The thing is no single 3rd world government or voter or faction or voting block can really be said to be responsible for the petro dollar. If your tractor won't run because your country's refineries can't get their hands on US dollars to buy oil because your government's central bank is out of dollars because your exports can't be sold in the US anymore, there is not much you can do about it, but you still can't grow the food.

The fact of the matter is that the US, our country, and our voters and our government, through 70 years of deliberate trade policy, leaning on the IMF, and plenty of bloody wars, put ourselves at the center of a very interconnected web of trade that yes, greatly benefited US and created a tribute system, but that flawed unfair system still feeds and awful lot of people. Just like you can't responsibly dismantle a feudal system by dropping a tactical nuke on the king's castle and expect everything to just go on functioning, you can't just blow a US-sized hole in the economy without doing major damage.

We strong-armed the current system into existence, we owe it to the world to disengage responsibly if we are tired of being the market of last resort.

I wasn't making a value statement about the current system. I'm just saying putting the a gun to the back of the world economy's head and pulling the trigger is not the answer. Over half the globe is setup to make shit for us to buy. And that half depends on selling that shit so they can get US dollars so they can buy oil and import food.

Whatever the moral valence of the previous status quo, Malaysian peasants will be starving in a year or two because of what is transpiring now with US economic policy.

Same reason it was only SF and Phoenix to start

Also those cities don't have weather, to speak of. Would love to see one of those things operate in the wake of a nor'easter when lanes markings, crosswalks, road signs, and curbs are all invisible and you need to navigate around plows and people walking in the street because sidewalks are obstructed.

No game console will reach 100M installed base in the US, which is required for the law to kick in. The most wildly successful console ever, the PS2, sold only ~160M units, world-wide, and that's when Sony's market dominance was much more secure. Also, the PS2 was manufactured and sold for an unprecedented 13 years, from 2000-'13. That's unlikely to be repeated with modern console cycles being more like 5-7 years, although the switch is a modern outlier since it's likely to go for 9+.

If this does ever become an issue for the manufactures, I'd expect for either consoles to become way more expensive or the industry to just implode. Most console hardware was historically sold at a loss with the money being made in licensing costs paid by publishers to get permission to sell their games on the closed console ecosystem. These days most manufacturers try to break even of make a modest profit on hardware, but it's not enough to justify the capital investment without the promise of licensing revenue.

Same goes for pretty much anything else with an app store. Very few things are as ubiquitous as phones that also have an online marketplace that sells 3rd party software. Most manufacturers would love to have the problem of 100M+ US customers.

Your Apple ID or Google account absolutely are used as 2nd factors by many sites and services. This often takes the form of a push notification that operates through the phone's built in system account (either Apple ID or Google Account). These notifications cannot be received on a Windows machine. I believe for Apple a Mac will do, but I don't think any old Android device works for Google, it must be a phone.

Apple can always start an Apple Certified App(TM) program, that puts a little gold ACA(TM) seal on an app in the app store. Heck, they can even have an optional warning that pops up (enabled by default, of course) that warns you if you are about to install a non-certified app. Even if downloaded through a third party app store, if the binary isn't signed by an Apple-trusted cert, the phone could be configured to warn you and optionally block it. What you are paying for is really the oversight and assurance. You can get that without having to funnel everything through Apple financially.

The standard for testing toilets is to use proscribed sized dollops of soybean paste (for consistency and "friction") and wads of toilet paper. See the MaP standards and test results here: https://map-testing.com/ If you think low-flow toilets universally suck, you are probably using a 20+ year old toilet, or just a cheap, bad one. Modern toilets have more flushing power than anything built 30+ years ago thanks to the standards pushing manufacturers to actually consider fluid dynamics in their designs.

They've put all their chips on Trump and if this does fail they have nobody left.

It doesn't matter. The global economic system that's existed since Bretton Woods and the subsequent Nixon/Volker shock is dead. The tariff plan killed it, even if it never fully takes effect. Just the threat and partial implementation did enough damage. I have no idea what comes next, but America is gonna find out what it feels like to not have the entire world propping up our currency. Right now the oligarchs are busy stripping the copper out of the walls before the entire edifice collapses.

Something being public record and giving your likeness rights to a 3rd party company are two different things.

Yup, their "distinctive bold flavor" or whatever came from when they were floundering and had to buy low quality beans to save money. So they over-roasted them to hide the fact. Then you market it as "strong coffee", when the reality is that the longer roast destroys more of the caffeine, but marketing can convince people that weak, bad coffee is bold, strong coffee, and thus was an empire born.

It's the same phenomenon with breweries and IPAs. Any half-assed brewery can dump a bunch of extra hops into an ale and make a "bold" IPA. If I want to know if a brewery is any good, I look to see if they offer a decent porter or stout.

Smog is not made up of brake dust and tire particulate. Smog is caused by nitrogen compounds and VOCs from the incomplete combustion of fuel and surface level ozone.

Increased nano-particles from tires is an concern with EVs due to greater tire wear, but that is mitigated by the greatly reduced brake dust due to the use of regenerative braking. Either way, it has nothing to due with smog.

Agree with you about the need for better public transit infrastructure.

As an EV owner myself, I can say that most of the negative propaganda about exploding cars and range is nonsense. However, one issue I have found that is talked about less is serviceability. Most garages and mechanics are simply not equipped to work on them, and parts are not widely available. For most non-trivial problems, you end up having to go back to the dealer, and you are sort of at their mercy. For that reason, make sure you go with a manufacturer that offers good warranty coverage on the electronics, battery, and drive train.

Give me 4 walls and a door I can close and I'll (begrudgingly) come back in. I haven't been in a cube since 2012, and I'll never work in an open plan office.

Well, if they aren't US-born citizens, the fact that foreign nationals are being rounded up and sent to El Salvador to a death gulag might be one reason.

When you buy a table, you are paying for the wholesale cost for the wood, and primarily, the carpenters skilled labor. A carpenter can coexist with someone copying their table design as long as the market for new tables can support 2 carpenters.

A new drug is not at all the same thing. The marginal cost of creating a pill is basically nothing compared to the cost of developing it. A copy cat drug maker will put the ones who developed the drug out of business because the copy cat can sell it for pennies on the developer's dollar as they aren't trying to recoup development costs.