I don't love FIPS either, but cryptosystems don't work the same way as buildings and electrical codes. It's very easy to have "secure cryptosystem A" and "secure cryptosystem B", and then have massive security holes in "cryptosystem A + B". This happens all the time, and is one of the main reasons for the classic "don't roll your own crypto" admonition. The FIPS "whole system" mandate is meant to forestall this failure mode.
Even in building and electrical, just because B is better than A does not mean it’s allowed.
IIRC the first wago parts (221) were UL-listed in 2017, the 221 were released in 2014, and the original push-lever splices (the 222) were released in 2004.
In my opinion, your entire comment is suffering from the "out of sight, out of mind" bias that drives so much policy around housing and mental illness, mostly for the worse. The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
And where's this assumption that SROs would have no facilities maintenance or law enforcement? There's no reason why publicly-funded SROs wouldn't have these things, probably at much lower cost than we currently end up paying for the revolving door of law enforcement, jail, mental hospital, regular hospital we have with the homeless right now. Again, I think this is "out of sight, out of mind" bias - you don't think the current spending is "real" because you can't see it, but this hypothetical new spending would be, even though the total cost to the taxpayer would be less.
As always, I'm firmly of the mind that none of this has to do with balance sheets or what things cost. There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits, thanks to decades of propaganda saying as such. The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line. The fact that housing assistance and other such things would clean up the streets of the same people while giving them the help they need, and at a lower cost than rolling the cops on them to beat them with batons and shove them into coach busses to other cities doesn't matter, because the violence is what they want.
There's a substantial slice of this country that legitimately hates poor people, whether they want to admit it or not, and they will die on the hill of spending a thousand taxpayer dollars making their life a living hell, before they will willingly accede to giving them a hundred bucks to buy food.
This is not a reasonable position and as such, you cannot reason with it.
> There's a type of person who just has this image in mind that everyone struggling is a drugged up loser who refuses to get a job and lives on benefits,
I wasn’t talking about people struggling. I was talking about the actual, visible drug users on the streets. The struggling people looking for temporary housing would be intermingled with these people and suffer the most.
The Y and religious shelters have a zero-tolerance policy. You get kicked out immediately for drugs or alcohol. So no, they're generally not intermingled.
> The fact that UBI would save us astronomical amounts of money versus the current piecemeal, ineffective and constantly under seige social system we have doesn't matter, because the point isn't to keep people fed, it's to keep poor people in line.
Big citation needed there. If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people, that works out to 3T in UBI payments alone give or take, and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever and still going hungry or needing healthcare. UBI is more of a "well we'll just give them a little money and then we can just ignore all the other problems" copium; you'll never be able to do away with SNAP or Medicaid without people going hungry or going to the ER for everything. Definitely not going to be saving any money at all doing UBI.
> If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people,
It's impressive you managed to be this wrong right out of the gate. Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income. So if we set UBI to be $35k a year, and you make $30k a year, you get $5k a year in UBI payments. The vast majority of employed adults wouldn't get anything, because they don't need it, so saying we're paying out $3 trillion in benefits is flatly ridiculous.
> and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever
And there shouldn't be. It's a Universal Basic Income. You can spend it on food, housing, a car, a model train set, hard Nicaraguan cocaine, prostitutes, or whatever else tickles your fancy. Poor people do not need to be shepherded: study[0] after study[1] after study[2] has proven that when you give people who are broke money that actually has the ability to change their circumstances, shock of shocks, they use it to change their circumstances. If somebody wants to take their UBI and then live on the street, weird choice, but that's also completely their choice and it is not your or anyone else's place to judge them for it.
And under the current system: You ARE paying for their ER visits. You're paying for their ER visits, you're paying to house them in prisons, you're paying for men with guns to beat the shit out of them and then drive them around, you're paying a justice system to move them about place to place and have hearings with judges, stenographers and guards, public defenders, and then when they do get out of jail, you're paying for the bus stop they're living in to boot.
The only thing UBI changes is it gives THEM the money instead of police departments, courts, healthcare companies so they can actually DO SOMETHING about their problems, rather than being shuffled from one awful system to another on an eternal loop because being homeless is just illegal in practice in America.
And better still, UBI strips a LOT of the administrative overhead involved, because it's very easy to calculate what everyone gets, it's literally back-of-napkin tier math. No means testing, no investigations. Just money to people who don't have enough so they have enough. I'm sure it won't solve EVERY social ill, of course. But it'll do a damn sight better job than the current system.
> Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income.
This is not how UBI is typically discussed, and it wasn’t how the regional pilot projects I am familiar with worked. Rather, every single citizen of a community gets the same amount regardless of how much money they earn from other sources.
That is part of the “universal” and it is precisely how UBI improves employees’ position against employers: an employee can safely quit at any moment because he already has the UBI as backup with no further actions required. What you are describing is more the “negative income tax” form of universal income that has been criticized for not empowering the working class this way.
