That's probably true at this exact instance, but they absolutely will give a shit if/when they start seeing the tax revenue river start to dry up.

And if they let job loss increase too much, the economy will tank and it'll won't matter how much junk the AI can make if no one is buying.

The way I see it; Chat GPT et.al. is making the system vibrate like mad, but it isn't swinging very far. Like every other complex system a new natural frequency will develop and the system will eventually normalize until the next big upset.

We have a metric ton of food and health programs for the poor and especially the kids. WIC, SNAP, EAP, TANF, DFS, FAMIS, etc. Not sure what any of that has to do with social media though.

Society has long ago determined that letting anyone under 18 enter into a contractual agreement is a bad (tm) idea. I think it's generally common knowledge that these social media apps record and track everything you do for all of time; something that could be argued is a contract of service.

Society overall tries to protect kids from things they don't fully understand; guns, drugs, alcohol, gambling, marriage, porn, and apparently now social media apps. I'd hazard a guess that in most cases we didn't have an age restriction until it is observed the amount of harm it caused.

Also not sure how supporting those assistance programs, or limiting things that have been proven to be bad for kids, would make someone a shithead. Nor how calling someone a shithead somehow makes your argument valid.

I think what the parent was alluding to are early on during the pandemic it was policy to count any death where the person also had COVID-19, as a death by COVID-19. I think this lasted for a quite a while before it was corrected. So the parent isn't wrong, but probably very over-exaggerated.

A small but notable quote from the White House from the article linked below, emphasis mine.

I distinctly remember the New York hospitals being called out for doing this; I can't find it right now, but it had something to do with the state and federal reporting systems only having one way of reporting a death, and the CDC needing to know if the person had Covid or not.

https://www.aamc.org/news-insi...

I'd most certainly land in that 75% grouping, as primarily I do just commute to work in my Ram. That said though, at least 8 times a year I trailer my two UTVs to the trail system 2 hours away. And 1-2 times a year borrow my dad's small tractor to get some heavier yard work done.

So I *could* have a smaller daily car and rent a truck when I need it, but my truck didn't cost any more than any car I've bought, and the difference in gas costs is in the neighborhood of $1000 more per year... Which is about the same as renting a truck that is setup for towing a handful of times.

So at least for me, it's just easier and simpler to have the one vehicle and it be able to do everything I do, even if it's relatively rare.

This used to be true if you used SQL+CAL licensing. But with 2019 Standard and higher you can license it per core instead, with no user and/or device limits. I think this was true as early as the 2016 versions. In fact, you have to specifically request the SQL+CAL licensing model now; which can be significantly cheaper if your using the database with a small number of users/devices like my company is.

You'll easily spend $14k for an 8-core license, but that's a one time cost; we'll maybe an every 3 year cost if you want to stay updated. If you have 50 people/devices that drops to $11k.

FWIW, there is a good calculator here.

https://wintelguy.com/mssql-st...

The problem I have, is no one has come up with a concise definition of Living Wage. It's because we don't have a good way to define it, that we use Minimum Wage as a proxy.

Does sharing an apartment with 4 folks in suburbs count as Living Wage? Studio apartment in San Francisco? If there is a shortage of housing in a given area, should the owners be forced to keep prices fixed, or raise them in a free market?

TL;DR; Compressors don't boost, they reduce. "Boosting lower volume up" is exactly what louder is!!! It seems louder, because it IS louder.

Compressors have several trigger points, that reduce the gain of the inputs as they cross user defined levels. Each additional level generally creates a steeper gain reduction. The ultimate goal is to keep the audio from clipping (cutting the peaks of the waveform creates square waves which is like adding in much higher frequency components).

Compressors generally aren't needed on the final outputs, they are primarily used on the inputs. Each actor's microphone, each band members instrument, etc, will have a compressor stage. This makes it easier for the engineer to focus on the mix without having to worry about clipping a channel.

Most audio engineers, say YouTube creators, will target an overall level for voice at -10dB and background music at -20db. This leaves headroom for dynamic range, i.e. if a singer gets loud for effect - then there is room for the loudness without clipping the output.

Commercials don't do this, they still use a compressors to prevent individual channel clipping, but then the mix targets all channels to something like -5dB or even 0dB. They sacrifice the dynamic range for just pure loud volume.

This is the the best first pass filter, but I've recently started using an awesome second pass filter. My android phone now lets me ignore all calls, or forward to voicemail, of any number who isn't in my phonebook. It also lets me treat local exchange numbers differently, which means they go to voicemail. At least then my phone doesn't ring, and I can deal with the person at my leasure. And thinks to the voice-to-text voicemail app, I don't even have to listen most of the time.

Was he? Because I was replying to this:

That sure sounds like he implied all conservatives have those views (we don't), and not just conservative leadership.

