Paypal used to be a useful tool that did useful things. Now it's just a way for rich people and con artists to extract money from others who apparently don't know better. It's infuriating how many nonprofits are losing truck loads of cash to paypal as the fees continue to climb. The ones I'm involved with switch to Zelle a while back for the majority of all transfers and that has been a huge step in the right direction though of course not without its own set of tax weirdness.

I suppose the can run a Earth's Eye ride and people can fly up and down over and over. They can sell tickets and launch famous people based on their anatomy in groups.

Does BO actually have any real plans of being more than a publicity stunt company? The whole Bezos launched famous women he wants to bonk stunt really ruined BO for me. Where are the flights showing progress towards living like the Jetsons? He sells carnival rides rather than scifi.

What will happen first, Musk takes full ownership of Mars or BO launches a meaningful mission.

What about the middle income earners. This has nothing to do with the middle class. The middle class would increase birthrate and lower the age their women get pregnant. But it would require long term guarantees to allow middle class people to change their life plans over it.

Middle income are "poor but we don't know it. We live by budgets but don't have enough to plan far ahead". This accounts for much of the US population. For them $1000 a month means feeding their child fresh vegetables rather than frozen. Fresh vegetables and proteins means major societal changes over time. $1000 a month could mean one less hour of overtime each day and an extra hour using an oven rather than a microwave.

My niece who I would give the world but she'd refuse it is one of these people. She lives on the edge of poverty but does it so she can cook her son's food and help him with his homework properly. She works overtime every other week when her son is with daddy and she scrapes up enough to dress him nicely and visit Legoland in the summer. $1000 a month would utterly change her world.

So, where are the stats on those people?

Everyone has watched what they are going to watch six times now and it's boring. New titles are just more of the same shit. Many of us search for old titles but they rarely have them or they have a Dwayne Johnson remake of it... and that's confusing as shit when it's a Bronte sisters story.

Netflix's catalogue is ok if you're into .... Nope, I have no way to finish that sentence.

I check maybe once a month, but I'm utterly burned out on big streaming content.

I don't watch educational programs on YouTube because it's better than Netflix. I just can't find anything interesting on Netflix I haven't already seen over and over.

Isn't this record getting old.

Stop at Spyware. Adding Chinese to it just makes you sound like you like US, Russian, Korean, Israeli... Spyware better.

Haha... In Epic's case, maybe your racist nonsense flipped on you.

Before, Epic installed low quality Spyware that hogged system resources and won't let you be spied on without waiting for slow massive updates to their Spyware. But now there is high quality Chinese Spyware and my PC is so much faster now!

That sounds a bit circular there. The argument is to get the newest hardware to run the newest software, but the newest software is specifically written only to run on the newest hardware - actual benefits of the hardware be damned. Certainly Sony and Microsoft wouldn't be selling these newest consoles if there wasn't money to be made doing so (regardless of where the profit actually lies for them).

It's just a hugely diminishing return at this point from my perspective. 2nd generation consoles -> 3rd generation consoles was a tremendous leap. 3rd generation -> 4th generation was a tremendous leap as well. 4th generation -> 5th generation was a bit less of a leap than before. 5th generation -> 6th generation was still significant but still smaller than before. We're now in the 8th and 9th generation of consoles, and not only do many people find the 8th and 9th generation titles indistinguishable from each other, many people have a hard time seeing benefits of even the 9th generation over the 7th generation.

Obviously the whole bit still makes a ton of money. Obviously folks don't care what I think of it. I'm going to say it anyways. Maybe I'll go yell at a cloud after lunch.

I'll start by saying I've never owned a console from Microsoft or Sony. I've seen them, I've seen game demos in stores, etc, but I've never owned one.

To me as one random consumer I fail to see the drive to upgrade from PS4 to PS5, or from the previous XBox to the newest. The games don't look that different. For that matter, it doesn't seem that the two consoles are really offering much difference from each other either. Both consoles are primarily hawking the newest Quake look-alike, or the latest professional (or college) sports titles. I see very few games for either that don't fit into one of those categories.

In other words my argument here is that they have sold to their core market already, and the demand has dissolved for the rest of the public. Even if we ignore the cost, the benefit is no longer clear to many people. Why upgrade to the newest console, other than to say you have it?

About 25 years ago, I was at a bbq where I spent the evening chatting with this guy named Lars Knoll. Even though I was busting my butt with my team to develop the Opera for Linux web browser, this guy had been hired by TrollTech after he had developed something called Konquerer which was becoming the default HTML rendering engine in the KDE project. He wrote the whole thing on top of the KDE libraries which were painfully slow. He rendered text and for controls using the KDE objects which were rarely more than Qt objects with a little KDE specific stuff on top. I remember thinking "there's no point thinking much about this because there's no chance it could compete with a real browser like Opera".

Shortly after, I was in Cupertino sitting across from a strange product manager type. His name was Tim Cooke. We were discussing developing the default web engine for this new Mac OS X project which was coming along. We would have to develop for Carbon because Apple hadn't implemented Objective C++ yet and we were a C++ shop and we couldn't use half the developers in the company to make a C abstraction layer for Cocoa. We came to an agreement and Apple sent us a palette full of the latest G4 macs and screens. I remember fighting over the 21" screens like children. We had an idiot project manager who insisted that we implement the browser the way Adobe was demanding. It didn't matter that we were pretty much the "experts" on making cross platform embedded browser engines. He was like "Adobe said it... it must be done this way... they are gods".

