mctoasterson

"Its not in the budget to apply security patches this quarter"

I mean, people already know. A tariff is literally a tax that artificially bouys one domestic industry or class of product, at the expense of all others who participate in the market.

I've never seen or heard of any point in history where the apparent "desired effect" is achieved and all manufacturing production is magically reshored resulting in prosperity. The actual result is Joe Consumer having fewer choices or buying a Chevy he didn't want vs. a Toyota he did want.

... and while we are at it, what is an "American" car these days? Any company that was started or Headquartered here? Anything that undergoes final assembly here? The Ford I used to drive had parts and assemblies from Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, and probably China.

Do I get any kind of points for thinking Tesla sucked before all the political windshift relating to Musk?

I've said from jumpstreet that, at best, Tesla is like the Apple of the car world:

• Model releases considered "cool" for the first year or so, because it's a way to flex on the plebs.

• Pretty soon everybody and their mom has one and the design isn't very remarkable in and of itself. Therefore the iPhone becomes the basic bitch phone, and the Tesla becomes the basic bitch vehicle.

• Overpriced relative to similar performing products.

• Horribly invasive sensors, bad data privacy, and generalized ecosystem.

This effort itself is more like a FEMA disaster preparedness set of tools for the public. Whether it's power outages, bad weather, or actual war, the steps make each citizen less of a liability to the overwhelmed emergency responders. Having reserve water, backup communication, and a family plan is not "remilitarizing", it is just common sense.

I recently vacationed in Germany and the immigration polizei agent asked me, in English, "what's the purpose of your visit here?" and I said something like "Urlaub machen und Bier trinken, naturlich!" He applied the stamp and waved me through without incident.

So... Thanks for being cool, Germans!

I have awesome luck with this kinda thing. Was in Paris during a huge garbage strike a while back, and may be arriving in Germany during this.

Many critical treatments and medicines are developed in the US. Congress could pass protectionist trade laws requiring that the poorest uninsured American can't be charged a penny more than whatever artificially low negotiated costs are paid by foreign countries systems like the Canadians or the British NHS.

Its possible that other countries could retaliate with cost controls for their own domestically developed drugs but it feels like this is an area where the US can and should have leverage.

Chinese cars are a known data privacy nightmare with proprietary software/ecosystems.

Tesla is much the same in the US... I've heard it analogized as "Tesla is the Apple of the automotive industry" and it is hard to argue they're not. Like the iPhone at its first launch, Teslas were the "new hotness" until they became so ubiquitous they are now the most basic bitch car ever. They're massively overpriced for what they are, they promise lots of features that often fall flat in execution, they are terminally online and reliant on proprietary cloud services. They collect tons of user data and do lord knows what with it.

All that said, can you imagine if Apple itself had successfully launched a car in the US market? Its fanbase would be beyond insufferable and it would likely have all the worst issues of both Chinese cars and US EVs.

Yeah well assisted living with skilled nursing costs a fortune. Luckily most people only need that for 6 months to a year before they die anyway. I'm talking more like "55+ downsized housing" that doesn't yet require a nurse, memory care, or any of that stuff.

I think for most Americans, they are considering it a win if their parents saved enough to retire and have their affairs in order. Just knowing you won't have to do some bizarre financial trickery to handle your parents retirement housing and end of life care is a huge relief, to say nothing of having anything left over to inherit when they're gone.

People don't seem to understand the risks presented by normalizing client-side scanning on closed source devices. Think about how image recognition works. It scans image content locally and matches to keywords or tags, describing the person, objects, emotions, and other characteristics. Even the rudimentary open-source model on an immich deployment on a Raspberry Pi can process thousands of images and make all the contents searchable with alarming speed and accuracy.

So once similar image analysis is done on a phone locally, and pre-encryption, it is trivial for Apple or Google to use that for whatever purposes their use terms allow. Forget the iCloud encryption backdoor. The big tech players can already scan content on your device pre-encryption.

And just because someone does a traffic analysis of the process itself (safety core or mediaanalysisd or whatever) and shows it doesn't directly phone home, doesn't mean it is safe. The entire OS is closed source, and it needs only to backchannel small amounts of data in order to fuck you over.

Remember the original justification for clientside scanning from Apple was "detecting CSAM". Well they backed away from that line of thinking but they kept all the client side scanning in iOS and Mac OS. It would be trivial for them to flag many other types of content and furnish that data to governments or third parties.