Cool. You wrote an opinion that perfectly matched the opinion of a particular demographic that’s common on the site, and are now very offended that no one knew you were someone less common.
Which also entirely draws the conversation away from you saying it’s good that the government pulled funding from an organization that’s doing something good because government messes everything up.

They’re already a non-profit. Why are you upset that they got money from the government? Wouldn’t the ideal to you be an NGO that got money without being under government control, and was therefore free from business influence as well?

Linux is a great example. It’s backed by a non-profit foundation, under the direction of mostly corporate advocates. That’s what people talk about when they talk about a non-profit being beholden to corporate money.
The shape of Linux has steadily been pushed towards being more and more focused on server and data center operations, since that’s what the people in charge of funding allocation care about, and that’s what they’ll direct their parent organizations to contribute developers to working on.

Your government sucks. I get that. It doesn’t mean I don’t expect more from mine, and it doesn’t mean that I reject the notion that I should have say in the management of the things around me.
The NGO that you envision will do a better job managing the drainage where I live doesn’t answer to me, and I have no recourse if they mess up and flood my house.

I’d like something like the NGO you envision, but with public accountability. This is often called a “government”.

Yeah, the lobbying question is a complicated one.

In an ideal world it would be much closer to how the standards committees work. The issue isn’t people sharing their opinions and desires for how the system should work, it’s when they use inequitable means to bias the decision. My industry, security, has lobbied for official guidelines on security requirements for different situations. Makes it easier to tell hospitals they can’t have nurses sharing login credentials: government says that’s bad, and now your insurance says it’s a liability.

The problem is that lobbying too often comes with stuff like a “we’re always hiring like minded people at our lobbying firm, if you happen to find yourself in the position to do so, give us a call.”.
It’s too easy for people with a lot of money to make their voices more heard.

It’s not that the wealthy and business interests should be barred from sharing opinions with legislators, it’s that “volume” shouldn’t be proportional to money. My voice as a person who lives near a river should be comparable to that of the guy who owns the car wash upstream when it comes to questions of how much we care about runoff going into the river.

So you want it to be run like it is today, but with less money? Do you think they’re going to spread whatever incompetence you see them having via funding?

Usually when people celebrate the removal of government from a public service it’s because they think it should be arranged to turn a profit.

You didn’t list your stance on every issue in your comment so I can only assume that you have the rest of the beliefs that I’ve always seen go with that opinion.

people will always mess stuff up. Government is just the group of people you have a say in.

When the public good gets messed up, I’d rather it be by the people I can vote out than by the people who only answer to shareholders.

I just don’t understand the persistent belief that a profit motive will magically make something more aligned with the public good.

Even corporations understand the value of having a seat at the table. A significant reason for corporate sponsorship of standards groups and such is so that if it comes up, they have a person there who can argue for their interests.
Not even in an interesting or corrupt way.
“Our engineers think it would be better to do it this way, any objections?” And then everyone talks about it.

Leaving means you only get to use what others put together. If your needs don’t fit you just have to cope.

Corporations love getting stuff for free, but if all it takes to solve a technical problem is cash, that’s great too. Cash is a better way to solve a technical problem than time and engineers.

The things that are cheaper to make in the US were already made in the US.
Because of the high cost of labor here, we tend to specialize in things where the unit cost is so high that the labor cost doesn’t matter as much and spending extra for educated and skilled workers becomes a cheaper upgrade. Things like jet engine parts, engines, and machine tools.
Also things where you make a lot of them in an automated fashion, like precision screws and nuts or refined petroleum products. We’re probably not making the plastic bags or chairs, but we would be making the giant tub of plastic beads used for the injection moulding, which is then shipped to Malaysia to be moulded, and then back to the US to be a deck chair.

The set of industries that are close enough to the line to make sense to move to the US and can be moved quickly enough for it to matter is vanishingly small.
It’s why most of our exports have been intangible for so long.

