All it's going to take is a subpoena and that's that. Writing reviews can be dangerous because businesses will cheerfully sue you if you write a bad review. Free speech is nice and all but you're still going to spend thousands of dollars depending yourself in court.

Everyone is. The economy is collapsing exactly as anyone with half a brain would have predicted when we put Trump in charge. Which is why Trump is hiding all of the reports showing how bad the economy is.

America is a failed state. When your leadership starts to hide report data that's when you know it's over.

We normally get 8 years of Democrats fixing the disasters caused by republicans. We never fully recover and the voters inevitably blamed the Democrats for that and go back to the Republicans because voters are dumb. But we usually get 8 years of relative stability with a little bit of Republican sabotage after the midterms and we didn't get that this time. Like absolutely everyone who isn't either an idiot or a paid shill predicted it's an absolute disaster.

I think one of the major problems is we have too many retirees who are completely insulated from the economy and who really do not give a fuck about their kids and grandkids. The kind that find Fox News entertaining for reasons that I do not fully comprehend. Like the kind of twerp that voted for brexit in the uk. People that can set fire to the whole world and get away with it. Probably anyway.

If you're under 65 though I don't think you're going to get away with it. The damage is too extreme and too fast. We are so fucked and the worst thing is is I don't think anyone has learned any lessons from this.

The internet is filled with idiots who have lost their livelihoods because of Trump's idiot policies and asserting that they will vote for him again given the chance. I do not know what you do with people like that but I know there are a bunch of them here and they like to keep their mouths shut when they're not in safe spaces.

Cite?

What conflict of interest? DCar Studio has money and wants advertising, the influencer wants money and can provide advertising. I see an alignment of interests, not a conflict.

He openly attempted to overthrow the US government. He is also a convicted felon and a rapist. Never mind that he is an incredibly incompetent buffoon who is bankrupted every single company he has ever been in charge of without exception.

And all it took for him to get another term with a shitload of propaganda, the news media being owned by billionaires and the Democrats running a man far too old to be running and a woman.

There was also a metric fuck ton of voters suppression. Literally millions of illegal challenges to signatures and voter registrations. Not to mention multi-hour waits to vote. There's a reason that a state like Missouri that is almost 50% black is a red state and it's not conservative family values.

Every single institution designed to protect you from psychopaths and rapists has failed. Or rather it has been systematically dismantled going back to when Barry Goldwater lost.

So yeah Donald Trump is absolutely going to run for a third term if he is physically able and the corrupt supreme Court that struck down Roe v Wade by citing a literal witchfinder general is going to rubber stamp it.

And I don't think the voters who are allowed to vote are going to stop him because about 30% of them think he is the second coming of Christ about another 10% think he is a business genius and about 5% are so confused they don't know what the fuck and then all the Republicans have to do is stop about 6% from voting and Bob's your uncle third term of trump.

All that for a man who has 28 credible rape accusations eight of which involved children.

If we can elect a rapist who bankrupts every company he touches president twice we can do it a third time.

in America. You can chart a direct line from when smartphones and the internet got cheap and widely available and the decline of religious extremist churches in America. Specifically the hyper-political mega churches that were created and built up by billionaires in order to trick people out of their property and jobs.

That's a good example of something like a one laptop per child having a direct tangible effect in a positive direction. Albeit not as a charity case but just as a consequence of cheap electronics. You went from people having a single source of Truth in the form of a corrupt preacher to being able to Google everything the corrupt preacher tells them.

It also means that all the rape and pedophilia the churches have been actively hiding gets around really fast. I suspect social media has a impact there too.

I had two family members with major health problems hit right around 2008 one of which survived the other of which died.

I wasn't fully recovered financially until around 2016 which is when my kid hit College and suddenly I had the pay for them to go through college. Not being a psychopath or a piece of shit I stepped up and actually paid for them to get through college. Because if you're going to have a fucking kid you should make damn sure they can actually support themselves in this fucked up world and have a decent life.

I have only just now recovered from that Financial blow only to have the fucktards that are the American voters put Donald Trump back in charge so that he can promptly collapse the economy.

Trump is likely going to get a third term unless he dies of old age or senality gets him. And the economic fallout from that is probably going to be the end of me.

Basically I've gotten one gut punch after another with just enough to keep me going until the next kicking the balls. Which is the quintessential American experience if you're not a piece of shit baby boomer who pulled the ladder up behind them because they hate queer people and are scared of brown skin.

There is nothing more American than I got mine fuck you. What's funny is is the age 50 to 64 Boomer types who got the tail end of the New deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great society are about to get a huge punch in the balls from their god king Donald Trump.

They are all over the Internet freaking out right now because he's bankrupting them and making them homeless. Every single one of them says the same thing, I voted for Trump three times and I will vote for him again but I don't understand why this great man has destroyed my business or my job or taking my health care away or murdered my kids or whatever horrible thing Trump did this week.

Out of maybe a hundred of them that show up over on the Reddit leopards eating faces for him one or two of them have the presence of mind to say they probably shouldn't have voted for trump. Probably. But fuck it feels good to vote for Trump doesn't it? Stick it to those fucking God damn liberals right? So fucking sick of them telling me what to do right?

This website is full of those fuckers. They keep their mouths shut and try to soak up mod points because they know what they're doing is wrong but they can't stop it because it feels so fucking good and that 12-year-old boy who doesn't like being told what to do kind of way.

We have too many people disconnected from the economy.

