Musk took a bunch of outside money during the buyout so they're still reporting results to e.g. Fidelity and other debtholders. Hence why we broadly know that investors have lost >70% of their money: https://x.com/danprimack/status/1774456271871033823
I too am a paying customer. Surprisingly -- at least to me -- it's easy to do with Microsoft's Edge browser on iOS. I use it as default on both iOS and macOS.
They recently decoupled that part (search, but I don't know if they did it for edge too) and made bing in the start menu a store app that can be uninstalled if you don't want it to be available on your system anymore.
The only reason why you can't use google there is because.. Google doesn't care. Just like how they never released apps for the Windows Phone store, they have no intention of touching the one on Windows.
Microsoft has been hit so many times by the EU that they really care to respect our regulations now. Not just the "letter of the law" but the "spirit of the law" too.
The same should (or has already happened, I don't know.. because I actually use Edge and didn't care to look deeper into it) happen for Edge:
Of note, among the things that have changed recently in Windows 11, you can disable the news page from msn on Widgets, and Teams is no longer a part of Windows.
I expect Google will release their implementation when the Windows feature gets into stable. Implementing something 9 years after Windows 10 is released doesn't show "respecting the EU" to me.
Correct. Minute userbase equals no leverage to extract tolls. If they ended up with the sort of dominant position they had at one point with IE on Mac they'd do this very thing and more.
There aren't many shenanigans that MS didn't pioneer in the 90s.
Because the money for it is stuck in weird places. I can't write some small bit of software and just sell that for a decent price. People don't pay for software these days, so my best hope is to give it away for free and then running ads. And then, if it's any good, someone will come by and make an open source clone and give that away for free, tanking sales/ad revenue. So the money in writing software is by working at a huge company that has found money with software, like Google and selling ads.
This is really the most concise (and depressing) explanation of the situation I've seen.
When I was a kid, I dreamt of being a solo programmer that had a few successful desktop programs. Think mIRC, WinAmp, WinRar. Despite the audience for that being >100x larger than it was in the 90s, I'd bet the number of solo shops doing that successfully isn't a whole lot larger than it was then.
I need a god damned lesson on this. I just don't get it. It's not like the bidet is a precise instrument. It does a half-assed job (literally!), and everything winds up wet and half clean. I then break a bunch of toilet paper trying to get everything dry, meaning my hands -- which I use to touch things other people touch -- are at least until washed decided less clean. I've only tried these damned things a couple times, but I definitely do not get it.
People are exaggerating a bit here. Texas ran out of power in 2021, and before that in 2011. These were totally unacceptable events to be sure, but I'm not sure once every 10 years qualifies as "common".
People might be confused a bit because there are usually several close calls over the year where supply is projected to outstrip demand, but the problem usually resolves when they go bribe some bitcoin mines to turn off. (Ugh.)
And I never said a single thing about "running out of power," because that wasn't the issue in most areas. The power infrastructure was physically damaged. The state is on its own grid, refuses to winterize, and people also carried on in their households as if it were a normal day, which overloaded local transformers.
It took me a week to regain power in 2021 because the transformer blew behind my house on Valentine's Day and Oncor would keep sending trucks with technicians who didn't realize they had access to the transformer via the giant vacant lot behind it. Instead of doing the intelligent thing and calling to ask for a frame of reference, they would cancel the report. They did this for days while the temperatures were near zero.
Dallas had a week-long blackout in some areas a week ago. We had an almost day's long power outage in January in some areas. This is becoming a common occurrence in the area due to severe weather.
I’m not sure if Texas qualifies, but yes. When it gets too hot or too cold the Texas grid tends to fall over. Mostly because Texas aggressively deregulated their power grid allowing producers to cheap out of weatherization.
If you live in Texas rooftop solar and a battery are highly recommended.
For what I read about Texas, the root if the problem is that they opted to disconnect from the interstate grid, IIRC to avoid Federal regulations. If anything goes bad, they can't lean on neighbor states to provide, so they blackout.
Sure wish Apple would now make it available in a Windows app, or at least in browser. It would be so helpful to be able to text from my Windows machine through my iPhone.
That won't happen unless they are forced. They know people buy iPhones to get the blue bubbles in iMessage, so they can be seen as "cool". They only make money by selling iPhones, not iMessage.
PFOA/PFOS propaganda is wild. They're very useful substances. Yes, acute exposures cause harm, but the same can be said of salt. Though with modern instrumentation we can measure presence in parts per trillion, I have seen no evidence at all that likely bioaccumulative pathways have resulted in harm to humans. Even the opening of this article levers "we found it" with "EPA regulates it in drinking water" as self-evident that it's some kind of super poison. But it's not. Frankly, it's not always even clear what "it" is as there are thousands of different compounds, many of which people consume daily (e.g., flonase, prozac, etc). The health alarm around these substances is just astounding to me.
Ironic, just about every time I see industry propaganda that defends some toxic chemical, they use two tactics. First, compare it to something else everybody uses and considers harmless. Second, repeat over and over again there's no studies that show it's harmful at very very low doses.