> The drug and mental illness you describe are widespread right now, but because they happen in periodically-swept homeless encampments, you can ignore them and pretend they're not real.
What are you talking about? I brought them up because it’s a front and center problem that anyone who walks through a big city will have to encounter on a daily basis. It’s not out of sight out of mind at all.
> And where's this assumption that SROs would have no facilities maintenance or law enforcement?
At $231 inflation adjusted dollars per month, just how much do you expect to be left over for daily cleaning staff? If you expect nearly hotel level frequency of cleaning common spaces, you’re going to have to expect nearly hotel level monthly rents.
Law enforcement isn’t going to arrest someone for refusing to clean their plates. It’s the responsibility of the SRO operator to evict people. Do you know how hard it is to evict anyone these days? Even literal squatters or people who stop paying rent can take months to evict.
It literally is Google-only. The RCS backend theoretically could be provided by carriers, but they've all chosen not to do that, so the actual service is provided by Google. No matter what the specification says, in reality it's a Google service running on Google's servers.
To put it another way, Google can't kill SMS short of literally removing the app from Android because it's not their infrastructure, but if they shut off their RCS servers tomorrow, it would be dead for good. That's a Google-only service.
It's sad to see so many people are blinded by this. The current situation of RCS is just that Google saw Apple disguised iMessage as SMS and wanted to do the same. RCS is merely a vehicle for Google.
They could just layer their own chat platform on top of Google Messages but we all saw how Google's IM business went along: Chat, Hangouts, Alo, Meet etc. So they muddied the water so deep (to a carrier level) to make it look like it's Apple's issue for not adopting RCS. And people actually fall for it.
Nobody wanted RCS. Even carriers don't want to maintain RCS. They just use Jibe. And that's exactly what Google wanted. My RCS communication with friends don't even show up in carrier's usage. How is that ever different from iMessage...
You know who chose to selfhost their own RCS server? Yes, Chinese carriers! They call it 5G Message. New ad delivery channel for businesses hooray! Instead of plain text and a link, now your campaigns can even have MENUs inside! I can send SMS to a Chinese number, I can send iMessage to a Chinese number, but I can't send RCS. Truly "Universal" profile.
I agree with all of this except for the claim that "Google wanted this". I think Google is as annoyed with this situation as everyone else. They would've preferred to have their own iMessage alternative, but they launched a dozen which all failed, so they went "Well, we can't make our own that people want to use, so let's get the carriers to make an upgraded version of SMS". And then the carriers didn't want to do that but the "it's decentralized!" message stuck with users and even a few governments, so now RCS is the worst of all worlds: it's a de facto Google service, but with a janky, half-baked decentralized protocol, where Google has limited capability to improve it compared to a native Google chat app.
Maybe, but not Oracle. Oracle is friends with the regime: Larry Ellison's kid runs TikTok and has promised to use it to push more conservative content. They'll get bailed out.
Another bit of ridiculousness is pinning the removal on Google. Removing XSLT was proposed by Mozilla and unanimously supported with no objections by the rest of the WHATWG. Go blame Mozilla if you want somebody to get mad at, or least blame all the browser vendors equally. This has nothing to do with Chrome’s market share.
Shouldn't the users of the Web also get a say? There's been a lot of blowback on this decision, so this isn't as cut and dried as it's being made out to be
Using the technology and opting in to telemetry, feedback forums, user surveys, newsgroups, letter writing, email campaigns, telnet into a BBS, grass-roots websites, semaphore, Morse code, teletype, fax, etc.
Anything is better than nothing, if anyone actually listens to the feedback they get instead of taking it and ignoring it.
Google are the ones immediately springing into action. They only started collecting feedback on which sites may break after they already pushed "Intention to remove" and prepared a PR to remove it from Chromium.
> Google are the ones immediately springing into action.
You say that like it's a bad thing. The proposal was already accepted. The most useful way to get feedback about which sites would break is to actually make a build without XSLT support and see what breaks.
To me that's the one of the most depressing developments about AI (which is chock-full of depressing developments): that its mere existence is eroding long-held ethics, not even necessarily out of a lack of commitment but out of practical necessity.
The tech people are all turning against scraping, independent artists are now clamoring for brutal IP crackdowns and Disney-style copyright maximalism (which I never would've predicted just 5 years ago, that crowd used to be staunchly against such things), people everywhere want more attestation and elimination of anonymity now that it's effectively free to make a swarm of convincingly-human misinformation agents, etc.
Honestly nickels and dimes, and maybe even quarters, should go too. It's ridiculous that we don't have $1 and $2 coins in widespread circulation in the US (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it).
Quarters might be premature, but the half-cent was discontinued when it was worth a (modern equivalent) of $0.12-17. Even 20-30 years ago, when I was just starting to interact with money enough to have an opinion, I thought it was a hassle to deal with anything smaller than a quarter. The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face value) also supports doing at least nickels.
