Generalising wildly, German engineers seem to be obsessed with manufacturing tolerances. Based on my experience disassembling and rebuilding German vs Japanese motorcycle engines, for as long as I can remember the manufacturing tolerances on parts made by German companies are just tighter. With thicker oils forming thicker lubrication layers you could get away with looser tolerances, but when you have to move to thinner oils the irregularities come back to bite you. If you've not had a company culture of tight tolerances forever then it's probably more expensive to tighten things up after the fact.

Surely Gen-Z drug dealers take cryptocurrency. That's what it's for, after all.

They found 26 cases out of just short of 13,000 staff, so 0.2% of the total. A quick internet search suggests that 1/3rd of the staff are admin/operations/lawyers and I suspect that at any given time at least 1/3rd of the rest are working through investigations and case documentation, so about half the total are probably working on a computer (rather than on the beat) at any given time. This suggests that they found somewhat under 0.5% of the desk staff doing this. Based on my pre-COVID experience of working in British offices, if only 0.5% of the staff were playing Solitaire, doom-scrolling social media or taking a tea-break and nattering about last weekend's football match then it would be considered a profound leap forward in productivity!

No. The article says:

The post I replied to said:

It's normal for seized funds to be retained, and they are given to the CICA. It's highly unusual to use them for paying the government's debts.

Which reports are these? Can you offer a citation rather than a vague accusation?

In the UK seized assets are returned to direct victims if they can be identified and if not they are used to fund the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, which provides compensation the blameless victims of crimes. Seized funds are generally not allowed to be used by the police (unlike in the USA) since legislators (rightly) believe that it would bias the police to be more inclined to seize assets.

Indeed. In fact it's about to get even better for the rest of the world. The production capacity in Asia isn't going away any time soon. Suppliers can try to slash their prices by a third to compensate for the tariffs going into the USA or they can cut them by 10%-15% and sell a load more to Europe, the Middle East and Australasia. The later outcome seems a lot more likely. Thanks!

4chan is a US company that has been delivering services to people in the UK and getting revenue from that traffic. UK law says that if you deliver service in the UK and meet certain criteria then you need to verify the users' age. They didn't comply, and the UK said "If you continue to deliver services into the UK that don't comply with the law then we will sanction you with both fines and blocking your traffic." They said "Screw you" to the regulator. Now when Ofcom asks UK ISPs to block their traffic, Ofcom is an "industry-funded global censorship bureau" and "Ofcom's ambitions are to regulate Internet communications for the entire world, regardless of where these websites are based or whether they have any connection to the UK,"

They're having a laugh.

If they deliver service in the UK then the service delivered into UK needs to comply with UK law. It's pretty simple. It's not like there's no internet geolocation technology. Most of the other sites that are covered by this law have worked out how to deliver UK-specific age verification. It's not that hard.

Personally I think that the UK's new law is ridiculously misguided and broken, not to mention unlikely to achieve what it sets out to do, but telling a business that their service in the UK needs to be compliant with current UK law is not an attempt "to regulate Internet communications for the entire world". They are welcome to join all the other people who are lobbying for the law be repealed. In the meantime they need to comply or cease local service.

Over in the UK apparently they are working on English Truly Open Neurals, known as ETON. Not only will these neural networks be exceptionally well educated but they will also have impeccable manners, although critics worry that they may occasionally be rather elitist and have a superiority complex. None the less, it is expected that more than a third of British Prime Ministers will use these models, despite protests from the Labour Party.

Indeed. Not only has Trump been playing chicken (and chickening out) on tariffs, but his reneging on the deal with he struck Canada and Mexico in his last term and his statements about not honouring the commitments America has to NATO have underscored the fact the any deal he is willing to strike is not worth the paper that its written on. American industry will suffer badly as a result. Why would you want to predicate any major, long term projects on a suppliers who might suddenly be involved in a trade war or change their alliances with your enemies? Trump said he wanted to reshape global trade, and he will. The problem for him (and the people of the US) is that America will loose out when everyone else is striking deals without them (and sticking to them).

Aside from the regularly cited (and very real) bloat in administration in education, there's another important factor driving up education costs: productivity gains in areas like manufacturing and technology tend to drive up prices in services sectors like education and healthcare. When productivity rises in some parts of the economy wages ultimately end up rising across the board, but for sectors (particularly in services) where productivity can't rise as fast, those wage increases turn into real value price increases for those services. A hairdresser can't increase the rate of delivering hair cuts the same way that car makers or electronic gadget makers have increased their productivity, and the same goes for the productivity of teachers (or nurses, or firefighters). So even without the bureaucratic overload of extra administrators, the price of education would be rising compared to the price of "stuff".

One sliver of hope is that recent advances in AI might offer a way to increase productivity in education. If we can do that then's a chance to reverse some of these rises, especially if we can get rid of some of the administrators!

One.

The dry weight of a Lucid Air Grand Touring is 2,360 kg. Add a couple of occupants at 80kg each then you're lifting 2,520kg up 1,300 meters. Gravitational potential energy e = ghm = 9.81 * 1300 * 2520 which comes out to just over 32.15 megajoules and very close to 9KWh. This is the baseline energy that is gained coming down hill and used going up hill. If we assume that the efficiency of the regeneration and the utilisation are about the same then you're going to gain less than this going down and use more than this going up, but the net difference is still going to be about 18KWh.

The nominal battery capacity of the Air Grand Touring is 112KWh, with the usable capacity probably several percent less, so you'll need about a 20% to 25% charge en route going back up the hill. Even if it's twice that, I don't think you're going to need to stop more than once.

And don't even get me started on the progress bars on the Microsoft EV chargers...

While I am no fan of the largest shareholder, if they are in a rural area and already paying $90/month for terrible internet, Starlink would be worth a look, especially if they are on a large plot with unobstructed views of the sky. If 'Residential Lite' is available in their area it would actually be lass than what they are paying now and still delivers 50MBs most of the time.

Dude, Jim and Mickey made him swear he's never blab, so he's not going to name any names. Oh, crap, forget I said that.

America has vast industries that can apply research too, and they're very good at it. The idea that US manufacturing production is in decline is a total myth. US manufacturing output has been trending consistently upwards (with the exception of 2020) for decades. It has declined as a fraction of GDP, but it has still grown in real terms. The reason that so many people think that it has declined (aside from propaganda from populist politicians telling them so) is that manufacturing productivity has been growing even faster, so US manufacturers are building more high value products with fewer people.

Now, if you want to stop the US from continuing to increase the value of the products it produces then a good way to do that would be to stop investing in long term primary research. Less new technology in your products will mean that they won't offer new value propositions. Is that really what you want?