uqual

"If women feel put off by chess unless they have their own tournaments, then they can have their own tournaments. It literally hurts nobody."

I'm not convinced that this is completely true.

The fact that there is a category reserved for women when there is no technical reason for such separation in that activity could make girls assume that women are somehow less proficient at that activity and other similar activities. That could discourage the best of them from even engaging in that activity or similar activities.

In some activities, such as power lifting, it's pretty obvious that such separation is essential as women would rarely, if ever, win at the most levels of competition in almost any age group (I don't know if this is true, for example, in the 1-3 month old category!). In these cases offering separation encourages participation.

In this particular case, who cares?! It's speedcubing and likely this girl will lose interest in the activity soon and move onto something else (or, more likely, I suspect her parents will push her into something else and drill her on that for a couple years).

I had considered buying a Framework laptop.

This systemic lack of support for the product for two problems of their own making, both the original design flaw of inadequate recovery from a broken BIOS and producing a bad BIOS for some models and actually encouraging its installation, is more than alarming.

My primary concern about Framework was if they would survive so they were capable of following up on their goal of modular upgrades. That was a risk that I was willing to take.

However, that a company that targets a market segment of fairly sophisticated technologists would fail this badly on _both_ engineering and customer support is a deal killer.

Framework is not even on the shopping radar now for me.

Since they came in through an open door, a fake badge that passed quick casual visual examination would have seemed potentially helpful here. I'm surprised the pen testers didn't craft such badges. Perhaps it was difficult to get a sufficiently high res image of a real badge from an employee entering or leaving the facility (although, if the front desk is manned, it might be possible to walk up to the desk with an innocuous question and snap a pic of the receptionist's badge if it's visible)?

I've never worked anywhere that stressed keeping your badge concealed until the moment of entry and concealing it upon last "scan" point on exit. If followed, such a policy would slightly reduce the risk of fake, but visually adequate, badges -- but compliance with such a policy would probably be very low in most commercial situations.

One can certainly propose a Constitutional Convention and get two-thirds the state legislatures to agree or convince two-thirds of the US Senators and two-thirds of the US Representatives to advance an amendment to effectively eliminate the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment.

But I predict it will be tough sledding and even if that's successful, getting three-quarters of the state legislatures to ratify the resulting modifications will be even harder.

Although, incumbents might like the idea as it would increase their job security.

Pretty much, yes.

A shareholder (i.e. part owner of the corporation) has chosen to "peaceably assemble" with other like minded individuals by buying stock. They have elected representatives (directors on the board of directors) to further the interests of the group.

Sometimes the group's interests include political issues. For example directors of Widget Corp may well want to promote a candidate running against the candidate running on a "Ban Widgets because they are 'addictive'" platform.

This is no different than people joining together to support candidates who are pro-choice or pro-"life". They pay dues and make donations to an organization (such as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund) which supports the individual's interests. The organization then decides who to support and makes donations or otherwise advance those those candidates' campaigns through a PAC. In some cases some of those individuals also make "in kind" contributions under the direct organized umbrella of the political entity (such as spending hours "door knocking" or "phone banking") that, combined with their cash donations to the candidate, exceed the $3,500 individual contribution limit.

Just because one assembled with others to further their financial interests doesn't suddenly mute them or take away their First Amendment rights. For example, some donate to the DSA because they think they or their family will benefit financially if the DSA candidates get elected and can push through certain legislation. Surely that their interest is, at least in part, financial does not mute them.

I can see some justification for not notifying developers of their actual pending suspension if they have not acted on prior notifications requiring verification steps.

Suppose a developer account, say that associated with VeraCrypt, had been compromised and the compromiser knew or feared they were unable successfully pass verification.

The compromiser could be exploiting their access to modify the product in profitable but fairly benign ways (say making VeraCrypt part of a botnet that didn't do any damage to the host beyond consuming some resources). However, if they got a message saying "Your account will be suspended in 12 hours if you do not pass verification", the compromiser would know that their profit would/could drop or go away. In response, they might push out one last "mandatory auto install" update with a nuclear bomb (perhaps with a delayed trigger) to just do malicious damage to hosts out of spite.

The CBP seems to be asserting that they lack the technical resources to issue the refunds in a timely fashion. Thus, when they finally comply, they (well, the US taxpayer) will end up paying more interest - probably around $20M/day (assuming 4% and $175B in illegal tariffs collected).

Perhaps this Administration should ask Musk to bring in a team to revamp the systems involved to get these refunds "in the mail" quickly. The DOGE team must be done with the Social Security system rewrite by now so may be available for this task. Maybe Big Balls is free this weekend to take care of this...

You, especially as someone who has "been there", nailed it.

And congrats on taking personal responsibility rather than blaming others and society for your bad decisions (and I'm betting that you, like most of us, have made some bad decisions from time to time - but try to learn from them rather than wallow in them).

In reality that would probably mean that something like 60% of the developer positions would be eliminated (and, frankly, those 60% are rarely very good developers in a large company).

