Yeah - modern cars last a long time compared to those of old. I get some motivation to replace old cars for environmental reasons, but nothing is free. A more efficient vehicle required a lot of energy output to produce it in the first place and will still require some form of potentially non green energy to keep it going in the future.

Even if it pollutes more, keeping an older vehicle on the road may be more environmentally friendly than replacing it due to having to effectively make up the production energy cost.

Never underestimate the environmental benefits of just keeping things longer and not constantly churning production lines.

Don't know if I can switch as I'm still on a locked in rate, but I'm already a customer paying the extra for unlimited data.

Yes Comcast is notorious for high prices and bad customer service, and I'd love to support my local ISP (which I did for a long time), but the local guys have absolute shitting reliability. I'm paying more for Comcast and I'm locked in for a year or two but honestly the increase in reliability has been more than worth it (with the local guys I was getting disconnects probably a dozen times per day - with Xfinity aside from a cut cable that resulted in several hours of outage, its been rock solid).

Maybe it'll help some iPhone users migrate, but that's a hard no for me. Every time somebody hands me an iPhone I'm confused for a second on why the URL bar is at the bottom.

Doesn't matter if it takes years. Steam isn't going to get all gamers to switch to Linux overnight.

Understand - I like Linux. I first installed it in 1998 and have been a heavy Linux user since 2001 or so. Nobody would like to see Linux succeed as a desktop OS more than me, but Steam isn't going to be able to do that.

And frankly Microsoft isn't likely to want to go that route anyways. It would likely draw anti-trust penalties and they're already doing pretty well as it is.

There is no way switching to Linux is going to be a viable backup plan for Valve to tell its customers.

If Microsoft wants to go that Apple route Steam would pay before trying to get their users to switch, or more likely fight them in court over the issue.

I dunno. Chrome keeps restricting what extensions can do to the point where a lot of ad blockers and stuff are having trouble continuing to function. All of those extensions continue to work as expected on Firefox.

Granted, Chrome is mostly open source so one could just make a version that doesn't restrict what extensions can do, but either way I'm not liking Google trying to dictate what I can an can't run on the browser.

Its only doom and gloom if you want to adopt some Logan's Run style "old people have to die" system or forgo the concept of retirement completely and everyone has to work until they die.

Retired individuals consume resources but do not produce them. Others such as rich people or the disabled who do not work are in the same boat, boat they tend to be fewer in number. They rely on the activities and labor of younger individuals to do the work of making society run (keeping the power on, growing food, constructing housing, etc).

The balance of "people working" to "people not working" has to be kept in check. A growing population is one way to make that happen. No retirement is another. Maximum age limits would be another (gruesome) way. MAYBE automation could help so that the ratio could be higher but you still are going to need some level of human input into the economy.

I'm not sure inequality is the root cause of falling births.

The reality is no matter how much money you have, you will always have MORE available if you don't have children.

Children are expensive - there's no getting around that. They also require a rather sizeable investment in time which is going to SIGNIFICANTLY cut into your social/leisure schedule. Its voluntarily giving up a LOT to support another person. If you already have children you learn to love them and its less of a problem. But when you don't have them yet and those potential children are just nebulous concepts with no identities yet, a lot of people don't want to give that up.

I mean would you be willing to give 30% of your income to help out a stranger (because until the child is born they're a stranger)

From a cultural standpoint, most people just don't want to give up the time and money required to raise children and they're rather enrich their own lives.

Sometimes each person acting individually in their own best interest means that as a collective its not in our overall best interest as a group.

Fucking is only part of the problem (though there definitely is less of that going on).

I don't want to demonize it because at an individual level every woman should have the right to determine if she wants to get pregnant, but realistically we've basically seen that when birth control is widely available and women have a choice on when and if to get pregnant, birth rates fall below replacement levels.

Now, this may end up solving itself from an evolutionary standpoint. Either biological or cultural. Either biologically over enough generations the women who have a strong desire to produce offspring and just don't want to use birth control may just win out genetically. Culturally societies that disallow birth control may also simply out-breed those that do (we're seeing that now in less developed nations, where many of them are the areas where population is still growing).

Realistically though, not having enough children is the tried and true method of eventual extinction - either at a species level or just for a sub-population. If we don't find a way to encourage people to have at least enough children to maintain the population, eventually your culture will die and be replaced by one where the people didn't have a choice.

Depends. Keeping lunatic conspiracy theories off is good, but what Youtube has done historically just hasn't worked.

Just mentioning "pandemic" during COVID was problematic you people would say things like "the panorama". "Pedophile" gets censored so people say "PDF file". We have an entire generation of kids coming up unironically saying that someone got "unalived" because Youtube would block or demonetize based on the word "killed" or "murdered".

And its not on Youtube but I ran into the same thing in an article comments section about ozempic. In a comment section about injected weight loss medication I couldn't use the words "drug" or "shot" without it flagging the comment for "violating community guidelines".

The concept of "advertiser unfriendly" *words* needs to go, and if this does that I'm all for it. Moderation needs to be based on the entire context not just specific 'no no words". Also sometimes you need to present the dumb content in order to debunk it. When you declare a certain viewpoint so taboo that it can't even be acknowledged for the sake of telling people how stupid it is, then that doesn't prevent its spread.

I don't see the complete eliminated of the need for human input to go away any time soon, so the best way to do that is to spread what labor is still needed amongst a larger pool.

Eventually work weeks may drop from 40 hours to 20 hours. Instead of working 40 years before retirement you might only need to work for 15 or 20 years.

Eventually if enough of it is automated it might be like the mandatory military service everyone puts in in some countries - after high school you have to put in your required 4 years of work and then you're done.

The alternative if you get too many people unemployed with no source of income and no job prospects is that they eventually get fed up, burn it all down, and go back to a system where they can participate in the economy again (ie, if they can't work because its automated, then they eliminate the automation).

I mean, its good, but the reality of tax filing software is that it needs consistent yearly updates to contend with policy changes. I'd wager that the maintenance work on such things probably outweighs the baseline source-code of getting something working in a general sense.

Plus most Americans also have to deal with filing state income tax too which I wouldn't guess this would handle, and will require much more effort to handle since you're dealing with 41 more different sets of laws that change annually (9 states don't do state income tax).

All in all though, Turbotax. Even as is they're too expensive. There are other companies out there that will do the same thing for cheaper. For a while I used TaxAct - recently I've switched to Tax Slayer instead.

Not really. Stupid hobbies and pursuits of the ultra-rich are a great way to get them to put their money back into the economy. It helps us all if rich people spend their money as much as possible.

That too is a matter of debate. Just HOW large the sun will expand to is still a bit up in the air. It will swallow Venus and Mercury almost certainly. Earth is in a "likey" zone but not assured. Even outside of that though, depending on the sun losing some mass as it expands the orbit of Earth could shift outwards a bit, so even if it encompasses Earth's current orbit, Earth might no longer be there.

But yes, Earth will indeed long be uninhabitable by then.

Humanity may or may not be extinct though. We've got close to a billion years to head elsewhere. Even at sub-light speeds that's plenty of time to travel to another star. It may be a feat that we never accomplish, but it should be technically feasible.

I've been around since the days of 8-bit computing but I admittedly didn't step into "IBM Compatibles" until getting a 486 - I was a Commodore guy before then. By that time VGA monitors using DB15 were the norm, all serials were DB9, and DB25 was pretty much always parallel.