... For our elected officials, that is.

AV1 seems like a good codec - I'm always happy to use it though, even hardware assisted encoding is still a bit slow for me. If I'm reencoding videos for my own use I usually will encode to x265 instead, which has a good balance between file size/quality and compression speed.

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What happens when all car manufacturers are displaying ads?

It's spreading...I just read something or maybe I saw it reported on YouTube...about Jeep doing this very same type thing....advertising something, I forgot exactly what it was...but was very similar to this.

For some things you don't even need ChatGPT. If you're having the flu, it would be really nice if you just call the doctor to get the prescription instead of having to pay a visit where the doctors says "Yeah here is the prescription, bye and come back if it doesn't get better". Sometimes you really don't need a long diagnosis.

What meds for the flu?

I mean, there is Tamiflu (sp?)...but that's really only effective if you catch it at the beginning.....but the best diagnosis is generally, treat the symptoms, plenty of fluids, rest and let it run its course...

Flu is viral....so NO ANTI-BIOTICS....no matter how much the patient bitches and asks for them....

"There are serious effects now"
Really?

As far as I can tell, the "current serious effects" are always handwavy either wrong or framing-dependent bullshit like:
1) "there's a drought in California" (entirely disregarding that we happen to have settled it in an extremely wet phase, while for the last 1000+ years the US SW has been much drier for *centuries* at a time), or
2) every time it rains in Charleston "global warming is making hurricanes worse" or "...more frequent" or both (both of which have been repeatedly debunked as an artifact of our North-Atlantic-Data focus, in regards to both 'severe' storms and total hurricane energy, EITHER in the NAtl or globally), or
3) the 'look at all the people that die from heat!' (invariably after a hot week in summer; again routinely and repeatedly debunked by statistics that show 6-10x more people die from cold than heat whether we're talking regionally or global scales).

So please, elaborate these 'serious effects NOW'? What did I miss? The 'sinking islands' that aren't actually sinking?

In the USA car companies are bribing politicians to keep fuel economy standards low because they do not want to spend money on R&D. Meanwhile the Chinese car makers are designing dark factories that crank out electric cars that are better and less expensive than anything made in the USA. Ten years from now there are going to be Chinese factories in the USA cranking out amazing cars. And it is going to be a bloodbath for the companies that want to keep living in the past.

Those cheap Chinese EVs aren't going to do a damned bit of good for the at least 1/3+ of US citizens that have no way to charge at home.

Unless you live on one of the extremes coasts, there just is not sufficient public charging infrastructure......hence, there's not likely to be much more EV demand in the US than there is now for the most part.

People largely don't want them....the ones that do, have them already.

Sure, low cost will win a lot of people over, BUT that hits a brick wall when you can't charge the damned things at home and they don't fit within your lifestyle .....

Not everyone lives in a fantastically rich petrostate.

That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.

But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.

That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.

Just how many innocent mice were killed and autopsied for this "research", just so wags could make jokes on social media?

What are "wags"?

Hell, my thought was,...MAYBE, we'll see the same effects of blue and green hair dye....and pretty soon, all the wailing far leftist protesters and complainers on TikTok will just basically dye, pierce and tattoo themselves out of the gene pool and we can maybe get back to a bit more normal like the days I grew up in .....

They did this by restricting new house building to push the value of their homes up.

I don't get this where you and other post this......I see new houses and neighborhoods being built up ALL over the places I live and visit here in the US.

There is a fuck ton of land around and people are building houses in masses.....

the US is HUGE...maybe you need to get out a bit and travel outside your 20 mile circle you currently burrow down into.....?

just remember that fully one third of Americans do not have a license,

I have to seriously question this stat you put up....especially if you are talking about real American Citizens....

But even so, not having a license doesn't necessarily keep one from driving....

We have a LOT of folks in the US without a lot of proper documentation or licensing driving around these days....

This is a guess but it's based on how people were when I was in college. The market for these would be people who occasionally need a car for something where they cannot borrow one or where they cannot get a friend to provide a lift.

Strange...everyone I knew HAD their own cars in college.....??

I'm talking very much low to middle middle class folks.....and this was decades back too....

Would this be the Starlink system Musk rushed to Ukraine and afaik continues to allow UKR to use free if charge? (I believe that some donor nations do pay sub fees for the systems they've purchased for Ukr, to be clear.)

Musk repeatedly said that he won't allow Starlink to be used to support offensive operations. Yes, sometimes free gifts come with strings attached.

Your insistence that because Musk doesn't do everything Ukraine wants without question, "we know where his sympathies lie" is childish.

Yes, I can see the argument that an offensive to retake Ukr territory should be allowed, but I can also see the argument that it is an offensive. Musk, a rather pacifistic person who routinely gets collywobbles when confirmed with violence as pacifists often do, probably sees it that way (and your own linked article mentioned that Biden military & intel people at the time thought Putin 's retaliatory threats were increasingly credible). My guess is that he was confronted with Russian threats to himself or his companies globally.

Would it be better if Starlink just entirely shut down all service to the region? Would that be better for Ukraine?
If that's not what you want, then maybe shut the fuck up?

What is happening to Ukraine is terrible. Ukraine's defense against a sociopathic neighbor has been heroic. That doesn't mean everyone, everywhere, 24/7 makes "what's best for Ukraine" their priority.

I post every now and then, but there isn't much to talk about with the old folks 'round here these days. Eventually every comments section looks like a Thanksgiving dinner! Most of my rambles are now on Reddit now.

Keep sharp!