It was an implementation error in a local payment structure, so people in other states weren't affected.
3,374 karma · joined July 30, 2024
Its heyday was in the 18th century, when a bunch of British colonies diced it was better to break off into their own countries, then to let their leaders tax them and limit what goods they could produce. Those colonies formed their own governments, and agreed to federate an extremely limited subset of services that would allow free movement and trade between them.
Since then, the government practice of most libertarian ideals have been on a continuous decline.
Governments have a monopoly on taking peoples money and kidnapping them if they don't agree to pay up. When they don't have that monopoly, they cease to be the government, and whoever is running the new monopoly is the new government.
When no one has met or even heard of anyone who was affected by running an outdated phone OS, they don't care if there's is outdated. Ask most random phone users, regardless of the OS, if their phone has current security updates, and they probably won't know what you're talking about. It doesn't really matter anyway, because your average phone user is far, far, far more likely to give away credentials through social engineering, or to be affect by a third-part data breach, than they are to be affected by the security of the software running on hardware they own.
Most phone security measures are security theater anyway, and state-sponsored organizations get around them with ease, which they only bother with because it is very important that the target not know they're compromised. Thieves stick to social engineering and stolen credit card numbers, because it's the easiest method.
It's no different than your house, where the door lock can be easily picked, but only someone committing a targeted covert break-in is even going to bother with that, because the regular thieves will just break a window.
Building them here isn't that difficult at all. They're relatively simple, as far as electronic goods go.
Getting insurance is nearly impossible though, as US manufacturers have a significant disadvantage over foreign manufacturers and importers when it comes to liability.
In other countries, if someone does something stupid with your product and hurts themselves or someone else, it's their fault. In the US, if someone does something stupid with your product and hurts themselves or someone else, it's their fault if it was imported, but if the manufacturer has business operations in the US, than it's the manufacturers fault. You might get the importer to stop carrying that exact SKU, but you're not getting any money from them, and they'll just import it under a different SKU.
Is everyone online just that bad at programming?
I work in electronics hardware development, where everything has to work on the first release, and the equivalent to compiling takes days to weeks. The field thrives on thorough and accurate documentation. If I want to incorporate a single transistor into a design, I can download a multi-page document detailing its behavior, and chances are that throughout an entire design, I won't come across any errors in any documentation I read.
Because the documentation is so good, a hardware design of a given complexity takes less time than the initial release of a software design with similar complexity, and it only needs to be updated when the design needs to accomplish something new.
Hardware design, especially semiconductor layout, has benefited from neural networks, and pretty much every computer processor released for decades has been partially designed by a neural network, but LLMs aren't having as big of an impact.
Because documentation for behaviors of software libraries and APIs isn't particularly thorough or accurate, and easy update processes have allowed a lax attitude toward getting software working correctly on release, an LLM's simultaneous access to the original documentation, as well as countless conversations about the difference between expected behavior and observed behavior, allows it to quickly create software routines more accurately than a human.
Tying all those routines together is still usually done better by a human, so a purely LLM written program isn't great, but a human programming while using an LLM can be faster and more accurate than a human alone or multiple humans.
It's been 30 years since anyone sold a new carbureted production car in the US, for just as long cars have had OBDII, and it's been 50 years since cars were sold without catalytic converters.
There was a time, immediately after those technologies were developed, when older cars polluted significantly more than newer cars, but modern engine designs have been around long enough that cars old enough to be big polluters are expensive collectors pieces.
There may be an occasional car with a blown head gasket or piston ring polluting excessively, but they won't run for long in that condition. Thanks to CAFE standards increasingly limiting the availability of smaller vehicles in the US, the average 20-to-30-year-old gasoline engine probably pollutes less per mile than the average 0-to-5-year-old gasoline engine.
He liked travelling in it, but what he really liked was hanging out inside it while drinking cocktails with friends and family, and if he could have done that while parked in an air-conditioned man cave he might never have taken it on the road.
The most cost effective alternate method, to avoid the churn of government instabilities in the middle east, is pipelines. Any investment into new oil handling methods will probably go there.
Without the standards it would be difficult to hold automakers liable for defects in design or workmanship, so the standards are more useful as a means to hold automakers responsible for safety failings than they are at internal developing the optimal safe design.
The more specific they get, the more difficult it is for automakers to implement new safety technologies. For example, the safety standards were too specific about headlight design, so we ended up making headlights extremely bright all of the time in the US, for years after other countries were using adaptive headlights that dim in areas with lights and other vehicles, and brighten in dark areas.
California's state government is basically the Comcast of governments. There's no consequences to any of their actions, so their spending goes up and the quality goes down, and will continue to do so, as long as the monopoly is in place.
Also, videos are one-dimensional, whereas print materials are two-dimensional, so finding things is much faster.
In some countries, it's common for every outlet in a house to have 240 V on a 32 A breaker, forcing four times as much power into any given resistive load, and giving an accidental touch of a frayed cord a much more dangerous outcome.
Often, when I search Google for information and find a promising web site, it won't let me view it, and I have to ask Gemini to summarize it for me. People have reacted so poorly to the presence of bots that can finally make useful summaries that it's making it difficult to view the original page, forcing humans to look at the bot summary.
If section 230 only protected from undermoderating and not from overmoderating, then providers would be incentivized to keep every comment up, from scam links to hate speech, because they'd only get in trouble for removing comments and not for allowing them.