You're not counting product placement in the "program" - which to my mind has become simply the primary ad of a endless stream of ads. Keeping in mind that I stopped watching any mainstream "entertainment" 25 years ago because of the damn ads, not just on OTA, but premium and 'exclusive' premium products. (I'm not counting being forced to go see a movie as a work 'team building' exercise). If there's a way to extract another dollar from any situation, you may be sure that the end stage capitalism we are in will find it. On the whole, I don't object to the ads in principal. I object to the stupefying ignorance and idiocy of them and their assumption that will sell me something.

The usual practice is to have rate limits on the API to prevent things like runaway ansible playbooks creating thousands of allocations. I don't recall which of the cloud providers but that API limit was usually set to no more than 50 to 100 VPS creations within 24 hours. Yes, the limit could be raised. One customer doing quite legitimate work would start spinning up thousands of VPSs at XAM their time, and spin them down at the end of their work. I am not allowed to say why, but it made sense to me, kinda. I don't know if they ever found out they would have gotten those same resources for less if they'd just leave 'em spinning or not. The customer was not one we looked forward to dealing with.

Support at [different cloud providers I worked at] would sometimes raise a ticket to allocate IPs to specific customer VPS instations. Unless it was a well established customer, such requests were usually declined but given root access to the infrastructure, it's possible to do - if there's a good enough reason to do it. Money for one. Big customer (which is another way to say "money") is another. I've even seen cases at one cloud company that would delete someone's instantiation without warning to evacuate the resources from the specific infrastructure, and pass it off to the customers as "an emergency hardware failure". Which was utter BS and would tick me off. We had tools they could use to safely and seamlessly evacuate instantations but either did not know, or did not care, or most common didn't want to justify it to the change management control process. Change Management is a pain in the neck, I know, but when dealing with hundreds of thousands to millions of servers in tens of dozens of data centers around the world, some process control is not avoidable even if it is a PITA.

Chinese "exports have risen by 6% overall, owing to increased shipments to Europe and South-East Asia. China's currency, meanwhile, is stronger now against the dollar than it was before April 2nd."

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Ffina...

This administration is too dumb to even know how to conduct a trade war.

Twitter used to be good for news, and the same is now true for BSky. Plenty of lists that supply me with news on Ukraine, science, technology and other topics that I am interested in.

My engagement there has not declined nor do I perceive a slowdown in posts.

Although this is earlier than the current AI stuff, I do think we are missing something serious about how human brains work, because a child can learn to recognize a dog with only seeing perhaps a dozen dogs, they do not need to see ten million dogs and ten million "not dogs" pictures.

USAID was dismantled overnight, without any opportunity for other aid organisations to step up. This is why it amounts to the deliberate murder of thousands of the world's poorest.

I also suspect that much of USAID wasn't for humanitarian purposes as much as it was for buying influence abroad,

All major nations do this. It's called soft power. And the US pissed it all away.

I'm going to have to think about that for some time, but off the cuff, I'd say most are Catholic because that's how they were raised, not due to any specific ideology other than Religion. Recall the quote from Proverbs "Train a boy in the way he should go; even when he is old, he will not swerve from it." At what point does early inculcation and canalization preclude any other thought pattern - and can I do that myself, since I was also subjected to it? An Ouroboros contemplation there.

Used to work for a State government that used satellite brokers to get pictures of areas that were hours old. This was done for infrastructure planning and expansion and did not have "side look" capabilities like drones do. EG: a satellite can't look into your window, but a drone can. Also, Satellites have "iris control" so that the NSA or NRO can stop US based satellites from photographing areas they don't want photographed. Drones have restrictions but not the same. Drones are cheap and quick, satalite can require weeks to months for a specific mission window to be available and are NOT, repeat NOT cheap. A typical photo mission at 1 m is multiple thousands of dollars. Not sure of today's rates, my time was more than a decade ago.
Bottom line, Sat is good when you have a known time window and a need for "big picture". Drones are good for "Right Now, Right There" missions. Different tools for different needs.

The 4th Amendment states:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

So are you advocating for the repeal of all the bill off rights, or just this one?

People that are homosexual and those that object to being killed due to their skin color tend to be liberal progressives, not the type of people that support or desire right wing authoritarianism and surveillance states. Fascism is a right wing ideology that is xenophobic, homophobic and racist. Don't take my word for it, use a dictionary.

I'm pretty certain he is trying to make a joke about shoplifting.

How thick are people here???

The idea with UBI is you CAN get a job. Getting the job does not mean you lose your UBI, which is a serious problem with welfare (which this idiot compared UBI to). This means the job can pay a lot less and still be worth taking. It also means people will gravitate more towards interesting jobs.

There are problems with UBI but you are not identifying them. As I see it there will be vast numbers of job openings, limited only by regulations needed to prevent scammers from fooling people into doing work for no or negative reward.

So every country in the Europe is not in any way socialist. Got it.

I'm not sure about that. The republican trick is to make sure everything is "means tested". This allows them to complain about cheating, and they completely ignore the bureaucracy needed to prevent cheating probably costs more than the payments. It also means the average person never actually gets one of these payments, since they would easily learn how exaggerated the "cheating" stories are. Yes you can buy lobster using EBT, but so few you will starve, and direct knowledge of this would defeat all the stories.