If 100% of jobs meet some standard, we'll pick a higher standard. For example, consider the standard that employees not be chained to their benches, fed nothing but moldy bread and be brutally whipped if the overseer feels like it. 100% of legitimate jobs in the US exceed that standard. OSHA exists to ensure that jobs meet minimum workplace safety standards and minimum wage laws ensure that jobs pay at least a certain amount, so we don't discuss whether jobs meet those standards, we take them as a given and set the quality bar higher.

If a study finds that 40% of jobs meet some standard, it means that the researchers did a reasonably good job of writing a description of the median job, then tweaked it upward just a bit. It's not like there is some universal, eternal standard for what constitutes a "quality job". It would be interesting to take the current standard and apply to historical working conditions, 50, 100, 200, 500 years ago. I'll bet the 1975 percentage would be half of the 2026 percentage and the older percentages would quickly tail off to ~0.

See, there's just no winning. If we move (back) to cardboard, the argument becomes about trees. If we move to that biodegradable quasi-plastic that some drinking straws are made out of, then the argument is that the change disproportionately affects the poor, since that stuff is somewhere around triple the cost of plastic. If we move to glass, then the transport of the containers becomes far more prone to pollution because of the significantly higher weight of everything. If we eliminate one-time packing entirely, then we deal with health concerns and chemicals to combat those health concerns.

As much as the plastic industry loves to lobby, let's not pretend that it's the only barrier.

Yes, because we all love walking half a mile a day in the rain...carrying groceries in paper bags...or in the cold...or in the heat...or transporting 20-kilo items...or making multiple trips...or are we just ordering everything from Buy-N-Large and no longer in-person shopping?

To the topic at hand, PHEVs are fantastic INTERIM solutions. The charging infrastructure isn't as pervasive as gasoline and diesel, so a solution that both encourages the use of charging stations while enabling the use of existing gas stations is a helpful way to handle the transition. As we get to the point where EVs can get 1,000 off a charge and/or 200 miles of range out of a 5-minute charge, and as the number of charging stations continues to increase, and the grid adjusts to compensate, PHEVs will be less desirable as their reduced EV range will start to become a liability as gas stations decrease in number.

Maybe you don't like the fact that intermediate solutions are compromises by definition, but you won't get a whole lot of folks on board with the expectation that the solution to a global problem for everyone to relocate to walkable cities.

Of course if you get rid of capitalism then you get a different systemic problem, massive shortfalls in production, making everyone worse off. Much like democracy, capitalism is the worst system except for all of the others.

For decades, India's call centres stood as the tired cliche of globalization: cheap voices on bad connections reading from scripts. But global capital has turned, and irony has a long memory. As AIs battle humans for dominance, Indian customer service might become the best in the world. A strange inversion begins. What used to feel inefficient now feels alive. The hesitations, the small talk, the accents once mocked all become proof that someone real is listening. Machines will solve your problem instantly, but they will never sound tired, kind, or quietly amused at your bad day. I forsee a company advertising, "100% Indian customer service!"

I certainly do, they are cheaper, more reliable, more energy efficient and anything up to 12 AWG will be less chunky than your typical braided USB-C cable.

This is not true. With USB-C you are limited to 5 amps max. A 14 AWG conductor can carry 6x more current and 9x for 12 AWG than your typical 22 AWG USB-C cable with the same resistive losses. This means providing roughly an order of magnitude lower voltage to the device without exceeding resistive losses of the USB-C cable.

The heck they don't. Charging tiny single cell 3v lithium ion batteries by applying 10v to the battery is batshit insane.

Low power is a solved problem. The issues my statement was addressing is higher power devices that sure as heck don't work with "any random cable".

Houston has the most stable housing prices of any city in the US. Houston does not have any zoning restrictions. If housing prices go up, developers tear down strip malls and build apartments. If commercial prices go up, they tear down low density housing or commercial property and build high-density commercial property. That is a functioning market.

People like to rag on Houston as not a nice place to live, but you can, at least, afford to live there.

I don't understand the argument you are trying to make given the picture you paint simply isn't a thing anymore. It is hard to find any sort of low energy device these days not powered and or recharged by USB which begs the question what is the real world impact?

The more relevant issue seems to be around higher power devices in the range of 30 to 250 watts being supplied by USB-C. This I believe is counterproductive and will only serve to increase costs and waste rather than save power.

USB C is an unnecessary expense, complexity, inefficiency and all around clusterfuck for high power (100-300 watts) applications.

Conductors are too small requiring unnecessary buck stages inside of the device to provide usable energy vs simply having larger sized conductors from the EPS. From my take of the EU text they are not addressing end to end efficiency just the efficiency of the power supply which is highly misleading and counterproductive if your end goal is saving energy.

Imagine a device with a power cord that plugs into a wall socket. If you add a plastic box to the power cord and call it an EPS it would have nearly 100% efficiency with virtually no losses whatsoever. All of the rectification, power conversion and losses would be internal to the device.

The same concept applies to supplies with higher voltage output.. All you are doing is shifting conversion losses from the power supply to internal regulators inside of the device being powered. The higher the voltage gradient the lower conversion efficiency.

This will also cause harm when powering devices that are now all USB-C from low voltage energy sources because now you need a boost stage in your supply where before you could simply use appropriately sized conductors and cut out wasteful boost/buck conversions. If you can source a 12V 100W PD or higher that does not get stupidly hot (e.g. wastes energy) please DO let me know where I can find that.

On top of all this cabling and interoperability is an absolute clusterfuck. The world is awash in cables that look exactly the same yet have radically different capabilities and they expect everyone with a life to know the difference.

