In Louisville, Kentucky, Cuqita Boyd was charged with DUI after a minor crash in January 2022, despite repeatedly asking for a portable breathalyzer, which the arresting officer did not provide. In a deposition, the officer explained that using breathalyzers "wasn't my thing." Boyd later got a breathalyzer test at the jail, which read 0.0, and a blood draw found no detectable alcohol in her system. Body camera footage shows the officer admitting she did not smell alcohol and that Boyd was not slurring her words, but claiming she was too slow to follow commands. Boyd spent 14 months fighting the charges before they were dismissed. Her family has sued, claiming the prolonged legal ordeal contributed to Boyd's death in May 2025 from high blood pressure complications.

The post Brickbat: What Is This Breathalyzer You Speak of? appeared first on Reason.com.

Save a bunch of files on a good ol’ magnetic hard drive, leave it in a box, and they’ll probably still be there a couple of decades later. The lubricants might have all solidified and the heads jammed in place, but if you can get things moving, you’ll still have your data. As explained over at [XDA Developers], though, SSDs can’t really offer the same longevity.

It all comes down to power. SSDs are considered non-volatile storage—in that they hold on to data even when power is removed. However, they can only do so for a rather limited amount of time. This is because of the way NAND flash storage works. It involves trapping a charge in a floating gate transistor to store a single bit of data. You can power down an SSD, and the trapped charge in all the NAND flash transistors will happily stay put. But over longer periods of time, from months to years, that charge can leak out. When this happens, data is lost.

Depending on your particular SSD, and the variety of NAND flash it uses (TLC, QLC, etc), the safe storage time may be anywhere from a few months to a few years. The process takes place faster at higher temperatures, too, so if you store your drives in a warm area, you could see surprisingly rapid loss.

Ultimately, it’s worth checking your drive specs and planning accordingly. Going on a two-week holiday? Your PC will probably be just fine switched off. Going to prison for three to five years with only a slim chance of parole? Maybe back up to a hard drive first, or have your cousin switch your machine on now and then for safety’s sake.

On a vaguely related note, we’ve even seen SSDs that can self-destruct on purpose. If you’ve got the low down on other neat solid-state stories, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

HP Inc. said that it will lay off 4,000 to 6,000 employees in favor of AI deployments, claiming it will help save $1 billion in annualized gross run rate by the end of its fiscal 2028.

HP expects to complete the layoffs by the end of that fiscal year. The reductions will largely hit product development, internal operations, and customer support, HP CEO Enrique Lores said during an earnings call on Tuesday.

Using AI, HP will “accelerate product innovation, improve customer satisfaction, and boost productivity,” Lores said.

In its fiscal 2025 earnings report released yesterday, HP said:

Structural cost savings represent gross reductions in costs driven by operational efficiency, digital transformation, and portfolio optimization. These initiatives include but are not limited to workforce reductions, platform simplification, programs consolidation and productivity measures undertaken by HP, which HP expects to be sustainable in the longer-term.

AI blamed for tech layoffs

HP’s announcement comes as workers everywhere try to decipher how AI will impact their future job statuses and job opportunities. Some industries, such as customer support, are expected to be more disrupted than others. But we’ve already seen many tech layoffs tied to AI.

Salesforce, for example, announced in October that it had let go of 4,000 customer support employees, with CEO Marc Benioff saying that AI meant “I need less heads.” In September, US senators accused Amazon of blaming its dismissal of “tens of thousands” of employees on the “adoption of generative AI tools” and then replacing the workers with over 10,000 foreign H-1B employees. Last month, Amazon announced it would lay off about 14,000 people to focus on its most promising projects, including generative AI. Last year, Intuit said it would lay off 1,800 people and replace them with AI-focused workers. Klarna and Duolingo have also replaced significant numbers of workers with AI. And in January, Meta announced plans to lay off 5 percent of its workforce as it looks to streamline operations and build its AI business.

That’s just a handful of layoffs by tech companies that have been outrightly or presumably connected to AI investments.

According to analysis from outplacement services and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, as of October, technology firms had announced 141,159 job cuts since the year’s start, a 17 percent increase from the same period last year (120,470).

