than half the OTC price (the OTC price in the UK, not the inflated prices Americans pay at that). That's because the NHS can go and say "you see those 3 factories, we want to buy all their output".

Not every culture places an emphasis on being honest and forthright... They probably feel just fine about it as long as they can't be held to blame because in some cultures being seen not to be at fault is far more important than almost anything else. If you get a lot of foreign scam calls who you really need to be angry at are the telco's who make money off it and the politicians who allow the former to happen because these are the people who have the power to stop it. They just don't want to. You'll always find people desperate enough to take crap jobs, would it really be any better if the scam caller really was Jethro from Alabama instead of India? Certainly in the UK there are (or at least recently were) UK based scam call centres, notably the "we's heard you bin in an accident" scam (yes, the standard of English really is that bad, they are hiring people who can't get any other job), I certainly didn't think these scam calls were any better than ones with foreign accents, it's still a time wasting scam call.

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.

They don't want "strict" emissions controls because then they'll have to make products that meet those standards. What they want is a specific loophole that they can easily meet but is difficult or expensive for everyone else, such as a critical "safety feature" that John Deere owns the patent of.

Erm. that is capitalism, it's the ultimate expression of capitalism. Monopoly is the end game of capitalism. If you can literally prevent your customers from going elsewhere and being dependent on you for all future maintenance, upgrades, et al. you have the holy grail of capitalism.

Never confuse market liberalism with capitalism. A free market is not, by any means, a prerequisite for capitalism.

A strong legal system preventing abuse is the defence against that form of capitalism and what enables a free market to flourish.

Stargate died 15 years ago, let it rest in peace.

Stargate effectively had a single gimmick, the underdog vs incredibly powerful enemies and somehow winning. This resulted in a trope I called "Stargate Syndrome". The Underdog, in order to beat the uber-powerful enemy needs to become more powerful to defeat them, once this happens they need to create another, even more powerful enemy which the heroes need to become more powerful to defeat and then they need an even more powerful enemy to keep the series going, so on and so forth. SG1 started fighting fake gods with high tech and ended up with all the tech fighting almost literal gods.

Joe Mallozzi, one of the writers of SG1 did another series in the 2010s called Dark Matter, which started out incredibly well but suffered from Stargate Syndrome in S2, it was cancelled before the end of S3. A shame as it had a lot of potential if they didn't make the heroes effectively untouchable.

SG1 should have stayed finished at S8, Atlantis was pretty much the perfect length at 5 seasons. Leaving you wanting just a little bit more compared to SG1's a season too far (as much as I like Morerna Baccarin, it really was terribad). The reason it has a following is because it was good, the later iterations were not good (SG Universe and Origins), it will lose it's following if they keep making terrible sequels and spin offs. What we need is more original Sci-Fi, not comfort blanket spin offs.

Not every game is multiplayer, there's no need to even go online unless you're specifically playing multiplayer. There's been a recent trend of making single player games a multiplayer game of one, when you play a single player session you're still required to be online which means the single player part stops working when they turn off the servers.

Owning several old phones, this does not seem to be an issue with any of them.

Nor is it widely reported in Android circles.

Random restarts sounds like a hardware design problem, not a battery problem. Or just an excuse to deliberately hobble old phones because you haven't ponied up £1,000 for a new one in more than a year.

This is pretty much the only way to stop this... Make the companies financially liable. Full refunds for every copy sold.

This is why Stop Killing Games is so important, it starts with games as it's easy to dismiss that as "they're just video games" but if this kind of behaviour is accepted there, it'll slowly move to consumer and business software until the frog is well and truly boiled.

Obviously the switch from "loss leader on a scale the capital markets can barely absorb" to "losing money" is going to sting; but I'm curious if we'll see sneakier knock-on effects.

So long as they were losing money hand over fist the vendor does want to throw enough tokens at you to make you feel like you are having a good time; but as few as are required to do that since they lose money on every one. If they were breaking even or turning a profit the incentive would be to sneak as much spend and upsell in as possible; and it's well known that the verbosity/cost of LLM chatter is hard to predict; harder if there are multiple models and other complications being switched around in the background.

What sort of exciting little tricks will we see from vendors who actually make more if you use more?

"Bomb" is so 1991, these days we use Improvised Explosive Device (not to be confused with an IUD) or if you're really advanced, Contraterrene Device (CTD).

Blaming AI, especially as it's not Elon's AI is easy.

If American politicians really wanted to do something about shootings and suicides they'd look at introducing meaningful firearm controls, most notably penalties for misuse, stop glorifying guns and violence (fix the culture behind the shootings) and do something to help the mental health of Americans (starting with the bullying that has become endemic to American culture)... But that's all way too sensible where you can just blame the right AI for all the ills because shootings and suicides weren't a problem before AI or Altman skeezed onto the scene?

Right, guys. right?

Hey ho... just more thoughts and prayers then because that's been working fantastically so far.

Yes, but the "AI good, worker bad" narrative must be maintained. If they can blame remote work for something remotely bad they will.

Everyone knows that 10x engineers validate inputs and carefully manage dependencies; so clearly there's no risk of unexpected behavior.