Well long story short, while we were implementing a crap Carbon based browser engine using crap tools from Metrowerks instead of the good Apple tools (which weren't that good yet). Apple put together a team which abstracted the KDE libraries and built bindings to C and then Objective-C/Cocoa. And they abstracted out everything that was platform specific otherwise from KHTML (Konquerer's underlying html widget) and wrapped it in a Cocoa wrapper and a Carbon wrapper and shipped it as Webkit and Safari. And man did it suck.

Who would have ever imagined that Lars Knoll's half assed KDE web browser would have eventually become the defacto Web standard and the default web browsing engine in every operating system... including Windows... except the strange 5 user corner case operating systems.

Don't bash a project like this. It has value. I immediately considered that I have had many cases in recent times where it could have been of value to me. That said, I wouldn't run a C based web browser engine ever. It's not that you can't write a good web browser in C. It's just that it's the wrong tool for the job. At 160,000 lines, it's a small job to port to something else. When JavaScript evolves into a JIT and the JS runtime is thunking the heck out of the DOM, then it's pretty much no longer an option. Oh, and someone will think it's a good idea to implement proper form controls. That's an insanely massive project, especially when adding WebGL as well. If this browser core catches on, which unfortunately due to the license, I don't expect it will, it will likely be 5 million lines of code almost overnight.

Yeh, no.

Three major events started "trade wars" and the government propaganda anti-China rhetoric.

1) 5G happened and Huawai was the only company with a full 5G implementation including millimeter wave and SA mode on release. Ericsson was 2-3 years behind. Nokia was 6. Huawei could deliver on day 1 and they cost much less because neither Sweden or Finland are ... well, they are terrible at competing. They simply expected China wouldn't be in the competition because... Why would they be. So, they were confused because they never had to actually compete against a company who actually did a good job.

Keep in mind, by now, nearly $2 trillion has been spent building 5G networks. Money to Sweden and Nokia recirculates. To China, it's horded and weakens the US.

2) Apple evaluated CXMT as RAM suppliers and YMTC and certified them as good enough for Apple to trust in their products and with their reputation. The US slammed the door shut on that. They are still making up excuses for why as there were no legitimate ones except that if those two companies get a foothold, the entire world semiconductor commodity trading market would collapse. As a result, non-Chinese companies can't legally license their tech to CXMT or YMTC so those companies operate patent free. But other companies have to pay license for their tech. This allows CXMT and YMTC to sell RAM and Flash for half the price. If the US lifts sanctions, in 3 years or less, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron could be considering bankruptcy of their RAM divisions and CXMT could aggressively dump RAM to collapse the value of the patents.

3) China focused on brands. Before Chinese brands happened, buying expensive Chinese products was a high risk, Huawei, Xiaomi and others started legitimizing Chinese premium brands. This made it so buying an $80k Chinese car was ok because it wasn't cheap Chinese no name crap.

The money floods to China and they invest in One China by spending obsessively on education and R&D. They raised 800 million people out of poverty so far. They know every yuan spent in China is worth it. They invest massively in Silk Road because they don't think 4 years at a time. Building infrastructure across Asia, South America and Africa will pay them back massively.

The one thing which will cause China's greatest growth will be when they start opening Chinese universities to the masses. It will be way bigger than any other Silk Road initiative. And it will devastate the US economy. The US cannot afford to lose access to the world's top talent and can't afford to lose control of who gets an education and who doesn't.

Did you know that China's defense against American anti-Chinese propaganda is simple pro-China marketing? Which do you think is working better long term globally?

There are people who see what's happening and prepares for the changes. There are fools who make idiotic comments like yours.

I can't recall the last time I ate a burger at McDonald's that tasted better than the wrapper it was served in. A while ago I tried the McRib as well and was left wishing it had stayed in the 90s.

It's possible that this article is less than honest on the matter, but it certainly appears that Trump had a license in NY issued at least as recently as 2012 .

Where are all the stories about all these good cops referring the bad cops to the DA for charges & testifying against them? These should be numerous, considering how many members of law enforcement are out there.

He would only ask it for things that result in an improved situation for him, personally. There is nothing at all for him to gain by seeing lower gas prices. He hasn't bought gas himself in many years - and will never have a reason to buy gas again for the rest of his life - so the price is completely irrelevant to him. If the price fell and the MAGA party lost part of congress he would still blame it on other people. If the price stays the same and the MAGA party loses part of congress he'll blame that on other people as well.

It's easy to reach that conclusion if you have never been active in a party. The democratic party does have a good local ground game that is run by volunteers who actually have beliefs and principles. The problem is that at the end of the day the candidate who wins in the one who can pull in the most money, and that's true no matter what. Where do you see a situation where an independent candidate can pull in enough money to win an election? The message is important, but getting the message out is what brings in votes. Just as the democrats need a more coherent message than just "we're not Trump", an independent needs a better message than just "I'm not a democrat or a republican" - and they need backing in order to get that message out.

There have been some democratic candidates who have been able to get some local traction without taking special interest money, but that's only possible if they had a large war chest of money ready before they announced their candidacy. An independent would face the same challenge.