“these days”? I take it you weren’t paying attention during the whole “explorative credit” thing? We had to make the consumer financial protection bureau to, amongst other things, make them be a little less shitty? The bureau they’ve been desperately trying to get dismantled because it moderately limits their profits?

Have they ever been better than “kinda bad” at best?

Anyway, I didn’t specifically decry credit issuers. I implied that spammers are shitty, which I stand by and is far from a new sentiment.

It’s a shorthand for all those other legal arrangements, in a pragmatic sense. You can build the same thing with documents that confer the different legal relationships, or you can use the pre-packaged bundle. A lot of the one-off arrangements require a lawyer and filling fees for each document, where the bundle can be done for a $25 or so fee, and a judge or the clerk who collected the fee, depending on your jurisdiction.

There are also social and relationship perks to a public declaration of commitment. It doesn’t change anything, but a public declaration can make things explicit on all accounts.
Rings are just a social shorthand to communicate that to others passively

They also don’t actually need to be expensive. They became expensive because people are usually willing to shell out a little more for a special occasion, and a lot of people wedged themselves in and argued that without them it wasn’t really special. If you can’t put a price on love, then how can $10k be too much?

If you’ve decided to make a public commitment, a little party to celebrate is legitimately fun. You just need to separate what you need for the party to be fun and feeling like the scale of the party is a testament to your love or sincerity.

When I got married the ceremony was five minutes and done by a friend of ours, we had our friends and the closer circle of relatives as guests and we didn’t need to save up for things because we only got what would make us happy for our party. Our rings were cheaper than most because we talked to a jewler and had them make something according to our designs, and neither of us like diamonds. (Mine is a metal reinforced piece of a beautiful rock we found while rock hunting at a favorite camping spot, and hers is her favorite color, laid out well to avoid snagging on clothing.)

But they also work for the bad company, so my sympathy is limited. Not super limited, else I wouldn’t point out that they’re inevitably hourly employees, and a long day cleaning glitter creates an annoying backlog that creates even more overtime.
Punishing the worker for working for spammers, but also putting money in their pocket at the cost of the people making choices.

Biggest issue is the cost of glitter. Easier to get dirt or rocks.

Just because I like getting pedantic: washing food in a dilute chlorine solution is harmless and is done basically everywhere.
Some countries ban the import of animal products treated in that way because they’re concerned it could lead to less sanitary practices before the wash.

The US has almost entirely stopped using chlorine and instead uses something closer to a dilute vinegar and hydrogen peroxide. The EU bans washing animal products with anything except for water.
They allow washing plant products with chlorine.

The EU and US have comparable levels of outbreaks of the diseases that are being attempted to control, so it’s unclear if one strategy is better.

Demanding that another country/region change their food safety regulations is ridiculous, but it’s good to remember that it’s not an argument over a specific chemical or food safety, but over a difference in regulation that could hypothetically be masking a production issue.

No, it’s that 1998 is so far before they were born that they blurred it with other “recognizably modern but fundamentally outdated” time periods.

A world where cell phones were not common, only 20% of homes had Internet, social media didn’t exist yet and mass media in general was far more homogeneous is as different from now to a child of today as the 1940s.

Ah, choosing to ignore the territorial annexation that took place during the war or annexations that failed? And China?

To be fair on that one, Puerto Ricans seem torn on what they want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_political_status_for_Puerto_Rico

Up until Trump the US has been reasonable about independence questions since WW2, for the most part. (Highlighting that independence is different than being free from interfering)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_occupations_by_the_Soviet_Union

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_territorial_acquisitions_table

Notable examples would be places like “Tibet”, several Baltic states, and an attempt on Finland. Hell, Russia is currently trying to annex Ukraine.

They specifically said 20th century, and were obviously referring to the post world war period.

After the wars, the US sought soft power, not territory.
Aligning with them was often a more safe move.

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.

I think you might be overestimating how complex the system is. This isn’t collaborative, and it’s barely even dynamic. It’s essentially bookkeeping around a list of numbers and a zip file of text documents.

https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

The reporting of the issues is already done by other people, they just rely on a central group to keep the numbers from colliding.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-3576

Not a whole lot there.

Significantly more worrying is the nvd.

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-31161

There’s additional data attached relating to not just the vulnerability, but exploitation and the system configuration that’s known to be exploitable.

Up until now it was benign, as well as entirely unavoidable, for so much of the infrastructure of the Internet to be closely tied to the US government.

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.

You get better insurance rates as a large business because you have more collateral and have a larger contract. If it gets the insurance company more net money to give you a lower rate per item insured, they want that extra bit of income. Rather, the person signing the deal wants that extra bit of commission on a large contract.

If what you’re insuring costs more than the contract value, they’ll 100% hike rates to make up for it.
They’re in the business of betting that they’ll make a lot of profit while you bet they’ll only make a little profit. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, they’ll always arrange the numbers so that their worst case scenario is minimal profit.

There’s no amount of money you can pay someone to lose money on a deal.

Don’t give him so much credit. Everything he does is credited as an intentional distraction from whatever it is that he just did.

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.