You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

Patreon should have just immediately pulled their app from Apple's store. They're a website. There's no obvious benefit to doing things in an app versus a website.

That said, nothing inherently prevents Apple from maliciously making it harder for Patreon's website to work on iOS. Apple controls the only web browser engine that is allowed to run on the platform.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Actually, it is. Cars don't generally allow third-party apps at all. They're an embedded system. Therefore, those are entirely moot.

Gaming systems are largely limited to games, and to a limited extent, media consumption (e.g. Netflix), which makes them a much more specialized system than an iPhone.

And gaming systems don't need to be a single tool that serves all of a user's needs in the way that a cell phone does. Cell phones are something you carry with you all day, and generally require a monthly cell service contract. So there are significant ongoing costs and hassles associated with having more than one. But most people play games primarily at home, which means it is relatively painless (apart from the initial purchase cost) to have multiple consoles; if a game isn't available on one, they can play it on another. Thus, game console app sales compete across platforms in a way that cellular phone app sales largely do not.

So while not entirely moot, gaming platforms are still a very different animal from a consumer perspective.

Apple is the only high-volume general-purpose computing platform I can think of that does not freely allow side-loading and third-party app stores. So in many critical ways, Apple stands alone on this one. And that's doubly true if you limit it to mobile platforms.

That said, I do agree that game platforms should not be allowed to be locked down, either. It is just far less important from an antitrust perspective because of fundamental differences in how the devices are used.

U.S. courts could not give two s**ts about worldwide market share. Apple has more than 58% of U.S. market share for cellular phones.

Apple's servers aren't involved at all for in-app purchase payments through third party payment processors. And no sane person would consider such sandboxing to be reasonable for a server that just provides downloads of app binaries, because the server is not doing anything more than loading bytes from disk and sending them out over HTTPS. So that would get smacked down by the courts in a quarter of a second.

Competent lawyers do not play games like that, because they know that doing so is the surest way to incur treble damages for willful violation of court orders.

They, in fact, have 58% of the U.S. cellular phone market, which is more than enough control over the market to regulate them under antitrust law.

This. When Steve first introduced the App Store, he said they weren't trying to make a profit off of it. That was quickly proven to be a lie, because the economies of scale brought the costs way down, but the fees never decreased.

And the fact of the matter is that the decision to make apps go through the app review process is a decision made by Apple primarily for their benefit, not for the user's benefit. No other general-purpose platform (as opposed to game-only platforms like primitive cell phones and game consoles and iPod) ever did anything like that prior to Apple doing it, and it was never a security disaster.

Because the user has no choice about whether to buy apps from Apple or from a third-party, it isn't reasonable for Apple to charge fees on the review process. Doing so is effectively rent seeking, interposing themselves in commerce while adding zero value to that commerce compared with other alternatives. Doing so distorts the free market for in-app payment processors by basically making that market not exist. And so on.

And Apple already charges a fee for the review process. Every developer has to pay a $99 a year to distribute apps through the store. That's paying for app reviews and a couple of DTS incidents. If that isn't adequate to cover the costs, then Apple needs to make that reflect the actual cost of app review.

And IMO, Apple should be forced to open up the platform to third-party app stores globally, allowing companies to choose whether to pay that fee or distribute their app through a third-party store instead. Building a platform should not give you carte blanche authority to say what apps run on that platform, because Apple does not own the hardware once a consumer buys it. It looks like a sale, so it is a sale. And at that point, the law recognizes customers' rights to do pretty much whatever they want to with the hardware, up to and including wiping it and running Android if they can figure out how.

There's no clear security justification for not requiring Apple to provide a switch on iOS similar to the one on macOS that lets you install apps signed by Apple and distributed outside the store, nor for providing a switch that lets you install and run unsigned apps with the same security mechanism that macOS provided prior to code signing. It worked well enough to keep users safe for decades, and the code is already there. All they have to do is turn it on, provide a little bit of UI integration, and maybe unify the keychain implementation if they haven't already done so by now.

Users who want the current model would just not go into Settings and change the setting. Apple can have three or four dire warnings about how doing this reduces the security of the phone before allowing users to do so, ensuring that only users who understand what they are doing throw the switch.

And there's no clear justification at all for Apple demanding that third-party app stores pay money for sales of apps that Apple doesn't actually review. That is *pure* rent seeking. Apple isn't providing *any* value in those transactions, but is still charging money ("core technology fee"). No way should that be allowed. Users already pay for the operating system as part of the cost of buying the device. Those fees are pure double dipping, and that's really not okay to charge two parties for the same purchase.

The more Apple clings to control over the platform, the more fines they are going to get, both in the U.S. and the European Union. One company exercising near-monopolistic control over a large chunk of the cellular phone market is inherently problematic, and using that monopoly to control an unrelated market (apps) by deliberately preventing consumers from being able to install alternative app stores that avoid those fees is IMO a flagrant violation of antitrust law. I'm glad the courts have affirmed that.

Where would we deport them to?

That will just mean media is no longer produced in New York.

Nutanix isnt as mature as VMWare, obviously. But its the best decision/move we have made in the wake of corporate greed.

Support is better than VMWare was, it has been the best response since support was handled by actual developers with detailed information on what is going on and a "here is what we are going to do" list.

If you are looking for an offramp that is the easiest to execute, Nutanix. They have software that moves your VMs from VMWare so well, you can time your migration down time. You prep the VM for move, wait for the data to move over, mostly, then complete it with snapshot final migration, takes 10 minutes before it comes back up, and Windows VMs/latest Linux OSes will even update IP on the OS.

There is so much more to it, but this is the best "get you started" a company could provide from a competitor to them.

Only limitation I have found is OVAs that dont have VirtIO drivers will not work on Nutanix, and you will have to find an alternative route. But it also might (Dell is the only one that 100% doesnt work, so far).

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.

I'm talking specifically about the meat substitutes that try to taste like meat. There are ways to have a healthy vegan diet, but a lot of the plant-based burgers and fake meat tend to be loaded up with large amounts of sodium salt. So switching to those because you think they are healthier may actually be way worse than not doing so.