The alternative it a strict zero trust network design with very internet access only via RDP or similar protocols. Not many companies are willing to do this.
The most infamous example of this is hip implants made in China that had to be recalled due to being made wrong. This is also why Chinese structural steel is rarely used in North America and Europe.
the key component of ASML is invented and manufactured by the US, that is how the US can force ASML not to export its EUV machine to China. it is an American tech.
Airbus is not the result of high tech manufacturing, it is the result of setting up regulations to stop others to join the competition. The entire EU is not capable of building any 5th gen fighter jet on its own, that is the best proof that its aerospace industry is about 20 years behind China's, same as the space industry.
> Airbus is not the result of high tech manufacturing
I LOL'ed.
> The entire EU is not capable of building any 5th gen fighter jet on its own
Saab is, but there has been no need to develop 5th gen fighters if there are reliable international partners that can provide them. Recent development made it clear the US is no longer a reliable partner and the European aerospace industry is working on reducing the dependence on US equipment.
An aircraft doesn’t need to be modern - it needs to shot down the other before it gets shot down.
And, as we have seen with cheap drones, all that money spent on making great stealth aircraft has not stopped Iran from blocking access to 20% of the world’s supply of crude.
So, how effective are your fifth generation fighters based on your nuclear carriers again?
The military don’t exist in a vacuum - and the equipment they need varies with mission requirements. That’s why the A-10s had its life extended: because it is a better fit than the F-35 for ground support missions. Same applies to the B-52 and the B-2.
The operational cost of the F-22 and F-35 alone make them a poor fit unless you are engaging highly sophisticated air defenses, something the US haven’t done since WWII.
The requirement to be able to neutralise American aircraft is a new one for European (and Canadian) air forces, but one that’ll be tackled.
> An aircraft doesn’t need to be modern - it needs to shot down the other before it gets shot down.
not on its own, but by having a combined AEW&C and high performance ultra long range air to air missiles.
Europoor just doesn't have any of these.
> all that money spent on making great stealth aircraft has not stopped Iran from blocking access to 20% of the world’s supply of crude.
that doesn't change the fact that Europoor doesn't have anything. Does Europoor has such drones? or the ability to knock them out of the sky at costs lower than drone production?
to get your some further idea on the gap - Shahed 136 is estimated to cost Iran $20-50k USD each, Chinese manufacturers are quoting less than $1k USD each including fuel.
> how effective are your fifth generation fighters based on your nuclear carriers again?
you don't have to pick which one is more effective when you can build and operate both at large scale. a few carrier strike groups fitted with fifth gen fighters and drone carrier-amphibious assault ships are a pretty good combination.
feel free to google Type-076 drone carrier-amphibious assault ships.
again - Europoor doesn't have any of these, so please stop pretending to be "advanced economy", you are no longer one.
> you don't have to pick which one is more effective when you can build and operate both at large scale. a few carrier strike groups fitted with fifth gen fighters and drone carrier-amphibious assault ships are a pretty good combination
Have you invaded Iran already? What’s stopping you? Didn’t Trump mention something like annihilating the current regime? Is it working?
The US-made Ultra UV light source is important, but there is quite a bit more than that to a $380 million lithography machine. (Otherwise someone would have created a competitor by now.)
Considering decent portions of the F35 are built by BAE, Leonardo, Rolls-Royce and Martin-Baker - all of which are working on a 6th generation fighter which is due to be flight tested next year - this doesn't really ring true.
I didn't say where the steel the US and EU uses comes from, just that they don't use Chinese steel. So this is a very bad trolling attempt. You also use the word "woke" like the Nazis used the word "Jewish"
Mythos was announced a few month ago and has been actually demoed in many companies who have all reported its abilities, supporting the claims made by Anthropic. How is this in any way similar to the FSD situation?
You're conflating the protracted promises for full-self-driving with the current rollout of autonomous driving features in Teslas, a feature people are using today. I've driving with multiple people who use their Tesla self-driving and report its quality/accuracy, this isn't some overpromised future feature.
And I mean, it's not like Anthropic is a zero-product company that is only offering gated access to their only product, Opus 4.7/4.8 are very good and are driving billions in revenue. Anyone can use it and see how good it is, and it is clear that it is a very good model at many things. It is no huge leap to imagine that a model that is 10x bigger is also better at many of the tasks that Opus is good at.
They are gating the release because of cybersecurity/misuse concerns, which makes sense because
1. Existing models are already being used to find exploits and hack into systems
2. We don't know the effects of releasing a tool which can autonomously exploit systems, especially in a world driven by a "security through obscurity" philosophy. It makes sense to give a heads-up to patch up software that affects billions of users before releasing it.
