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.

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.

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 :)

At this point, yes. It's the only way they can deter the US and Israel from attacking them.

Murdoch became a US citizen four decades ago (in 1985) so he could expand his media presence in the US. He's been one of you since long before this site existed. The most recent iteration of the media conglomerate News Corporation (since 2004) was incorporated in Delaware with headquarters in New York, with the US media assets becoming 21st Century Fox in 2013 (the Australian media assets were spun off as News Corp, but they don't have significant US presence). You can't complain about Fox being "foreign" at this point.

I think you're right as far adults go -- adults are having fewer children because children are unaffordable.

Teens, OTOH, were almost never making a conscious decision to try to conceive children anyway -- if they got pregnant, that was an unintended side effect of having recreational sex. So if the teenage fertility rate is falling, the most likely explanation is that teens are either having less sex, or they are using contraception more effectively (or both). It's quite plausible that teens are simply spending less time in each others' physical proximity, and therefore having sex with each other less often.

Trump ordered the immediate surrender of Iran as well. What Trump commands and what Trump is competent to actually make happen are two vastly different things.

I mean, we could, but when the total expenses for building and running a solar farm are less than just the ongoing cost of buying more coal for an existing coal plant (never mind the maintenance or environmental remediation costs), that's almost literally lighting money on fire. It takes a pretty dedicated idealogue to hold out against the capitalist temptation of making more money solely to show the libs who's boss, and anyone who does so is likely to find themselves replaced by someone else who can "better maximize shareholder value". Hence the shift; even Trump can't stop an idea whose time has come.

Read your .sig

Maybe I don't read the Zeitgeist as well as I should, but AFAICT anything AI-related is seen as extremely uncool these days (at least, outside of certain tech-topian circles). So if Visa thinks "Adopting AI means people will think we're cool", I suspect they are in for a surprise.

It's more just a case of Rei frequently talking about things she only has the most superficial knowledge of as though she's an expert, then somehow getting multiple comments modded up, presumably because people trust the confidence. But it's just Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

If the only goal is producing electricity at the current minimum price per kWh, then you have a good point.

OTOH if you also have a long-term goal of figuring out how to effectively design and build fusion reactors, then it's worthwhile to build them as best you can even if wind is currently more cost-effective.

As for why you might have such a long-term goal, I can think of several reasons:

1. Future fusion reactor designs might be much more economical to build and run, once enough hands-on experience has been gathered to make them so
2. Fusion reactors could be used in situations where wind power isn't available (e.g. space exploration)

French "faible" is cognate with English "feeble", not "fable". Strangely enough, "fable" means the same thing in French and English.

How embarrassing. At least it wasn't in security-critical software.

Wut? Performa desktops were all 68K or PowerPC. The only non-Apple notebooks remotely close to them were the PowerPC-based ThinkPad 800 series, which were rare, expensive, and not really "PCs" in the conventional sense, as they couldn't run regular x86 PC operating systems.