Well, the big problem is many employers are the ones forcing taxpayers to subsidize their employees. Most SNAP recipients work full time - Walmart is a famous employer who helps employees apply for benefits upon employment. In other words, SNAP benefits are going to Walmart - Walmart gets to mooch off taxpayers by not paying employees enough and relying on taxpayer programs to make up the savings in payroll.

Now consider what happens when those benefits were cut.

Western companies only interested in creating jobs overseas, and helping other nations with tax payers.

What happened to "America first"? :(

Effect of tariffs. If you're making a widget, you can make it in China and make it in the US. Because of US tariffs, making it in China is no longer an option. So you create jobs making the widget in the US. But what about worldwide demand? You could export it from the US, but because the US tariffs cause reciprocal tariffs, it's not cost effective to ship US made widgets to other countries. It's cheaper to retain your Chinese factory making widgets to sell to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the US customers pay for the US made version. It would be cheaper than the Chinese made part plus tariffs, but probably also more expensive than the Chinese made part before the whole trade war began.

Meanwhile US exporters are hurt because reciprocal tariffs but also by the fact that their customers may seek alternative suppliers for the product, which hurts the US company more because now their customers are choosing the competition. And those customers once lost, may never return having found an alternative.

it's why US tourism operators are worried because tourists are going everywhere but the US, and they may find somewhere else to be their holiday tradition.

Trade wars are not easy and there are a ton of unintended consequences "America First" sure, but that may also mean "Everyone but America" for everyone else.

Is anyone finding that the quality of Indian IT resources is getting even close to being comparable to US resources? My experience is abysmal.

Depends. The good ones don't tend to stay in India but emigrate to other countries. All the US did was basically chase them out of the US, and now they get re-hired outside of the US.

That's in character, sure; but what's the paper-thin excuse for that being a cogent policy idea?

The same excuses to impose tariffs because "DRUGS!" while pardoning drug kingpins. Or sinking boats because "DRUG BOATS" while again, pardoning drug kingpins and smugglers.

The excuse is that its pay to play. Those drug king[ins paid Trump for pardons. China pays Trump for chips. As long as you're paying Trump, you're good.

Keeping people employed just because is probably the reason the USPS is having the issues it already has. Cutting the workforce and cutting every other day of delivery could make a HUGE impact to their bottom line. Likely the same mail trucks could carry and deliver two days of mail every other day without needing to put more trucks on the road.

No, the USPS is having to fully fund pensions for people not born yet is what's causing the problems. If you look at the profitability graph it nosedives around year 2000 or so purely because Bush Jr and the GOP were trying to kill it by forcing it to fully fund pensions for the next 75 years or so, which includes funding pensions for people not born nor employed by the USPS.

Most companies aren't doing this which means if they go under, there goes all the pension funds. USPS pensions being fully funded means those people keep their funds when USPS goes under.

It's basically been a way to kill the USPS without killing the USPS directly.

Before this ruling came out, the USPS was really quite profitable, and those profits could've been used to fund the pensions until the obligation was met rather than force them to pay for pensions fully by going into debt.

The other problem with biodiesel is there isn't enough of it. The only reason it works right now is few people are converting used oils to biodiesel for their own private purposes. If you're doing it at an industrial level there just isn't enough feed stock available.

And it doesn't work too well in cold environments - you have to start the engine using regular diesel because biodiesel when cold is basically a cold gloopy fat blob and needs regular diesel to be thinned out.

Hardly. There's no memory manufacturers in any way restricting production to "manufacture this shortage". They may be price fixing (they have a history of that) but right now they are producing memory at full tilt.

And if you ask why they didn't invest years ago, can you please tell me tonight's winning lotto numbers since you are so good at predicting the future?

They are also not increasing production - because the past decade they've done so and gotten screwed over - prices spike, they increase production and then demand collapses, leaving a huge oversupply of RAM and them having to dump it for low prices. So they aren't producing anymore memory than they normally could.

Instead they're switching production to things like HBM needed for the AI chips and such.

Big screen and big sound. Maybe it doesn't mean much because you have a house in the suburbs, but if you're in an apartment (either because you don't want to commute, you want to live in a city, or it's all you can afford for housing), TV speakers are pretty much it because anything more will get you noise complaints.

Depending on your income and housing costs, you may be limited on how big a TV you can have as well.

So a theatre is pretty much the only place if you want that sort of thing.

Granted, I don't go out to theatres much anymore either - and I spent $35 on the ticket (one, for myself), mostly because I want the big screen IMAX, but it's a far drive. And the local theatres are regular screens which aren't great. I pretty much limit myself to one movie a year or so tops.

I believe part of the reason is the year 2038 issue. A while ago I remember seeing posts about the issues FreeBSD has/had with getting around 2038 on their system. IIRC, it was a huge effort.

