Either way, the point remains that you would typically expect that if 3% of people are the sorts of people tempted to commit crimes and you have 100 people, then 3 of them are tempted to commit crimes, and if you have 200 people, then 6 of them are tempted to commit crimes. Larger governments, assuming all else is equal, should have proportionally more criminals. Therefore, having more people convicted of corruption does not prove that the government is more corrupt, but rather, proves that the government is bigger, which is just stating the obvious.

It's not. Kodak sold a pile of 1000 odd patents to a consortium of tech companies for something like half a billion dollars. It was the accumulated bullshit of thirty years of "transferring a digital image via digital computer network on a Tuesday" type stuff, plus some actual innovation, much of it in algorithms, mixed in.

Hacky: the first of pretty much any gadget is going to be a pile of junk on some engineer's desk. So long as it fits on a desk.

Why secretive? He took an image sensor invented at Bell Labs and manufactured by Fairchild and used it to make an image. Secretive from his bosses maybe, since he managed to put Kodak out of business.

And aging U.S. equipment is a lot better maintained and newer than what's left of Russia's aging equipment.

Per capita? Assuming equal levels of corruption per capita, you would expect California to have three times as many charges per year as Illinois, twice as many as New York, and four times as many as New Jersey.

Never mind. I already know the answer. Per capita, California is one of the least corrupt states in the country, ranking at number 34 out of 50 (source).

Using corruption conviction rate per capita, Arizona is #9 in corruption, behind only Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, and Alabama.

Fun fact: Of the ten most corrupt states, six are red states, two purple, two blue. Of the ten least corrupt, three are red states, three purple, four blue. Statistically, you would expect 3.4 blue, 1.8 purple, 4.8 red. Interpret that as you will.

I mean, you can massively increase your water supply and reduce global warming all at the same time by covering the entire length of the aqueducts with solar panels.

And water isn't scarce and dwindling. It's just not local to that area. We have almost infinite amounts of water ready for desalination. Nothing prevents us from having as much fresh water as we could ever need other than us not being willing to spend the money to build desalination plants. Heck, we might even be able to do it passively with solar stills.

Not inherently. Some unions do put in specific rules about specific job levels having specific pay, but not all. It just depends on what the union demands in their negotiations. A more reasonable approach would be to demand a certain minimum amount of wage increase each year. Even in that situation, if management isn't willing to give merit-based increases because the total dollar amount including the mandatory minimum for everyone else adds up to too much money, then it could still have that effect, of course. Either way, rigid pay rates aren't a hard-and-fast requirement of union workplaces.

Some union shops also have rules mandating that nobody do anything that is someone else's job. While theoretically intended to prevent consolidating and firing people, those sorts of rules often end up making life miserable by limiting opportunities for advancement and career growth. But again, not every union does things like that.

The real problem with unions is that they are basically doing what the government should be doing, were governments not hopelessly pledging fealty to industry. But because unions are too close to the problem, they see only the employees' side of things, and over the long term, their demands usually end up outpacing practical limits, and companies close the plants and move workers to another country. This is not to say that they would not have eventually done that anyway, but unions often exacerbate the problem and accelerate the job loss.

If unions focused only on improving working conditions, limiting working hours, requiring reasonable minimum standards for termination, requiring voluntary exit programs before any layoffs, and other largely cost-neutral demands, they could make life better for workers by being a check on penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions without causing long-term job loss or other downsides. But the temptation to always ask for more money is too great, so this almost never happens.

Yeah, the charging situation is interesting.

If you charge at home, so much cheaper than gas.

If you can't charge at home, so much more expensive than gas.

Well, sure, but you can say the same thing of so much in automotive tech...

When all those gaskets need to be replaced, when the transmission grinds itself, when the coolant system leaks, when the turbo goes, if the timing belt goes, every few months when you change the oil, etc etc.

Sure, it's a item worthy of being wary of and a good opportunity to improve, but it's not like ICE engines are nice and immune from expensive costs down the line.

I'm part of the app ecosystem and I *still* don't understand why people develop half the apps that they develop, rather than making their websites work like the app does and having a button to save a bookmark on the home screen.

Credit card autofill has worked in Safari since iOS 7 (before Wallet). Wallet added the ability to scan cards. I can only assume that the functionality was tied together from the very beginning, since Safari's feature predated Wallet by a year. For sure, the integration has worked in Safari for as long as I've used it, which would have probably been a few months after the Apple Card came out in 2019.

Income taxes, not taxes.

You actually expect me to give actual guidance on how Apple could get away with violating antitrust law without getting caught? I use their devices. I have zero incentive to do that.

"Instant" profit is more like "in five years" or "during my time in charge" profit. That AI "research" is very much aimed at generating profits in the short term. Nobody really cared that much until OpenAI announced something that could potentially cut into Google's ad+search money pipe, then the race was on. It follows precisely the silicon valley software company strategy: write some software, offer it free or steeply discounted at a loss to get users (i.e. "scale") then monetize it with ads.

In my lifetime you could open a bank account with just a name, ditto for renting an apartment, and pay for everything in cash.

This guy is screwed unless he's only a guest of a patron.

Crime was lower and people were more responsible back then too.

All this control grid surveillance still hasn't caught the Building 7 people.

Maybe it's possible to decide a course of action was a bad idea and reverse it?