I know someone who bought a defunct bank to solve a family wealth repatriation catch-22 issue.

This might be a sensible approach.

Or, if they had some sense, they'd get into the credit business with their own "store card" that doesn't use V/MC. With this, they'd have the leverage to tell credit card processors to "get bent" should V/MC try telling them how to run their business and what content is acceptable.

The most obvious, naive approach is banking blood & marrow prior to treatment. However, there's a need to clear metastatic cells (CTCs) or train the immune system to find and kill them so that it doesn't reintroduce CTCs upon retransfusion.

Figure out how much RAM, L1-3|4 cache, integer, vector, graphics, and AI horsepower is needed for a use-case ahead-of-time and cram them all into one huge socket with intensive power rails and cooling. The internal RAM bus doesn't have to be DDRn/X either. An integrated northbridge would deliver PCIe, etc.

Amazon has the exceptionalism syndrome whereby they trade short-term dividends and profits for reinvestment into expansion that they claim they can dial up and down to ensure minimum profitability with maximum growth. They want to be a real Tyrell Corporation, but they might discover the same fate instead.

Yep. One such example is the cotton gin and the rise of concentrated wealth by plantation owners led to the continuation of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Civil War.

The internet and smartphones destroyed many categories of products and whole industries. AI is the latest cotton gin in spite of the hype because of capital's response to it with mass layoffs.

self-propelled equipment shall, when under its own power and in motion, have an operator stationed at the vehicular controls. Wow. I didn't realize there was a ban and that it's from 1977. Btw, we had an almost autonomous Case tractor ("AutoSteer") at Trimble in Sunnyvale (department since moved to Colorado) in 2000 without an operator at the controls (so it was possibly illegal), but it's surprising that it's a blanket ban rather than a selective one like human-overseen. Perhaps it was written to protect jobs or there was subconscious fear over killer machines later epitomized by the film Maximum Overdrive (1986).

Its not a ban on autonomy, which didn't exist at the time to ban. It was directed at people trying to maximize use of their time by getting off slow moving, non-autonomous, equipment to do other things and then climbing back on when needed to make course changes.

It also functions to ban unattended autonomous vehicles now that they do exist, and it may need to be adjusted to allow for an appropriate regulatory framework for limited and safe use of unattended autonomous vehicles, but that was not a subject of concern when it was written.

I had an all chrome and black pads Diamondback bike with black mags, and the scar tissue on my knees and elbows to prove it.

The road I always wanted to fly down was Harwood Rd (SW end on the Los Gatos side) ever since 1982-3 when I saw Woz's house under construction but didn't realize who that was. Harwood's steepness was an obsessive objective for maximizing bicycle and skateboard speed when I was 5-6 and the local roads and sidewalks in front of my house were somewhat uneven. This was an era when many San Jose and Los Gatos residential streets were smooth blacktop and not yet besmirched with a very rough, gray aggregate bonded topcoat hostile to bicycles and especially skateboards.

(Later, I had a steel frame Miyata that was perpetually too small for me extended by ever-increasing handlebar and seat extension risers. (It was eventually stolen in Davis CA the only time I forgot to lock it. Its wheels had slime tubes and Kevlar linings to defeat California's omnipresent goatheads.))

When I grew older, I would fly down Bernal Rd (down from IBM) on the Miyata and Hicks Rd (on the back side before Alamitos Rd) with my best friend. Hicks Rd has/had a grade so ridiculously steep and pavement so uneven, I had to sit on my bike rack to avoid tumbling over the handlebars. In adult life, I found out he became a Christian metal/rock performer and had an insanely hot SO... that's cool and to each, their own.

In recent years in the midst of my mid-life (crisis?) I found that Kaabo King GT Pro goes 60 mph (96 kmh) while standing. I had to have that. It turned out to be (almost) true (57 mph (92 kmh) on a slight downhill, but I'm probably double the weight it was designed to carry). And it did fly around Austin downtown and surrounding areas 2020-2024.

If I was near the Bonneville Salt Flats as a kit, I would've probably been obsessed with building rocket-powered wagons and bikes. Sadly, all we kids had was gravity and the potential energy of short hills and later, some small mountains. I'm guess that was a blessing because there are sensible risk appetites. There's a bathtub of reasonableness between completely risk-adverse and (un)knowingly Darwin award. The former is result of helicopter parents who turned kids' parks into boring, perfectly-safe, plastic "paradises" no one goes to when there were uneven, redwood telephone pones to jump on, a semi-enclosed vertical steel maze about 15' tall with 3' horizontal sections to crawl up, and a real retired Korean Era jet in a sandbox. None of that cool stuff remains.

These days, my current neighbor won't even let their almost adult son use an electric hedge trimmer because "ooh, too dangerous!" but they gave him an offroad 125cc motorcycle (I would've died for one of those)... which doesn't make any sense at all.

My great grandfather, also Irish-American, is buried in Epinal, France. He died fighting in the battle of the bulge. I wonder what part of the US population was Irish-Americans during WW2, and furthermore what percentage of lower incomes were made up by Irish-Americans. That could explain the over representation.

TIL: The Deserter's Stamp was a brand of nails shaped liked the letter "D" heated and applied to the hips of lesser punished (not shot or hung) deserters until 1871. https://www.harveyhistoryonline.com/?p=4549