This is reminiscent of people claiming PoE is more efficient than separately powered devices. In the end it is just more cost, more complexity and in absolute terms more expenditures of energy.

As someone who considers Mass Effect their favorite game, all the way to actually-liking Andromeda (I read the novel that replaced the Quarian Ark DLC)...ME4 is something I'm keeping an eye on, but have zero hope about.

We're coming up on four years since the release of the teaser poster, and three years since the trailer...and by all accounts, the game is still in pre-production. *PRE* production, for longer than it took to make ME3, and a year less than the time it took to make ME:A.

This leads me to believe one of a few things: first, that the original push was likely similar to that of Veilguard, namely that EA wanted to make it a casino game, er, "live service"...then, pretty far into the production process, the MBAs were somehow convinced that turning Dragon Age into a live service was going to fail as spectacularly as Anthem, causing a massive pivot back into the single-player narrative game the audience wanted all along. It would shock me more to know that the ME4 story didn't follow a similar chain of events.

Second, I would completely believe that there's a whole lot of internal bickering within the team about how to progress on...basically everything. Amongst the stories about why ME:A was such a disaster was because the team was forced to use Frostbite, which was made for FPSes but not RPGs, leaving the team to waste time building systems for Frostbite that already existed in Unreal...well, it was announced years ago that ME5 would use the Unreal engine again, so 'building the infrastructure' doesn't factor in this go-round. Art assets certainly need to be created, but the use of Unreal means that a good number of assets from the remaster can be utilized, so it's not that sort of baseline stuff.

Let's talk about ME:A for a quick minute...what made it such a letdown had nothing to do with the crappy animations or the fact that there was some transgender NPC in the game...the story itself was the problem. First off, the game's runtime was massively padded with fetch quests - lots of driving around and...retrieving these rocks, scanning this structure, getting this plant...if the missions were limited to unlocking the vaults and fighting Architects, the game would be ten hours long. There *were* pieces that were interesting, but they were few and far between. In terms of the actual narrative...there were two alien factions, the oppressor and the oppressed, and we sided with the oppressed fighting the oppressor...no sign of the nuance or complexity that made one stop and think that the Salarian Dalatross might *possibly* have a point, that curing the genophage might not *actually* be a good idea...just an enemy who wants to destroy everything and a Fern Gully/Na'vi, everyone-gets-along-with-everyone underdog race...that's it. Oh, and dialog choices that never *actually* matter. Either ME4 is spending so much time in pre-production to overcorrect for these issues (I concede that it takes a LOT of time to do either branching outcomes or multiroute missions like the garage pass in Noveria), or it's a bunch of people going to work and arguing all day about how to do things, and the game will be built on a stack of compromises that will please no one.

The fact that they're five years into production - longer than any other game in the series' development cycle - and they still aren't into the actual-production phase - leads me to believe that the game is going to absolutely wreak of compromise at every stage. If the game is in development hell at this stage, I fully expect the release to be about as smooth as Cyberpunk 2077's...and I *don't* expect the sort of stability patches that made ME:A playable in the months to follow.

Really, my pipe dream is that EA will sell the franchises to other developers and stick to a publishing exclusivity deal...they could probably make some decent money doing that with some of their older franchises if their plans involve sticking to FIFA and Battlefield...but I have no hope that Saudi leadership is going to do any better with ME or DA or SimCity than the former owners did.

The techno-bro dream. Billions of people tethered in their harness, living artificial lives that require payment to the tech companies for every second. The future is bullshit.

Sorry, you'll have to wait for the next simulation reboot. This one has to run its course, and was set to dystopia at launch.

I've got a half theory, half conspiracy lunatic fringe whatever, that there's been some human conditioning going on making computers out to be superior to humans for at least the last two generations, perhaps longer. There are a lot of folks that see computers as some form of deity, or perhaps demigod, and so far above humanity already, rather than seeing them as the tools they currently are and look to remain to be for some time now. Basically, as people have escaped traditional religions, they've been replacing them with computer as god. We even see it a bit around here, with several discussions over the years basically breaking down to "just trust the computers, the computers are better than humans." Without evidence, without hard data to back it up. See any self-driving discussion for instance.

I'd imagine labels will suddenly get behind 'artists' once they realise that 90% of music consumption can be AI dross and nobody is going to care. Just think of all the savings across the world's restaurants and shops if you can have background music that is AI good enough, and not have to pay royalties to the music labels.

And at this point I'm not sure there's a problem. Most pop music is pretty rubbish. On the other hand, there is an absolute wealth of great indie bands now in every genre you can imagine, and you can easily access them. If you just want pop filler then that will always be available, and AI will eventually do it very well, but now there is lots of really great high quality content if you're prepared to put the effort in. Perhaps the only thing we could improve with this model is somehow reducing the cost of touring so that smaller bands can profitably tour. There are a lot of indie bands I'd love to see, but I can see why it's not viable for them to visit my city.

Had a program for the CV1 that emulated a large movie screen in VR. It was sort of cool. People have weird ideas of putting on a HMD and watching little floating TV screens. It is more like sitting in a theater.

On the go if you had a portable HMD I can see people using this sort of gadget. The whole Facebook Smart TV ads thing is lame.

If it runs, it runs? You must be in management.

I have yet to see an AI code a "large segment" without flaw. Small snippets, sometimes, but even there it's a 50/50 shot. The larger the ask, the easier it is to get back complete garbage that may run, but won't actually do what was in the spec / prompt.