Free Republic

Microsoft has officially ended support for Windows 10, all but forcing users to either upgrade or pay more money to keep getting essential security updates for the OS they already own. No matter that its replacement, Windows 11, can’t be run on nearly half a billion machines, meaning it’ll create mountains of e-waste as those old, perfectly usable PCs get thrown out for new ones. If possible, things are getting even worse. This week, Microsoft is launching a suite of artificial intelligence features that basically turns existing Windows 11 systems into full-blown “AI PCs” which are controlled by Copilot, the...

If the dollar dominates stablecoins, America could dominate global finance for centuries“I will make sure the US is the crypto capital of the world,” Donald Trump vowed earlier this year. In July, he signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (Genius) Act. The Act creates federal guardrails for dollar-pegged stablecoins and regulates who can issue and redeem them. Concerns from law enforcement are also addressed, by making sure anti-money laundering and consumer regulation applies. But what are stablecoins? They are digital tokens built to stay at a stable price, usually one dollar. They sit on the blockchain...

The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a...

In my previous article I suggested that the UK’s proposed “mandatory” digital ID, called the BritCard, was a bait and switch psyop. I posited that the arguments presented by Keir Starmer’s purported Labour government, to supposedly justify the BritCard rollout, coupled with the timing of the announcement, the apparent inability to understand public opinion, and the lack of necessity for the BritCard, indicated that there was something amiss with the so-called government’s BritCard proposition. It seems to me that the purpose of the BritCard gambit is to frame the Overton Window for the public debate about digital ID in the...