The remaining "surplus" 20% roles retained will then be devoted to developing features and implementing fixes using AI where those features and fixes would previously not have been high enough priority to implement or fix.

When the price of implementing a feature drops, it becomes economically viable (and perhaps competitively essential) to do so -- but in this scenario, AI couldn't do _all_ the work to implement such features so that's why 40% rather than 20% of the developer roles would be retained.

The 40% of developer roles that remain will, in theory, be more efficient also because they won't be spending as much time babysitting the "lesser" developers in the 60% of the roles that were eliminated. As well, "N" in the Mythical Man Month is reduced leading to increased efficiency.

(No, I have no idea what the actual percentages would be overall, let alone in a particular environment - for example, requirements for Spotify are quite different than for Airbus/Boeing avionics software.)

Most people, by count, of course would not leave because of the wealth tax currently being proposed in California as it targets just a tiny segment of the population - current estimates are that less than 250 Californians, or less than 0.001%, would pay the currently proposed statewide wealth tax. The other 99.999+% would not (yet) have to pay a wealth tax. However, the <0.001% that (esp. the wealthiest among them) who would pay the wealth tax would be motivated to move.

Unfortunately for California about 40% of the total state income tax collected (which accounts for about 65% of the state general fund) is paid by the top 1% of income earners -- which includes those 0.001% who will be motivated to move by a wealth tax (or even merely the threat of one).

The <0.001% number appears to be based on population _before_ several billionaires moved out before Jan 1, 2026 - likely at least partially motivated by the small, but real, risk of the "billionaire's tax" qualifying for the ballot and passing (and that proposed tax is only "temporary" and is only a total of 5% over three years so isn't nearly as alarming to the wealthy as a "permanent" tax would be). If it looks like this measure will end up on the ballot and have a chance of passing, expect many more to leave. This will, even if it does not ultimately pass, erode the income tax base.

California has rebelled against wealth taxes in the past - most notably by the passage of Prop 13 almost 50 years ago (a property tax is a wealth tax). They are not popular except when the hit "the other guy" -- but "the other guy" is the one most able to avoid the tax.

Wealthy people are typically very flexible as to where they live. They often already own multiple homes and often spend a lot of time out of the state they "live" in. When they move, they are not packing and labeling their own boxes or are likely even present on "moving day". They also are more likely to set up HQ and shop near where they spend a lot of their time. Even if they have family in California, they can still get together with them for Thanksgiving dinner -- either by flying the family to them on their private and chartered jets or by themselves flying to California for the weekend on one of their jets. They can conduct most business very efficiently remotely and often do so now to a significant extent.

It only takes a few to leave to tank the California budget - likely causing the progressive income and wealth taxes to reach deeper and deeper into the upper middle classes as California desperately tries to balance their budget without cutting yet more programs.

Other states are loving this though and will cut tax deals to attract these very billionaires that California are encouraging to leave.

IMHO "this seems to be building up" in the US is a bit of an overstatement.

Mandami, AOC, and Sanders are the laughing stock of much of the electorate in the US. They are fairly popular in progressive population centers but not elsewhere. There have been activists promoting much the same ideas for my entire life (and I'm not young!) and they rarely if ever get national traction.

The "silent majority" in the US is just that - they don't make the news because they, in most cases, don't go out and protest and engage in battles with law enforcement. They have jobs, go to work, go home to their families, and vote - but they rarely are seen in the news any more than the fact the sun came up in the East and set in the West yesterday is "newsworthy" enough to be promoted in the media. "If it bleeds, it leads" is the criteria for being newsworthy.

This is something I've been in favor of for some time.

Obviously the tax basis in the assets would also be stepped up by this action.

The US should also get rid of the step up in basis at death. The recipient of an illiquid asset such as a family business should have a period of time (perhaps five or ten years from the triggering death depending on the type of asset) to "pay up" the tax basis "to market" at the time of death. Gains in liquid assets (such as publicly traded stock) should be taxed at the market value at the time of death by the estate or trust and passed on to beneficiaries with that adjusted tax basis.

Although it would be amusing for them to do it at high velocity if the cars (and surrounding cars if any) were "dead heading" or had no humans in them for other reasons (perhaps because the humans had fled the vehicles upon seeing the fire truck headed their way!).

Waymo may discover that heavy equipment (large fire trucks can easily push Waymo out of the way if it can find somewhere to push it to) WILL move the cars (at least if there is no one in them at the time) in such cases. I recall the scenes during recent wildfires where abandoned cars were blocking roads and a skip loader was just picking up the cars and dumping/pushing them to the side of the road/over the edge - causing extensive damage to some of them.

Decades ago I recall talking to a fireman expressing a question of what happened if there was a car blocking their access in an emergency and he made it clear that the bumper on the front of the truck and the truck's healthy diesel engine would usually take care of the problem very quickly.

Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet).

Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights responding to a braking action).