Its part of diversifying your business and its often required. If you're a super focused but excellent printer manufacturer then your business goes to crap if people stop printing as much.

We're kinda seeing that with Intel. Intel was king of the heap and basically made desktop CPU's with limited branching out. They did some SSD's and some other IC's and have started with some GPU's but they stayed very focused on desktop CPU's and now they're faltering and there's talks of them being bought out.

Yeah I liked it. Admittedly they nickel and dime you for all extras but if you simply decide not to buy extras it was a was to fly for pretty cheap. I basically just would take a backpack (personal item) with clothes and buy nothing else. I don't need to change my seat. I don't need another bag. I don't need any snacks or water. I just want you to get me physically from location to another. I would fly from SC to NY for as low as $49 depending on timing. For that it was great.

They're not effective as a front-line fighter against the top tier enemies, but against the typical adversaries in the middle east an F-15 is still incredibly capable.

Tracking says where things are. Particularly for older satellites that were there before they were being tracked, its not necessarily going to know where it is supposed to be.

Yeah. Two things are always bad for services: caps and meters.

Both make it feel like every hour spent is removing a resource. If its a cap you're using up your allotted usage, and you feel compelled to not use it unless needed. If its metered, then every amount of time you're using it money is trickling away. If its a fixed cost the money is already spend an you're good with that.

Most people who only spend 30 hours per month on the service will dislike a 200 hour cap being there. And most people who might would average $10 on a metered service would probably rather pay $20 for unlimited instead. Even though they're paying more they don't feel like they're running up a bill while using the service.

This isn't going to matter. Most of the sites in the US require that a user be 13 already, and all the kids do is backdate their birthyear by however much is required to meet the minimum.

Sure parents can check to make sure they're not doing that, but the parents that would/could check on that could have already forbade their kids from using it anyways.

The banking industry doesn't run on modern day technologies. It works on a lot of really, really old but really well tested code that most people don't want to touch because making a mistake in this type of code is a career death sentence.

Not necessarily. A lot of the wealth of the rich is tied up in unrealized gains. Even the funds that are liquid largely aren't spent, and the economy has already price-adjusted to that money not really being in play. Taking stagnant money and making it "live" money will still result inflation.

Don't get me wrong I count myself as a "fan of phsyical media", but VHS was basically the worst physical media ever made. All the downsides of tape (need to rewind, playing it wears it out, etc) and literally the shittiest video quality you could ask for.

I get that this is probably only a collectable and not meant to be actually played, but still . . . I don't even get the desire to collect it.

Indeed - a lot of things are theoretically possible, but most things out there are things that people assume we'll eventually be able to do, or if they say "We technically already know how to do this." its something that works out mathematically if you had infinite funds and infinite energy and the attempt when flawlessly with no hiccups.

I think we vastly overestimate our future technology potential, and assume infinite linear progression forward for all technical capabilities. Realistically there have been and will be many plateaus in technological advancement, and there will be many things we eventually just hit a limit imposed by the laws of physics.

I think in all likelihood our species will eventually go extinct here on this same planet. I don't really think we'll ever be able to reach another star. We might attempt it with an AI probe (since they can technically live "forever") but I don't have confidence in us being able to build anything that will last long enough to reach another star system. Even a robot/computer would likely just be a non-functional piece of equipment by the time it arrived.

Its not an exact analogy but think about an iPhone or desktop computer and how much worse they work after they're 5 or 6 years old. Now imagine one that's 50,000 years old . . .

Yep. A lot of people have lofty ideals about education for education's sake, but realistically liberal arts degrees are a luxury of the rich. We need a very small number of them to serve as teachers for the subjects, but for most people college is a matter of making yourself a potentially more valuable employee and contributing member of society. Obviously STEM is good, but outside of that we also need people with degrees in business, law, finance, etc.

If you want to study something obscure for self-enrichment, then by all means do so, but do it with your own money not loans.

Per Google, there are currently around 5916 colleges in the US. Losing 40 of them isn't likely to hurt that much. They were likely 40 private and obscure colleges.

To me, unless someone else is paying for it (eg rich parents or you got a scholarship), a private university is a pointless waste of money. Part of becoming an adult means making more intelligent purchasing decisions, and a large well-known subsidized state/public university is financially your best bet for a college education. They're well known, and most of them are pretty good (yeah the top schools in the country are private, but some of the worst schools are also private - public universities are more consistently decent).

Personally I'm fine with some of the stragglers closing down.

PS I found most of the list here: https://www.bestcolleges.com/r...

Yep, its mostly private schools. The few public ones were largely satellite campuses closing or 1 entity splitting into 2 (which I guess counts as the original closing).

Yet at the end of the day, the bills for the servers have to get paid.

Most people when presented with something like Youtube Premium are like "LOL - Adblockerz!", while proclaiming that ads don't work and are pointless.

At some point you have to either suffer through whatever penance there is to watch content for "free", or you have to pay for it, otherwise its not profitable to host it and the content will go away.

And remember even in a world of user generated content you still need servers to host this stuff, unless you want to be downloading the latest influencer video via a torrent link. Sure they could setup their own server and host it themselves, but then we get back to the same old problem: that server needs to make money off ads or the consumers need to pay otherwise its doing nothing but costing them money.

Google's ad division can already serve ads on anyone's website, not just Google's. There's no reason a spun off search portion wouldn't work the same way, becoming a partner selling ad space on its own search results.

Earth will likely be incapable of supporting life long before that. Obviously that's a hard deadline where even microbial life will go, but most estimates put Earth at having between 800 million and 1 billion years of habitability left.

This is because as the amount of helium in the sun builds up, it grows hotter even within its main phase, on the order of about a 10% increase per billion years. Over the next billion years that increase will become too much for Earth to remain habitable. The temperature will creep up over time, and there will be a point where eventually the oceans start boiling and create a runaway greenhouse affect. Eventually we'll look a lot more like Venus.

This is outside of crazy sci-fi inspired scenarios like engineering some method to nudge Earth further away from the sun, or installing large space-born "shades" to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the planet.

Realistically I think simple travel/relocation to another star system is more likely than either of those types of scenarios.