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Comment Re:Yeah tourists please stop (Score 2) 270

This is a proposed restriction on a program that lets people from a handful of countries come to the US without a visa. It doesn't impact people using a traditional visa.

It applies to 42 countries, including 32 of the 35 members of the OECD that don't have some other form of visa-free entry. These countries account from a little over a third of visitors to the USA and given that the OECD represents the largest economies in the world it's likely that their spending is disproportionately higher.

And quite honestly, if someone has spent the last few years talking about killing Americans or Jews, I don't ever want them to come here.

If they were only looking for people who were talking about killing people (of any nationality, ethnicity or religion), and they couldn't get that information some other way, then there might be some case for this. The problem is that all the evidence so far indicates that this is an administration which will be looking for and punishing people who happen to oppose this administration, even if they are highly supportive of America and Americans in general. What makes you think that this won't be abused once it's in place?

Comment Re:You said "cheap" and "Wifi", but... (Score 1) 147

I needed to have an internet connection for the camera to be installed, something that wasn't easy at the location it was needed.

Were you setting up using the app? Had you set up any other systems with the app previously? I have set up several Unifi systems using the phone app and Bluetooth without needing a functioning internet connection, but none of them were the first I'd installed.

Comment Re:You said "cheap" and "Wifi", but... (Score 1) 147

The unifi stuff leans heavily towards cloud, you can force it to do direct connections but its not the default and there are some limitations,

That's simply not true. Ubiquiti doesn't currently even offer cloud storage for the UniFi Protect. They do offer cloud connectivity back to your local storage, and they support archiving of local storage into Google Drive or OneDrive, but in the first instance the recording always goes to local storage. The main limitation is that it requires you to use their NVR products, but IMHO these are reasonably priced and they don't have any limitations about you adding your own drives to them, so you can source the bulk of the storage yourself.

Comment Re:The old auto makers are fucked. (Score 3, Informative) 254

Why do European companies not have this problem?

Generalising wildly, German engineers seem to be obsessed with manufacturing tolerances. Based on my experience disassembling and rebuilding German vs Japanese motorcycle engines, for as long as I can remember the manufacturing tolerances on parts made by German companies are just tighter. With thicker oils forming thicker lubrication layers you could get away with looser tolerances, but when you have to move to thinner oils the irregularities come back to bite you. If you've not had a company culture of tight tolerances forever then it's probably more expensive to tighten things up after the fact.

Comment Detection rate? (Score 5, Funny) 57

They found 26 cases out of just short of 13,000 staff, so 0.2% of the total. A quick internet search suggests that 1/3rd of the staff are admin/operations/lawyers and I suspect that at any given time at least 1/3rd of the rest are working through investigations and case documentation, so about half the total are probably working on a computer (rather than on the beat) at any given time. This suggests that they found somewhat under 0.5% of the desk staff doing this. Based on my pre-COVID experience of working in British offices, if only 0.5% of the staff were playing Solitaire, doom-scrolling social media or taking a tea-break and nattering about last weekend's football match then it would be considered a profound leap forward in productivity!

Comment Re:UK government will seek to retain the seized fu (Score 0) 35

RTFA. BBC reported that.

No. The article says:

"Some reports have suggested the UK government will seek to retain the seized funds."

The post I replied to said:

"Reports have suggested the UK government will seek to retain the seized funds to pay off its own debts,... "

It's normal for seized funds to be retained, and they are given to the CICA. It's highly unusual to use them for paying the government's debts.

Comment Re:UK government will seek to retain the seized fu (Score 4, Informative) 35

Which reports are these? Can you offer a citation rather than a vague accusation?

In the UK seized assets are returned to direct victims if they can be identified and if not they are used to fund the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, which provides compensation the blameless victims of crimes. Seized funds are generally not allowed to be used by the police (unlike in the USA) since legislators (rightly) believe that it would bias the police to be more inclined to seize assets.

Comment Re:The Age of Cheap Online Shopping is Ending???? (Score 3, Insightful) 258

Indeed. In fact it's about to get even better for the rest of the world. The production capacity in Asia isn't going away any time soon. Suppliers can try to slash their prices by a third to compensate for the tariffs going into the USA or they can cut them by 10%-15% and sell a load more to Europe, the Middle East and Australasia. The later outcome seems a lot more likely. Thanks!

