I would say that communism has worked quite well, but only at small scales. A few people or families working together naturally gravitate towards a communist collective, at least among themselves. Heck, most churches are very strongly communist in their social structure. I would theorize that the upper bound of functional communist society is the Dunbar Number --- about 150 people.

Beyond that, the degree of interpersonal relations needed to make communism functional just isn't there, and everything begins to fray. In other words, communism doesn't scale. In particular, it just doesn't work when used as the basis for a country's government, and the larger the country, the worse it does.

I think the main reason it keeps getting brought up is that it makes sense that it would work at small scales (where people's mental models apply), and people assume that if it works at a small scale, it should work at a large scale. But they don't recognize that the institutions that developed over history were created *because* stuff that worked at the small scale (band, family, tribe) didn't work anymore as societies grew larger. Large-scale communism is an attempt to return to those early roots out of a sense of philosophical nostalgia. The stereotypical "noble savage", and the feeling of community and family where everyone worked together, and shared what they had. The desire to be part of the family, rather than just a cog in the machine.

The desire for it absolutely makes sense. (And homeopathy seems to prey on that same general feeling.) It just fails at a mechanical level.

So, hypothetically, if an employee at a bakery protested against the employer refusing to serve LGBT customers, and possibly getting fired for not cooperating with such a decision, would the federal labor laws apply?

2018 had a higher actual and adjusted for inflation total box office revenue than 2019. And while 2018 was the highest in absolute numbers, after adjusting for inflation it's #18 out of the last 25 years. 2019 is #22.

The inflation-adjusted peak for the box office was 2002, and it's been slowly declining ever since. 2019 was down 21.5% from that peak.

Which isn't to say that the theater experience isn't valuable in its own right, but it's not everything.

If you want people going back to theaters, you need to lower the costs that people have to pay, and to do that, the largest part of your budget is likely to be going to the studios. So if you want people going back to the movies (after dealing with Covid), you know where to start looking.

No comments about the further (much more detailed, and much more damning) information revealed in Wladimir Palant's blog post on the issue? (https://palant.info/2020/05/04/are-xiaomi-browsers-spyware-yes-they-are.../)

Yes.

More precisely, what the summary doesn't include is the fact that the average "fit" of the free TV service was 12%. That is, about 1 in 8 titles that people were watching were actually available on the free service. Surprise, surprise, people keep using torrent for the rest.

UI: Much improved. Or, put another way, they removed a ton of the Australis crap that people have been griping about for years. That says quite a bit about their UX team.

- Caveat: They still manage to make a few small stupid errors, like removing the color from bookmark folders (change applied in FF58), and a 'default' theme that mixes light and dark in a way that's annoying no matter which you'd prefer. Just change to either light or dark and be done with it.

Performance: *Vastly* improved, across the board. This is both in chrome and on web pages. These are all the speed improvements that should have been done 5 years ago, but they were too busy pretending desktop didn't matter (Firefox OS is the future!) or pretending user complaints weren't valid, and not putting in any effort to really measure the problem.

- Caveat: That said, this basically just brings them up to on par with Chrome. We'll see if WebRender actually pushes them ahead.

Security: Presumably better. Rust still only covers limited modules, though, so it's not a suddenly perfect system. They have a huge amount of replacement work still to do.

Memory: Each individual process has improved a great deal, but all the processes together still add up to quite a bit. Right now (on my system as I write this), the largest content process is only 170MB. However all processes together add up to over 1.1GB. On the other hand, a few years ago 1.1GB total memory used would have meant the program was starting to melt down. Now, it's completely unnoticeable, and doesn't build up problems over time.

Extensions: On life support. 75% of my extensions are unusable, mostly because the APIs necessary either have not been or will never be built. The ones that *do* run are examples of unpolished, alpha-quality software. Yeah, there's a replacement, but even ignoring what's been crippled, what it does do, it doesn't do as well as the old mature extension did.

- Caveat: This changeover did need to be done. None of the above changes could have been done without ripping out the old ecosystem entirely. Extensions had become the kudzu that kept healthy growth from happening.

Summary: This is the sort of work that Mozilla should have done ~5-7 years ago, back when Chrome was just starting to take off. Chrome ate Firefox's lunch because Firefox couldn't be arsed to look at the problems that people were complaining about. But Mozilla will still claim that Chrome's rise to prominence was solely due to Google leveraging it's ubiquitous presence on the web, and not because Mozilla got sloppy and lazy.

I think you just proved unixisc's point.

I think you missed the sarcasm.

And: "state-of-the-art" climate models were "mirrored" in "multiple" actual temperature measurements.

I mean, even if you're trying to play scare quotes, putting quotes around "multiple"? Really? Or should that be, "Really"? Or maybe I'm just confused and I "really" should be quoting "most" of my words.

Tab Groups.

Per individual window, 8 tabs is about the most that's comfortable, and 10 is when I start looking to trim out stuff that I've finished looking at.

However Tab groups lets me keep tabs organized. Spatially, it's like having a new window per tab group, but each group is named, and it's easy to move tabs between groups, so usability-wise it's far superior. So I can have a group for the threads I'm reading on some forum, and another group for Github stuff, and another group for programming stuff I'm reading, and another group for research I'm doing on voting mathematics, etc, etc.

I don't need to find one tab out of 50 on a single window, where you can't read any tab names. I just need to know what topic category I wanted to move to, and scan through 5 to 10 tabs that are easy enough to work with.

