I'm sorry you were modded down - you make an interesting counterpoint. And your note about not realizing "how good" we've been having it resonates with me. I often think about that, shielded behind the ad blocking technology that saves me from the junk that so many others put up with. And sometimes I'm thankful that they put up with it, because that actually makes it easier for ad avoiders like me to get lost in the crowd.

And then I think about ALL the people who have fully bought into Corporate World's vision: the people who allow themselves to be tracked without putting up a fight, who wear corporate-branded clothes as though they're cool, who buy into 'loyalty programs' that make it more expensive for me to not be tracked, who have helped make Facebook the slimy giant spyball that it is, and who bend over reflexively for the likes of Google. ALL those people make it ever and ever more difficult to have an umbrella big enough and strong enough against all the crap raining down from the sky. That's when I say "Fuck'em - I'm looking out for myself. I'm happy to escape the ads, and if there are enough of us ad avoiders that it results in the end of YouTube, that's probably for the best".

I get what you're saying, and I have fond memories of advertising pictures in print publications. Further to the point you made later regarding hobbies, I especially liked photos in electronics magazines. But that kind of response is why I included them in my thought experiment ban. Even still pictures can be powerfully propagandistic, promising kinds of emotional and spiritual fulfillment which the product either doesn't deliver or, worse, delivers for just long enough to instill a desire for more. An extreme example of this is pornographic photos and drawings.

That said, there were TV commercials which I looked forward to, and still remember six decades later. Thinking about this just now, it occurs to me that advertising might best be described as "weaponized culture". It uses elements of our culture which arose from our animal needs and desires, distills them, and delivers them as a needle delivers a drug.

Here in my part of Canada we have a new roadside phenomenon. They are electronic billboards which look something like an inverted golf club, with the handle in the ground and a giant video screen covering the face of the club. These things are very high, so if they catch a driver's attention then the driver is moving his eyes even farther off the road ahead. I wonder how many accidents these things will cause. More pain and death as sacrifices to the god of wealth concentration. Yay!

Dupe of Earl, Dupe, Dupe...

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/04/03/1624214/anthropic-researchers-wear-down-ai-ethics-with-repeated-questions

In 2001 the terrorists probably couldn't imagine how far-reaching their actions would be. Twenty-three years later, the US response to those attacks is still ongoing, and citizens have less and less freedom from government spying every year. The US is doing exactly what the terrorists wanted, which was to turn the States into the kind of shithole they themselves grew up in.

Good job American leaders - keep you country safe by having your nose up the ass of every one of your constituents. What a great way to live up to the spirit and principles upon which your country was founded.

Since Google took over, YouTube has always been "yet another marketing platform". After all, Google is an advertising company. YT just took longer than many other platforms to 'mature' to the point where the enshittification is starting to make it unusable for both viewers and creators.

Spending $3.5 million of somebody else's money to 'acquire' a million of your own seems to me a perfectly acceptable ROI!

There is a fourth option as well, and it involves a societal ban on any advertising beyond printed words that say basically "you can get this product or service here, and this is how much it costs". No photos, video, or or other visual cues, and no audio.

Clearly, the odds of that ever happening are also zero, and always have been. But contemplating a world without advertising as we know it is an interesting thought experiment. Our world would be VERY different from what it is now - perhaps unrecognizably so. I believe that it would be a lot more just, and that corporations wouldn't be running our lives and ruining our biosphere as they are now.

Try FreeTube: https://freetubeapp.io/ . It's available for Windows, Mac, and various flavours of Linux. I use it on Linux Mint.

You can also watch using FreeTube on a laptop or desktop, or NewPipe on an Android phone. I haven't tried the latter on anything other than LineageOS, so if you're running the Android that came with your phone, YMMV.

As for yt-dlp, I also use it a lot, for videos I want to keep. But without a YouTube GUI of some kind, you're limited to doing full downloads of whatever a search engine turns up. I find the GUI apps - especially FreeTube - allow videos to be a lot more discoverable.

I came to say the same thing, so I have no idea why you were modded down. Given the state of US - China relations, questioning whether there might be some 'accidentally-on-purpose' deficiency in something that stores that much energy isn't racism or trolling. It's a legitimate concern.

First off, there was Covid - in most urban areas traffic decreased as a result. Do variations in the reading correlate with that?

Second, did they monitor and account for any population changes in the area? TFA - if it can be called an article, which I question - doesn't mention that. Third, did they analyze Bay-area car registrations to see if there was an uptick in replacing older ICE vehicles with new ones? That alone could account for a non-trivial decrease in emissions.

It's great that emissions dropped steadily; but attributing the drop primarily to EV adoption seems scientifically dubious, at least given the info (or lack thereof) in the link provided.

Sure, overnight is enough. But as I said in my comment:

and

If electric car adoption outstrips charging infrastructure - as seems likely - people may not have many opportunities to fully charge their cars. So they may have to sit at a charging station twiddling their thumbs. Worse, they may be stuck with insufficient charge to get to work on time, or 'worser still', not enough charge in an emergency situation. THAT is a major reason for people's concern over both charging speed, and range.

I think people tend to put apostrophes in pluralized acronyms - or rather, 'initialisms' - for the same reason they put them in contractions. That is, they're aware that an apostrophe stands in for missing letters. In this case, all of the letters between the "O" and the "s" in "Officers" are missing.

I often add an apostrophe in such cases, even though I'm fully aware of the distinction between contractions and acro... er, initialisms. It's a stylistic thing, and probably a much lesser sin than that of spelling the possessive form of "it" as "it's"... ;-)

Thanks to commenter 'anonymous scaredycat' below for differentiating between acronyms and initialisms - that's a new one for me.

I'm happy to keep my phones for a long time for the environmental benefits of doing so. But in my case there are additional incentives. It's a real PITA to find a decent phone with a LineageOS build that works well. And then it's a white-knuckle PITA of a process to get LineageOS onto it - I bricked one phone in the attempt. So once I have a functional phone that's set up the way I like and has a minimal amount of Google spyware on it, I keep it until it's truly on its last legs.

If comms infrastructure didn't change as frequently as it does - making older models partially or fully obsolete - I'd buy two phones at once, set them both up, and store one against the time when the other dies.

Sure - but do they have the opportunity to charge? How many apartment complexes have charging capability for all tenants, plus a few for two-car households? Never mind visitors. So that's roughly eight hours of the day where a car may not be chargeable.

Then there's the workplace. How many companies have or will have a charger for every parking spot? So some or many people may not be able to charge their cars at work - there's another eight-hour charging opportunity gone.

Until we have saturation-level charging capability, fast charging will be an "obsession" simply because even 95% average downtime doesn't necessarily guarantee sufficient charging time.