So you don't need a nanny compiler. Fine by me, C and assembler were among the first programming languages I learnt.

But when you follow that up by "and here's our nanny memory leak checker instead..." and you don't notice the irony, I'm not sure if I want to trust you with my pointers if one redirect throws you off...

It's not a surprise but this sort of thing (along with the less consumer-facing; but also pretty serious, tariff burdens on obtaining manufacturing equipment) really emphasizes how counterproductive the "announce huge blanket tariffs based on some mixture of nonsense and a quasi-mercantilist-with-a-heap-of-bitterness theory of balance of trade" 'strategy', if you can call it that, really is.

If you want American greatness generally, or onshore manufacturing in particular, you are making things vastly harder for yourself by just abruptly making more or less anything that isn't already domestically manufactured harder and more expensive to get. Does Adafruit or Sparkfun's catalog run a bit into fairly casual nerd toys at the shallow end? Arguably. Does it also include a wide variety of bits and pieces that people who are most likely to be interested in entering the engineering pipeline as they grow up, along with people who are doing engineering and need a given bit or piece quickly and reliably, would definitely want? Indeed it does.

Are you going to win the future by making it harder for someone interested in robotics to get a PWM/servo driver board because it's on a Chinese PCB? Even if your desired end-goal is a 100% vertically integrated mine to customer production chain it's absurd to think that the most efficient(or even possible) way of doing that is by blanket restrictions on basically everything all at once. If anything (not unlike we've been accusing China of doing for some decades) you'd presumably want zero to effectively negative tariffs/other regulatory incentives on certain things precisely because you wish to develop capability in areas downstream of them.

It's only really in more or less purely frivolous consumption goods where just flatly increasing the cost of the foreign stuff isn't obviously self-destructive(still not necessarily good policy; but if football-watchers went from 65in TVs to 45in ones and more tailgating it wouldn't cause obvious injury to the football industry; while someone doing boutique electronics for specialist applications could easily go from viable to out of business if they can't get a PCB spun quickly or get some test leads nice and fast).

They have: the answer is "the explanation of how much energy it uses on the sticker with the energy star logo".

If the proposal is to just not provide that information anymore (or, worse, leave the gutted program in some zombie state where you can retain the style but ignore the now-deprecated test standards and put whatever numbers you want in there); what exactly are people going to be looking for?

Is everyone just going to become a rugged individualist with a set of electronic test equipment for best buy runs and a mass spec in the garage so you can verify heavy metal levels when you get home from the grocery store?

I think that there is an important distinction between 'government solution' in the sense of "the Ministry of Efficiency Shall Design All the TVs" and in the sense of "we can't expect The Market to decide if it's either legal or unenforced to just lie on the label".

'Market' solutions tend to absolutely require access to quality information. In its absence people can't really make decisions that align with their interests; and a lot of low-value or unequal party transactions make it either economically irrational or simply not feasible to be a 'sophisticated' buyer. If I'm a cranky electronics hobbyist maybe I value time with my test equipment at a negative rate because it's a hobby; and if I'm buying an entire datacenter I can probably afford to have my own experts to give the vendor's claims due scrutiny; but the random in the grocery store hoping that there won't be lead in their cinnamon can't realistically mass spec their way to information; and the guy in best buy staring at TVs has no meaningful ability to either verify their energy usage or hold the vendor to account if it turns out that, a year from now, it was actually different than represented(the situation is, if anything, significantly messier now that everything has a computer in it, often network connected, so the vendor has a lot more ability to just change things or implement complex anti-testing behaviors if they wish).

There's definitely a principled argument to be made that regulation of something like appliance energy efficiency should be around accuracy and honesty rather than "No TVs over 200w"; but any proposal that is 'let the market decide!' out of one half of its mouth and 'defang anything that risks providing customers information with which to decide' out of the other is quite likely to be a demand for impunity rather than a request to let price signals replace mandates.

1) break government
2) privatize what's left
3) profit

that's really it. they have zero care (the R party) for regular non-billionaire people. regular people need government. ultra rich are the ones who pay government to make laws that favor them.

I guess its not clear to everyone so it will be stated again: the R party is the robber baron party and they are not here to HELP anyone but themselves.

It's hard to argue with the idea that people pushing out low-effort nastygrams will also embrace bots if they prove either reliable enough or cheap enough to proofread; but I suspect that(at least with current likely suspects, it's possible that something less predictable will be unleashed) the effect won't be as dramatic just because of how much business process automation and separation of labor you can already manage, especially when you are just sending scary-looking letters to random little people rather than submitting stuff to a judge who may not appreciate your lack of effort.

The rules frown on purporting to be a lawyer when you are not; but they are substantially more permissive in terms of how thin you can spread your lawyer: even in respectable high end contexts it's quite normal for some, potentially much, of the writing to get farmed out to associates and paralegals unless the fancy partner's expertise is required; and in some sleazy boiler room operation there's not much stopping you from mostly using mail merge and the cheapest clerical temps you can find to turn whatever batches of questionably documented and dubiously collectable debt into letters, with the lawyers there to handle putting the templates together and appearing on the letterhead.

That said, I'd also be skeptical of how far this sort of service could go in redressing fights between significantly unequal parties: especially with things like the dodgy end of consumer collections the real killer isn't necessarily that they have a keen legal mind on the case and you don't(since this is often not true; and such situations are more likely to be disputes of fact rather than some sort of subtle argument); but that they, rather than you, are typically treated as the presumptively respectable party while you are treated as having the burden of disproving the allegation.

All the browser need do is exist to get Googlebux, but instead of putting their revenue into the browser and Thunderbird, Mozilla chose to enrich their buddy network on unrelated garbage.

There is no support burden remotely close to Mozilla revenue.

Mozilla failed to concentrate their resources on the browser and Thunderbird which is why they're not competitive.

It was not always thus but Google money removed any need to compete for market share.

Firefox used to be the default recommendation for new Windows installs with Internet Explorer used to download Firefox then ignored. It spread thanks to user advocacy but that was a long time ago.

You finally got it.

Yes, I'm shouting "beware, they are thieves" before they actually took something - because they are, in fact, well-known thieves. This is the thing that's called "reputation" (just adding that since you actually seem to be new to the planet).

If they've done it a hundred times before, it is very likely that they'll do it again. It really is that simple.