I read a bunch and I also really struggled with the first book. I would start a new chapter and it would take me a page to realize we'd skipped forward/back in time, and that the characters were somehow related. I'm american born with no asian heritage, and I found all the names really difficult to follow as well. I thought the plot was good but the translation was awful. I did not bother with books 2 or 3

Have you lived in a cave the last 25 years? They have this thing now, it's called "social media"

...Did you mean "Taylor Swift Concert Tickets"?

I don't know why this got downvoted. In my very-extended "friends group" several husbands died of "suffocation". My grandmother died of covid (otherwise healthy before she caught it) but the official cause was listed as heart failure or whatever.
 
The best way to look at the data is to look at "excess deaths" data, it was significantly above the norm in 2020-21-22 and a big portion of the delta between excess deaths and covid deaths those years, a large part of that is likely covid.

Average shot length for most movies is between 6 and 12 seconds, for more modern movies it's on the shorter end. Even for long shots, they used to use wind up cameras and could only shoot 15 seconds at a time. You could totally do a "into the spiderverse" style movie with this today. You'll struggle with the neccessary long shots, but really almost all shots are pretty short.
 
If you're looking for a movie with really long shots, "children of men" has a continious ~12 minute shot near the middle of it which is pretty impressive, and The West Wing is famous for it's "walk and talk" scenes that follows several conversations through the hallways of the whitehouse

Burger flippers make $25/hr in california. Most 18 year olds who aren't getting shot at don't care about health care. So what you're saying is that for the last two years of enrollment in the army you'd be making marginally more than the buger flipper in year one. And if you don't like your boss, you can't quit. Kind of splitting hairs. I doubt the mortality rate of burger flippers even approaches that of infantry, which is a major consideration for a lot of people.

Nobody was dragging religion in to this, thanks for participating.

We used to live above a major chain grocery store. I had my own private "shopping cart" and would elevator down, put things in the cart, check out, and then instead of putting it in bags, it just went back in the cart, and back up the elevator. There was never any question of how much I could haul back upstairs. Unfortnuately with the sole exception of a handful of neighborhoods, sidewalks universally suck and this isn't viable for about 99.99% of the population

I'd pay a dollar per bag. Two dollars per bag for the large paper sacks that can actually hold more than 2 items per bag. I have a toddler I don't have time to keep track of reusable bags. $15/bag is probably where I would invest in reusable bags, or buy into a rental bag scheme where I can mail them back or something. Most grocery runs, all my groceries fit in three paper sacks, and yes I do prioritize stores that have paper sacks. $3 out of a $150 grocery run is almost a rounding error

You can deliver pizzas or flip burgers for the same as entry level military work. And you get five days off, access to unlimited porn and almost unlimited Xbox/PlayStation. At this point the only thing the military provides is a halfway reasonable social safety net got retired GI and possibly a path to a college edition, which most 18 year olds aren't super focused on. Last resort in America is flipping burgers. Military service is an unnecessary risk at any economic level in America

The French Foreign Legion existed for many many years and was a great success. If you're in a country's military... are you still an "illegal" immigrant? Being part of a peacekeeping security organization is about as Legal as it gets, is it not? Typically also a common way to gain citizenship. Bleeding for a country is probably better proof of citizenship than being born there.

Russia, England, the US are all experiencing the same thing: failing to hit recruitment goals. Between movies, games, and in particular social media coming out of Ukraine of kids getting shot at (and having to shoot back) in an active war, nobody wants to get involved in these things. From birth kids are exposed to the very grim reality of war, and voices both for and against it.
 
If nobody wants to go to war, how will government wage war? Russia is just barely hanging on to their immediate recruitment needs by sending their prison population through the meat grinder, and many of the best and brightest fled the country at the first hint of war. They all have (much, much better) jobs now and are unlikely to return before retirement age, if ever.
 
I think there's a lesson to be told here; going to war means your upper middle class will immediately flee, and your financial system will be kneecapped indefinitely. And also that nobody (who hasn't already been brainwashed) really wants to take a bullet for their country.

I mostly use LLMs for 1) code completion and 2) extracting key facts without having to feed it through google and watch 25 ads to get the answer and 3) doing unit conversions (how many cups in 223 fl oz? how many mile is 226 km?). It's pretty great. If it could turn on/off the lights in my house and set cooking timers I'd be able to replace all the google home devices in my house tomorrow.

I'd love for my google home devices to just tell me the answer to XYZ question without giving me a link to some terrible SEO result. The number of times I get "I don't know, but here's a search result that might help." bitch if I wanted to google it on my computer I'd just go do that. I'm not getting off my couch to go research what the population of salt lake city was last year, or what voltage high speed rail trains use in europe.

You can just park in a private garage. Street parking is already ludicrously difficult to come by in most places.