Onomatopoeia

That's why you have the phone call, to discuss it, and in closing state you'll send an email.

I don't disagree it's a focus thing for many people. I'm often stunned at the lack of comprehension or attention to detail using any medium, even in person (also technical field).

Like look, I just said to do what you're asking would require 250 firewall rules...why are you now talking as if firewall rules aren't required? I even went through the simplest math out loud during this meeting, so everyone would understand how I came up with that number and didn't just pull it out of my ass.

People pay attention to what they want to pay attention to (or as my grandfather would say - people hear what they want to hear). If those questions aren't a high priority for their own work, they simply don't see them.

For OP: email is a terrible medium for such things, unless there's been a conversation about it, and this is part of moving a project forward. Anything out of left field isn't important to your audience, and... people dislike comitting to anything in email. As you work with people up the food chain, you'll find less and less happens via verifiable comms like email (which is archived).

panel of federated instances

Nope, can't see anything going wrong with that idea.

The great thing about federation is any instance owner can already do this, you're just asking to create an organization that decides who can federate. May as well be bluesky or reddit then.

At best you get a few major instances who together decide who can federate with them, and then those "major" instances lose traffic because people get annoyed with such nonsense and don't federate with them, their traffic slowly decreases, and eventually they become irrelevant.

Worst case: reddit.

If a few instances decide to pull this nonsense, I'll do all I can to avoid them. May make me setup my own just to ensure I don't have to deal with such authoritarians.

Very cool.

Wonder if most people even realize how often they've listened to one of his songs - he wrote countless songs for movies and TV.

Really? Let's see China suddenly ship the next 6 months of produced stuff somewhere else and sell it (because they've been making it to allow for shipping time). They're producing 2025 Xmas stuff now.

Who's got 500 billion of extra purchasing power right now? (The 200 billion deficit plus current US purchasing)?

Remember, China has hundreds of massive container ships just waiting to dock. Are they going to spend millions on fuel to now send those ships elsewhere?

Ya all crack me up that you actually believe China has any leverage in this conflict. We haven't even touched on Xi having no ability to back down.

They do right now, as their manufacturing is built around shipping 300 billion more to the US than they buy from the US.

If the US suddenly reduces that buying by even 20%, it's not like they can suddenly sell that elsewhere. "Elsewhere" is already buying what they want. You can't magically make new consumers appear.

Yes, the deficit means China has the greater risk. China pushing a tariff on the little they consume from the US means nothing, just because they buy so little.

Basic economics.

Sure. But they sell a huge amount to the US. And this is about a trade deficit between US and China. This one hurt the US like it will China - US can buy similar goods elsewhere, while the rest of the world can't compensate for the loss of sales to the US - they're already purchasing what they need.

I mean this is basic economics, and you all act like China can magically come up with new customers.

The current effective tariff on Chinese goods is 104%, and that doesn't include the tariffs on countries through which China ships. Those tariffs put Xi in a no-win situation. He can't even afford the 34% Tariff for any length of time, because of the massive overproduction going on. They have manufacturing going to meet demand 6 months from now, to compensate for distribution time. All that stuff will now sit in China, where they don't have storage capacity for it.

What are calls?

/woosh

It's alright, we all sometimes miss sarcasm on the web.

Wonder how many politicians will magically not be on the list?