I came across a project a while ago, Acurast, that is a distributed system of a quarter million smartphones, rented out as compute capacity. IIRC, the most common workloads are pretty lightweight, like web scraping. It's a good way to keep old phones (or phones with broken screens) out of the landfill, but I wasn't convinced that it would be competitive against what you can rent in the cloud.

And then chip prices went crazy.... maybe there is something to this phones-as-compute-resources idea after all.

...a new corporate name.

Jeebus Christmas, what drunken Scrabble game did "Kyndryl" come out of?

Maybe GitHub sucking will inspire devs to see the benefits of not only having distributed source control (git), but also distributed code collaboration. Radicle is one such project. It's open source too, so if it starts sucking, it can be forked.

Traffic is largely caused by on ramps and exits. A limited access highway with exits spaced similarly to those of long-distance rail would have less congestion. And the whole thing should be HOV-only, to increase throughput.

Moving to Gitlab or another centralized collaboration system is possible, but it's still centralized with all the baggage that includes. Maybe it's time that -- like the source control system itself -- the collaboration layer on top of it is also decentralized. Radicle is one alternative; are there others?

Let's check commodity prices over the past 5 years:

Corn: down
Oats: down
Rice: down
Wheat: down

Milk: down
Cheese: down

Coffee: up, significantly
Sugar: down
Cocoa: up

So the staple commodities prices over the past 5 years have dropped, and that's in light of 20% inflation in that time period. Coffee prices have surged (as have cocoa, though they're down as of late), but land buyers for data centers aren't surveying land in the tropics.

You may be spending more on food, but I don't think it's because of North American farmers. Processed food, food away from home, and imported food would have other contributing factors to their increase in price.

Shoulder surfing. It's a thing.

Huh? The tax burden of those with the least is very low or negative.

The solo 401k may be a "quirk" but isn't a loophole. Self-employed people are required to pay both the employee and employer portion of OASDI tax and medicare tax, so why wouldn't they be allowed to contribute the employee and employer portion for a 401k? And a solo 401k is available to any self-employed person; it's not exclusive to the already rich.

USPS delivers to every mailing address, but not to every physical address. USPS has been using cluster mailboxes as a cost-saving mechanism for some time. There are also "Group E" PO Boxes, which the USPS provides (without charge) to those physical addresses to which it will not deliver.

In other words, the Universal Service Obligation is satisfied by having a "drive here and pickup your mail" policy. I expect a private company would offer the same.

According to the article, the offer is $4000 for a new or used EV for drivers in CA, CO, MA, or NYC. In MA there are decent used Model 3 LRs going for $22k. Additionally, MA has an EV rebate program for rideshare drivers. So: $23k-$4k-$2.5k = $15.5k. That's an attractive price, especially if you're a driver in need of replacing your ride soon. It's less than a used Kia K4 of the same age.

People working to keep the value of the money they earned is, in fact, good.

As for paying an "unknown" person in an "unknown" country as an intermediary... isn't that how international transactions work? Do you know the people at Western Union? Do you know which country the SWIFT servers are located in? Or which routers you use to connect to a bank's website?

The fact is, workers abroad found a solution to remit their earnings back home, cheaply and effectively. That's good.

The company may have foreign owners, but the company operating in your state is still under the jurisdiction of the state regulator.

If your state is "deregulated," then the power company provides transmission, but not generation, to its customers. In that case they bill you the supply cost based on what the market is offering.

If your state is not "deregulated," then the power company is providing both transmission and generation to its customers. In that case the state regulator will define the allowed markup on the generated kilowatt hours they supply.

True for many messaging apps, but not all!

Session and SimpleX don't use phone numbers or email addresses as identifiers, which greatly limits inbound messages from unknown senders.

Echostar's market cap may only be $8B, but its enterprise value is > $30B. Market cap is just the sum total of all the shares outstanding. This is what a buyer could theoretically take over ownership of the company for. But for a heavily-indebted company like Echostar, the debt obligations are significant... $8B may buy you the company, but it also buys the obligation for all the debt.

You just said it: buying reputation. By adding cost to the system, a hurdle has been added to weed out a significant portion of bad actors, because spamming then costs money.

The reason phone scams took off in the 1990s is because the cost to make calls dropped to basically zero. And numbers are easily spoofed, so verification isn't easy.

With an identity that can't be spoofed, and takes time to become valuable, a lot of the low-end spam would disappear. Either because the spammers would need to spend years developing reputation, or because they'd need to pay for stolen identities. There would still be spam, but less of it.