Why is it considered greedy to remove a middleman from your transaction so you can receive 100% of the funds due to you. Are you considered greedy because you cash your check at a bank instead of a check-cashing place that takes 3% of your paycheck?

I work in sustainability. I facilitate EV adoption. This is 100% the case. Most interestingly, though, electric vehicle mandates and solar rooftops pushed the PIE much higher than would have happened naturally which will make the TOD fall feel pretty extreme. In the process, the EV PIE crowded out the easier-to-implement HFC tech which is in the shadows getting better and greener every month. I wouldn't be surprised if HFC is outright more cost effective in every sector (ownership, fueling, lifecycle, etc.) than BEV by the time BEV comes out of TOD.

Universal BEV fueling infrastructure is just SO MUCH HARDER to make happen (and maintain/sustain) than anyone has been willing to talk about over the last 10 years. Speak to any utility or EVSE mfg. and they'll tell you.

And we're not even talking about battery waste yet...

Fantastic example! Uniformed soldiers, marines, sailors, and ROTC members lead the national anthem pretty much throughout American athletics (which are entertainment endeavors first and foremost) not to mention all the air force fly-bys and air shows.

And the complaint is sponsoring video game competitions in the name of "developing brains"?

- The military has backed or directly facilitated wartime and peacetime movies since the 1930s.
- "GI Joe" was created to 1964. They've had multiple cartoons and movies since the 80s.
- "America's Army" was a series of first-person shooter video games developed and published by the U.S. Army starting in 2002.

Military sponsorship of youth-targeted entertainment is nothing new. That military recruitment is continually falling despite continually increasing investment shows that their recruitment problem is less about visibility and more due to other factors (veteran treatment post-service, etc.).

Brain development has nothing to do with it. We raise young men to like guns, to want to be a hero, and to idolize the heroic endeavors of the military of years' past. If we don't want young men to volunteer for military service, then we should probably find other means for meeting the obligations of today's and tomorrow's military... because someone still has to do those jobs.

My first thought was of of IOI's proposed "Pure O2" advertising system in Ready Player One. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw)

Nope. Just being honest. I'd be surprised if more than 20% of Amazon Prime subscribers even watch a Prime Streaming video once per week. It's not THE reason most people pay for the service. It's effectively "free" for most people (before they consider how much more expensive their Prime membership is because of the streaming service).

I actually work in transportation. I like the concept and I don't like that we need it. Here's why it's needed:

1. Our driver's licensure process is too easy. It doesn't require "safe driving competency", just knowledge of operating a motor vehicle in the most common circumstances.
2. Renewing a license is rarely more than an administrative process. Over the age of 70 drivers MAY be required to pass a vision test.
3. Use of motor vehicles is legally a revocable privilege, but gross violators of traffic law are continually allowed to drive because our transportation infrastructure all but requires the use of a personal automobile outside of specific communities in California.
4. With the visible lack of traffic enforcement, people are running stop signs, red lights, and traveling beyond the speed limit more frequently and more brazenly.
5. Over 90% of adults in California have smartphones and a large (but unknown) proportion use them while operating vehicles. Their use contributes to collision frequency.
6. Traffic law/safety enforcement is almost non-existent throughout California since 2020 due to the various laws and initiatives making it more difficult or arduous to stop someone for any reason on the road.

Is it really that bad? YES. Recently, the California legislature approved the enforcement of bus lane violations, bike lane violations (parking in...), and excessive speed via camera and mailed citations instead of via in-person enforcement because of the desire to minimize interactions with those breaking the law. California has effectively neutered its traffic enforcement (and to a certain extent, law enforcement efforts in general) and needs SOME OTHER METHOD to mitigate the rate at which people are killing themselves and others on the road. Thus, speed limiters.

Now, to fix some of the widely spread myths from other comments on this article:

"Driving slower than the speed limit is more dangerous than driving above the speed limit."

This is literally never true when drivers on the road are attentive. In fact, if you're on a 2-lane road (one in each direction) with a speed limit of 45, the person ahead of you is doing 40, and you're doing 55, the person ahead of you has the right of way and is fully within their legal right to go that speed. As the person on approach YOU are creating the speed differential. As the person on approach, YOU have full control of your speed and should be able to tell that you're gaining on the vehicle.

If safe and legal, you can pass that person or you can slow down and follow at a safe distance. If you crash into that person, you will be entirely at fault.

This goes for every road user. If you see a bicyclist legally riding in the general travel lane and you hit them from behind, you are at fault because you should have simply slowed your vehicle, changed, lanes, and safely passed with 3+ feet between the outermost edge of any part of the vehicle and the bicycle.

"Speed differential, not SPEED is the unsafe issue."