Comment So, let me get this straight... (Score 3, Informative) 103

4chan is a US company that has been delivering services to people in the UK and getting revenue from that traffic. UK law says that if you deliver service in the UK and meet certain criteria then you need to verify the users' age. They didn't comply, and the UK said "If you continue to deliver services into the UK that don't comply with the law then we will sanction you with both fines and blocking your traffic." They said "Screw you" to the regulator. Now when Ofcom asks UK ISPs to block their traffic, Ofcom is an "industry-funded global censorship bureau" and "Ofcom's ambitions are to regulate Internet communications for the entire world, regardless of where these websites are based or whether they have any connection to the UK,"

They're having a laugh.

If they deliver service in the UK then the service delivered into UK needs to comply with UK law. It's pretty simple. It's not like there's no internet geolocation technology. Most of the other sites that are covered by this law have worked out how to deliver UK-specific age verification. It's not that hard.

Personally I think that the UK's new law is ridiculously misguided and broken, not to mention unlikely to achieve what it sets out to do, but telling a business that their service in the UK needs to be compliant with current UK law is not an attempt "to regulate Internet communications for the entire world". They are welcome to join all the other people who are lobbying for the law be repealed. In the meantime they need to comply or cease local service.

Comment The British are working on this too (Score 1) 20

Over in the UK apparently they are working on English Truly Open Neurals, known as ETON. Not only will these neural networks be exceptionally well educated but they will also have impeccable manners, although critics worry that they may occasionally be rather elitist and have a superiority complex. None the less, it is expected that more than a third of British Prime Ministers will use these models, despite protests from the Labour Party.

Comment Re:'murica proving to the rest of the world (Score 4, Insightful) 118

Indeed. Not only has Trump been playing chicken (and chickening out) on tariffs, but his reneging on the deal with he struck Canada and Mexico in his last term and his statements about not honouring the commitments America has to NATO have underscored the fact the any deal he is willing to strike is not worth the paper that its written on. American industry will suffer badly as a result. Why would you want to predicate any major, long term projects on a suppliers who might suddenly be involved in a trade war or change their alliances with your enemies? Trump said he wanted to reshape global trade, and he will. The problem for him (and the people of the US) is that America will loose out when everyone else is striking deals without them (and sticking to them).

Comment Baumol's Cost Disease (Score 1) 112

Aside from the regularly cited (and very real) bloat in administration in education, there's another important factor driving up education costs: productivity gains in areas like manufacturing and technology tend to drive up prices in services sectors like education and healthcare. When productivity rises in some parts of the economy wages ultimately end up rising across the board, but for sectors (particularly in services) where productivity can't rise as fast, those wage increases turn into real value price increases for those services. A hairdresser can't increase the rate of delivering hair cuts the same way that car makers or electronic gadget makers have increased their productivity, and the same goes for the productivity of teachers (or nurses, or firefighters). So even without the bureaucratic overload of extra administrators, the price of education would be rising compared to the price of "stuff".

One sliver of hope is that recent advances in AI might offer a way to increase productivity in education. If we can do that then's a chance to reverse some of these rises, especially if we can get rid of some of the administrators!

Comment Re:getting back? (Score 5, Informative) 201

And how many charging stops to drive it back the other way up the mountain?

One.

The dry weight of a Lucid Air Grand Touring is 2,360 kg. Add a couple of occupants at 80kg each then you're lifting 2,520kg up 1,300 meters. Gravitational potential energy e = ghm = 9.81 * 1300 * 2520 which comes out to just over 32.15 megajoules and very close to 9KWh. This is the baseline energy that is gained coming down hill and used going up hill. If we assume that the efficiency of the regeneration and the utilisation are about the same then you're going to gain less than this going down and use more than this going up, but the net difference is still going to be about 18KWh.

The nominal battery capacity of the Air Grand Touring is 112KWh, with the usable capacity probably several percent less, so you'll need about a 20% to 25% charge en route going back up the hill. Even if it's twice that, I don't think you're going to need to stop more than once.

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