See, they found a way to get the support of the ones profitting from it.

The story makes pretty clear that they've been working this a long while, before at least the current hyped LLM was available.

To the extent "AI" might even play a role given their timeline, it was stuff that was pretty useless. People tried unleashing machine learning on these sorts of records and it just didn't do much.

Sounds like it's just a run at modernizing records keeping and access, which is fine.

The real problem with C is that it doesn't have any built-in support for strings. Everyone is forced to fake it with char-arrays, which aren't quite the same thing and require very careful handling. The problem with that is, everyone has their off days, and so everyone who does string-handling in C eventually ends up shipping string-related bugs that introduce security problems.

Yes, but for a wealthy person, this is a much tinier fraction of their wealth.

The fact remains for someone under the threshold of the standard deduction, the property tax is something they have to pay that they cannot deduct, but a landlord could.

As I said, it's deductable without regard to the standard deduction. You can take the standard deduction *and* the property tax deduction but only if you are a landlord. I don't know how you decided to say "No you can't deduct that, it gets deducted"

A common person is somewhat potentially in posession of hundreds of thousands in house value. They are relatively less likely to have that much in stock except maybe their 401k, which is totally different.

Yes, there's sales tax. Ordinary income gets taxed that way on top of income tax. The leveraging unrealized gains as a loan is the most famous loophole, re-upping through re-borrowing at payoff and juggling that until death where there's a much more favorable estate tax.

The counterpoint is that the valuation seems to be a fiction when it could represent a liability, and a real thing when they want to, say, take out a loan against it.

It's awfully convenient that it is selectively fictional.

Note that for more humble "wealth", folks are taxed. If you own the house you live in, even if you are not using it as a financial instrument but just a place to live, you get taxed on the unrealized "value" of the house. I don't get to say the market value of my house is a fiction since I'm not selling it.

So we have a double standard, rich people wealth is selectively fictional with respect to tax burden, common person wealth is very much considered real for taxation purposes.

Even wilder, if you live in your house, your property tax is subject to the standard deduction, which means folks generally don't get a deduction for it. If you own a house that you rent out to someone else, the property tax you pay is not subject to the deductible, and you can deduct it. The tax system rewards landlords more than homeowners.

It seems that either you assess a property tax on net worth analogous to what is imposed on common folk or at *least* tax loans against such assets that have nothing to do with paying for that asset.

Rather than guillotining anyone, the solution ought to be regulating the growth-rate of data centers so that they don't eat the economy. There's no reason to allow them to grow "as fast as possible" when it's not even clear how useful they'll be long-term. Unregulated capitalism leads to violent boom/bust cycles which cause economic pain.

The flying system seems to be the same one used in Thunderbirds.

I think at one time they did say they had antigravity of some sort. Apparently all it can do is make the ship weightless, and you need rockets in order to make it move around or change it's velocity.

The moon base set, as well as a lot of the models, were built for continuing the show UFO which was pretty successful at the time. That however got cancelled in the USA, and they had to come up with some new idea that reused the sets. That led to this strange story...

Every computer manufacturer would love to have margins like Apples', and would raise their prices in a heartbeat to get them, if they could. You can call that corporate greed if you want, but it's also standard capitalism.

The more pertinent question to ask is: why is Apple able to command a premium, without losing sales, while other computer manufacturers cannot do the same?

The standard Slashdot answer will be "because Mac purchasers are idiots", but I don't think that is the reason. I think it's because Apple is able to sufficiently differentiate its products from those of its competition, such that customers don't make their purchasing decisions based on a dollars-per-megabyte analysis. If Macs were sold with Windows and featured a consumer-gaming video card (like most every other PC in the world), it would be different, but Apple is the only (legal) source for a MacOS-running computer, and its one of the few providers of a unified-memory architecture for local AI execution. Until it gets some direct competitors, that gives it the ability to name its price.

It's cheaper in the short term to get going. Methods without the lock in tend to be a bit more expensive up front. Most businesses are looking only at the current quarter without regard for the longer term. Buying is cheaper than renting only after some period of time, and that period of time is nearly always longer than a quarter.

Also, they have established their way as 'the' way for any *serious* business to do things. So management doesn't want to be seen as failing to do 'the' thing.

While true, you trade the VMware problem for a vendor that actively wants you to stop using your preferred product and start renting from azure instead.

Unless you are all in on azure, Microsoft is a dubious choice as a virtualization solution.

Orbital Factories are unlikely to employ very many human workers.

For used cars, at least, I would like to test-drive the actual one I am buying. It is not clear from the description whether this is possible though.

Peak capitalism should at least succeed commercially. This looks more like a bad idea that will sell maybe a dozen units and then be forgotten. So it remains faithful to the spirit of Commodore's business model at least :)

It works with subsidized phone plans. So not sure what you are trying to get at here.