I believe it’s paid as part of clearing customs. Since everything is in some capacity inspected (even if that just means checking the weight, container seals, and serial numbers in the freight container), that means there’s some record of what’s coming in and from where. At that point the importer pays customs the various fees and taxes before customs let’s them take the goods out of the port of entry.

The importer would mark it down as part of the taxes that they paid on their purchase, but it would largely only matter so that they can appropriately indicate what portion of the purchase price was taxes that have already been paid so they don’t double pay later.

Right now there are three “biggest powers” on the world stage. US, China and Russia. China has belligerent rhetoric towards a lot of their neighbors, particularly Taiwan. They want the areas they control, but largely stop short of action. It’s why they claim the South China sea, and other nations need to pointedly ignore their claims to delegitimize them.
Russia has been openly annexing, or trying to anyway, their neighbors, and using historical precedent as their excuse.
As the largest power, the US very notably not annexing land nearby shifts the tone way into the realm of it being the norm not to do that.

Annexing, or at least threatening to, nearby land makes it more that all major powers do so, or at least are looking for opportunities to do so.
If cold war schemes give the US historical claim to Greenland, then Russias claims on Ukraine start being less unhinged and more generally expansionist.

It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.

My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.

It does work there. The unfortunate thing is that so many sites change their login structure often enough that it no unusual to discover that a site just changed again and you need to update the list.

Should have said you’d be delighted for them to visit, and then just not let them inside. Deny any knowledge of talking to them before. Waste their time and money and call them names.

I actually wouldn’t be shocked if it was possible with modern smartphones. A significant amount of money is available to be made from federal security work, and meeting the NSA criteria has benefits that extend to companies that work in the federal security space as well.

… What?

Your screenshot has the founder saying it’s reparable. It also has him telling someone with unreasonable expectations that they would be disappointed.

If you literally take his comment out of context you can construe it as him saying they didn’t consider repairability or lifetime. But why wouldn’t you look at the context that’s right there?

In the context of him saying the device is repairable, the top comment talking about repairing it, and the comment in question replying to that thread, it seems a bit weird to say “he didn’t say it in this comment, so the comments where he says it’s repairable don’t count”.

Sure have!

He told someone not to buy it if they expect more than five years without repairs. That person seemed to think spending more than $100 should get them a product that lasts a lifetime, and was irritated the founder said he thought it was pretty good that a piece of low cost consumer electronics made it five years before needing repairs.

What part of that says to you that it’s not reparable or won’t last five years?

How does that read to you like him saying it’s not replaceable?

It reads to me like he’s saying that if you expect 5+ years without maintenance if it’s more than $100, you should look at a different product.
The top comments are someone saying that after five years they needed to repair it due to battery failure, and the founder saying the repair process is the same.

Five years is longer than the average lifespan of a liIon battery. Expecting to be able to skip repairs that long is unreasonable for a $150 product.

It reads like the founder actually giving realistic expectations. A $150 product will likely need repairs to last longer than five years, and you’ll be disappointed if you expect otherwise.

Can you point to a similar product that costs about as much that fits your criteria?

They do need to protect their branding, but only if it’s likely to be viewed as “similar”. there’s no reasonable risk of people thinking that a watch and an old processor are the same.
There’s a lot of products with similar names that haven’t had issues.

I don’t think they’re that clever. Seriously. I think that all the “distractions” are crazy things their major supporters want (less regulation on putting raw sewage in drinking water), crazy things their policy architects want for stupid or awful reasons (ending birthright citizenship because you think America should be a white Christian nation), naked adoration for dictators because they’re what running a country like a business looks like, or just the most transparent “negotiation” that burns good will because you don’t understand that getting an agreement is good, and getting an agreement where the other side is happy too is better.

Threaten tariffs and wait a while to let the other side offer something to get you to not do it. Threaten to annex Greenland, and then compromise on guaranteed transit rights in their territorial waters and maybe some resource extraction agreements. Same for the Panama canal.

Weird.

I used the search function to find it, since it’s kinda tucked away oddly.