Can you send some documentation on how? For example, I tried googling for transferring a passkey out of popular systems and it doesn't seem possible[1][2] other than through JSON export[3] which is what some sites want to block as I understand.
I don't think you're going to find it. The main vendors are hostile to this workflow. I get why, any flow that can exist to export passkeys can be used by hostile actors to walk a 75-year old millionaire grandma through handing over $$$. I think however that that's just a risk we have to make the bank and brokerages accept. It's not a problem with a technical solution.
Wasn't the discussion you responded to about how they currently can't be shared and that the vendors don't want them to be shared as it breaks their desired lock-in?
But open-source programs can always be modified to do that, so that's a terrible reason to ban open-source passkey managers. And besides, you shouldn't be forbidden from doing things with your own data just because they're unwise.
They don’t have room for another building the size of the data center to store batteries in and thousands of acres of land for solar panels (wild ass guesses on battery building footprint and solar field footprint)
Critical loads require generators, batteries don’t cut it. Data centers want the most reliable backup power they can with the longest runtime. Battery storage density is not high enough to back up a 500MW+ data center for any length of time without a comical amount of batteries.
When the NEC allows critical, equipment, and life safety branch at hospitals to be backed up with batteries and solar panels, battery storage will be at a point where battery backup of data centers is feasible. Right now it isn’t.
They have(in just this one example) - 35 turbines at 16MW each - that's half a gigawatt of power. Having the kind of battery storage that could provide this amount of power for more than a few minutes is.....well, not impossible, but extremely expensive, especially for something that will just sit there unused(hopefully). Gas generators are comparatively very cheap, easily available, and if fuel is being fed into the system can operate for days on end.
And you'd need an insane amount of solar panels to actually recharge those batteries in any kind of reasonable time too, so you expose yourself to a massive risk if you had two out of power events within say 12 hours. So you'd probably build all of those batteries and solar panels but you'd still need to have emergency generators ready to go anyway.
There's a weird thing happening in the US where all the restaurant suppliers have consolidated. What that means is you likely won't see competitive prices anywhere else not due to scale but due to the input price being fixed regardless of who you are.
I believe McDonalds is still somewhat independent in it's sourcing. IDK about wendy's. But Burger King is absolutely just another Sysco reseller at this point.
That means a lot of the smaller burger stands end up just selling the same stuff as every other burger stand. Food that tastes a lot like my high school cafeteria did (hint, also Sysco).
The only real lever any food business can pull is in facilities and staffing. The price of the food is fixed and there's no real competition to be had.
Yup, and I really hate it. Monopolies and oligopolies are really terrible in just about every way imaginable. Everyone that isn't an oligopoly gets screwed.
This is also simply the natural end state of free market capitalism. Every one of these giant businesses knows that by swallowing up smaller competitors they can ultimately improve their revenue without improving quality or actually innovating/competing.
Companies like sysco should have never been allowed to merge with other distributors and they should absolutely be broken up.
Internally, these huge corporations behave exactly the same as a good old fashioned USSR bureaucracy:
endless meetings where no work gets done
a huge class of bureaucrats (manager, senior manager, VP, senior VP, director, senior director ... what's next? commissar? secretary?) who don't actually do any of the line work and instead exist only to perpetuate a process
huge amount of process that does nothing for the bottom line or indeed for anyone at all
random party lines that you must accept or be fired (new director came in. Now we're doing a 30 minute velocity retrospective every week. you must attend, comrade!)
party language determined from on high, that changes once every 5 years (blockchain is our five year plan! huh? blockchain? no no, AI is our five year plan!)
party princelings who rise not on merit but purely on positional signifiers alone (Comrade, I know you've been a party loyalist for 25 years, but your senior director position is being given to a new princeling. He's 26 years old. He came from Stanford, and was on the forbes 30 under 30. They say he was a protege of Peter Thiel!)
and, most importantly: everyone at the bottom, who pays for all of it, and must take it completely seriously.
The difference is that unlike USSR bureaucracy, these corporations' continued operations depend completely on the decisions (buy or not) of customers who they cannot coerce -- so their feet are far more held to the fire of market reality than totalitarian regime leaders. They do not have the power to force people not to vote with their wallets (not to mention with their feet).
As frustrating and corrupt as our market economy is, the oppression under regimes like the USSR and East Germany was unimaginably worse.
That being said, yes -- we badly need another round of legislative reform like the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and all the regulatory actions that followed.
In this day and age, that feels like something that is true in principle but not in reality. For food, the grocery store shelves are almost entirely stocked with brands owned by 10 companies, that have a combined revenue of $375 billion a year [1]. If you have a bad experience with DiGiorno pizza and boycott them, would you know you also needed to boycott Tombstone Pizza, California Pizza Kitchen, Cheerios, Tidy Cat, and on and on. If you wanted to actually boycott Nestle, how difficult would it be to maintain a spreadsheet of the literal thousands of brands they own [2]? Any issue with any brand is just absorbed by a thousand others. Any regional effort is absorbed by their global market. It isn't the USSR, but the idea that consumers can vote with their wallet just isn't the reality we live in anymore.
If the market is a consumer need then yeah, these companies can coerce simply by being the only (or one of a few) options in town. Food, healthcare, and housing are all markets that appear to be narrowing which means increasing in their coercive abilities.
It's true that the USSR and East Germany were worse, but that had a lot more to do with the concentration of power into a strongman leader rather than the people. And, in fact, a major part of why West germany did so well wasn't really due to market forces, but rather due to the US spending ungodly amounts of money on rebuilding them (and Japan). The USSR was always pretty cash strapped. Especially since the only nations they could really interact with were nations under the USSR umbrella. Even other communist nations like China had pretty tense and often not friendly relations with the USSR.
In today's money, we dumped about $120B on West Germany. Just to put things in context.
Sysco isn't the only one, but it is one of the few.
If you start looking at the distribution centers of these companies and the competitors, you get a pretty clear picture of how concentrated things are.
The drop off for the distribution centers of the top 3 is stark. [1]
The city I live in has number of locally owned restaurants that easily compete against McDonalds and Wendys price point. I find the quality of food to be better.
Lack of communication to outsiders and visitors about those that compete against such establishments is key. The larger organizations have more capital to advertise and help capture that economic arena.
Personally, when I travel, I go out of my way to find local establishments over large franchises because the former slowly siphons out the local economy to some CEO that gets paid millions. The latter helps keep the competition local economy health. I haven't given Starbucks a penny in over 7 years and plan to never fund their organization ever again.
Passkeys are encrypyed so they can't be simply copied off your device.
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