That's because these are generally valid arguments. The phrase "the dose makes the poison" did not just occur in someone's head for no reason.
There's a couple things to note about "forever chemicals":
They're around "forever" because they are extremely unreactive.
The concentrations the public is concerned about are ridiculous.
With such small concentrations, huge timescales for the cause-effect chain to take place and countless confounding factors in between it's basically impossible to make the bold claims the general public makes.
That being said:
Workers are exposed to much higher concentrations and they should have been protected from it.
New chemicals shouldn't be used as widely as they do by simply assuming they're safe.
There are uses (like cosmetics etc) were no risk is really warranted so they should be more restricted with what they use.
At the end of the day though, when you ban something you need to really understand and take into consideration what kind of damage you'll do to people by banning a substance and all the products that depend on it vs. what kind of damage the substance will do. You can't pretend that you can just ban a whole class of really important compounds without any societal side effects.
And that's coming from someone who's really concerned about dangerous chemicals. If you know chemistry, and look around you, you can tell there's a lot more dangerous issues than PFAS that aren't being tackled and nobody seems to care about.
Primarily how nobody seems to check what's really included in tons of "cheap" (in terms of manufacturing, not always of price) imported cosmetics, personal hygiene products and parapharmaceuticals.
People are buying protein powders and supplements of unknown producers, raw materials and manufacturing methods by the kilos, plastic cooking utensils from the internet and boil/oven bake them with their food, buy sketchy adhesives for their PVC water pipes, and then complain about some 1ppt concentration of inert chemicals in their drinking water. I understand how the public is easily swayed on things that are technical, and I am happy with people being aware of potential dangers, but the focus is really misplaced on something that looks new, scary, unsolvable and interesting instead of tackling the old, boring but important and serious issues we come across every day.
What dose of any substance is harmful instead of harmless? Is this a philosophical question or a practical one? If it's a practical one, we don't know, because if there are any effects they're too weak to infer with certainty. Unlike for example those of benzene in your sunscreen or acne products, or flame retardants in your furniture.
They must work for one of these companies. The last 6 months of their post history is a majority of just showing up when an article like this appears and defending PFAS and other types of chemicals or poisons.
I work for a lumber company. We have no connection to, or use of, any of these substances. I just work on toxics issues in different arenas (e.g., air toxics and pesticides).
I would enjoy seeing the studies that show they are harmful in the doses that humans are exposed to as well, I don't know much of anything about this subject.
> What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies — two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low — roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet.
the only propaganda about PFOS was made by 3M, telling us these chemicals were safe, when they knew they weren't.
Like countless substances both natural and synthetic, they appear safe enough if you don't eat a substantial amount of them. How do the quantities involved in the studies compare to the levels we end up consuming? Nobody ever seems to address that.
since these chemicals accumulate in the body, if we're absorbing them from the environment they could reach toxic levels. but what if we don't measure toxicity just by death, but by worsening health? if i or my child has some mysterious ailment, how do we know it's not from PFOS chemicals, or many of the other synthetic chemicals industries have been pumping into our air, water, and earth for decades?
Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities.
Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto. Sometimes that kind of throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified, as in the leaded-gasoline example, while sometimes it's not.
this is some real bad faith arguing saying my point is semantically identical to the unabomber manifesto. i really don't think it's close to that, since i'm not arguing for any kind of primitivism, nor for killing people to get there. and if you agree that this throw-the-baby-out reaction is justified sometime, maybe this is actually one of those cases?
the point of the article, and what i think you're ignoring, is the decades of cover-up by the corporate producers of these chemicals to protect their profits. that's not a good look if they're convinced their products are worth the damage
> Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities.
We mostly don't take things in the large-enough quantities to make them poisonous. We cook on teflon for entire lifetimes, scraping food off of it, throwing out the pans when we visibly see the coating coming off.
> Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto.
No, they don't. But suggestions of regulation or political change somehow always get compared to terrorism.
In exactly what way does it sound like that? Did coffee companies find out that about a asprin's weight of coffee grounds would kill a monkey, and suppress that information?
Or is it because just because that you think it's not important that a study found that some aspect of coffee could cause cancer in rats, and you also don't care about studies about PFOAs, so they're the same?
Yes, acute exposures cause harm, but the same can be said of salt.
Experience has taught me that anytime someone pulls the "well, technically, water can poison you in large enough doses" card, an intellectually dishonest conversation is about to follow. This one is no exception: the "well, technically..." card is played, followed by repeated statements of "...ergo, I don't see what the big deal is", and a hefty sprinkling of some whataboutism for seasoning.
There is a class of internet users that doesn't use a search engine, and instead types things like "usedcarsdetroit.com" in the URL bar until they find something they want.
And there is the class that starts with a single word search like "cars", which can't go straight to Google. It instead has to see if "cars.fritz.box" exists, because perhaps there's a server called "cars" on your network.
And god forbid that your parent types "bankofmerica.com" instead of using a bookmark or their smart phone app.
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