Brexit absolutely destroyed the UK economy but you wouldn't know that if you're an elderly pensioner who voted for it because as the saying goes I got mine, fuck you. At worst you had to sell your Spanish summer home.

The same goes for the billionaires who used to just be lowly millionaires.

Both groups basically have all the political power, the billionaire is because of their money and the old people because of their numbers.

So you get a lot of public policy that is basically guaranteed to destroy everything because why the hell not?

The billionaires want absolute power and to build monuments and Dick ship rockets. The old people want to revel in their Petty bigotries and look back at the good old days without acknowledging the help from the government that made those days good.

Both sides have basically screwed anyone under 50.

Eventually although the billionaires will get away with it the old people might not. Especially the ones in the 50 to 65 age group.

DVD-R? DVD+R? DVD+RW? Single or dual layer? Gold metallic layer? Silver metallic layer? How are they stored?

Depending on how you answer those questions, your 25 year-old media may be past due and you've just gotten lucky, may be just entering the timeframe where it may die, or may have decades of reliable life left.

DVD-R single layer disks with a gold metallic layer are good for 50-100 years. Other recordable DVD options are less durable, some as little as 5-10 years.

More like an anti-solution to me. I almost never use File Explorer. On those rare occasions, it does not bother me to wait for a few seconds while it loads.

Me thinks that the real reason for making it resident is the greater convenience of Microsoft. Probably for some secretive tool that is harvesting my PI for Microsoft's greater glory and profit. Not visibly, of course, but using File Explorer in the background. (Any other comments along such lines?)

My rent stopped going up. Like full stop.

It's painfully obvious this is cost consumers hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. The frustrating thing is as usual it's a settlement where they don't have to give up any of the ill-gotten gains. All any of these crooks ever have to do is hold out until there is a republican in the White House and then run it up to a federal court. It worked for Microsoft.

Seriously go read up on their antitrust lawsuit. They just dragged it in court until Bush Jr got in charge and he gave them a sweetheart deal that included a significant expansion of their presence in public schools.

Better than the usual FP contribution from an AC, but I'm not getting your point and sure wouldn't moderate the FP interesting or funny (if'n I ever had a mod point to give). Perhaps you care to clarify (and even offer a more focused title)?

I do have some complicated thoughts on the topic. Maybe I'm even qualified as a resident of Tokyo to care about the problem? Calls for my ancient and little used sociologist's hat, however... But I really wish I had studied more psychology.

But I can reduce my answer to my stomach. I like Indian/Nepali food and I like trying new restaurants. I also like "atmospheric" coffee shops. (And sometimes I like to try something else.) I'm pretty sure I'm never going to run out of new places to try in Tokyo. However I'm pretty sure that would be true for many of the largest cities in the world... (AI angle via reviews?)

So how about the flip side of the coin? Why are so many people so strongly motivated to move into large cities? And on that side of the ledger things look really strange in Japan...

A few days ago there was a major fire that consumed about 170 buildings. That was in a small town far from Tokyo. However many of the buildings were empties. They call that an "akiya" for empty house. I've heard an estimate of around 100 empties destroyed in the fire. It's not just that no one wanted to live those vacant homes, and that there are places that will actively encourage people to live in vacant homes, but in this case it's worse. If those empty homes had been removed the rest of the community would still be there. Apparently they were the main source of kindling that made the fire so bad.

Another angle on the extreme demographic concentration. From the central part of Tokyo it is possible to walk to a suburb named West Tokyo. Takes about an hour on foot. Not long ago a bear was sighted in West Tokyo... Yesterday's news included a story about capturing (and killing) an extremely large bear near another town... Kind of like a war now, though I don't trust my (AI) source for this next item: Have the few remaining (and mostly quite elderly) bear hunters actually killed more than 4,200 bears in Japan this year? Actually seems quite possible. Nothing else to stop the bear population from increasing. They only look cute and fuzzy when they are quite young. But there was another story on the news about eating bear meat...

Combining the three branches? At least the bears rarely break into empty houses. No food smells. And so far I haven't heard of any bear sightings in the central parts of Tokyo... So in conclusion lots of people move to Tokyo because they like food and dislike bears?

Maybe that is why they made that Borat Manikini iSock - to hide the phone. I suppose I could go for the deep blue. But why not the black color like on the base iPhone 17?

I mean, it's a matter of personal taste, but it reminds me of attention seeking behavior. And it looks like recycled plastic from those orange traffic cones. It looks cheap.

None of it is unique to the device — I have backups of everything — but I still want the photos and videos on the new phone. :-)

A huge portion of their revenue is from AI data centers and there is going to be a huge push to create custom built hardware specifically designed to accelerate those workloads. You saw the same thing with Bitcoin where custom hardware was built and it outperformed gpus.

This means that a few good pieces of custom hardware have the potential to completely wipe Nvidia out. This is especially tough because everything is still consolidated into a handful of monopolies and duopolies that the couple of companies that are going to rule the roost for AI within the next few years will have more than enough resources to build their own custom hardware to do it. And they aren't going to like being dependent on an external company like Nvidia.

Nvidia may be able to stay ahead though by monopolizing engineers. It'll cost them literally hundreds of millions of dollars but it's doable.

I do Wonder though how long the wage arms race will last. Usually big companies like this don't like to get into bidding wars for talent and before long they are making deals at country clubs. Golf is a popular game for that because you're out in the open where it's harder for people to overhear what you're doing.