Try reading up on Weimar Republic pre-WWII. They tried this experiment. And they are not the only real world example.

For a satirical take on hyperinflation, I recommend Douglas Adams' novel "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", in which near the end, the occupants of a crashed spaceship try to function in an undeveloped "natural" environment. They end up adopting leaves as legal tender. They stuffed their suits with them until they bulged. Then they brilliantly figured out how to solve the fact that a single pack of peanuts cost several forests. Solution? Burn the forests!

I could go on....

Yes, maybe. BUT - you won't have to pay for their medical coverage, give them vacations or parental leave, or help fund their retirement.

If it's worth saying, it's worth saying twice!

OK I'll join in. My first PC was the original IBM PC with 8088 processor, 64K of RAM and a pair of 360KB floppy disks. I think that was 1985 or 1986.

My first hard drive was a 5.25" 20MB drive in an external SCSI enclosure for my Macintosh Plus.

Fast forward and today I'm on a 64 GB RAM Windows PC, booting from a 500 GB SSD with main storage being a 4TB NVMe SSD, and another 1TB NVMe. In my garage I have an old HP server with a 6TB spinning rust array (RAID 5 I think, but maybe RAID 6 - not sure).

My biggest problem is that I packrat too much data - because, why not?

I had a system to build in 2019 and I specified Poweredge R6415 servers (four per datacenter). I took some criticism for not specifying Intel, but the AMD servers have performed fabulously and are still in service (due to be refreshed soon, but still working). There was one field failure - Dell replaced the server, but otherwise rock solid.

We paid thousands less per server for 32 core single socket CPUs versus Intel's best (28 core at the time). I'm retired now, but my legacy keeps on keepin' on.

-Unapologetic AMD fanboy, including on my home PC.

... is an "anti-bloat" button that removes all the dreck from a Windows install in one operation. Don't need news. Don't need weather. Don't need maps. Don't need voice recognition. Don't need AI. Don't need sports. Don't need Solitaire.

I go through the routine of uninstalling as much of this as I can every time I build a VM to test something in Windows (just Windows 10, never tried Windows 11).

Please oh please...

Thank you - well said and saved me the trouble. It wasn't a hard article to read, for people who can (read) :-)

... but damn if I can remember what it was now...

They borrow it. Just a tiny bit more added to the annual federal deficit. The 2024 deficit was about 1.8 trillion, aka 1,800 billion. So 3 billion amounts to about 0.17 percent of the deficit.

.. the dark underbelly of putting your crown jewels in an Internet-accessible place.

Not really, A microwave oven emits 2.4 GHz energy on half the AC cycle. So half the time it's not emitting anything. Believe it or not, WiFi works fine in the presence of 2.4 GHz microwave oven interference - it just transmits in the half cycle when the microwave isn't "on".

One caveat to this, by example. I once lived in a small town and the only Internet service I could get was via 2.4 GHz WiFi. The ISP's base station was only a few hundred yards from my home so most of the time it worked great. But at lunchtime, a restaurant adjacent to the base station was apparently cooking with more than one microwave oven, and apparently they were plugged into different phases (of the two phases available with 240V split phase power). This caused nearly continuous microwave interference for a couple of hours around lunchtime. Nearly made my internet unusable.

Then there are the other bands used for WiFi - e.g. 5 GHz, 6 GHz (others?), which microwave ovens won't interfere with - ever.

And I just looked up MWC 2024 in Barcelona - 101,000 attendees.

... will just move on to another European city. When I attended MWC there (in Barcelona) in the mid 2000's, I think there were like 30,000 attendees. Without the 10,000 or so short term rentals, I doubt Barcelona has enough hotel rooms to accommodate the attendance. That's gonna hurt if MWC moves on.

Before Barcelona, MWC was held in Cannes. That was a sweet venue! Don't know why they moved from there - perhaps the same problem in France?

No, that would be me.

I puzzled over this too, so I went to the article. The quote was a misspeak. If you look at the bar graph, AMD dropped from 19% to 12%. So the quote should have been "... putting it down to 12% total." Then, the math works.