... and yet, sporks are used only rarely, mostly by campers or at picnics, both of which are specialized niche use-cases where minimizing the amount of gear to transport justifies the necessary compromises in usability.

So, his analogy is exactly right. Most people don't want to use a spork, and will only use one in situations where access to a separate spoon and a fork isn't an easy option.

I can think of one reason -- supporting that would at least double the amount of QA they needed to do to validate each new release of either MacOS or iOS. That would be a pretty significant amount of overhead to support a configuration that most people didn't ask for and don't want.

OTOH if macOS was informally "ported" to the iPad by some non-Apple group, Apple might just look the other way and say "that's not supported by us, if you do it, no warranty, YMMV, good luck".

Don't forget the second-order effects of overruling your engineers' better judgement: your best talent gets frustrated with their work being sabotaged, and quit your company to work for one of your competitors instead.... leaving you with the less-talented engineers who are still willing/forced to put up with your bad ideas. Now you have bad ideas, implemented badly.

Meh. Boeing's recent safety record is worse than Airbus's, but flying with either of them is still significantly safer than driving a car, which nobody thinks twice about doing.

You are correct. I do not believe that will happen. If it does, then it may run afoul of the constitution, and then you can point at this post and say "told ya so", and I will buy you a cookie--even if it turns out that in doing so it saves the government a tremendous amount of money.

The interesting part is the human psychology behind it, i.e. what causes (allegedly) intelligent people to perform a necessary test, and then simply ignore the results of that test when the results aren't what they had hoped for? Were they imagining that the ocean would just give them a pass because they had made an effort?

I don't think the Chinese government has a whole lot of motivation to make life easier for gullible Americans at the moment.

Ok, so the *government* can't pay the president except for his salary. I still do not see a prohibition against the president running a private enterprise.

Yes, how can we tell the difference between a true random number generator, and a device that is simply reading the next entry from a very long one-time-pad that our mortal enemies also have a copy of, and therefore can trivially "predict" future results from, no matter how perfectly random they are?

There are plenty of crappy scripting languages out there. Why did Python rise to dominance over AppleScript and Visual Basic and bash and MS-DOS .bat files and Perl and Tcl and all the rest?

I suggest that it's because Python is significantly less crappy than its competition.

Liberals / leftists really aren't the ones who want open borders; at least even if those interests do coincide with other interests, their option really does not matter much:
It has long been and continues to be big corporate interests, and billionaire / globalist class who actually own those corporations who want and benefit from open borders more so than anyone else.
Nobody remembers that in the 80s and 90s, and even into the early 2000s it was the democrats beating the anti-immigration drums, as it was the labor unions who correctly surmised that illegal immigration artificially suppresses wages, and the democrats often go where the labor unions lead them. During those times the democrats blamed the Koch brothers and the rest of their sort who had influence in the Republican Party for keeping the borders open.
The reality is they both were responsible, just for different reasons.
Now that the demographic shift caused by those policies is hitting stride (2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from those times are becoming voters), and they align overwhelmingly with the democrat party, that party now wants unlimited immigration. It just so happens they are now on the side of the oligarchs on this one issue; they want to suppress wages across the board and bringing in more laborers does just that.
And people are SHOCKED the labor unions and laborers in general (even Latinos whose families came in in the 60s and prior) are moving away from the democrat party, and cozying up to the republican party. I am not. It is entirely predictable.

Seems like not-enough-people is a relatively straightforward problem to solve, if your country isn't completely awful. You just invite some immigrants in, and presto, you've got more people. There are plenty of people around the world looking for stable, decent places to live, so sourcing shouldn't be a problem.

Too-many-people is a much trickier problem, since nobody wants to be voted off the island.

Soon it will be just like over-the-air TV, except you're paying Amazon $180/year for the privilege of watching their ads.

The amusing thing to me is that you're blaming Trump for this, and who you really need to be blaming is Obama and Biden, and basically all of the previous administrations of our time.
Trump is a symptom of a disease, not a cause of it.

I think they are going for "reduced waiting time" and "more consistent high quality preparation", with an option for "cheaper prices" at some point (if they feel they must). It's not clear that AI will actually provide any of those things, but that's the goal.

The song will advise you to "share and enjoy", and the beverage will be almost (but not quite) entirely unlike the one you wanted.