I'm sorry that the current leadership attacks LGBTQ+ like they do, it is also not representative of the whole (as you seem to imply you already know ). I don't care about it one way or the other, I personally draw the line when someone tries to compel my speech and dictate that I "have" to call a girl a boy and vis-a-versa. We aren't there yet, but it's coming; Canada already did this. If someone asks me to use a pronoun I probably would. I gain nothing by being an asshole about it. I also draw the line at teach these things to young children in any setting OTHER than during sex education at the appropriate age. Let math be math, and science be science, none of those should ever feel the need to discuss LGBQT+ topics. And having you're community push those things is where all the friction is coming from (at least in my town).

Your right, my list of very much abbreviated. I'm coming from a place where at my age, most of my liberal friends are well out of college and have steady and well paid jobs. I understand that isn't typical of the younger generations.

So from my circle of friends, co-workers, and family the biggest concern is healthcare. And they are always pointing at other countries who actually do get it better as 'proof' that the US sucks. For them it is a single axis of 'better'.

Per your American Myth claim: Yeah maybe a little bit. I'm in the mid 40s now, I did all the things I was supposed to do and was piss poor for many years. But through endurance and some fortunate situations that I was lucky enough to take full advantage of, I'm in a much better place now. Am I Rich? Nope. But I don't have to worry about having money to pay the utilities or mortgage again, and that's enough of a dream for me.

So no, it wasn't about working hard for me. It was some amount of dumb luck and being able to recognize the situation I was presented and use it to it's fullest.

I could of phrased that a bit better, and as another commenter posted there are a few other big ticket items in the liberal agenda (free education, flat taxes, etc) but at least among my circle healthcare is the biggest source of angst.

But nothing in my statements is gaslighting, there is no emotional abuse implied or given, no false narrative (unless you're claiming health care reform isn't a liberal talking point), nor was I questioning anyone's reality.

So yes, I am here in good faith. Oh, and please tell me what numbers I listed are far from reality? You really need me to share a my health care quote with you from the government marketplace? You assume I'd lie about my pre-Obama health plan status?

I usually don't reply to sh*t like this, I just assume your trolling. But in this case I'm not certain that you are trolling.

I'm conservative, and I believe in free speech just like everyone else. I think what you said is complete BS and easily refuted. But I also don't mind that you said ii, as obviously you've come to this conclusion for some specific reason. I am curious as to what that reason is. If that reason is something you say on reddit/tiktok/twitter than I strongly suggest you get out and talk to real people more.

I'm also a Christian, and like most Christians we are the first to admit we fail and get things wrong. That's kind of the whole premise of the Bible FWIW: No one gets a right, we all suck, and need forgiveness from God and to be able to forgive each other. Also, another core tenant of the Bible is the rules apply to believers, and to not expect non-believers to follow those rules.

In my circle of conservative friends and relatives, I know of exactly one person who actually liked Trump much less thought of him as "the most exemplary".

And not to nitpick, but the US is pretty freaking awesome. Do other countries do some things better than we do? Yes. Do we do things better than other countries? Also yes. One thing I have noticed of the more liberal inclined is their definition of a better country is measured purely on the single axis of health care.

Does our health care system suck, hell yeah it does. Did Obama make it better? Nope, not in my opinion. I'm still on a pre-Obama plan thankfully, because every year I check and an 'equivalent' Obama plan would cost me over $2300 a month and it has a deductible 3x higher than my current one at $15,000. So I get to pay ~27k a year for insurance, that when I get sick am on the hook for the first 15k. Pass.

Obama care was/is a clusterf*ck unless you qualify for the free plans. What it could of done, but chose not to, is cap the prices at hospitals. Instead some idiot long ago decided that capping the earnings on insurance providers to 3% was the solution; result, insurance lets the hospitals raise their rates 7% every year for the last 20 years because the more the care costs, the more that 3% is worth.

To be fair, if we had something akin to ranked voting, most democrats wouldn't be elected either. A truly representative voting system would likely land most votes down the middle. Maybe one person in my set of friends and extended family is everything 'trump', the rest, while still republican in policy are very much not pro-trump and never will.

In fact I'm pretty sure they were mostly 'not-hillary' votes. Both parties presented the extreme candidate. No one was comfortable voting 3rd party because of the 'wasted vote' fallacy. And that problem is solvable with ranked voting.

They aren't claiming first in the World, but first in the US. I'm pretty sure that's why the title of the post starts with "First US Mile ..."

Like many others, my system went down because of this. I didn't get to pick enom, google picked it for me 12 years ago when I signed up for business email and domain.

For nearly 3 days my email was down, my main website was down, and VPN was down (in the middle of a f*cking snow storm).

The emails I did received once I notified them, were frankly embarrassing. There own internal systems were down because of a 'data center' migration for the first two days. Then they reported everything was perfect. Then they said some users were impacted. Then they said all DNS was down.

What a shit show; I'd really LOVE to hear what happened, but either way I've got to figure out how to not let this happen again and still maintain google business email.