But some experts question whether or not AI is really driving corporate layoffs or if companies are using the buzzy technology as a scapegoat.

Peter Cappelli, a management professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told CNBC this month that “there’s very little evidence that [AI] cuts jobs anywhere near like the level that we’re talking about.” He noted that effectively using AI to replace human workers is “enormously complicated and time-consuming.”

In September, Gartner analysts predicted that all IT work will involve AI by 2030, compared to 81 percent today. However, humans will remain essential, per VP analysts Alicia Mullery and Daryl Plummer, who said that 75 percent of IT workloads will still involve people.

More broadly, there’s hope that AI will actually lead to more jobs, not fewer. In January, the World Economic Forum released its Future of Jobs Report 2025, which predicted that AI would create 78 million more jobs than it eliminates by 2030. The report was based on data from 1,000 companies with 14 million employees worldwide.

It will be years before we comprehend AI’s impact on the workforce. In the meantime, we can expect AI to be at the center of more layoff announcements —whether people believe the job cuts are solely the results of AI or not.

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About five years ago, the comedian Ryan Long posted a video in which a woke progressive and an old-fashioned racist meet and, much to their astonishment, discover that rather than being bitterly opposed, they agree on pretty much everything.

There was a strong echo of that convergence in last week's White House tete-a-tete between Republican President Donald Trump and New York's new socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Anticipated to be a grudge match, it instead turned into something of a lovefest. Well, of course it did. As fans of horseshoe theory accurately point out, control freaks from the political extremes might differ on details, but they have more in common with each other than they do with people who respect each other's liberty.

Trump and Mamdani in 'a Place of Shared Admiration and Love'

In reporting on the meeting, The Hill noted, "Trump and Mamdani answered questions from reporters, both striking a remarkably cordial tone, with the president indicating he agreed with many of the mayor-elect's ideas."

According to Mamdani, "It was a productive meeting focused on a place of shared admiration and love."

Trump added that Mamdani would be "hopefully a really great mayor." He also commented, "There's no difference in party. There's no difference in anything."

So, how did two politicians who entered the meeting slinging epithets at each other like "communist" and "fascist" exit with the makings of a mutual admiration society? There's a hint in a question a BBC reporter posed to the new mayor at the White House when he commented "you're both populist" and asked, "to what extent the president's campaign…inspired any part of your campaign?"

Mamdani eagerly brought up cost-of-living and economic concerns while Trump nodded and then chimed in with agreement about concerns over the price of energy.

That's the key to this meeting of the minds. Trump and Mamdani are strongly focused on economic issues. They also share a taste for addressing those concerns with government direction.

Two Paths to Socialism

Mamdani boasts of his open socialism. He's gone so far as to call for "seizing the means of production." He won office with a campaign that promised city-run grocery stores, a rent freeze, and free buses, child care, and other services funded by higher taxes on whoever can be interpreted as "wealthy." That should be interesting since he wants to tax the extremely wealthy out of existence.

In an exercise of what can be called "Republican socialism," Trump actually did seize a portion of the means of production when his administration leaned on U.S. Steel for a "golden share" of the company. Under his leadership, the federal government has also taken ownership positions in firms including Intel, Lithium Americas, and Trilogy Metals. Trump's protectionism is crafted to enable the state to push firms to revive domestic manufacturing—or else.

Mamdani believes in government control of the economy for the sake of achieving socialism. Trump endorses government control of the economy to accomplish his nationalist goals. But whatever they call their views, both men think political leaders should be directing economic activity.

What brought Mamdani to socialism is probably best left as a question for his shrink, his parents, and his college professors. But Trump's path to state control of the economy almost certainly lies in his nationalist impulses. He came to office on the slogan "Make America Great Again" and has enthusiastically used the power of the federal government to enact what he believes that means, often replacing individual choice with politicians' preferences.

As the economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, "It is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism. To think in terms of 'our' industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest."

Hayek differentiated nationalism from patriotism, which he considered pride in your origins as opposed to nationalism's collectivism and xenophobia. The shared collectivism of socialism and nationalism, he added, is why "we frequently find the conservatives joining hands with the socialists against the liberals."

