Income and gains should only be taxed in the jurisdiction they are earned. Only stupid Americans with a world view that consists of one country would argue otherwise. That's literally what tax is for. Not to fund your country in your absence.
Copilot sucks. Gemeni is a sassy teenager. Chatgpt 4o is actually halfway decent. When they announced Gemeni had a million context tokens, that was awesome. But it can't give coherent output to save its life. Useless.
Security theater. A show run by idiots for idiots to make them believe they're safe. How many guns they miss, knives, etc. It's ridiculous. And this month, how many fireworks they missed in people's carryon bags is outstanding! Now with the internet we can get real-time updates by soon-to-be-on-the-no-fly-list social media wannabe stars, who post all the crap they get through security.
It's mostly the airport and local regulations that prevent plane cooling today.
If a plane uses ground air, it's usually only a few degrees cooler than the plane. For example in F, if the plane lands and has all the windows shut and is 80F which is too hot already, they hook up to ground air which will blow in 70F to 72F air. You aren't cooling a plane in the direct sunlight with 200 people breathing with a 10F max temperature differential. It's just not possible.
In the old days, you'd drop the APU and run the PAC which would actually air condition the air and keep the plane cool. Even in the hot sun. But this cost about 20 to 30 gallons an hour and was a big noisy stinky polluting engine running anytime the plane was on the ground. Plus the maintenance of the APU and such for hours run.
If you travel outside the US and Europe, the APU and PAC is still used as normal. But it is not environmentally friendly. However neither is the actual giant plane. 30 gallons is a leak for the hour on the ground compared to what's burned just to get air born.
I'm fully aware of the few buzzword and marketing pitches that cloud hosting uses. I'm forced to use both GCP and AWS for different contracts and I'm good at it.
The real truth is that most websites and internet services do not need scale. They do not need all this crap. A Pentium 3 could host all the data for most of these businesses and services. You don't need serverless lambda functions to handle an api when an actual endpoint does the same thing to pull some info. The few companies that need such distributed computing and power, will need a big on-site or off-site implementation. It makes sense for that sometimes. But most times, it doesn't even then. You're just outsourcing your engineering and paying a premium.
I have seen so many startups spin up cloud accounts costing thousands of dollars a month when they're in "private beta stealth". Literally a $500 laptop could host all of their services just as quickly with no monthly fee. But as long as the VCs are paying, just flush that cash down.
Anything that requires a fancy buzzword is usually stupid but a good way to make money for someone. The "cloud" has always existed as offsite hosting. Off-site shared servers, VPSs, whatever. It's no different than running CPanel on an LAMP VPS in 2003.
But calling it "the cloud" gave all the business majors a hard on and then the accounts department realized they could manipulate share pricing by reducing the amount of assets a company holds. It's the same stupid reason many companies don't own their corporate headquarters or remote centers. They lease the, even if from themselves through another holding. It looks better on paper so the share price goes up. It's all mind boggling stupid.
It's a Google updates issue since they're blocked. Apple isn't but they comply with the Chinese government just as much as they do in the US as does Google. Remember Google is banned because it would not comply with China. How quickly the Americans forget.
Most likely the corporate spyware that Microsoft enables, requires very recent Google services and Apple services to operate. It's pretty standard in the corporate spyware world. Usually just a few months out of date at most.
It is relevant for the intended audience of the article as the way it is written purposefully makes it seem as if this is a new and unacceptable form of punishment for the crime in the West's eyes.
You cannot stop the collection. It ALWAYS collects. It may not transmit, even if connected. For example the black box in many cars is really an assortment of ECUs that contain fine grained historical data. It does eventually roll over and get replaced but the data is there.
For example there are public cases you can find where the police, not even needing a warrant, were allowed to dump this data off of a rental vehicle that a suspect, not convicted just suspected, was thought to have been in. Of course the copaganda story showed that they the used this data which was mostly location by gps and speed by the wheel sensors and gps to get a track of everywhere that vehicle had been in the last 6 months. Every person who rented it and drove it somewhere had their privacy violated. But I guess that's normal now.
The infotainment systems are the biggest jerks for data storage as they're just mini generic computers today with lots of storage.
To stop wireless transmission you can remove the sim card from the modem. Many vehicles won't work or even start if the modem is disconnected (unplugged or unfused). A Nissan for example will drain its 12v battery overnight trying to find the modem if it is unplugged. But if the sim is bad or disabled, it will try and fail to communicate, then retry later which won't kill the battery.
You lose a lot of convenience and the data is still there. So the answer is basically you can't drive a new vehicle without it violating your privacy with collection. You can only make the wireless transmission more private or disabled. I suppose you could buy a scanner yourself and before you leave the vehicle, factory wipe all ECUs. But even then you'll need to enable them for emissions testing and such if that's in your area.
Primary residence, the door is never locked. Even when travelling out of the country, it's open. In a city of 3m+ people.
Other houses in less desirable countries have automatic locks. When the door closes, it locks. Garage door and front doors on internet control to open and verify status.
I have not used a physical key or worried about door locks for almost 20 years now.
Big business bad to many people but it's the point of the USA. I disagree with it. But that's the point of free market capitalism to the exception of anything else, Murica. Insert eagle (red tailed hawk) screech here.
Many countries decide to incentivize smaller stores and punish chain stores. We call this socialism. The US decides to punish small stores with rules that make no sense for a 200sqft store while giving away billions in tax cuts, sorry "incentives", to big stores.
Instead of taking less from those you want to succeed, the US takes more from the individual to give to the big store.
This is an important distinction because big box stores in places that aren't the USA actually have a disadvantage. And their prices are not much lower if at all, relying solely on economies of scale. You can then choose to shop in one which if we're honest has convenience. Open 24 hours a day, get 7 items that have no logistical correlation, get a brand name item that the local store doesn't have, etc. And you don't feel like you're exploiting people at the same time.
I now do almost all of my day to day shopping in small shops. The rest, bigger purchases or weird items, are big online people or online scooter delivery from a mom and pop store but over an app that takes a 5% cut, so I put it in the same category.
I'm convinced Americans have the same level of propagandist ignorance as North Koreans. And they also have no idea. Only a few can see the reality. And they try to escape.