It is probably more likely that the phone modems have become less sensitive. In the old days you had maybe a 4 band phone, and now is well north of 20 bands (sorry I left the cell industry almost a decade ago, and at that time it was at 20 bands). A lot of those bands never get used by a given phone, but the Apple's and Samsung's of the world want a single model to work in every country for every carrier, so you pack in every possible band into the phone. Front end loss has steadily grown, requiring more power from the transmitting power amplifier, but the LNA's are already ~1 dB noise figure, and adding 6-8 dB of loss can't be overcome other than just letting the phone be less sensitive.

The antenna's signal has to pass through more switches, duplexers, and other complexity to get to the modem, so you have a lot worse noise figure. The rule of thumb a decade ago was about 0.1 dB of frontend loss for each additional channel. I would guess this is the issue more than 3G/4G/5G differences. 4G and 5G are slightly more, not less efficient with their encoding and efficient use of spectrum. Basically better DSP power with better CMOS nodes in the modems has allowed less wasted spectral space between channels, and more flexibility in packing channels together to handle both very low speed data (like voice) and huge bandwidths compared to 3G. Basically Moore's law has been employed to squeeze better efficiency and flexibility out of the existing spectrum.

Does AI news have the same protections as new written by a human? There is a very high bar to sue a journalist for libel. So in this brave new world does MSN open themselves up to lawsuits with few journalistic protections, or how does this all work now?

Yep. We often have the illusion of competition, but once you recognize just how many brands are just tendrils of the same mega-corp, the illusion disappears. At the grocery store you are often comparing prices of two brands that are actually from the same single company, or at best two companies that are "competing" by raising prices in near unison and blaming outside factors as a smoke screen.

So using its market dominance to manipulate prices is OK? The method is a little novel, but they basically just plain old price fixing with a hint of technology thrown in to obfuscate things.

If it is so trivially easy, why does Google waste 10's of Billions of dollars to make sure you never have to do it yourself?

Personally if my choices are mostly Bing or Google for search, it is hard to care. Sort of like being a banana that two meth'ed up gorillas are fighting over, in the end up treated like monkey crap. I like neither company, but having to listen to M$ whine about another software giant acting like a monopoly is pretty darn rich coming from them.

Put pro-union info on them and see how quickly they disappear.

There is an old saying: "I know I am wasting half my advertising dollars, I just don't know which half."

I'd really like to know how much of this crap has been actually measured for efficacy. Do these disruptive screens actually generate more revenue than the stores lose to annoyed customers? I've grown an active aversion to products that push intrusive advertising, and would guess I am not alone. Ads that go from annoying to actively hindering my normal daily life are a bridge way, way, too far.

The ever expanding flood of ads everywhere surely has reached the points where it is no longer half the advertising dollars being wasted, but more like 90%. It wasn't too long ago that a number of companies tried pulling their online ads from various services only to see zero change in sales. Maybe marketing departments need to get more rigorous before just slapping screens with ads wherever humanly possible.

Corruption shows up everywhere there. A big drag to India growing beyond its current ceiling are the paper mills churning out farcical degrees without much meaning. When interviewing candidates who went to university there we had to get one of our Indian employees to decode which Universities were worth anything, and which (the majority) were semi-scam operations with poor instruction and no real standards. He helped us dodge a lot of bullets, and helped us know where to press on skillsets to find out if a candidate actually knew what their degree and resume claimed. All too often the semi-scam nature had rubbed off when you carefully pressed for details in their work history. We had folks who only really helped in tertiary way as a contractor claiming they architected and fully designed most of a major project themselves.

Extra hours will not fix all that.

So off the bat I agree that Economists are more charlatans and carnival barkers than rigorous scientists, no matter how much they claim otherwise. Economies are largely driven by feelings, herd mentality, and other "animal spirits" that are hard to model, but easier to create excuses for.

One thing that was actually clear is that many companies were raising prices faster and for longer than necessary to deal with the initial demand spike or rising raw materials prices. We've had decades of low regulation, massive consolidation, and so forth. Your grocery store looks like it has a lot of brands competing, when it is just a handful of conglomerates often "competing" with themselves by offering you two alternatives made by the same megacorp sitting on the shelf next to each other.

Rents are coordinated through shady software. Salaries get anonymized and shared through services like Radford, so even "competing" companies will all offer similar "market rate" offers that are just half a step away from direct collusion to suppress wages. Such behaviors are rampant nowadays and we have slowly become nihilistic in the face of it.

Basically the markets are broken, and prices are set not by cost and competition, but by raising prices at just below the level that will trigger adequate outrage to spur congressional action (and congress is mostly owned through all the dark money laundered through super-PAC's to fund re-elections of those who don't upset the status quo).

So bad economists making bad predictions is the least of my worries with inflation.

I don't mind paying for my content, but paying AND still getting ads will get a quick cancellation. We cancelled Hulu years back for violating this.

I guess I really want to know just how much they are getting paid to show these ads?

At the current pace I expect the Ford Raptor M1A1 Abrams Edition to be released within a few years. When drivers think the only way to be safe is to driver a bigger Truck/SUV than everyone else on the road there is just no end to the vicious cycle.

Massive EV's with huge battery packs are not the solution either, and come with their own baked in carbon footprint. Somehow we need to get the average carbon footprint of the rich countries to actually shrink rather than just greenwashing continued gluttony.

Often management of paid time off is out of the hands of the employees, with lots of coercion to take or not take it, and often carry over balances are capped quite low.

A while back (early 2000's) I worked at a defense sub-contractor owned by Tyco Electronics that would try and get all its PTO obligations zeroed out at the end of each fiscal year to make the accounting look good. Managers would hound you to make sure you got your balance down to near zero, and even post a list of balances outside their cubes by employee number to shame you. The trouble was that their fiscal year was at the end of September, just before cold/flu season. So the whole office was full of flu ridden zombies running on DayQuil with no PTO balance to be able to stay at home.

It was really a stupid sight to behold, but almost entirely out of the employees hands.

Elon has already shown that being a CEO is only a part time job. If he can run Boring/Tesla/X/Neuralink/SpaceX simultaneously, then being a CEO is a 1-day-a-week job at most, right?

Lasting products could be worth it, but knowing how well something is built is really, really hard for a consumer to know. The result is we'd rather take a known crappy product for a low cost than risk overpaying for something that has a high chance of being just as junky but makes you feel like a dupe for buying.

Successful well built products with a good reputation inevitably become targets for some private equity monolith to take over the parent company and milk the reputation into the ground. Higher prices used to be a signal of quality, but anymore it is just as likely a sign of scammery. We are also now buying everything online, where you can't heft a widget, feel the thickness of a sweater, or inspect to atrocious sewing. Instead it shows up in an Amazon box and we just keep lowering our expectations accordingly.

It seems like basic math would be predictive. If you have access to wage, headcount, and address data you can kind of readily calculate who is paying too high a percentage of income in rent/mortgage. Add in any sort of medical debt collections data, and voila! you get a pretty accurate picture of who is headed for eviction soon, no AI required.

It seems the AI charlatans are trying to sell their wares into all sorts of places to monetize replacement of common sense with a black box that comes with a hefty subscription.