FYI, most public defenders are experts in the Courts they are in. Their client base has a large variety of problems "the law" usually can't fix, though. At least here in NY, most of the assigned counsel I know are at least competent, and many of them are true believers and very motivated.

He who represents himself has a fool for an attorney. I get that especially among engineers, there is dislike of lawyers. You deal in math. We deal in intangibles. I've seen people who thought they could do it themselves...do jail time for basic errors. Take crappy plea deals in criminal and traffic proceedings. Lose money to insurance companies or employers. Get screwed by the landlord. Do poorly in a divorce proceeding. There is a legit reason you have to go to school and take a tough exam, and it isn't all restraint of trade. I'm happy you fixed your own traffic ticket but reliance on a set of templates or if/then is false economy. Corporate America, the insurance industry, and many others will f-you over a heartbeat. No set of logic trees will advocate for you. Haven't we just done a round of how well AI and Chatbots do ?

This and stories like it mean HP products won't grace my home or business...every since a work related (not my office) HP refused to print black and white because "cyan" was empty...

Does GNAA still exist ?

If the feature is in the car, you paid for it. Period. Those heat elements in the seat don't disappear if you don't subscribe. I don't mind subscriptions for things like data...sat radio...traffic information. There is a cost of aggregation and distribution in real time. Charging me to complete a circuit so my wheel heats up ? In a car I already own ? This is like the Brits who have a coin-op meter for heat in their homes...who'd willingly want that ? Luckily, so far, we still have a choice.

What was the company that just eliminated customer service, seeing it cheaper to lose customers than to try to retain them ?

We don't amazon. Every single thing they sell can be bought from a more worthy seller and delivered to you shortly.

Will this new search method be able to block the first 100-1000 hits, all of which are SEO babble, with "click my link" Amazon Affiliate nonsense. Search any consumer product-actual information is impossible, and a legit review takes work to find. Millions of people with spare time and a basic HTML understanding have destroyed the internet. Think of them as the ubers of the internet, but they show up in a 1973 Grand Marquis with an exhaust leak.

I worked in lower Manhattan in the pre internet era. Center of the world, all commerce, street retail was food, bars, stores, even titty bars... Went back recently. Most of it is gone. Storefronts closed up and clearly not cleaned for years. I was the only guy in a suit (?!). Money used to flow down those streets, because you needed to be near other people to "do business". Downtown as a concept is going the way of the Age of Steam. It has a certain romance and was a way of life...but its time has passed, and the same thing is now done in a much more efficent manner.

In order to avoid copyright, a certain big-deal pro football game is unhappy if you use their name. I stole this from Colbert

"to see the Superb Owl, enter your email address or cell phone number NOW". (there will be a way to do it without this, but it will be buried under 12 pages of TOS-Click at end, and the link will be in the middle, somewhere, and not a hyperlink)

As a radio buff, I have had OTA forever. When it was NTSC, I discovered the OTA was cleaner than the slice and dice of my Cable Company. Went to dish and OTA. When HDTV was experimental, got a USDTV box from Walmart and hooked it to my NTSC set. It worked very well, and the downconverted signal was still better than even my clean OTA NTSC signal. I got one of the first HDTV sets, and for a long time UHF was HDTV and the old allocations for NTSC. Fast forward a few years....broadcasters nerfed the picture quality of uncompressed ATSC 1.0 by putting many sub channels into the signal...The OG signals were beautiful, now bandwidth is given to home shopping channels....great. The broadcasters were well paid for the move to ATSC so the cell companies could profit. I don't see what 3.0 would get me. There isn't a converter box to see if it would work anyway. NYC stations haven't shown any interest, and given the cluster -f that the HDTV transition was, I'm not hopeful. I already have adblockers on most of my stuff anyway....now I need one on the TV set ? I have one of the last Plasmas, and am now praying for its continued operation.....

Netflix has gone from movies to formula crime dramas. I enjoy the cinematic looks at other nations, and the assumptions in their crime dramas. We have now seen the actor stable in most of the European nations and it is always fun to see the on location backgrounds. Smoking is sponsored in all of these dramas, I am absolutely amazed at the constant/gratuitous puffing. While big tobacco was chased off most platforms, there is clearly a lot of money spent quietly by tobacco for these production companies.

I can see you kept your job at Twitter and signed on for the work hard for a billionaire plan....

Agreed-over time the good content has migrated to one or another streamer...the days where Broadcast owned the media and the narrative are Age of Steam in the media world.