I'm OK with the new path, as long as the FinTech companies are allowed the forward the data charges back to the consumer. It'd make a nice page on their website:
Access Charges by Bank
Bank of Assholes: 6.9%
Podunk FCU: 0.5%

There's nothing better than sunshine for reducing stink. I'd really love to see the same thing for Merchant fees for credit cards:
Credit Card Surcharge:
Visa: 4.3%
Mastercard: 4.1%
Discover: 6%
Amex: 10%
(Note that I've got no idea what the real percentages are)

>>> What do you mean by "investors"? VCs are the investors, or represent a private pool of investors.

By investors, I meant the "private pool of investors". Andreesen Horowitz claims $42 billion of "assets under management". How much of that is AH assets, and how much is "private pool of investors" assets?

>>> No. They are the investor buying shovels and pans up front for the miners for a percentage. They are not manufacturing shovels and pans, nor or they the merchant's selling shovels and pans.

For most VC firms, my belief is that they're selling shovels and pans TO THE INVESTORS, who are trying to get in on the gold rush. The startup companies are almost immaterial, other than they can be sold as a shovel or a pan. Most VC firms aren't paying their CEO from investment returns; they're paying their CEO (and the researchers, salesmen, and janitors) from Investor's money. Perhaps the economics changes after the VC firm has been around for 10 years and has successes under it's belt, but until then they're a middleman vulture, scraping money off the investor side and the investment side without necessarily having any of their own money invested.

Exactly.

You're absolutely right that an individual Venture Capitalist makes or loses money off their portfolio. Long term, their financial success is based on both luck and how well they can judge future success of a venture.

You're absolutely wrong in that generally a Venture Capital Firm, especially one staffed with non-successful professionals, is NOT focused on making money off their portfolio. They exist to take capital from investors and distribute it to new ventures. And, of course, they need a percentage of that incoming capital to pay for rent and salaries and bonuses because return from the ventures is years out, and eventually they skim a bit off the top of any ventures that actually make money (even though the firm itself may not have any money invested in the venture). They are the company selling shovels and pans to gold miners, not the gold miners themselves.

I've always told people in relation to "investment advisors" that if the advisors were any good, they wouldn't have a day job. I would take investment advice from Warren Buffett, not so much from the drone trying to reach me from Fidelity Investment Services.

Sounds like Venture Capital has the same problem - most of them make their money off of you, not off of their massive portfolio of successful venture investments. Kinda like There are venture capital firms that have shown good success over the long haul, but that ain't most of them. I'd invest with Andreesen Horowitz long before I'd invest with Affinity Partners.

is exactly the reason that I have all alerts silenced on my phone. I support the concept of Amber alerts, but when there are 20 different colored alerts all operating under the same umbrella, and when non-custodial parent issues get lumped under the same umbrella as "child snatched from the playground", I just don't want to hear about it anymore.

But it points out an issue that should be addressed. If I lived in an area with tornados or flash floods, I want a warning - but I don't want a warning aimed at people 10 miles away. We need to move away from the broadcast radio mindset, and into a "We know where you are, we know where and what the hazard is, we're going to inform the people who need to know about this".

I live in Phoenix, which has some summer thunderstorms, some quite spectacular. It's not uncommon for the NWS to issue a "flash flood advisory" covering 100 square miles. Frankly, I live on a rise 100' above the lowlands; if I have to worry about a flash flood, then I'm terribly late in building an ark. The County has weather stations in an array all over the city; the County has topographic maps and historical data about where water likes to go in heavy rains. Marrying those two to decide which ravines are going to (or are getting) filled should be easily do-able, as is notifying people in danger from those specific ravines. I want that alert, not the "sometime today it's possible that a thunderstorm will fill a ravine somewhere in the county" alert.

In the modern world, Right to Repair doesn't mean a whole lot without access to the parts necessary to do so.
Access to the parts doesn't mean a whole lot without access to the diagnostic, calibration, and other hardware/software tools necessary to make the unit work after installing the parts.

There is no way in hell that the US Government, and especially the DOD, should be buying any bespoke equipment WITHOUT getting a full delivery of the software and hardware necessary to repair the equipment. That doesn't mean that there can't be a service contract if the DOD believes that having a civilian contractor come aboard and repair an item is more effective than doing it themselves; but a CVN or an F-35 or an SSBN is going to find itself in places at times where doing it themselves is more effective, and they should be perfectly capable of doing so.

What do YOU think would happen if Ukraine simply capitulated three years ago when the Russians rolled in? How many more countries would be subjugated, men killed, women and children raped, in the name of Greater Glory to Mother Russia? Or do you believe that appeasing Russia would stop them.

Consider reviewing the Budapest Memorandum, Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, Ukraine in 2022.

And that's the problem with nuclear weapons.

As long as everyone with them is rational, and willing to accept defeat, they never get used. In a world without nuclear weapons, Putin's only possible response would be to redouble his war efforts - which, of course, may not be possible.

In a world with nuclear weapons, and an irrational actor facing defeat, an irrational act can have devastating world-wide consequences.

What civilization hasn't figured out yet is how to deal with an irrational nuclear weapons owner. Do you appease them every time they say "Hey, that country is blocking the view of the Black Sea from my summer dacha, I'm going to take it?", just to avoid any nuclear unpleasantness? That path leads to political darkness. Or do you oppose those territorial aggressions, and risk nuclear darkness?

Kill the penny. Kill the Nickel. Kill the Quarter. Kill the $1 bill. Kill the $5 bill. Kill the $10 bill.

Make the dime the smallest unit of change - it's already physically that.

