Todd Howard loved that.

I think even the idea of dropping $250 for a video game is absolutely bonkers, and calling Skyrim "ground-breaking" is being vastly too generous. The only reason Skyrim has had the staying power it has is (1) modders and (2) Bethesda's inability to release more than 1 game every 5-6 years, leading to 10-12 years between each franchise game.

If I knew that, I'd be a tech billionaire inventing them.

The best part of innovations is that they are NOT obvious, but once they are in the world, you can't do without.

Oregon isn't a red state overall. Almost all states, whether red, blue, or purple, allow felons to vote at some point.

Democrats sure don't. They want them to vote and everything.

The following red states allow felons to vote after completing their sentences (carceral sentences in some cases, or complete sentences and fines in others):

Alaska, Arkansas, Florida (1), Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa (2), Kansas, Kentucky (3), Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

That's the overwhelming majority of them. A couple of them have exceptions for certain crimes like rape and murder, but for the rest, if you can finish your sentence, you can probably vote.

(1) Sort of -- the state government has intentionally made a mess of the initiative that passed 65-35.

(2) While the Iowa constitution bars felons from voting unless they have applied to the governor to have voting rights reinstated, Gov. Reynolds (a Republican) has a standing executive order automatically reinstating voting rights of felons upon completing their sentences unless they were convicted of murder.

(3) Similar to (2), except that Gov. Beshear's executive order applies only to those convicted of non-violent offenses.

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.

Quite so. It's been how many years since something really new came out of Cupertino? Granted, Apple is more profitable than ever, but the company clearly shows what the result of placing a supply-chain expert as the CEO does.

The really sad part is that there's nobody ELSE, either. Microsoft hasn't invented anything ever, Facebook and Google are busy selling our personal data to advertisers, and who else is there who can risk a billion on an innovation that may or may not work out?

Automatic salary increases have been part of federal law since 1989, as your linked article mentions. They haven't happened since 2009. The bill that the link mentions didn't pass, and the replacement bill didn't change the prior block, so no pay raises are possible until the new session in 2027.

I get that members of Congress are unpopular. But if we want regular people in Congress, people not coming in wealthy, they're going to face extra expenses that aren't covered from their office budgets, and they should be paid enough to not end up poor for doing their service. Maintaining a separate residence -- even sharing in renting an apartment -- in or around DC is expensive. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) was unable to rent an apartment in DC when he was elected last year because even with a guaranteed Congressional salary, he didn't make enough to overcome a poor credit rating coming in and the apartment complex rejected him. I'm all for the stock trading bans for them and their family. I'm fine with them participating in Social Security and the federal employee pension fund. I'm happy with them getting their health insurance off the DC ACA exchange. But at some point, the pay should increase so that we can send people who aren't already rich or who won't have extra temptation to bend or break the rules because they're about to go broke.

That's wrong. I stopped using wrist watches 25 years ago and haven't looked back a single day. I don't want shit on my wrist. Try living without for a year and you'll realize why. It's hard to express in words. It's like having a chain removed.

Headphones, on the other hand, I use occasionally. For phone calls or for music on the train, plane, etc. - and especially for the plane if the noise cancellation comes close to my current over-the-ear Bose I'd take them on the two-day business trips where I travel with hand luggage only and space is a premium.

Do I want a heartbeat sensor? No idea. I don't care. But if there's any use for it than at least for me that's not a replication. I'm pretty sure many, many Apple users don't have a smart watch.

"They take much better photos but since there's no option for a cloud backup even if manually triggered, I'm left with finding a local solution that is always going to be more cumbersome."

Wifi SD cards exist and will let you transfer photos from camera to computer.

So he claims that social media - the platform where everyone pretends to be more happy, more active, better looking, more interesting, more travelled, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, - feels "fake" ?

Man.

Next he's going to say that artificial sweeteners taste might not be natural.

Seriously, though, social media has been the domain of bots for at least a decade. Even people who actually write their posts themselves use bots to cross-post to all the different platforms and at "optimal" times. Nothing on social media is not fake. Well, maybe your grandmother's photo album because she doesn't know Photoshop exists.

Do you want to bet on the percentage of Fortune 500 companies that use amateur-level procedures for their prod systems?

"Above 50%" seems like a guaranteed win to me.
"Above 75%" is where I start to think "maybe not that high". But I fear I'm giving them too much credit.

It is impossible to do now that half of what we have always considered clear indicators of a scam or phishing attempt are actually being done by actual companies.

But the "m" in npm always stood for "malware", did it not?

The npm ecosystem is deeply flawed. Look at some of the affected repositories. Many of them are just a few lines of code, yet over a hundred other packages depend on them. At least half of them have no reason to even exist. A lot of them have last been updated years ago.

We have an ecosystem where seemingly every individual function has its own package. That is just ridiculous. It is modularization driven to its absurd extreme. It's why you add one package to your project and it pulls in a hundred dependencies.

And the more tiny packages there are, the larger the attack surface and the smaller the amount that can be monitored for malware injection and other problems. I wouldn't at all be surprised if one or more of these packages will never be updated and have the malware in them forever simply because the only dev with the password to the repo has since died or gone to do other things with his life.

Tell me one thing you do now that you couldn't do on a 32-bit system.

The Apollo moon lander only had 8-12 bit memory.

If you need a 64-bit system to do what we did on far less in the 70s, well, that's a skill issue.