> The same logic behind getting rid of pennies (they cost more to make than the face value)
I've honestly never understood why this is a valid reason to object to the coin. Coins aren't used only once, so that they cost most to make than their face value doesn't seem very important, unless the differential is much, much larger than it actually is.
I get what you mean, but the Mint does "sell" currency in a sense, so it's not a terrible point to make. It also serves as a decent benchmark for the "should we even bother" aspect; should we lose money by literally making money?
We also have a $2 bill that nobody uses for whatever reason.
I never understood the objections to the $1 coin, especially after the redesign to make it more distinct from a quarter. $1 coins are great for buying stuff out of vending machines since you don't have to fight with a dodgy bill acceptor or a mangled bill.
My only real objection I guess, and the reason I don't carry change of any sort, is because it's constantly falling out of my pockets. I'm rather tall, so many seating positions put my knees higher than my waist, which I think contributes to that.
Further, since I don't have enough pockets to have a dedicated change pocket, it's always getting caught up in my keys and/or pocket knife.
Nobody really gave us training on this stuff, do other countries use a coin purse or some such?
Lastly, they're just comparatively heavy.
I just carry cash around in either a clip or a "front pocket wallet" I think they're called, and it seems more convenient all around.
Yeah. My proposal would be to have 10 cent, 50 cent, and $1 coins (rounding everything to the nearest 10 cents), with $2 the smallest bill. And probably you could drop the $5 bill at that point.
There's a lot of physical infrastructure that works with quarters, and it's probably not worth giving that up for slightly improved coinage. Just drop all the coins smaller than a quarter.
There's also the 3rd amendment. It would be worthless to say soldiers can't demand change for the vending machine, when nobody at all can get quarters.
> But I've never found a retailer willing to give a $2 bill as change.
Mostly retailers don't stock $2 bills (because they're weird), so if a customer brings a $2, the cashier will put it in their their exceptional bills area, which usually is just large bills. No change is made with exceptional bills, so twos don't get recirculated.
It's hard to even get $10 bills in change these days because of the ways that retailers handle putting larger bills into the safe, and getting smaller bills for change out of the safe.
"Alright. Your total is $25.13. You're paying with $100? No, no, it's fine; I just hope you like fives and ones."
Dispensaries in OR/WA love $2 bills, for some chains they're as unremarkable as a $1 and must special request them in bulk to keep on hand for making change.
Sorry Europe and Canada, $1 and $2 coins are just absolutely terrible. I never want to have to think about where my change is. Bills are much lighter than coins and stack with the rest of the bills.
When I was in Japan everything was all-cash and the smallest bill was the equivalent of a $10, with equivalents to $1 and $5 coins being in common circulation. Most wallets they sold/people had had a coin pocket to account for this.
Nickels and dimes certainly have predecent. When the US killed the half-penny in 1857, it had a purchasing power of somewhere around 19 cents from 2024.
Honestly I'd rather just not have coins at that point, rather than try to push $1 and $2 coins. Then I can just carry my wallet for bills and not have to worry about keeping track of coins separately.
Gotta do something to make the $2 bill popular though, no idea how.
I'd mourn the loss of the quarter. I use those quite often.
> (we have a $1 coin but nobody uses it)
Because they keep designing it in the stupidest way, making it easy to confuse with a quarter. I don't know why they do that.
That said, I do prefer paper $1 bills over coins. Paper is lighter and easier to carry. But I'd only slightly grumble if we replaced it with a reasonable coin.
That's why the dollar coin was redesigned in 2000. The old dollar coin had a reeded edge that was too similar to a quarter, so it was sometimes hard to distinguish if you had vision issues (or if you didn't have vision issues because they were about the same size as a quarter). The new ones have a smooth edge so you can tell them apart from quarters without having to look at them
True, and the new design is better than the old because of it. But it hasn't resolved the issue enough to really matter. Some less subtle physical difference is required -- put a hole in it, make it an obviously unique size, whatever.
At least that's how it seems to me. It's an interesting design issue. I don't personally care too much -- I'm fine with the paper bill -- but I do have curiosity about why the coin designers have made the decisions they did about the $1 coin.
Yeah, since I often buy things with cash in places that are so dark I can't see the coins that's a major consideration for me. JFC what planet do you live on?
If you have vision problems, US currency is totally unfriendly to you. Unlike other countries, which have bills of different sizes, all the US currency bills are the same size, so getting change as a blind person is basically relying on the honesty of whoever is behind the counter.
A fully-patched NTP server should be fine. A lot of tier-2 ISPs were treating their NTP servers as abandonware that never got updates, so they ended up being ripe for UDP amplification attacks, but that was a vulnerability in ancient software, not the protocol.
Google removed a ridiculous amount of material during the dispute with the Author's Guild. I know because a bunch of my legal history research citation links collected between 2007-2011 are long since dead, with the material completely gone, AFAICT, and either not discoverable or only available in excerpt. And this was stuff from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which definitely was out of copyright in the US, though some of it may have potentially been a headache in Europe regarding copyright-adjacent author rights that Google didn't want to deal with.
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