I wrote to the Commerce Commission expressing concern that we're going back to the world where the mobile phone operators will only allow people to use devices that they have approved, rather than allowing people to use any device that meets the appropriate technical standards.

The Commerce Commission responded with "Regulation of handset devices is not currently within our powers."

I've written back and said that a) it's about regulation of the networks and how people connect to them, not just the handsets, b) that it puts up additional barriers to people switching providers if one provider supports their handset and the other doesn't, and c) that it's abuse of the telco's market power.

I've asked them to revisit the issue.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7405995746514132992-97KH

I just learned that ICE seized and deported a long-time resident of my hometown back in Pennsylvania. Carlos is a family man. He worked in the local schools and at the YMCA as a janitor. He has been in America since the 1990s. He has legal status. He has a Real ID. He has a social security number. He pays taxes. He has no criminal record.

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This chart shows all objects in the Universe, arranged by mass (vertical) and radius (horizontal).

The edge of the upper left corner is the "Schwarzschild radius" - anything along this edge becomes a black hole, so we don't expect stuff above and to the left of that.

The edge of the lower left corner is the "Compton wavelength" - anything here has a size so small that measuring its position that accurately would require enough energy to create a new one.

These two corners intersect in a white dot. This would be a black hole so small that it's heavily affected by quantum mechanics. By definition its mass would be the Planck mass, and its radius the Planck length. Nobody has seen such a thing.

The black region to the left of that dot, labeled "QG", contains imaginary objects that are more compressed than black holes, yet also ruled out by the uncertainty principle. So they're doubly impossible - unless Quantum Gravity, which we don't understand, changes the rules.

The pink strips of slope 3 are lines of constant density. For example "QGP" is the density of quark-gluon plasma, "BBN" is the density of the universe when Big Bang nucleosynthesis was going on, and so on.

The Earth is only slightly more dense than a flea.

The black dot labeled "Hubble radius" is the whole observable universe.

I like this chart a lot. It's from here:

C. H. Lineweaver and V. M. Patel, “All objects and some questions”, American Journal of Physics 91 (2023), 819-825. Free at https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-pdf/91/10/819/20107261/819_1_5.0150209.pdf

A higher-resolution version is on Wikicommons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Masses_and_sizes_of_objects_in_our_Universe.png

See the alt text for more!

Latest comic: A hot new startup

#corporations #deregulation #economy #oligarchy #WallStreet #cartoon #comic

Today in "Don't Trust AI to Tell You Facts": How several different "AI" programs messed up the simple fact of to whom I dedicated a book, and what that means for how much you should trust "AI" to tell you the truth about things (spoiler: not much at all):

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/