I mean, he’s actively supporting the opposition (Trump) right now. Were Trump to win then he’d certainly be in a very good position within Trump’s desired oligarchy. Until then he’s just a very rich asshole whose main major concrete political power comes from his ownership of Twitter and (largely artificial) audience. If anything his support of Trump kneecaps him in his ability to run his businesses as the Biden and hypothetical Harris administrations are not as likely to let him keep getting away with all the blatantly illegal shit he keeps doing.

Michael Bloomberg OTOH fits the term pretty well, as he’s a very major donor to the DNC and that certainly makes him very close to the ear of the president and policy decisions.

That conspiracy theory is so dumb.

The government almost certainly doesn’t need a backdoor as telegram is almost completely unencrypted (only one-to-one channels can be but aren’t by default). The real (but more boring) conspiracy theory is that governments generally don’t mind Telegram because its willfully terrible security model allows them to keep an eye on terrorists and activists’ communications (I have a hard time believing that the NSA or even DGSE don’t have their own backdoors already).

However the EU does have laws mandating the moderation of said unencrypted messages, especially when it comes to CSAM, which Telegram is notoriously poorly moderated. It’s certainly reason enough to arrest and question this guy, at least until formal charges are brought or he walks free. Maybe there are additional political considerations, but there doesn’t have to be.

Also how would arresting this guy help with backdooring. He doesn’t have access to the source code. Whoever he calls to get that done is out of reach of the French police. He has no reason not to disable that backdoor as soon as he gets out of the EU. If he can be bought off he already has been (Crypto AG style except way lamer because no-one clever&important trusts Telegram), you don’t need to arrest someone to pay them. I’m no DSGSE bigwig but pressuring lower level engineers to backdoor their code seems like a 1000% more effective approach.

Try to turn up the contrast and saturation to 200 %, that should increase the comments on picture quality :)

FR tho, mine is also impressively thin but like… I discovered that when I unpacked it? Thinness is not effectively conveyed by marketing material, and maybe it’s because I haven’t set foot in an electronics store in years but aren’t TVs typically laid out in a way that you don’t see them from the side?

Maybe I’m totally off-base and it truly is a big factor for normies shopping for a TV, but I just can’t even really understand how a 3 cm thick panel would significantly impact sales compared to panel tech, size, cost, and ancillary features.

However now that I think about it, maybe “thick” LCDs can’t go bezel-less? That I could easily understand how it impacts the overall esthetics (or even practicality with respect to Ambilight for instance).

What’s the overlap of the general public, people who buy “fancy sculpture TVs”, and people who still buy LCD TVs when OLED has been affordable for years now (I paid a grand for mine)? Keeping in mind that regular TVs already look impossibly thin so you gotta find someone knowledgeable enough to know that 3-5 cm is not as thin as it goes, but not knowledgeable enough to know LCD ain’t shit.

Maybe there are enough of these people to justify a SKU to cater to their needs. But I can also believe that no market research exists to support that hypothesis, and it reads a lot like the average boomer’s understanding of “the younguns and their flat-screen television sets” as if the switch away from bulky CRTs had only happened 5 years ago and not 25.

Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.

And having gotten to interact with the real process of product development, I gotta say in my (relatively narrow) experience it’s based a lot more on vibes/politics than market research or focus groups.

I can totally see “make it as thin as XYZ” being a hard requirement for no better reason than a PM felt strongly about it, and no-one had all three infinity stones necessary to call them out (engineering knowledge, understanding of the PD pipeline, and political capital).

Corporate behemoths are going to keep doing what they do best.

Their ISO-whatever certification says they gotta get that kind of software, so they do. Whether it is found to actually increase business risk does not matter in the slightest, what matters is that a box is checked for the audit.

It’s like Oracle or IBM, who did not contribute anything of value to the world since about 2005 and notoriously have some of the most aggressive licensing lawyers on the planet. But there are lots of companies out there who sort a product segment from Old to New and pick the first result on account of the fact that it’s “established”, “reputable” and “reliable”, every other consideration be damned.