nickff

There is almost no will to prosecute big-business shenanigans until the scheme or organization collapses. See back-dated options during dot-com, SBF-FTX, Libor scandal, etc.

>"I'm fond of pointing out the stat (true as of a year ago) that Massachusetts (I think it's MA?) has more MRI machines than the entire country of Canada."

Long wait times (6-12 months+) for MRIs (due to a lack of both machines and technicians) are a frequent complaint by Canadians.

The number of different taxes is constantly increasing, obfuscating the total tax burden, and making democratic accountability almost impossible. Additionally, tax collections are already at a historical high, while government deficits world-wide are also at record levels, with services on the decline, and no realistic prospect of balancing budgets. This is true for most western countries.

Given the current situation, I do not agree that "we need more taxes", but would welcome your clarifying exactly what you mean.

> "Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. To prevent more people falling prey to fraudsters, Justice Stevens recommends that this amendment should be repealed"

I think you might be missing a sentence or a citation there, because Stevens was an associate justice, never the chief on SCOTUS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Stevens

You're describing the 'private attorney general' theory/idea, which I'd believe if class-action lawyers were taking less remunerative cases that offered more public benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_attorney_general

MS Word was a descendant of Bravo and Gypsy on the Xerox Alto, not ND-NOTIS. NOTIS is an interesting footnote in the history of software, but PARC's influence on early microcomputing is well-known and recognized.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto#Software

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-NOTIS

The 'tipping point' for class actions is usually the class certification, not a final judgement by the court. Class actions are absurdly expensive for defendants, largely due to the scope of discovery, and they also cause problems for public companies (for reporting and other reasons), so public companies almost always settle them after the class is certified. On the other side, these settlements often don't offer much benefit to the class, because the plaintiff counsel take a massive fee off the top, pay off the lead plaintiff, and don't have much incentive to do anything for the remainder of the class.

Many places have a ‘small claims court’, which is very similar to arbitration. The issue is that class action lawsuits are very profitable for plaintiff lawyers working on contingency, so those are the cases that get brought.

>"According to Isaacson's biography of Musk, Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part in Tesla and SpaceX machines."

This removal of surplus-age is common in the automotive industry, and one of the reasons that cars are such an amazing value. It seems like Musk's remarkable ability to achieve cost reductions (at least in the aerospace context) is attributable to his pursuit of vertical integration. Airframers (aeronautical vehicle designers & manufacturer) are bound by the costs dictated by their component suppliers, especially after a configuration has achieved regulatory approval. SpaceX has managed to avoid being 'held hostage' by pseudo-monopoly suppliers.

Excluding foreign competitors is a classic ‘regulatory capture’-style approach. Regulatory capture is (typically) a ‘bootleggers and baptists’ scenario where there are both good and bad reasons to enact the rules.

The Soviets attached cannons to space stations, and the Chinese are believed to have deployed space-based weapons. The USA is actually a laggard in this field.

The Libyans gave up their WMD program shortly after the USA invaded Iraq…

>”This is what capitalism's all about. Take as much as possible and give as little as possible if you want to win. Ideally, give negative amounts.”

Your description is vague enough to encompass every system that I’m aware of, from feudalism, through to mercantilism, communism, and capitalism. It may best fit communism and feudalism, both of which are most notable for fostering negative-value-added firms.

Fentanyl is actually much more toxic than the mycotoxins produced by mold (which I'm guessing is what you're referring to), and yet fentanyl is generally recognized to be a useful drug because of its therapeutic effects. If something has no possible therapeutic, recreational, nutritional, or culinary effect, while being toxic, it might be fair to characterize it as a 'pure poison'.

As the saying goes: “the dose makes the poison”. Many (perhaps most) drugs cause harm at the wrong dosage.

One of the very early Nick-names for the EPA (shortly after its founding) was “Every Polluter’s Ally”, as it was viewed as more emitter-friendly than the state regulators which preceded it.

That statement does not say that CAMP had agreements with all property owners, and it is possible that they did not have an agreement with this one.

There was evidence of the NSA intercepting international communications before Snowden, but for some reason that didn't seem to make much of a lasting impression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

It's also significant to note that while the government is quite bad at keeping 'problematic' behavior secret, companies are much worse at it.

This seems paranoid. There are many things which are technically possible, but there is no evidence of some super-advertiser doing. It's not even clear to me that much of the 'fingerprinting' (past basic re-targeting) actually works.

Cellular modems seem unlikely, because both they and the service plan they'd need are too expensive to be justified by any benefit to the manufacturer.

Most of the planning for possible conflict between the USA and China is for a more limited conflict, such as an invasion of Taiwan.

Not at all, but the term for routing and placing the components is ‘layout’. Floorplanning usually refers to the laying out of larger blocks of the circuit (with the blocks themselves already having been laid-out).

Routing is the easiest part of layout, and there have been auto-routers (which mostly worked) for a long time now; the difficult task is in placing components, and adjusting those placements.

There are plenty of examples of democracies which began after the American Revolution, and subsequently devolved to single-party states.

I didn’t say that either of those two were the result of multi-party democracy; I was trying to give the GP a variety of examples of single-party government, with different origins.

Please note that the comment I replied to has been substantially modified since I posted.

North Korea, China, Russia, Uganda, etc. are examples of one party taking over; the USA is just a country that has one party (you don't seem to like) with most (but not all) of the political power at the moment.

I am not an American either, but there is a great deal of work on this subject, and the two-party system is actually one of the most resistant to single-individual or single-party takeover. The reason is that multi-party systems are vulnerable to having a party in power 'promoting diversity' (or something similar), in order to disempower all their opponents, while making it look like they're allowing for more views. Examples of this include quotas for minority representation, and (strategically designed) multi-member voting districts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Surviva...

>"One zener diode might be all you need."

It would... if you're willing to just let the thing draw up to 0.1W all the time, and fail catastrophically if anything goes wrong with the zener or the supply is more capable than you anticipated (i.e. you plugged into a PoE jack by accident). This is a very bad idea.

Phone call scams seem to ebb and flow depending on which 'sucker lists' you're on. Online scams appear to be persistently on the rise, both against consumers and organizations (businesses, non-profits, and governments). I suspect that LLM-AI will be a boon for scammers of all sorts, but particularly for phone and video-call scammers.

It doesn’t matter that they can’t get past 3D-S, because the whole point of what they’re doing is checking what security features are enabled for a card, and whether their address and other validation data will pass. The fact that the scammers are testing so many cards that fail gets you banned from those payments providers, whether or not any payments go through. And this is ignoring all the attackers using bots for other purposes such as taking control of the website to obtain user or client data.