I find this far easier to use than bookmarks, because open tabs are transient; I will eventually close them as each need is complete. Bookmarks accumulate. I have a single bookmark folder of about 30 news sites, probably half of which I haven't visited in years. Another folder of maybe 40 blogs (just for computer stuff), and I'm sure at least some of them don't even exist on the web anymore. Some stuff is worth using bookmarks for, because you find you'll keep going back to them later, but most is either temporary (I won't care about it again after I close it) or ongoing (such as a web serial I'm reading that could take me multiple months to get through the backlog), where bookmarking doesn't serve any real purpose.

And *because* bookmarks accumulate, the longer you go, the harder they are to use. Other than the most frequently visited of those blogs, I can hardly remember why I bookmarked most of them, or what they were about. If I know I bookmarked some blog about some topic a year ago, I'm still better off using Google than trying to go through each blog one by one to find what I'm looking for. Clicking on each of 50 tabs in the browser window to find a single page is faster than that.

Well, then apparently the local newspaper (http://www.samoaobserver.ws/en/01_07_2016/local/8109/Fuel-prices-increase-for-July.htm) needs better editors.

Diesel cost in Samoa as of last July (quick Google check) was $2.06 to $2.28 per liter. That's between $7.80 and $8.63 per gallon. Call it $8.00. 300 gallons per day, 365 days per year, gives an annual cost of roughly $876,000. A $2.75 million battery cost would be paid for in saved fuel costs in a little over 3 years.

Still have to figure in the solar panel costs. It's a 1.4 MW microgrid. Current Google response on solar panel costs is $3.57 per watt. There's federal compensation for solar installations (~30%), but I have no idea whether they'd be able to get any funding/credit for that, given that it's not a home installation. So going with the $3.57 value, 1.4 million watts would cost $4,998,000.

Total cost is thus $7.75 million. Figure maintenance costs balance out with the diesel setup (less to break, more expensive per break), so no real effect there.

Total buyback cost in terms of diesel fuel would thus be slightly under 9 years, not counting inflation or continued increases in fuel prices. Allowing for cost fluctuations, you could then say that the entire solar grid plus batteries should for itself within 10 years, which is a pretty decent rate. As long as the replacement time is significantly above that, it's a good deal.

No, TV show ratings show evidence that misogyny exists. Maybe. (Correlation is not causation, etc) Claiming that they are equivalent, though, it not what's being asserted, and is generally a false representation of the argument being presented.

I think the most relevant graphic in the article was the one about how often men and women give 1 ratings to shows, relative to the percentage of men vs women rating the show overall.

Women also skew upwards in giving 1s to highly male-dominated shows. If at least 20% of the ratings are given by women, the percentage of 1s is pretty constant, at a little over 2%, but below 20% women, the percentage of 1s increases dramatically, to about 8% at the far edge.

Men, on the other hand, have a different trend line. Up to around 30%, maybe 40%, of women rating a show, men's 1s are perhaps a bit under 3% of all ratings. However over 40% (so 60% or fewer men, vs 20% or fewer women for the same effect on the other side) this increases dramatically, reaching perhaps 12% of all ratings being 1s for the shows with the highest female percentage (capping at 80%). There's definitely a difference in both perception and tolerance for shows that are outside your primary demographic.

Now, if you look at the rate that each one increases, women's percentage of 1s grows faster than men's (0.3 vs 0.225), but men's starts much sooner (40% rather than 80%). Possibly an indication that men are more likely to severely diss shows that are only mildly outside their comfort zone, while women will try to remain tolerant until things reach extreme levels, and then they start going negative far more quickly.

On the Sex and the City example, it was interesting to note that the average rating, when broken down by age group, was almost exactly the same across all ages (5.7 - 5.8 for men, 7.5 - 8.1 for women, with the 7.5 being a slight outlier of a relatively low sample size group of 45+ women [1100 vs 10k+ in other groups], the rest being 7.8 - 8.1).

The fact that the average doesn't vary by age actually seems like a counter-point to the misogyny as a source effect. One would expect that general behaviors have changed over time, and certainly over ~3 generations. Thus one might look for explanations outside of mere sexual attitudes, and more into behavioral aspects that have not varied over time. However the fact that men end up giving the same average ratings over such a large age range implies it's not just teenage brats going on a 1-rating spree, nor the influence of an older (presumably more misogynistic) age bracket influencing the final totals. It's something more pervasive and consistent.

Anyway, there's most definitely evidence of some sort of behavior difference between men and women in the data, though a lot more research is needed before I'd agree to any specific 'cause' being defined.

You're watching 0.86 hours per day, on average (6 1-hour shows over 7 days) rather than the population average of 1.67. Basically, half the amount of TV watching per week.

Then you're only watching 26 weeks per year, so again, half of the population average.

Thus, overall you're watching about 1/4 as much as the average person. 6.6 days / 4 = 1.65 * 24 = 39.6 hours. Tada! The magic of math.

Picasa hasn't been updated in yeaaaars. I have a download of 3.9 from March 2012. There were a bunch of minor issues in it that they never addressed, and a bunch of feature requests that never got added.

It's always sat on that cusp of "almost useful", for me. It's one of the better image managers out there, but all that means is that most image managers are crap, and Picasa manages to *almost* be 'good' (but fails in enough ways that I still eventually abandon it).