Create a new $0.50 piece that's larger than the dime, and visually distinct. Perhaps make it multi-sided like many non-US coins.

Dump the quarter-sized dollar coins. Create a new one that's visually distinct from the retired (nickels, quarters, dimes) and the new $0.50 piece. And, no, a goldish surface finish is not sufficient after a couple of years of accumulated grime.

Create a new $5 coin, visually larger than a $1 coin.

Now, currency become $0.1, $0.5, $1.0, $5.0 coins, and $20/$50/$100 bills.

And please, for God's sake, don't do this in the next four years or everything will have Trumps gilded face on it.

He's absolutely correct.
There's nothing faster than a skillfully written, monolithic 'C' codebase with just a wee bit of assembly thrown in for those CPU-bound routines. Twitter could run on 1/4 the servers they use currently; I could do everything I normally do on my computer at home or work on a 10 year old Athlon II or Core i5 CPU.

BUT, there aren't enough programmers in the world capable of skillfully writing and skillfully maintaining all the services, features, games, entertainment, surveillance, etc. that we've come to enjoy in this world if they were all using 'C' with a wee bit of assembly (or maybe I'll let them use Rust instead to reduce the kinds of errors endemic to 'C').

Look, Case Insensitivity is a historical oddity, like stricmp() in C.

For programmers, ASCII was fast and simple. One character, one byte for programmers was fast and efficient when your processor ran at 0.3 MIPs (the original 8086; the keyboard controller in your current keyboard probably runs faster than that now).

Case insensitivity was a conscious choice - it was slower than being case sensitive, because every string compare had to start with a strupr() (or strlwr()) call, where CS didn't. But for users, a case-insensitive DOS or Windows 3.x worked the way they expected - when they looked for "financials.123", they were looking for a case-insensitive comparison. Could they have been taught that "Financials.123" and "financials.123" were different files? Probably, but that isn't what people were expecting. ASCII was the right choice in 1972 for C and case insensitivity using ASCII in 1981 for DOS. I don't recall what filesystems were CI in the 1980's and 1990's, but I'd guess it was more than just DOS and Windows 3.x.

The problem came in when the rest of the world decided they wanted to use computers in their native language and character sets, and the nightmare that was code pages transitioned to Unicode (first release: 1991, first Windows NT release: 1993).

Unix made the transition, because case sensitivity made it simpler - old code that treated strings as sequences of bytes would be almost correct for a Unicode string. User retraining wasn't particularly necessary - the "Unix Way" was to completely ignore that a keyboard had a "shift" key, so filename conversion to Unicode was fairly painless.

Windows didn't make the transition, largely because Windows had roughly 10 bazillion times more users, and less-savvy users, than Unix had. A conscious decision was made that backwards compatibility was more important than changing from a case-insensitive file system to a case-sensitive one - think of all the other compatibility decisions they made at the time to keep the DOS window functioning, and the Windows 3.1 subsystem working. Transitioning to a case-sensitive file system in Windows NT or Windows 2000 would have kept that OS line from getting any mind- or market-share.

Today? As an English-speaking US citizen, my quick-and-dirty one-off C code still uses ASCII because of it's simplicity, though I know my Python uses Unicode, which is fine because it does an excellent job of hiding it from me. I don't need to read thousand-year old Chinese documents, I don't deal with the Tower of Babel that is Europe. I don't have filenames on my computer that have diacritics, but I do like to CamelCase my filenames because I really haven't made peace with putting spaces in filenames, and CamelCase makes them easy to read. Case-Insensitivity means I can do that, and still find the files I want without remembering whether I CamelCased the filename or not.

But in the modern world, I agree with Linus. The way that character encoding has developed over the last 40 years suggests that Case Sensitivity is the proper way for the OS to handle filenames. I would argue that, from a human perspective, Case Insensitivity should be a built-in - when I search for "financials.123", the userland utilities and/or GUI that I use should offer me "Financials.123" as a alternative ("I didn't find "financials.123", but I did find "Financials.123", is that what you were looking for?"). The old-skool neckbeards will shout that if that's what I want, I should remember the correct CI flag for each individual utility to make it work that way, and the Cinnamon GUI requires that I click an icon to do so. Maybe when AI assistance becomes useful for navigating my computer, this will all get papered over.

How Microsoft would transition to a case-sensitive file system is beyond me. It's a legacy decision that they have to live with. Unix/Linux has their legacies that they have to live with also. If the computing world were as dynamic today as it was in 1980, it might be possible for both to eliminate those legacies.

As of today, you're right. Have you ever seen this happen where a company didn't have a 5-year plan to tighten the noose?

I give it a year before this workaround stops working, 2 years before the "grandfathered" disks lose the upgraded features, and 4 years before new non-branded disks don't work at all. The only question is, will Synology still be alive by the end of the 5-year plan?

You should have lost that argument.

It's a firm fixed price contract, with payments made at specific milestones. The actual contract, and the actual milestones, is not public information so there's always going to be some speculation involved in how much money is left on the contract that Boeing could get paid.

But, speculating here, getting Starliner certified to carry NASA crew to the ISS is something that stands out as perhaps the most obvious milestone possible. If there's a milestone payment associated with that (likely, IMHO), they'll get that if they ever get certified. They'll also get paid for each NASA mission that goes to the ISS. So, IMHO, you're likely wrong with "Boeing has been paid everything they're going to get paid for". They're not getting any more money until they meet the next milestone, whatever that is.

Exactly. There's no reason for your ROV to cut a cable, but there are plenty of things (like tapping, or placing explosives) that ROVs are good for. The question is, why announce an offensive capability that isn't particularly useful?