If you use a VPN, you’re always connecting to the same IP

No, you’re not. A VPN provider can have hundreds of thousands of IP:s.

which is unusual

OK, but not unheard of. And even a dynamic IP might remain the same for months, if not years, depending on the operator.

would tend to indicate VPN usage

No, it wouldn’t.

they can see that all your traffic is going to one IP address and can guess/assume it’s a VPN

Umm… What?

I’m not sure that’s true. Fewer, sure, although not necessarily that much fewer. But “fewer and fewer”, I don’t think so. It’s not big enough of a hurdle to dissuade anyone who has already done it once.

Well, as far as I know the current idea is that you’ll have to toggle a setting in developer options and wait 24 hours (once). After that you can sideload unverified stuff as much as you like. So it’s not horribly sad, I´d say.

I actually kind of think that’s a reasonable change. It improves safety for the clueless majority, but it still gives those that know what they are doing a free reign with a minor initial inconvenience. And I kind of feel like articles still claiming how horrible this all is are mostly just outrage farming. Unless the plans have changed to something more fucked up, that is.

(76 and Fallout Shelter do not count)

Would it make a difference?

Quickly glancing through the paper it doesn’t really seem to support your claim. They attribute their major losses to the parabolic reflector (meaning they don’t have very well concentrated microwave beams?), and say that developing higher efficiency focusing components is important work for the future. I’m kind of guessing that’s one thing the Chinese are doing.

Still, I’m sure there are relevant losses even in properly focused microwave beams. How much that is, I have no clue, and didn’t see it addressed in the paper. Might have missed it - it was a very quick glance. :)

A concentrated, collimated beam doesn’t act like a point source. There’s of course some amount of scattering and absorption loss due to atmospheric particles, but other than that a fully collimated wireless energy transmission doesn’t lose intensity over distance. Kind of obvious, really, because “where would the energy go?”.

It actually doesn’t really show much, except maybe that inflation exists and people generally have more money now.

If it’s supposed to show how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, it does a lousy job. It’s practically impossible to see the relative change between the groups, since the lower two graphs’ behaviors are impossible to see. The only thing that can at least somewhat be seen is that the top 10% and the top 1% grow quite correspondingly.

So, basically that graph shows that everything seems to be as fair as it has always been. Probably wasn’t the intention, and certainly not a good representation of what’s happening. It’s very possible that the top 1% is included also in the top 10% and dominates it, but just based on that graph it’s impossible to know.