Being stuck on a shit connection, I never watch above 720p and often below. I wonder if that's why I haven't noticed any slowdown... I'm already close to rock bottom.

That's nothing. I was convinced to install an adblocker when I was served a 30 minute unskippable crapomercial before I could watch 5 minutes of fluff.

And I'm being recommended more and more obviously bot-generated content with obvious repetition designed around multiple ads (like, every minute or two for the duration, yet such channels somehow have 12 million subs??) which makes me think that there's a big con game going on that Google isn't privy to, and is probably where most of the revenue-to-creators actually winds up.

And if it did exist, is there some reason AI couldn't incorporate this watermarking into its generated images?

Once upon a time I actually queried the Library of Congress about whether copyright was available on something that was NOT available for distribution.

I was told flat out NO COPYRIGHT.

Hmmmm.

Dealers used to be where you got the best service, and were least likely to be ripped off. They hired all the best mechanics, and it was steady work without the huge investment in tools and facility and inventory.

This changed sometime in the 1980s... some dealerships were (and are) still good, but service stopped being service and became revenue stream. And the better mechanics began migrating to being independent shops.

This seems to have happened throughout the service industries, perhaps as a side effect of acquisitions and consolidation (and concomitant cost-cutting). Frex, was a time the competent plumber worked for the big outfit; now the big outfit is a ripoff and the only good ones are the independents.

Side thought: every industry that depends on sales commissions becomes cancerous, because that's a direct conflict with the customer's interests.

Does the same thing happen in Welltris?

[Never liked Tetris, but I did like Welltris. I'm weird.]

Ah. Well in that case... I could have digitized it a couple years ago, which was when I tripped over a copy at a giveaway price. Thanks.

So... I own a copy of a very rare specialty book (25, maybe 26 copies known to still exist, of the original 300) that has a stated copyright of 1936, but AFAIK was never renewed, and the owner died in 1937 (and has no extant legal heirs).

When can I digitize the durn thing and make it public?

You can have judicious logging, or you can have wildfires. Logging (done right) simulates wildfires by clearing out surplus growth.

You can't choose "none of the above" because then you get overgrowth, and litter buildup, and crown fires that kill everything instead of just thinning it, and soil that's glazed and sterilized, and a fire that isn't just a fire, it's a local catastrophe.

Was perusing satellite view of California not long after one of their Great Roaring Fires, and .... forested land in the path that was entirely logging-prohibited had burned down to the dirt. Conversely private land that had been logged still had standing trees (they'd left some trees, scattered enough that none touched another, in imitation of a healthy natural forest), and was no worse off than before.

Yeah, it's good to protect old-growth. It's not necessarily good to entirely prevent logging therein, or when (and it is when, not if) the younger too-packed trees go up, they'll burn the old ones with them.

Barring catastrophic hardware failure (which usually results in "Well, maybe now I'll upgrade the OS too"), in 30 years I have never done a reinstall of Windows on my own hardware, and have had some installs (most of them, actually) that were daily drivers or heavy lifters for over ten years without a single crash. (And some with uptimes measured in years, too.) However, I don't run it on crap hardware. Windows is very much canary in coal mine for shit hardware/drivers. If it crashes a lot, throw out the PC and get a better one.

Unfortunately I cannot say the same of my linux installs. The most stable has been PCLinuxOS, almost but not entirely trouble-free. Others need regular restarts (I'm lookin' at you, Fedora), or eventually become cranky, or GRUB eats itself (*cough* Mint), or suddenly I have "broken packages" for no reason (no changes since previous update, so WTF) or some other fail that's not easily recoverable, or needs a session with Timeshift.

Meanwhile southern Germany is reeling under record snowfall (18" at one go), as are parts of Russia (not to mention -68F already in parts of Siberia, about 30F degrees below normal).

Good point.

One might observe that those who most hate clergy are the most likely to be seeing a therapist.

How about instead California stops letting most of their rainwater and snowmelt run into the ocean? Snowpack on the Sierras alone averages 150% of the state's water needs (and some years much more than that). The past couple years have been mondo rainy, to the point of flooding, but 95% of the rainwater was allowed to simply run off. (Farmers wanted to pump some of it back into the aquifer, and were denied.) Money was allocated for more reservoirs 40-some years ago but none have been built. And so on. California's water crisis is not reality, it's politically created.

That's true. You just don't know. Let's play Treatment Roulette!

My point is the term "homeopathic" has spread to stuff that is actual concentrates and extracts, and is no longer constrained to mean "homeopathic by the dilute until absent ritual magic".

Bullshit terms tend to have that sort of mission creep.

"Organic" has suffered a similar creep. A while back I saw shoes labeled "organic". (Well, I suppose they contained petroleum, being mostly plastic...)