Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

"Rational actor" has been disproven for a very long time.

My favorite easy experiment (you can run it with a grade school class) is this one:

Two participants. One participant is given one dollar. The other participant is given nothing.

Now, the participant with one dollar must offer some amount of that dollar to the other participant. The other participant can say 'yes,' take that amount, and they both walk away, or 'no,' and both participants get nothing.

The 'rational actor' would accept an offer of 'I'll give you a penny.' After all, walking away with one penny leaves you materially better than walking away with zero pennies.

The average participant, however, will only accept, at minimum, something like 37 cents. Anything less than that is seen as 'insulting' or 'greedy' and worthy of punishment.

The question isn't 'are they number 1' or 'are they number 2' but 'did they sell enough hardware and software, or otherwise benefit from having the brand, to make it worth their while?'

After all, you mention the Wii, but a lot of people who bought a Wii never bought a game past Wii Sports. Many people bought PS3s to be Blu-Ray players, just like many people bought a PS2 to be a DVD player.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.

If people don't have a government-granted monopoly on their features, they'll have no incentive to have any features at all.

We never needed "AI" or LLMs to think we're nothing more than machines.

I agree completely, on all counts.

Right, and with fiber, you just using something like invisilight, where you run a whisker-thin fiber along a baseboard, or up in the corner where you wall meets the ceiling, and cover it up with just an itty bitty bit of stuff.

In other words, instead of running copper from each room back to wherever your Internet demarc sits, run fiber to each room back to your Internet demarc, and use managed fiber endpoints instead of managed wifi mesh devices.

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?

You only need to refuel your ICE car once a week or so, and the same is true for a BEV. Even though plugging in at home is less hassle than going to a gas station, it's still not something you want to have to do every day.

Why wouldn't you want to plug the car in 'every day' if you have the ability to? Going to the gas station is dead time; you're standing there pumping.

Plugging in any sort of plugin EV is not dead time; you seat the connector and...walk away. Your involvement is done until you want to drive next, and you..unplug the connector and set it into it's holder. Or lay it on the ground out of the way.

Do you also complain about plugging in your phone at night?

Being driven by both is not some kind of third option

It kind of is. My wife's PHEV's hybrid mode will use the ICE in 'eco' mode, and use the batteries if, for example, she accelerates quickly to pass on the highway, and is always using regen braking to put power back in the batteries.

On the other hand, I had a PHEV rental a while back that was either on battery or on engine, and that's that.

'5 minutes is a threshold mark' for what?

Shit, back when I drove ICE cars, it was common to spend longer than that *in line* at the gas station, let alone pumping.

EVs are not gas cars. You lose the idea of 'stopping to get gas.' That paradigm simply does not apply.

And let me tell you, from personal experience, popping out of your car, plugging in the fast charger, popping back in, and turning the cabin climate control back on is a hell of a lot nicer than standing outside in the -45 wind chill pumping gas, even if you're just sitting there in the car for twenty minutes.

The next step is usually a full EV when people figure out that range anxiety is bullshit and they spend most of their time driving their hybrid in full EV mode anyway.

My wife drives a PHEV, I drive a BEV. I have to remind her every once in a while to go burn her gas, lest it start to degrade, she goes so long driving in battery mode. And we almost invariably wind up taking my BEV on long road trips, because it's cheaper to drive, and we need a rest stop before it does, and at any half-way decent fast charger, it's done charging before we're done eating at said rest stop.