Amateur. It's more like:
*drops to knees* KHAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNN!

And that is the assumption you made. The article specifically mentions "affiliates, parents, or subsidiaries” accounts. The way I read it, if you owe Apple money, Apple is not asking Epic Game Store for the money. If you have multiple accounts, Apple is not limiting withdrawing from the main account. Banks have done this where overdrafts on checking gets pulled from savings or other accounts. I would assume if the amount owed exceeds money in all accounts, then Apple would use a third party debt collector.

Where in the world did you read that Apple "can arbitrarily make up a number"? The article says that IF a developer owes Apple money, Apple can pull the funds not from the developer's primary account but other accounts the developer might have. For example if a developer has a separate account for two apps and one of them is in the red, Apple can withdraw money from the other account.

If I read the article correctly, Apple will go after debt that a developer owes them by withdrawing from other accounts that developer might have. If the developer has "affiliates, parents, or subsidiaries" accounts, then Apple will get the money from them. How is that a debt collector again which is normally someone recovering debts for a third party?

And no one said any of that. In the world today, the current EUV machines are made by one company in the world. It is ASML in the Netherlands. The US nor Japan produces them, and both countries have a long history with making lithography machines. The problem was the cost of R&D and the specific strategies to make EUV was successful only for one company. Making EUV machines is not an easy task that someone can do in their garage this weekend.

Can China copy everything ASML did? Sure. The issue is that it will take them a while to do so as part of the difficulty with EUV is that only very specific companies make the parts as EUV is on the cutting edge of technology. And as long as China is willing to spend huge amounts of money so that their machines are never profitable, they can do that.

The issue is you have taken China's word they have actually accomplished what they said they did. Personally, I don't believe them until I have seen it. For example, China proclaimed a breakthrough when SMIC made the Kirin 9000 processor for the Huawei Mate 60 Pro in 2023. The chip was a 7nm chip which all the "naysayers" said China could never manufacture. Except it was made using DUV not EUV. No one ever said 7nm was not possible using DUV. The main reason EUV was used was the smaller size meant low yields as not to be profitable and practical if DUV was used.

So the claim that China has made 7nm chips was technically true.

Meanwhile, the Alexa team is hoping to have a conversation with ChatGPT on how to successfully monetize Alexa.

The infection was already there. Anyone who'd invested in any mortgage derived securities was compromised because the underwriting and scoring process was fundamentally fraudulent. Securities are rated and, at least in theory, those ratings are supposed to reflect the degree of risk. But the scoring agencies essentially became captives of the folks minting the securities and just handed out great ratings like halloween candy.

The Fed and the money printing and all that -- concerning as it all was -- really had more to do with making sure the national banking industry and therefore the currency didn't fail. There was a moment there when it really felt like a financial 9/11... like everything could come crashing down all across the world as a result of something that happened in Manhattan.

It's just an anecdote, but I vividly remember the short-term credit markets freezing up and everyone collectively realizing that nearly every business in the country uses short term credit to manage cashflow so that they can decouple employee paychecks and infrastructure purchases from sales and client payments in terms of timing. Most people just didn't know that and, without credit to make the accounting process move fluidly, like half the country was looking down the barrel of "well, we'll pay you when we know we have money in the accounts."

It's easy to run the Fed down now, but we were one or two days away from a grim fable with an unhappy, bloody ending.

This all powerfully reminds me of the deals the big banks like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns struck back in 2006 and 2007. If you're too young to remember that particular shitshow, the mortgage industry was fundamentally toxic and a bunch of securities were created by mushing bad mortgages in with good ones so that the combination looked secure enough to invest in.

And then THOSE securities were subdivided up and repackaged into even more securities. And so on. And so on.

Bad debt ended up "infecting" the entire market such that it was essentially impossible to invest in "safe" mortgages and so, when the collapse happened, many of the banks found out that the bets they *thought* they were making to hedge their bets on the risky side of the housing bubble were, in fact, just MORE BETS on the risky side of the housing bubble.

At this point it's essentially impossible to invest in technology without investing in AI which means its very hard to bet against AI in the tech industry. And that feels very, very dangerous.

From what I know digital signage displays are a lot more than consumer TVs. They will last forever, but the down side is they are not great to watch content with lots of motion.

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

It was probably minimally profitable even with the Xbox 360 hardware issues. Still Xbox was a small part of MS so there was not a lot of profit pressure on them. Then MS started acquiring major developers. Activision Blizzard was a $69B purchase alone. Now MS has more profit expectations of Xbox.