Paypal was never prohibited from becoming a bank. They remained not-a-bank because they believed it was a more profitable arrangement. They have now apparently changed their mind, and in my view they're many years late in that decision. Other startup financial services companies have been nipping at their heels harder and faster in the last couple years. Recent politics and are mentioned in the same story but it can not be concluded that these are directly related.

I've watched my kids play Roblox for extended periods, and I even join them for an hour every now and then. I didn't see anything particularly alarming, at all. I'm sure it happens but it seems very rare.

You can buy Japanese sim cards on amazon.co.jp which work great. I'm sure some or many of the Japanese telecom companies are rubbish, as most are across the world. However, sim locking in Japan is not required for all carriers.

NREL had a report released quarterly, until last year, with cost buildups. Unfortunately, NREL has now been renamed and that report discontinued for basically political reasons. https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy2...

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

It's important to note that over the last 15 years, cumulative U.S. inflation has been on the order of about 45â"55% depending on which exact months you choose and which price index you use. College prices have risen faster than inflation but everything is more expensive too.

The library is most likely benefiting from volunteer labor to run the program and take care of the machines. The university has to pay someone for that. Completely changes the way the services are offered since there are real costs of labor.

no problem.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

Web search is trending on a path similar to TV. At first, TV was free with no ads. Very quickly ads were introduced. Then came cable TV where you could pay and watch ad-free. Fairly soon after that cable TV had ads too. Then streaming did the same thing. The quest for every-increasing profits will have the same end result for paid search, eventually.

I'm thinking that all the GPS jamming and spoofing Russia is doing to try to mitigate drone strikes is the most likely factor. This would be a reasonable QA test case for Porsche to have missed.

Well there is a way to test this hypothesis. Placing the computer a couple dozen feet underground and repeating memtest a few times should do it. This is an interesting case and I look forward to an update in due course.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.