Imagining that this delayed rollout is all a big marketing scheme, that they have gotten dozens of multi-national companies to play along, and that Anthropic is somehow now just patently being dishonest about something while they have every incentive to not be dishonest (especially when they are neck and neck with OpenAI and their relative success depends on verified claims about model abilities), is pure conspiratorial thinking and driving more by a motivated cynicism about AI companies rather than a reasoned examination of the claims being made.
If things really get that bad then everything will require FIDO keys or push authorization using a phone app and possibly a initial registration code sent to a physical address. This is how Epic MyChart works.
Most of your cash back money actually comes from fees that merchants pay. In the US and especially for credit cards with cash back those fees can be quite high, and unfortunately it's illegal for merchants to discriminate against credit cards with high fees.
This used to be true. But the 2025 Interchange Fee Settlement abolished the “Honor All Cards” regime. Perhaps, I know it’s crazy, but… perhaps segmenting the market into extremely high-spending customers, normal pay-every-month-relatively-low-fees, and no-frills, was a smart move by the big issuers? My sense is that alienating big spenders (whose interchange fees tend to be in the 4% range) is just not worth it?
All I can say for sure is no store I’ve ever encountered has operationalized the newfound ability to differentially reject some cards yet. I am starting to see grittier establishments offer 5% cash discounts more frequently than they used to, and I’m always happy to pay cash when they do.
But when there’s no discount, why would I forgo better accounting and 3-5% back in points?
Those rules are about discriminating against various cards from the same brand. They have also been significantly limited in many jurisdictions by now.
Most of the time it’s the other way around, at least in the US: because cash and credit card prices are almost always the same it is the cash users who are overpaying, to the tune of 2-3% of the purchase price. It makes no sense to use cash.
No, the merchant pays, although recently more and more have been handing off the 3% to the consumer by giving a lower cash price. But well, most people don't have cash so that's essentially a convenience fee.
The credit card companies tell you that the merchant pays. Cost incidence doesn't work like that. If every seller in a fungible commodity market has the same additional cost, the price is going up by that amount.
Incidence is very much on customers, but (high interchange fee) credit card users are getting a rebate of most, if not all, of that. It’s the cash users who AREN’T getting a rebate, and thus the incidence is on them (and people using other low-or-zero cashback payment methods).
The incidence is on everyone. Paying 3% more or, for small purchases, >10% more is a net loss even if you get 2% back. Meanwhile merchants are increasingly offering a lower price for paying cash, and the ones offering that will generally have the same credit prices as the ones who don't, so paying with a card is paying 3%+ more to get 2% back -- and not everyone even gets 2% back. People with poor credit typically aren't offered those cards.
Yes, but consider who pays the merchant fee in the end. Sure, you might be getting a kickback of that in rewards, but usually less than you pay yourself in fees indirectly.
Yes, that's the problem: Part of people are getting part of the pot of extra money back, through a highly complex coupon collector's version of a Rube Goldberg machine that skews win rates towards those with better credit.
It's really the perfect scheme, as the system creates its own never ending supply of advocates.
In many cases they do actually offer the discount (or tack on the "hidden" fee for using a credit card). In some markets there are also sellers who only accept cash (often discount stores etc.) and correspondingly have lower prices, which is a slightly more inconvenient version of the same thing if you patronize them.
Moreover, we should encourage every retailer to offer this, because getting 2% back (or less) while paying 3% more is not just a net loss, it's also worse for privacy.
Airlines also sell "points" for cash and you can get them for essentially the same cost as the credit card companies do. They're just using the 2% cash back to buy them for you, so even if you want flights, getting a 3%+ discount and using the money to buy points puts you ahead. It also lets you time your purchase (there are sometimes temporary "deals" on points), collect interest on the cash until you exchange it for something, and not lock yourself in to getting only airline miles instead of any of the other things you can buy with money until you decide that instead of having it imposed you at the point you use that card.
That's not really true on a practical level. For the most part, you can't just buy airline points at the one to two cent price that you effectively get them for in credit card transactions or the even lower price that the credit card companies themselves are likely paying.
Airlines do regular promotions where you can buy miles for less than 2 cents per mile. If you get 2% cash back or pay with cash and get a 3% cash discount and can then buy miles for 1.2 cents/mile during the promotion, you're losing 0.8% or 1.8% respectively by using the card that gives you miles instead.
