I think it's a symptom of streaming services. They want to offer a massively wide variety of shows to try and capture as much of the market as possible, which means a large number of titles. But money and human resources (writers, actors, directors, etc) are still finite, so now they spread those resources across twice or three times as many shows as they used to back in the 24/26 episode seasons. Then multiply this across a dozen different "platforms". So now we get 8 or 10 episodes per "season".

Add to that their desire to keep people hooked and subscribed. If they drip-feed seasons, people will be more likely to stick around because several shows they have started are still unfinished (some kind of combination of inertia and FOMO). So now we wait 2-4 years between seasons (which, to be honest, bothers me a *lot* more than the shorter seasons).

It really sucks in a bunch of ways. Aside from just making everyone spend 10 years to watch a 4 season show, huge breaks make for problems with the availability and visual appearance of aging actors. Writers and showrunners come and go more frequently, making seasons inconsistent and lacking a coherent plan, and the small number of episodes means every episode must be SUPER EXCITING AND IMPORTANT or people feel like it's a waste of precious screentime (which it kind of is). This means there should be fewer "filler" episodes (even though there are still a lot of them) and a lot less episodes that focus more on character development vs plot movement.

Oh, and episodic storytelling has completely died as an art, so every season has to be part of one HUGE IMPORTANT series arc which is almost always disappointing because none of these shows are planned more than one season ahead. Companies want to be able to cut any show at any time, so nobody is willing to commit to 3 or 4 seasons with a planned story. And it turns out JIT storytelling mostly sucks.

Streaming kinda ruined dramatic TV.

I agree with your larger point, but it's not entirely fair to lump covid response in with the tax breaks. From a quick look, it appears that something like $5-6T of that $17T can be attributed to tax breaks and spending related to the first couple years of the pandemic.

But $11-12 trillion in 8 years is still absolutely bonkers.

I concur. The unemployment rate is about 4% and even the more padded U6 unemployment rate is below 5%
Those are normal.
Under condition when unemployment rates are normal the primary job of the federal reserve is to bring down inflation. It's not simply a good idea. It's their mandate

The fact that there are more jobseekers than jobs is also close to normal. There's always a mismatch between jobs and jobseekers.

It may well be that those jobs are demotions or involve moving etc..

So the Fed has done everthing correctly.

But now they are on toes because we have the immigrant labor leaving and hightarrufs.

While those might increase the number of jobs available it might not fund takers. And both will cause supply side inflation. Simultaneously extending the tax cuts and the debt ceiling means the high rate of pumping debt into the economy will continue.

So the Fed is in an uncharted territory . It could mean high inflation is coming. Most likely. But it could mean a recession. You love the rate in opposite directions there! Most likely is both: stagflation. Which is awful. We did the stagflation experiment in the early 70s and tried both spending into it and later raising interest rates sky high. Only the latter worked.

Fed is exactly doing the right Thing by being watchful

Remember when if you didn't want a shitty "upgrade", you could choose to just not install the new version of the software? When such "updates" weren't forced down your throat because, even on Windows, because you owned your computer? When drastic changes to operating systems that affect how people use them was limited to major releases?

Microsoft remembers, and they hated it. They are so close to customers being fully accustomed to forced updates that they don't want. The next step is to convince users that these constant (forced, unwanted, unnecessary) necessary updates are just so expensive for Microsoft to produce, and so obviously people need to pay a monthly fee for Windows. I'm a little surprised that didn't come along already with the "Windows 11" moniker, but I guarantee it's coming.

What do you want it to do with memory when there are no programs running and the system is idle? Windows is pretty aggressive at using memory for the file system cache, for example, and it will prefetch programs and files that you use often into memory so they're available instantly when you try to access them.

This is a good thing, not bad. All of this memory can be instantly dumped if a program suddenly requests a bunch of memory for private use. Memory that is not being used for something is wasted memory. It doesn't go bad by being used.

But obviously memory demand bloat is a growing problem. A few Electron apps and a dozen browser tabs will set you back more memory than most computers had 10 years ago, which really is pretty bonkers. I wouldn't be surprised if some Windows components had followed a similar trajectory.

I have two theories
1. Other languages are falling faster than Perl making Perl rise

2. Perl is what smart people use instead of bash. So for all sysadmin tasks or ad hoc system scripts or gluing you'd be crazy to use bash when you can use Perl.

does 2x shift the frequency?

I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

Agreed. For kicks I asked ChatGPT:

Apparently the reports of the horrible casualties are all wrong and fake news! I love the idea of getting a text summary of bloated, ad-infested YouTube videos, but Jesus....

Yup. It's past comical how much bullshit nonsense (no doubt most of it AI slop these days) gets put before a recipe on most sites. I've started going to AllRecipes by default most of the time, just because it doesn't do that.

The Firefox extension Jump to Recipe automatically clicks a "Jump to Recipe" link on the page if one exists. It works pretty well for me.

Agree and disagree. While I share an affection for the simpler hardware and instruction set and do see value in being able to fully understand the whole thing end to end, the simplicity and limitation also gives rise to complexity in the search for performance and capability.

You can "understand" the assembly code (or even machine code), but when a program is using esoteric or questionable techniques to eek every last clock cycle of performance out of these chips, you can end up with code that requires a larger breadth of knowledge - everything from binary math hacks (fast inverse square root) to processor quirks (16-bit loads in four clocks vs 8-bit in one) to undocumented ISA "features" like abusing obcodes with flag side effects that end up being faster than the operation you're really interested in.

Some people enjoy this kind of hacking (using the word in the best possible way) but it definitely requires an additional, different, and sometimes very broad mastery of the systems. I think this is both good and bad (but mostly bad once longjmp gets involved...).

Astonishing. You're proposing MOVING TO A DIFFERENT PLANET that cannot support literally ANY FORM OF LIFE without a massive support infrastructure instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, moving away from burning fossil fuels, and making a few other relatively simple changes to keep the earth habitable for human civilization.

This sort of stupidity would be unbelievable if it wasn't parroted so often by clueless and/or paid-for oligarch mouthpieces.

I'm certainly guilty of this, though I also use bookmarks. For me, an unloaded tab is much more "in your face" than a bookmark hidden away in a menu. I tend to use my list of tabs (about 30) as a todo list and bookmarks as "this might be useful again in the future".

This may sound weird, but I think the biggest problem with bookmarks is finding them again. Whether you try to organize them into 1000 folders (IMO a lost cause) or use the Gmail approach of just search everything (also a lost cause, because not enough metadata is associated with the bookmark), even if you know you bookmarked something in the past, unless you remember the title of the page you probably aren't going to find it again.

I'd really like to see a better system for keeping track of pages. Personally, I set Firefox to never, ever, forget my browser history, so I can search it going back years. That's helped me dig up a lot of old stuff that I couldn't quite remember where I found something.

Is Trump still going forward with Musk's recommendation to deorbit the ISS in 2027?

SpaceX was awarded a $843 million contract to deorbit the ISS back in 2024 (Biden was president) in the year 2030.

https://www.google.com/search?...

Was there an update to this plan that I didn't hear about?