Also, if a solar storm actually wiped out all satellites in LEO (a huge assumption), who really cares how long it takes them to collide? Realistically it's all dead space until they de-orbit in a couple years.
And to avoid simply building more homes. There's been a housing shortage for 50+ years, it's a little late to blame the 2025 datacenter craze for the problem
Do you think about the things you say, or is it just reflex?
Everyone working for a startup knows it may be 5 years to a liquidity event. We're all big boys, we work on uncertainty and expectation. If the government changes the rules halfway through, it's pretty brain-damaged to blame the beancounters for hoodwinking the employees, and not using their magic oracular powers to predict how the laws would change under their feet.
Do you not factor in the risk of government tax policy changing when you make large financial decisions? I certainly do (for instance, when I choose between traditional and Roth contributions for my 401k, or when I was purchasing a new car a few years back), and it doesn't strike me as a particularly difficult thing to do; I think I may have even done so the last time I was hired for a job which offered options (although that was quite a while ago and my memory is hazy).
More to the point, however, I think if 2 years is insufficient notice to get your tax situation in order w/r/t employee stock options, either your finances are enough of a mess, or you're frankly just so stupid, that you would not be helped much more with 5 years, or even 10 years, of advance notice. And at that point, you (the poster, not the hypothetical hapless employee) are just arguing that the government should never change its tax policy, which is just absurd.
Maybe we should consider this a chaos monkey test rather than castigating Amazon.
If Amazon can accidentally take down internet in a large area with a cheap commercial drone... what can a genuine bad actor do with a few thousand of these. If this is any indicator, half the country is going to be blind and deaf in the first day of a Taiwan war, it's going to be be over before we even get back online.
We've lost the shipbuilding race, auto race, drone race, without anyone in DC actually noticing. Most Americans don't even realize China has a manned space station. If China had a presence on the moon, would that wake up congress, or would they just put out a few tweets and go back to cultural dramatics?
(Maybe you are just joking, but I wonder about the idea.)
When I was a kid, it was a general assumption in science fiction that living in zero-G or low-G would provide health/longevity benefits. Our experience with the ISS shows that microgravity is bad for health (muscle atrophy, bone loss, vision problems). It is not clear that low gravity would be much different.
I don’t know. I have the same background. But I would think lack of falls and pressure on your heart would be a positive. My mother-in-law went down hill quickly after 80 when she fell and broke her leg.
I would assume it was a one way trip, and the trick would be getting to orbit while you could still survive liftoff
Honestly I doubt it. Current government doesn't really have the ability to get their shit together and compete with anyone in any capacity.
As much as usgov would love another reason to clutch pearls and shriek about China, we simply don't have the industry or resources to compete without a federal investment so massive that we wouldn't have any tax money left to give to the already ludicrously wealthy. And we can't have that.
But really american industry has been so thoroughly gutted that we can't compete anymore. Everyone else builds everything better and cheaper than we can. If there's a new space race to be had, we've already lost.
I actually think the US industry is perfectly capable of competing in the space race if given regulatory streamlining, long-term consistent goals, and relatively modest funding by congress.
But none of those are going to happen. I mean SpaceX was delayed to do an environmental impact statement to check whether their rockets would land on whales in the gulf of mexico. Nobody's serious.
Potentially destroying a significant amount of higher level mammals in the ocean is a real issue. Spacex managed to built their launch facility right on top of a formerly protected area
I think they'll be fine
Free countries do not have long-term consistent goals, almost by definition. They have elections instead, in which citizens indirectly determine the national goals and priorities for the next few years.
> When Mann booked the accommodations, Formula One organizers hadn't locked in the exact race dates. So she covered her bases — reserving the same four-bedroom unit for two possible weekends in May 2026, both with free cancellation.
> Once the official dates were announced, she cancelled the extra booking, in line with Booking.com rules.
Let's be real here. Booking.com is not the only side stretching the terms of service to the limit to extract maximum value. This speculative booking and cancellation also drives costs up for other consumers who book reservations with honest intent by pulling a bunch of units off the market. It's hard to blame Booking.com for wanting to stick it to her.
Free cancellation is an upcharge (often a significant one), which she paid for, and made use of.
It would have been easily possible for booking.com and the hotel to offer rooms at two price points and make the conditions clear ahead of time:
- High price (guaranteed room)
- Low price (based on availability, if F1 is that week you'll get the choice between paying an upcharge, cancellation, or moving the booking to another date)
There's nothing morally wrong with not knowing when you want to take a holiday in advance and acting accordingly to cover your bases. What an interesting sentiment...
The only thing wrong with what she did was not to read the fine print and realize that paying for free cancellation meant paying Booking.com to pay on her behalf rather than directly paying the hotel.
It was rolled back temporarily because the first version had an "account created in country [X]" indicator that was found to be unreliable. The new version (which is active now) just has the country the user is currently in.
This is a very odd framing, because the actual reason from quotes in the article is that the EU is acutely feeling the pain of having no big tech companies, due in part to burdensome privacy regulations.
The pressure isn't really from big tech, it's from feeling poor and setting themselves up as irrelevant consumers of an economy permeated by AI.
A large part is due to their approach to startup investing and chronic undercapitalization. GDPR is coming up 10 years now and the worries about it were overblown. What hasn't budged is Europe is very fiscally conservative on technology. Unless it's coming from their big corporations it's very hard to get funding. Everyone wants the same thing, a sure bet.
GDPR showed that once you are a ten-billion dollar company, your compliance team can manage GDPR enough to enter the market. For a startup, starting in the EU or entering the EU early is still extremely difficult because the burdens do not scale linearly with size.
This means that yes, US tech giants can sell into the EU, but the EU will never get their own domestic tech giants because they simply cannot get off the ground there.
My company did not retain customer data or retained very little. So compliance for us was very simple. If your business venture relies on that PII data you're going to have a hard time. And I'm not exactly sympathetic since I'm regularly getting notified from HaveIbeenPwned about another PII leak.
I'm not sure what you're looking for here. If your position is "it should be difficult to make a company that has PII" you won't get any significant AI or consumer tech companies in your jurisdiction. That's just reality, they use PII, they personalize on PII, they receive PII, that's how they work.
If that is your goal, OK, that's a choice, but then you can't say "oh GDPR fears were overblown". They caused exactly the problems people were predicting, and that's what EU leadership is now trying to change.
This notion that tech companies or even internet companies somehow fundamentally rely on PII is false and just an indicator of how normalized we've let unbounded and needless data collection become.
There are tons of business that can run without collecting any or extremely minimal PII. We already let the big companies take this data unnecessarily, let's not also let them brainwash us all into thinking unfettered surveillance is somehow essential to building a software business.
> If that is your goal, OK, that's a choice, but then you can't say "oh GDPR fears were overblown". They caused exactly the problems people were predicting
I feel like, there's nothing in my statement you can actually disagree with, so you're just expressing general frustration with the state of the world.
That's fine. You can set up aggressive PII laws, you're a big boy sovereign nation. But then you will not get domestic tech giants. That's not like, my opinion, that is the reality we are in.
I am describing that reality, and that the EU is unhappy with it, and your response is "Here's why we set up laws!". OK. I'm not sure what you are looking for here. We all know how you got here.
We have plenty of tech companies. The reason you've not heard about them is because most of them cater to their domestic market first. Neighbors second. Rest of the world third or never.
Unless there was a violated promise of an on-prem notetaker app, there's absolutely no difference between having a third-party AI and third-party contractor listening to your meetings. You should ALWAYS assume their engineers have access to stored data for maintenance and debugging.
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