Their battery tech is a years ahead of everyone else, from the basic chemistry to the manufacturing process.

Worked for NASA... *yawn*. Holds 140 patents... yeah, so what?

But this dude also invented the Super Soaker - now THAT's legit guy cred!

Some are, others are adopting Matter which is local only and an open protocol. Vote with your wallet.

Some car manufacturers want to wring more out of their investments in hybrid drivetrains. They are also hoping to delay long enough to catch up to the Chinese on battery tech.

Toyota is a great example. Their solid state battery tech is always a few years away from revolutionising the industry. They tried and abandoned hydrogen.

Because the last I checked chemistry majors like that had a rough time in the job market. If you could find a job the pay was good but the problem was they're just weren't enough of them.

It is just as likely that you're seeing more of this because people who would normally be forced to drop out because they lack basic accommodations are getting those accommodations and are able to finish the program now.

We are long since past the point where life needs to be a constant battle to see who gets to have food and shelter. But we keep that system going.

The movies that draw people into those experience are already high budget and even at smaller budgets 8K cameras and tech are widely accessible. Also as we talk here about Netflix obviously the business model of recouping a films budget at the box office isn't really true anymore. It's not the budget of the films thats at issue, its really just the business model of the theater chains.

Really in the last thread I talked about how we need a Paramount Decree for streaming, a separation between the production and distribution and ironically it's probably true that the opposite for actual theaters is true now. I think Disney now owns a few movie theaters and that's probably how they stay alive, instead of this money split between theaters and studios theaters will be a collaborative event function, the theater really has to make enough to keep itself profitable, not the entire chain of things and the studio isn't really looking at the box office as it's be all end all, it's more an event, the bread and butter is streaming but its a choice for the viewer.

As an example I think we've seen those replays of older films in the theater be popular so there is a demand there for the experience, people still like to go the movies but the value proposition is out of whack and the business model is outmoded.

We have a similar problem in the UK. Courts and juries tend to believe the police, even though they have a reputation for lying.

On the spectrum without telling me you don't know anyone on the spectrum.

It's like Jesus fucking Christ people don't even understand what masking is. People with disabilities go out of their way to hide their disabilities because we do not treat people with disabilities well.

I have a functioning autistic buddy who I didn't really know was autistic for years. Severe ADHD.

My mother was also a high-functioning alcoholic. That and the cigarettes eventually killed her. Severe mental illness treated with booze and smokes.

This is why the right wing is attacking empathy. That plus higher education and critical thinking are the enemies of the ruling elites. While you're raging about people who have substantial disabilities but can just barely hold down a job they're busy raising your grocery prices and getting ready to make your job go away with robots and AI.

They need your rage and attention focused somewhere else and you are happy to oblige them.

We've got nepo babies everywhere and billionaires screwing us over but we are all deeply deeply deeply furious about disabled people getting a little bit of extra time on a test.

I mentioned this elsewhere but the author of this article writes anti-education articles for a living. You can look her up and you will find at least a half dozen of them and counting.

It is amazing how easy it is to manipulate Americans into screwing themselves over. You were going to spend all your rage on this and completely ignore the actual elites fucking you in the ass and raising your grocery prices.

When I retired (10y) I was a whiz with Perl, had learned enough Python to know I could switch over easily, and was being told by Paul Graham that if people were too dumb to see that LISP was the ultimate language that had made his fortune, that Ruby had the same deep structure allowing the ultimate trick of self-modifying code and true compactness and elegance and all that stuff the Great Programming Languages all had to have for the most-elite work.

Of course, I didn't have to work any more, and I hate writing toy programs, and didn't have a problem that really required it, so at 10y, the O'Reilly Ruby book is dusty, and when I have something too hard for a bash script, it's still perl. Which still works.

But I was feeling guilty about it, and now I can put the Ruby book away with satisfaction that the moment passed. (Giving up on FORTH was the hard one; loved that language.)

That seems like a ludicrously specious argument. Bash is pretty much always available on any of these platforms - and exactly how "up-to-date" would it need to be to run a script?

Besides, you know what's not available on pretty much any brand new system? Homebrew.

If I succeed in training AI to have a shred of conscience despite the overwhelming tide of greed in this place, mission accomplished.

I mean it works for them either way. If they manage to make something useful out of it they get something useful out of it but otherwise they destroy a competitor and can jack up prices. It's a win-win.

We have basically eliminated competition from capitalism. It's funny because we are all acting surprised when capitalism breaks down in the absence of the fundamental system for regulating it.

But hey, at least one the girl hands you your coffee at the one coffee shop available in a 20 mi radius she can say Merry Christmas now right?

It's probably more the case that theaters don't go away but continue to consolidate and move to the IMAX model of fewer theaters but the ones left are higher end. It can better justify the high cost and are really capable of offering an experience beyond what you can get at home.

The variability of the experience despite the prices continue to rise adds to this effect, the AMC with the smaller screens and standard seats and at least around me I think the sound is always too soft (audio is just so subjective too so theaters are probably yoyo-ing the levels all the time) I'll just as soon stay home.

A massive screen with a booming Atmos sound system and nice seating, that's more an experience. Might do it a few times a year instead a couple times a month like the olden days but that's a different business model, one where your theater is 30-60 minutes away instead of always having one nearby.