My favorite part of Paramount+ and a few other platforms, when they decided to stick ads in, they failed to do what TV has been doing since the 1950s and properly sync the ads to the scene cuts. Doing a re-watch of TNG with my partner and where the commercial break naturally was, no commercial, you'd get 5-10 seconds into the next scene (the return from commercial in the original airing) and then BANG, cut to ads.

I'm shocked they couldn't find a way to automate this task and failing that, pay some intern an entry level wage to do it for them, "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to watch 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and press this button after each scene change." I'll sign up for that job at minimum wage, lol.

Of course, the real answer is they just don't care about the consumer experience, it's all about $$$

We gave up and signed up for the ad free tier, which is kind of funny, because if you listen to their earnings calls they make MORE money from the cheaper to the consumer ad supported tiers. You'd think they'd want to get it right.

Can't wait. Hope to never see another computer or user looking for help for the rest of my life. I like to think every person in I.T. support has a "Well" of empathy and desire to help others. The bottom of mine has been a dry, cracked, and dusty surface for about 10 years. It's long past time.

Too bad - not many available right now. What is available, is only available through a connection. Nobody is hiring "cold" applicants.

though every single economist worth a damn will tell you that inflation right now is caused by price gouging.

Just... no. No, they will not.

The price gouging is a responsive measure to the inflationary actions. It isn't the cause. The inflation started as soon as the government inflated the incurrency directly - by printing 80% of the total US dollars ever printed in the course of 2 years (link)

This is the real "trickle down economics". When there is an increase (or decrease) in supply in a market, the prices change to match. Increasing the supply of money decreased its value, and made it more available. You saw the results almost immediately in used car markets (in part due to supply side shortages in new cars, but also due to the surplus of cash that people had due to the handouts received around the same time). Corporations did the same.

That doesn't change that it absolutely is "price gouging" across the board, but the price gouging wasn't the cause - it's just a symptom. It's no different than taking the initiative to provide a supply of a rare in-demand commodity during a disaster - water, food, guns - and charging a premium for your initiative. It's the same exact principle which regulates the ecology of our world: when there is an excess of something, something else will come along and eat it. It could be trees and bark beetles, seals and sharks or bears, or something else. That's just how the world is.

Our banking system is too unstable and weak to go a protracted period of time with higher interest rates. So the Federal reserve is going to have to cut rates at some point. From what I can tell they're planning to do it shortly after the election.

No disagreement there.

So I'm curious, just how may power lines cross the Pacific?

... they wound up in the trash.

Remember, no matter the problem, the solution is always socialism. </sarcasm>

I've had the same install of linux on numerous systems for many, many years.

Yeah, you can fiddle and fuck with it to your heart's content, but you can also leave it alone and it mostly works for desktop use.

The worst thing I've ever experienced is is bugs getting introduced when upgrading between major releases, or major architectural changes in something introducing new behavior or incompatibility. We're talking about different kernel schedulers or drivers needing to be reinstalled, introduction of things like systemd which break compatibility, and so on: major things for linux folks, but still only a handful of things over the course of almost 25 years for me.

I've got systems still that I installed in the early 2000s. The hardware has long since been retired but the systems live on as VMs. I never have to fiddle with them, and in most cases they're still up to date and secure, simply by occasionally updating releases (every 3-5 years or so).

If you want to use WINE and Windows apps, or follow cutting edge development, it's more of a 'fiddle around' scenario, but for the most part that's all completely unneeded. Since at least 2008, "just install it and go" has been entirely possible with any KDE based distribution, with better usability than Windows or Mac in most cases. Want to configure it specifically to your liking? The same configs I made in 2008 still work fine for current versions of KDE without issue.

China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds.

Until we get China and India to play along, all the handwringing in the world won't mean squat.

That's partially due to the ARM hardware all being quite lackluster, compared to PC: poor performance CPUs, small bus bandwidth, and storage as a second class with poor performance (no PCI, no SATA, no NVME). Most of what is available is roughly the same in the $20-200 range for a board.

It's better than it used to be, but the features just aren't there to make a performant desktop experience, generally.

You clearly didn't understand what I said, and that's OK.

It's about ecological balance. An excess of turkeys with negligible predators is an imbalance. Ticks will feed on turkeys in their nymph stage. That's part of the problem.

Thanks - that's the data I was looking for, but was on my phone.

At some point, you've got to look at the systemic effects of these things. This has broad reaching social and economic implications.

That said, there's no keeping this cat in the bag at this point... it's going to happen one way or the other.

It's because the financial tradeoff potential is huge.

The principal cost of porn production is the women ('actresses'). If you could generate AI women, you eliminate almost all the cost.

OnlyFans, which has even mediocre women making millions.

Personalized avatars + sexbots for lonely people, or those who've lost a loved one.

Generating esoteric fettish material - as mentioned in the OP, things like ultraviolent and niche porn.

The market there is huge. It would almost sublimate the existing porn market if the tools were accessible to developers.

And, the fact of the matter is: porn pushes tech. This tech will happen, and is happening. There is no stopping it, so they might as well get in on the ground floor for some revenue: I think that's their likely thought process.

Incorrect.

Malaria was eliminated in the US and Europe through judicious application of DDT in the 1940s and 1950s. The entire world has been plagued by malaria since the beginning of recorded time.

The other primary way to mitigate malaria is through control/elimination of standing ground water.

Africa has seen variations in malaria largely coinciding with rainfall variations - primarily driven by variations in decade-long climatic cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic, like El Nino/La Nina.

Everyone's so quick to claim, "oh, it's AGW!" when there are other much more probable, provable causes. Just because an environment changes doesn't mean it's AGW.

I will agree, observationally, that urbanized development (an absence of variation in ecosystems) has contributed heavily to tick-borne illness (and indeed, the general wellness of ecosystems decaying). Ticks are consumed by fowl and possum in extremely large numbers. Unfortunately, habitat for those animals has been destroyed for suburbia: places where, 50 years ago, there were rural family farms, or just family dwellings with gardens and fields, separated by treelines, was ideal habitat for opossums, chipmunks, mice, and game birds (turkeys, grouse, pheasant, quail, woodcock). These species all eat ticks as a primary part of their diet. You can see this throughout the US, and is evident even in the span of 20-30 years in some places: squirrels and chipmunks aren't as common as they used to to be, and places that had ample gamebirds now have few to none.

Believe it or not, humans have been here for a long time - burning, building, and growing things on land. North America had a large population of people doing just that for millennia before Columbus came and killed them all with disease, leaving behind remnant orchards, fields, and forests which had been carefully manicured to produce a bounty and variety of food with as little effort as possible.

If you live in a city, you're a big part of this problem.