Inevitably Shared Authoritarianism

Whether collectivist economic impulses are exercised by nationalists or by socialists, Hayek observed that the result is inevitably authoritarian. When the state controls economic activity, it can deny permits, withhold resources, cut off finance, impose punitive taxes, and otherwise make existence independent of the state almost impossible.

"Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends," Hayek warned in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. "And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for."

From different directions, Trump and Mamdani have arrived at agreement that economic activity should be directed by government officials over the objections of those who want to make their own decisions about their property, their businesses, and their money. They got along so well together at the White House because, like Ryan Long's fictional wokester and racist, they were delighted to discover the similarities in their desires for a society controlled from the top.

Yes, Mamdani is back to calling Trump a "fascist," but there's a quality of rote recital to it. He's giving his supporters what they expect. Trump will probably call him a communist again. But they're not bitter enemies; the two men are rivals peddling similar products and vying for market share.

Holding Onto Individualism

In opposition to both these representatives of neighboring arms of the ideological horseshoe are Hayek-style classical liberals, libertarians, and other individualists. Advocates of liberty oppose collectivism and state control whether it's called socialism, nationalism, or some other name. We see society as a cooperative endeavor among free individuals, not as a collective to be commanded from above.

Unfortunately, Mamdani and Trump represent political movements that are consuming their respective political parties. If they're successful in displacing the remaining relatively individualistic voices, the political choices offered in the future by the major parties will be nothing more than competing brands of collectivism. Of course, collectivists favor a world in which choices are made for us.

The post Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump Prove That There Are Two Paths Toward Socialism appeared first on Reason.com.

We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of their depths.

The merger disaster was particularly hard on HBO, once the pinnacle of prestige television. AT&T executives were obsessed with distancing themselves from the popular brand, and their decisions (like demanding Game Of Thrones be shot in short-form verticality so it would be easier to watch on phones) showed they really didn’t understand what made HBO popular in the first place.

So they engaged in a long series of pointless name changes, they eliminated a lot of the programming people liked, they threatened new restrictions on password sharing, they generally lowered overall quality in the mindless pursuit of scale, and they began hiking streaming video prices three times in the last three years. This, unsurprisingly drove subscribers to the exits.

HBO Max CEO Casey Bloys seems to have realized that all of that pointless deal-making by the extraction class wasn’t great for the brand or for quality television. Being everything to everyone in a bid to obtain impossible scale (by producing a lot of low quality mass market appeal bullshit) wasn’t what HBO was all about:

“The result was that HBO, the most premium of premium TV companies, became absorbed into something that was meant to be a Netflix-killer.

As HBO Max CEO Casey Bloys told reporters Nov. 20 in the company’s Hudson Yards offices, that ended up being a fool’s errand: “To Netflix’s credit, as the first mover, they have become a utility for consumers,” Bloys said. “In retrospect, we can all see that the streaming industry’s race for volume, years ago, found many brands losing their identity.”

So HBO is hoping to focus on being the kind of company that made it originally popular in the first place, nine years after AT&T originally signaled its intention to acquire Time Warner. Nine years for these guys to figure out that they should stick to what they’re good at: quality television.

Unfortunately, there’s some bad news for Bloys.

Warner Brothers is about to be purchased by the Ellisons, who are on a massive acquisition spree (TikTok, CBS, the exclusive rights to MMA). All of these deals are going to saddle HBO’s new parent company with mountains of debt. And just like AT&T, Time Warner, and Discovery, that’s going to result in an entirely new wave of layoffs, quality erosion, and price hikes to recoup the investment.

And this is all going to happen before the damage from all the past pointless consolidation deals (including ongoing layoffs from Paramount’s acquisition of CBS) have even fully formed.

It’s also going to result in an entirely new wave of trust fund brats, out of their depths and obsessed with scale, trying to “tweak” the HBO formula so they can obtain impossible scale by being everything to everyone. They’re going to look at the hard lessons HBO experienced over the last nine years and… completely ignore them and repeat all the same mistakes. Write it down.