That's actually correct, but people draw the wrong conclusions from it. Capping speeds mitigates reduces the maximum speed differential and thus this statement actually is supportive of a speed restrictor.

"It's illegal to go slow!"

No it's not. If you want to go 50 in a 55, that's 100% OK, but you need to be ready to pull off to the side when 5 or more vehicles have accumulated behind you on a two-lane road.

"You can lose control at any speed. Limiting speed won't prevent crashes."

This is objectively false. If we had a universal restricted speed of 5 mph, there would obviously be fewer collisions (and fewer SEVERE) collisions than with the current system. Why? Because everyone would be traveling slow enough that even the most negligent people would have enough time to respond to potential conflicts up ahead. That same principle stands when you increase the speed restriction level until the point where a person's reaction time can no longer compensate for the speed. What is that speed? It's different per person (age, experience, disabilities, etc.) and vehicle (condition, performance). Generally speaking, it's somewhere between 50mph and 80mph and it's on a curve with fewer and fewer people being competent at the higher speeds.

Giving our EXTREMELY lax licensure standards, it make sense to treat everyone as "less competent".

"This is big brother trying to control you/me!"

Kinda, but only because the siblings as a whole can't get their act together.

I subscribed to Amazon Prime years ago before they had a streaming video service. They added it on with no explicit price increase. Prime has increased in price since then, but the value of prime for delivery and returns is absolutely worth it for me before even considering the streaming. Now, I also happen to like a few of the Prime-only shows they've produced and I appreciate non-Prime things being made available. They're not my go-to but I like it.

Commercials are not offensive to me. I doubt I will notice them when I have a show/movie on unless they modify volumes irrationally.

I think the bigger issue are streaming companies who exclusively offer streaming services and then change the terms of their subscription models. Netflix provides a streaming-only produce (as compared to Prime shipping & streaming) and is implementing commercials at their cheapest level. THAT is unacceptable.

You don't need a search warrant to buy stuff that's up for legal sale. If you can buy it legally, they can buy it legally.

The problem is that your data's for sale.

This is a good move by Amazon as it likely reduces legal liability on their part. In America, law enforcement is allowed to request anything of you. (It doesn't hurt to ask.) They cannot however demand all things from you. For that, they need a warrant or one of a few justifications that would be argued in court at a later date.

The problem is that most people don't understand the nuance of their rights, the authority of law enforcement, or the consequences of certain actions, so they may just comply because they assume that every request is effectively a court-backed warrant. If someone provides video as requested by law enforcement in relation to a crime and in the process incriminates him/herself for something unrelated to the original request, they may turn around and blame Amazon. They may assert that since Amazon is facilitating this conversation between law enforcement and a camera-owner, that Amazon is validating the request as 100% legitimate and that the owner is required to comply.

A human translator costs at least $30/hour plus benefits and they can't just go in and type a word-for-word translation. They need to learn the nuance of what is being said and translate it according to the nuance of the language. Nobody wants to pay that much money for an group that may make up a non-substantial proportion of website visitors.

A better conclusion would be, "Providing an equal level of service across all populations' needs is extremely expensive and businesses/organizations will take shortcuts where necessary."

There are three reasons why websites are fading:

1. Revenue generation via Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has incentivized individuals and companies alike to make really bad static content which in turn has driven people away from static pages.

2. People are reading less and less. 20 years ago, I could tell someone "Search Google, find a forum, ask a question, and watch all the helpful people stumble over each other to give you free advice." Today, that's too much work for most web users. Instead, they want to scan through a YouTube video or watch a TikTok. That's it. I work for a major university and when it comes to communicating with any group outside of retirees, the constant request is, "We don't read websites... please make a TikTok." It's absolutely deflating.

3. System maintenance. As a lifelong gamer, it's been heartbreaking to see massive forums full of huge amounts of information fall defunct and be deleted from the web because the original owner of the forum no longer had the bandwidth to keep up with software updates, security patches, SPAM mitigation, moderation, etc. Most people won't ever know just how much completely free labor went into making the first 20-30 years of the internet/world wide web so incredibly useful for civilization. Today, most people resort to a platform (YouTube, TikTok, Discord, Reddit, etc.) because the cost of maintenance is just too high.

Then you'd be sticking with Nvidia cards for a while. AMD's cards while providing better value for money when just considering retail prices really chew up electricity to get to their performance levels and thus come with larger heatsinks than their similarly performing Nvidia counterparts.

Nvidia: More power efficient (saves money long-term) and thus smaller heatsinks. Also comes with better upscaling/frame generation abilities.
AMD: Cheaper retail prices, nicer software suite.

Thank you! Well said!

Yes and no. It's the just the way education was managed, but it's the new habits that students adopted. In particular, they found out just how easy it is to cheat and they found out that they can get away with it. Today's student writing is even worse.