FriendOfDeSoto

It can be a bit of both. Can't speak to the UK but in Japan you're constantly asked to become a prepper because we don't need no stinking strait of Hormuz to threaten us, the earth we live on is doing that all by itself.

Japan is in a bit of a pickle because it relies on the US for defense to quite a high degree. Nobody here thinks the orange's adventure in Persia is a good idea. But since he reacts like a toddler nobody really dares speak out in public. So the only thing the government can do is ask companies to find ways around the closed off strait. And then the PHP thing happened. And a big data breach. Our ongoing cost of living crisis is amplified by a weak currency. The crises are piling up over here as well. Naturally, the government issues guidance. They can't do much else.

There have been weird developments in IT thanks to so-called AI. Along with a limited number of advantages at current, it presents a major threat. It provides a Google translate tool for normal speak to code with a reliability of Google translate from 15 years ago. The North Koreans who hacked Sony had to know what they're doing. We're now in a place where you can just ask your tailored LLM agent to hack a company and you don't have to know how to do that. The agent will come up with ways nobody thought of. Offence in IT tends to be faster than defence. So the heightened threat level is not a farce. The impotent government response can be though.

That's not necessarily a ding on politicians. Representative democracy requires a political meat grinder that few people get out of still mostly intact. Those are the candidates you get to vote on. It takes a certain kind of person to survive the meat grinder long enough to be on a ballot. There are 350 million people in the US, for instance. There are maybe a half million people seeking office from local to federal. That's about .15 percent of the entire population. It's a sheer numbers game that you haven't voted for anyone you liked.

Many good people don't want to enter the meat grinder in the first place, skewing the result further. That's why democracy is mostly about voting for the least bad.

I fear if you tally up the environmental impact of war, which is more often than not the reason for the rising oil price, it may exceed the savings at the end consumer level.

Space is very cold. It's -270something C. The temperature on Earth is much higher. The rays that make it through to our atmosphere bounce off the ground, warming it up from the bottom up. That's why you need a jacket when you climb up a mountain because it's getting colder the higher you go. Imagine a mountain higher than anything we have. Eventually, you'll get to -50 C.

You are straining the credo of this community. Gauging general trust in engineers based on where the most popular PC operating system comes from is simply too simplistic.

Very few people use Microsoft products because they actually like them. They are just the market leader in desktop OSs and do their darnedest to keep people trapped in Office. Their market dominance is no reflection on trust.

None of this applies to all places necessarily:

Large distances in rural areas.

Stranger danger.

Everything is car focused in the US. The famous sentence "It's 5 minutes on foot, let's walk there." has never been uttered.

Public transport may be shit or not suitably safe/reliable to get kids to school.

Big yellow buses have become a default, a cultural cornerstone, and many people rely on it and expect it.

Long traffic jams at schools are the sign of a more affluent population in the district.

I started getting uncontrolled erections whenever my sat nav told me where to go. Now I know that Knight Rider was to blame.

I offered an argument

That's debatable. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

Great use of the royal "we."

Stickers can be forged. Checking your papers against a database is a lot more certain. The sticker is just there (or out of date) to justify pulling you over.

I think they want to continue to make hand over first kind of money. If the gold veneer house came out with straight up accusations that Huang was dumb because he was spied on, I'm sure there is a whole rat's tail of procedures that need to be followed. And some of those would surely impede Nvidia's ability to rake it in like that and it may lead to a change in company leadership as well. And Huang is a buddy. Whatever the NYT writes is just "fake news" so they can ignore that like they do all the other proven lies.

I'm also thinking somebody in the clown car is aware of how bubbly this so-called AI economy is and that the two time peace prize runner up should try and not poke a needle needlessly before the midterms.

After I wrote my earlier reply, I was also thinking the motivation could be so much simpler. The orange, one of his kids he likes, or somebody else he knows is heavily invested in Nvidia. This could just be grift and greed as well.

EU countries try really hard to register all births with the proper documents that then lead you to get an ID or passport later on in life. Everybody is used to needing an ID, being able to show it upon request, and using it to vote as well. Most people are just fine with all of that.

The US doesn't follow this logic. For example, a person born earlier the last century in the deep south may not have received a birth certificate. The birth could have just been written into the household bible. So when you require a voter ID and to get that you need a birth certificate, you have eliminated a possible voter. And what if I added this bible practice was done predominantly in African-American communities. There will be other loopholes where people will be required to produce paperwork they can only acquire after a Kafkaesque tour through various administrations. Funny enough a lot of them affecting minority communities first and foremost.

If you want to do a proper voter ID, you need to first convince the people this isn't government overreach (good luck). And then make sure everybody has an equal chance to get this ID, e.g. by issuing missing birth certificates. The laws that generally want to introduce this do not care about equal chances. They tend to target voters who vote for the other side.