> The chip is made using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s 5-nanometer technique, Waymo said.
It's great to see alternatives to NVIDIA chips coming up, but this really highlights the underlying bottleneck that is TSMC's dominance in the manufacturing of these devices.
I think the issue of what your average citizen can or cannot do is a relatively minor.
The bigger problem is law enforcement's use of private business as end-around to dodge 4th amendment.
Google and Apple, Verizon and AT&T, auto manufacturers, Flock, and every other business that scoops up our data has a trove of information that would be unquestionably illegal for law enforcement to collect directly due to 4th amendment protections against government mass surveillance. So, instead, the businesses conduct the mass surveillance and then law enforcement gets to access that information -- either with a warrant as is the case for Google and Apple, or with some sort agreement as with Flock.
Businesses (or individuals) that deliver surveillance data to the government, compelled by warrant or otherwise, should be subject to the same constitutional restrictions as the government itself.
"Autonomous dragnet surveillance cameras" wasn't as popular with the focus groups.
> No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network
Doorbell cameras were at least for individual security, initially. There's no attempt being made to market Flock as anything but mass surveillance. Surely we all expect them or their successors to be detecting peoples' faces, walking gates, and who-knows-what-else in the near future.
And that's your choice. Mars decided that they were going to limit serving sizes to 250 calories or less, and products shrank or were dropped in line with that.
This was a better idea than simply saying a single use package really contains more than one serving in it to look like the company was being responsible.
You choosing to eat more is just that, your choice. It has nothing to do with any company.
If the original larger bar contained more calories as well as higher quality ingredients requiring more time to digest, then the older bar may actually have been the healthier option.
Why stop there or wait for the shrink to come to the conclusion? At least it's easier to eat 1 than 0.5 and store it though, and more work to open 2 than 1.
I'm not sold the magnitude of the effect is really worth much though.
You could always eat two. But most people are inclined to use one as a "serving".
The same thing has been said about pints of ice cream. They are (or were?) labeled as being 2.5 servings - reasonable - but lots of people just ate them whole and then complained that they had too many calories.
They even sell two in one pack. I believe "king size" was banned at some point (probably some EU thing if I had to guess) so they now sell "duo" packs which are for "sharing" to get around it.
That's my hunch as to what's driving this. Some suit at Mars calculated that shrinking the size of a bar will compel enough consumers to purchase an additional bar, thus selling 2 bars instead of one, essentially doubling the revenue from many customers. The suit probably got a huge promotion/bonus for this incredible work, benefiting all of humanity. /s
Let's say Mars sells the bars to distributors for 20 cents and it costs 10 cents a bar to make and package.
A pound of milk chocolate costs $5 and you can get 250 bars out of it. Meaning, every bar has 2 cents of chocolate.
Chocolate prices go up to $6/pound. Now, every bar has 2.4 cents of chocolate. You can maybe eat that cost. Depending on the price increase of other ingredients. Eventually, chocolate hits $10/lb and you are spending 4 cents per bar on chocolate.
You can increase your price, OR you can use less chocolate per bar. You can slightly shrink the dimensions of every bar and use a thinner layer of chocolate to get your costs back in line with 2 cents per bar.
Everyone is going to notice your prices increasing. Fewer people are going to notice your sizes decreasing.
Only if we acknowledge that this is due to greed not health consciousness.
Always remember: if McDonalds could legally and without risk of negative PR: _double_ the average customer spend at the cost of _halving_ their life expectancy - this would bring the same revenue in half the time which would be a great corporate decision.
These people see a normal healthy person as an underutilised resource. The fact that a person could be a healthy weight means they have not consumed enough product. These people are pure scum and the only worse parasites on earth are in private equity on Wall Street.
The article clearly lays out that the take-home test was not a test of memorization, but a test of students' understanding of the class material and ability to reason about how different assumptions affect its conclusions.
> Any semblance of capitalism we have is a shambling corpse barely getting around. Do you know who pulls on all the strings of our economy, gives out student aid loans to kids who just barely graduates high school? Who controls market interest rates, and gives massive multi billion dollar contracts to Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook, Google, Microsoft? Who approved of the printing of the 50% increase in the dollar supply in the last 5 years?
Nothing in your provided definition of capitalism precludes government control of money supply, taxation, regulation, or even government contracts.
Private ownership still owns capital goods and private decision is the primary driver of investment, prices, production and distribution in most industries. This is why we have a hard time with things that are obviously good for society as a whole, like renewable energy, efficient transportation, and low-cost housing, that don't have a competitive short-term return on investment.
I think you're take is a bit off for multiple reasons.
First, people need transportation, not cars. For the vast majority of people, if you truly need a car, it's because your infrastructure was built in a way that doesn't provide any other modes of transportation.
Second, mass shootings aren't the intended effect of guns in the same way pedestrian fatalities aren't the intended effect of cars. Both cars and guns are providing some perceived value (personal transportation freedom and self-defense/safeguard against tyranny/national defense) with a significant number of deaths as a tradeoff.
Third, implying someone with a BAC over the legal limit for DRIVING is somehow responsible for getting killed while WALKING instead of driving is comical and darkly ironic considering drunk driving accounts for almost a third of traffic deaths in the US [1].
I would argue that cars provide a tangible value, and guns only provide a perceived / emotional value. Guns make you objectively less safe, and at enormous social cost. Cars are (unfortunately) necessary in a lot of cases for the economy to work, there is really no comparison to guns.
Cars are not necessary nearly as much as most Americans think they are.
It is a difficult problem to untangle, but not impossible. Accepting this level of tragedy and violence because cars are sometimes “economically necessary” is very sad. And again they are not nearly as necessary as is perceived. I drive my car maybe once or twice a week now and I live in a suburb of about 40k people, not in a major city.
Wow that's a lot of assumptions baked into one sentence.
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