*EVERY* UNIX and UNIX-like system has to deal with the problem. But it's got nothing to do with 32-bit systems, because OpenBSD and NetBSD have it working since 2012 on 32-bit systems. Linux since 2020 (Linux supported 64-bit time_t on 64-bit platforms already, but 2020 is when 32-bit systems supported it).

It's not a simple solution, but it's been done before on other systems. It's also why Linux has a bunch of system calls that are merely using 64-bit versions.

Windows NT used to give you a whole bunch of details when it hit a BSoD - NT4 bluescreens were wildly informative, but to the average user, completely useless. It was just a bunch of numbers that had no meaning to them or provide them with any pointer to what the problem was. It didn't help that many drivers adopted the 8.3 naming convention making it even more obscure.

Also completely useless because the screenful of information was there but you couldn't do anything with it - you couldn't print it or anything. Windows 2000 simplified it a lot but was still mostly useless - now instead of a screenful, it just showed the stop code with parameters and the module that triggered it. But again, mostly useless information.

The information was contained in the kernel core dumps = the critical bits in the minidumps that it creates that could be loaded into a debugger, or a full dump file. These were much more useful because you could do a post-mortem examination using a debugger with full symbols. (The data for the dump files was written to the swapfile - since the BSoD meant the kernel could not be trusted you couldn't trust the filesystem or disk block driver stack to be working, so the BSoD code would write the core dump to the known blocks of swapfile using direct disk access - it's why there are "text mode" drivers). The next reboot when the kernel starts and initializes the filesystem, before it starts swapfile it checks the swapfile for the dump and if it's there copies it to a new file.

But there were a lot of stop codes that were completely odd but the cause was hardware. There was one that basically said you had bad RAM, another one that would tell you your CPU was overheating. a third that would happen if your disk was dying, and some of the odder ones caused when your GPU was dying and causing PCI bus errors.

It was straightaway - if you see this error, replace RAM. If you see this error, check the heatsink. This error means your disk is dying. You never saw the errors for anything else.

The article doesn't say anything about heat absorption. I wonder if the fabric traps most of the heat associated with the light as well? I'm assuming it would.

Well, the energy absorbed by the fabric has to go somewhere - typically it's converted to heat. Granted, it could be highly reflective elsewhere in the spectrum - like it could take that energy and convert it to IR light so it doesn't get hot.

The bigger issue is physical releases. Netflix has a policy of no physical releases of their content. It's why many directors have stopped working for Netflix - they don't want to see their work "locked up" and unable to be enjoyed by people without a subscription. Maybe the odd director can enjoy a theatrical release but only because it's required for award consideration.

Also means that no movie is static and can be edited freely, like Amazon has with the James Bond movies. (Admittedly they are a product of their time, and if you didn't take that to account, they play completely differently now without the historical context. But still offensive or not, it's needed to study the historical context of the movie, not some cleaned up version that you can only get on physical media).

Long ago when Quicktime was dying because Apple abandoned it in the 2000s; the developer list had an email asking opinions about open sourcing quicktime. Apple should have open sourced most of it. MKV didn't need to happen. I certainly liked the ability to have reference movies that just worked and took no space.

MKV did need to happen. MKV is a free and open container format, made in a way that ensures it tramples on no one's rights (e.g., the lack of FourCC codes for identifiers).

MOV is still wildly popular in industry, and subsets of it are part of the MPEG4 standard - the MP4 file format is a subset (basically limiting what an MP4 file can contain since it's only really for h.264 video and a few audio formats).

The golden age was arguably when Netflix had the streaming monopoly and everyone licensed their stuff to them, which ended long, long ago.

Only because cable was still competition.

These days, if you believe Netflix wouldn't be just another cable company when they're the only streaming game in town, I've got a bridge to sell you.

They're still the market movers - ever notice Netflix jacks up their price, then all the other streaming services follow? Or how Netflix stops password sharing, then the others follow?

A garage door opener, thermostat, dishwasher, surveillance camera, vacuum cleaner -- or whatever other home appliance you care to name ABSOLUTELY NEEDS a cloud connection... really?
Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy, but christ alive .. getting really sick of this ad-fueled fuckery.

Depends, Maybe you are receiving a package and would like the delivery person to leave it in the garage where it will sit until you get home rather than on the patio. This would require you to be able to remotely open the garage and then close it again.

Thermostat you might want to control with an app and it needs cloud if you want to remotely access it (think normal user here).

Heck, sometimes you have HVAC and hot water systems that need to be remotely controlled as part of load management. Most utilities have found that such devices generally are no longer reachable after a year to the point my old company made a product for utility companies to use that didn't depend on the user having WiFi - it stuck to the meter box and provided WiFi for those devices. If the customer switched ISPs it didn't matter since the utility retained control.