If, at this point, it's not being upgraded, it's because the users are demanding free labour.

Like I said, if it's important to you, it's a cost of business, and needs to be paid for.

Welp, then the users can pony up the cash to have the changes made.

If your embedded industrial systems are accessible by 'nation states,' the state of your patching isn't the issue, nor is it going to prevent exploits.

Oddly enough, the software already running on those controllers won't simply disappear, and the last working build will also still be available.

Well, a lot of them are willing to act as if they believe it which often amounts to the same thing.

But some, I think, believe The Donald and other conspiracy theories because during Covid I heard about people who got Covid and went to their deaths saying things like, 'I am not dying of Covid. Covid is not real.' That's the message they chose to send to their families. Not 'you should get the vaccine and avoid crowded spaces.' Is that not a True Believer?

It's a nonsensical claim without stating what they were getting paid. Generally silicon valley engineers are paid a LOT for a high level of commitment.

I don't deny this is bad news and signals an incipient recession. But what about credential inflation? The number of college graduates has nearly doubled since 2000:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Feducationdata.org%2Fnumb...

Have to wonder if demand has kept pace with that huge increase in supply.

People are always talking about how great college students had it in the 1960's. But you have to realize that was a very small, select (not necessarily by merit) population of college students back then. Grant some privilege to everybody, and it tends to dilute the value of it.

First, I think your recollection of last year's election is a bit hazy. Biden was not on the ballot on election day.

But secondly, you cannot deny that Trump has a lot of really adamant supporters who would vote for him over anybody else you can name. Not grudgingly. In fact they automatically believe anything he says, which is quite a feat.

Yeah.

Fundamentally, you can take any living human being, and find something 'neurodivergent' about them.

That kid twirling their hair while reading? Stimming, clearly. That kid who would rather go outside and play than read a book? ADHD, clearly. That kid who'd rather read than play football? Social anxiety, obviously.

When I was a kid, 'autistic' meant you flapped your arms, and screamed when somebody turned on the lights wrong. Behavior that nowadays gets labelled as 'ASD' was..weird. Awkward. Shy. Introverted.

Honestly, I think we give too much accommodation in this day and age; kids don't get taught that sometimes, they need to manage their behaviors and bend to the expectations of the world, and they get rudely shocked when the real world doesn't bend over backwards for them.

Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child, and all that.

China has reached a kind of crossroads where they need some kind of transformation.

The usual answer being that China needs to increase internal consumption, becoming more of a consumer-oriented economy.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcarnegieendowment.org%2F...

What I don't understand is why this is hard to do. Don't people love to spend money and increase their standard of living? Better food, nicer transport, more clothes. Then Uber Eats and a couple jet skis and a big towing vehicle. As an American the, concept of people not wanting to join the rat race, or being too principled to do so, is really foreign to me.

If they win any sizeable market share, their prices will go right up.

I don't think that is an issue. If the prices become uncompetitive then someone else (even Apple) is free to step in and offer a cheaper alternative.

The whole reason Apple got away with charging so much was because they set the App Store rules so no-one could offer an alternative.

I'm not up on this but what are you referring to? It doesn't look like they're jacking up the price on any hardware they were already selling at a lower price.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nintendo.com%2Fus%2Fwh...

Raising prices on existing hardware is pretty rare in tech. Moore's outlaw?

Games, ok, that's a labor-driven thing. Nobody thinks the cost of the dvd media or download bandwidth are driving the price.

It looks to me like if you set your desktop to a solid color the 'dumb' way - with a small (e.g. 2x2) bitmap of the color you want and let it get scaled or tiled - you would not get the delay.

Disinfo bots yes - but how about marketing? Virtually the entire web is this same experiment, except to sell stuff. Collecting demographic (including political leanings) and puchasing info to present the most persuasive message to individual potential customers - from simple ad placement to custom text - is a many-billion-dollar business. Maybe trillions? Sounds hyperbolic, but that's what drives google, facebook, twitter, the lot.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or not.

As I point out, the importer brokers the fee, in that they're the ones that remit it to the government, yes. But they immediately pass that cost on to the consumer, as you say, rather than eating it as a cost of doing business.

So while the tax is assessed to the importer, it is a defacto tax on the consumer (specifically, to encourage them to buy non-tariffed products) rather than a cost to the foreign manufacturer, or to the middle-man importer.