So do credit card companies run transfer bonuses. There are only a handful of airlines who sell pts < 2 cent per point during promo, like Avianca. Others, including the big three US carriers, seldom do this.
Also the big part of this game is sign up bonuses, like spending $5,000 and get 100,000 points instead of the 2% daily rate.
Cash discounts only really exist for locally owned restaurants and other smaller retailers, not bigger ones like Macy's or Best Buy which have a flat price. So in most cases it is in fact the cash purchasers who are paying the 3% fee implicitly but getting no benefits back in the form of cash back or points.
On average yes, but for savvy people they are worth much more for biz/first class travel. There is even a whole industry built around mileage booking.
Why subsidize? There is no subsidize at all, an empty seat on a flight is an empty seat unsold, any money they can make back is extra profit. Airlines do not make money by flying people nowadays, but by selling miles in bulk to banks [0].
> There is no subsidize at all, an empty seat on a flight is an empty seat unsold, any money they can make back is extra profit.
This completely disregards the opportunity cost of being able to sell the same seat. Even if the airline is absolutely unable to sell the empty seats cheaper, consider what consistently giving away seats for free would do to the remaining paid seats...
> Airlines do not make money by flying people nowadays, but by selling miles in bulk to banks
They certainly make some money from this, but definitely not the bulk, or even all of it. Don't believe everything you hear on the Internet, even (or maybe especially) if it's presented in a shiny, high production value video.
What you said is true, but it pertains to how to balance the game once it started, while I was giving a explanation why the game is started in the first place.
> consider what consistently giving away seats for free would do to the remaining paid seats
After all those years it is still fairly niche because few people knew about how it actually works, and it took quite a bit of learning, with dedicated forum [0] existing for decades. It shows even in this thread, and I would rank hn ppl very tech-savvy.
Also the award seats are not given out free, since airlines got paid when they sold miles to banks.
> but definitely not the bulk
Even CNN thinks otherwise: Frequent flyer programs: The most profitable part of the airline industry [1]. If you think about it a bit, this is basically money printing under little oversight. What business can be more profitable than that?
I chose that video because it does explain why and is often quoted to newcomers in the community, hence its view count. I myself have been in this game for a couple years and my family almost travel solely on international award tickets now, so it is not just something heard over the Internet.
Oh, I don’t doubt that mile optimization/churning works or that it can be very lucrative.
I do however very much doubt that it’s somehow core to the economics of airlines. I think that the real power of rewards programs is that they exploit the principal-agent problem of business travel, with an added bonus of many people being very bad at redemptions and realizing how much they’re often overpaying for a few extra miles or status.
Then I don't understand how the money from the sale of the agricultural equipment is "clean". Surely someone can think to ask: "where did you get the money to buy all that agricultural equipment?"
Suppose a piece of equipment has a market value of $200k if it's working, but only half that if it's in need of major repairs. They go to a farmer and offer them $100k plus another $100k piece of equipment for the $200k one, but instead of listing it as a $200k transaction, they specify the condition of the expensive one as non-operational and list only the $100k in money. The farmer is happy because they get to write off a $100k loss on their taxes and get the other $100k piece of equipment off the books. The other party then claims to have repaired the $200k equipment even though it was never broken and sells it for $200k, thereby laundering $100k in dirty money.
This is why attempts to prevent money laundering have extremely low effectiveness. All you need is two parties, one of which wants to get something of value off the books, the other other of which wants to get clean money on the books. They engage in an on the books transaction and an off the books transaction at the same time, account for the value of the off the books transaction in the price for the on the books transaction, and agree on a reason for that to have been the price which is plausible but hard to verify.
Someone can, and that's indeed a common way for criminals to get caught. But a bank won't let you open an account at all if you don't have an explanation that's at least plausible. How much further effort a criminal invests depends on how competent they are and how much they want to reduce the risk of getting caught by some review or another.
There are many windows laptops that have usb-c docks that don't physically dock. They are more accurately called port replicators. My work laptop is a Dell with one.
Yeah parent is out of touch with 2026 reality. I sit now at work, having dell laptop connected to 'dock' via single usb cable to dell monitor. Monitor handles usb mouse, keyboard etc and power delivery.
But, it depends on the shape of your data, your indexes, how much of the data you care about is filling up a page. If your distribution is more even you sometimes need more cache than a more Pareto distributed data set etc. Things like not caching prepared statements costs you more (you should almost always be caching prepared statements per connection with sqlite).
You have to give things more thought at a billion sure. Partial indexes are your friend. You'll also want more cache to prevent thrashing etc.
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