And then there are guys like me. I'm an embedded dev also, but the vast majority of my work can be accomplished from home, which has worked for me for the past several years. If I need to touch a particular piece of hardware, I go in. On occasion, I spend several weeks in a row in the lab. The difference is, my employer doesn't really care. They just want to see results. If I can produce results at home, they're fine with that, but if I need to be onsite to get something done, then that's what is expected.

And such downloading would affect almost no one that had any personal association with the show. So far as I know, Erin Murphy is the only living person regularly involved with the show that still receives royalties, but is pretty much retired from acting and did well enough with other ventures that those checks don't do anything to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" in any articulable manner.

Not to mention that despite all of the claims of "theft" by rightsholders, extended copyright terms represent REAL theft from society, as in "taking something that the rightful owner can no longer make use of".

Higher interest rates control genuine inflation that results from supply/demand or money supply factors, but I don't think it does much to control inflation that results from profiteering.

We really should be heavily taxing housing ownership that are investments, via higher property taxes or land value taxes, sales taxes, and/ or higher capital gains taxes.

Lots of states already do this implicitly via homestead exemptions for people that actually live in their homes The absentee-landlord owner of the house across the street from me pays almost 50% more per year in property taxes than I do, despite our homes being of comparable value and me having bought our place 12 years after she bought hers (newer owners in my state pay more in taxes due to Proposition 13-ish laws).

However, that exemption isn't enough to discourage the practice of investment buying.

As a metal fire, water isn't an appropriate extinguisher method anyways.

EV fires aren't considered a Class D fire - it's not elemental lithium that's burning. The huge amounts of water are used to keep the burning batteries cool (to prevent other cells from rupturing/burning), since the reaction in the battery is self-sustaining without oxygen and isn't really able to be stopped, even using a Class D agent.

That would be a waste of my time.

As opposed to a nebulous spleen-venting post that provides no useful information, and wastes the time of everyone else on Slashdot? If you really couldn't care less about it, you wouldn't have taken the time to post. Your story likely would be of interest to a lot of folks here.

When hunting for enganent bands the ads would show up not only on My device but on my girlfriends too.

That would have annoyed the hell out of me.

In the world I live in, almost no ads work on almost anybody. It's been such an unending tide of brainwashing nonsense for so many decades that advertisement is just background noise that people try their best ot avoid, filter out or simply ignore if all else fails.

For ads aren't targeted, I'd agree with you, but if they are they can be quite effective. I almost don't ever buy anything because I saw an ad for it, but if the ad is relevant to my interests, I might. Just yesterday I bought a product due to seeing an ad, but it was specific to my needs. The vast majority of ads I see get ignored or actively blocked afterwards, however.

On the flip side, at one employer we used to get web ads all the time for that employer's products, and it annoyed the hell out of us. This employer had their own pre-CIDR Class B netblock, so you'd think the brokers would be smart enough to not try to sell to people logging in from the advertiser themselves.

Also, the roughly contemporary Three Mile Island was like 1 paragraph in one of my high school textbooks, we didn't learn all about it and I doubt many 20 year olds here know about it.

That's probably because TMI didn't render the entire Harrisburg metro area uninhabitable and is in fact still running today. The accidents aren't really comparable. Lots of people also don't know about the accident with the cesium-137 radiotherapy source in Brazil a few years later, but it was rated at the same severity. Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only two accidents that most younger folks might be aware of due to just how bad they were.

At least Klinger still did his job and didn't compromise the effectiveness of the 4077th, along with entertaining everyone there.

From what I gather, the extra money the Red Army got went mainly into materiel, not troop training.

That's because you can't steal and resell troop training.

Cross-compilers?

It doesn't even need to be groundbreaking. The amount of money they spent last year could have bought a state-of-the-art Ford-class aircraft carrier, and still had change left over.

If you just remove the parking spaces, you will not get fewer people using their cars. You will get more people driving around searching for a place to put their car.

You'll also get a lot fewer people willing to patronize those businesses. Europe had kind of a mixed blessing with limited land area, in that it forced more efficient use of it. In the U.S., there's so much land that people just don't care. Same is true of low fuel/electricity prices - anytime a resource has easy availability and trivial cost, you can count on it being used wastefully.