I have mine connected to a Raspberry Pi and a Google Chromecast. I can update the Pi myself and if the Chromecast fails, gets EOLed or just enshittified, I'm out $30 and still have a functional TV with the Pi. Then I just throw some other inexpensive device on it.

By contrast, the 'Smart' TV leaves me stuck. If it gets enshittified or EOLed, I don't have much in the way of options unless I can figure out a way to lobotomize it and make it a dumb TV.

Meanwhile, the all-or-nothing Smart TV removes real disincentives for enshittification.

So no, for the consumer, it really does NOT make sense. For corporate executives rubbing their hands waiting for enshitification day, it makes a lot of sense, unfortunately.

The thin is, the artists WANT to keep the prices down because they (or at least their managers) understand that fans able to get tickets and see concerts is a driving force for their fandom. You don't get big or even stay big by only being seen by a few wealthy patrons (or their kids).

Actually, they own a few and have a contractual lock on many many more.

The big problem with these "smart" things is that it's getting hard to avoid them. Several years ago I was looking for TV. A few dozen "smart" TVs to choose from but exactly 2 non-smart TVs. I don't mean 2 models, I mean 2 TVs in the whole store. Luckily one of them was suitable.

Some of it will take care of itself. You can only veg on the couch so long before you die from otherwise preventable disease.

The percentage affected may be smaller than it seems. Some want to veg and watch sports all weekend because they were forced to bust their as all week in a job they hate. Take away the job (and the need for the job) and they might get more active in their free time. The unemployed who sit and veg mostly have no money to do anything and have lost hope in getting a job.

Though I'm sure there are some di-hards that reallywould sit on the couch until they de-compensate and die. But that is a choice they make and it would solve the problem.

Much of the world's Capitalism...

Do you really think a significant portion of the U.S. Adult population really want to go to work?

No matter what, you're still going to need someone in a red shirt to duck into the circuit bays and reverse the polarity.

I remember a fair number of people in the '80s getting fooled by Eliza, a collection of heuristics designed to create the illusion that the computer understood what was being types and formulating reasoned responses. Of course, it was doing no such thing.

Modern chatbots do a much better job of it. 'Good' enough that susceptible adults sometimes go over the edge into a full mental health crisis after a month or so interacting with them.

The constant affirmation and un-wavering support makes the chatbots the ultimate yes-man. We have all seen what happens when celebrities and people in power become drunk on their own yes-men.

It's worse than internet echo-chambers. At least those don't tend to let the conversation get that personal and specific. Chatbots will get as personal as you wnt and they are designed to never break engagement (how will the company keep gathering underpants if the chatbot keeps saying no?).

And all of that with adults. Now imagine turning all of that on a young teen that hasn't had time to mature enough to know better. YIPE!

Proven by the fact that a few have hacked Windows 11 to run fine on machines that supposedly can't run it.

I wouldn't trust those hacks in production, but they prove the possibility. Of course, I don't trust ANY Windows in production.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

You're missing that both a bleed air system AND poor maintenance are required for this problem to manifest.

Presumably the other planes with a bleed air system are getting better maintenance, so haven't been a problem. No idea how the 787's maintenance is, but since it doesn't have a bleed air system, the problem of dangerously contaminated cabin air hasn't manifested.

More specifically, this happens when engine oil or hydraulic fluid leak into the engine while bleed air is being drawn.

In my day, to plug in a mouse: We took the box apart, installed a proprietary bus card, and then tried to figure out non-conflicting spots for the I/O and IRQ jumpers. Then we typed a bunch of gibberish into AUTOEXEC.BAT. And we liked it!

"EVs can lose almost half their driving distance when temperatures drop"
"In January, Seattle-based Recurrent, a company that tests and analyzes EVs, found an average range loss of 20% in extreme cold"

No one would say 20% is almost half. That is not how numbers work.

Even if it seems to save some money (probably not THAT much in the end), it'll still cost them.

In 10 years, the Vibe coding kids will be middle-aged vibe coders, but the entry level engineers would have been senior level engineers. Eventually, once you were ready to retire or move to management, one or more of them would have been the new you.

Instead, now when you retire, they'll be swimming in a sea of middle aged vibe coders and nobody left will have a clue how to fix the horrors that they produce. They won't be able to hire a new you from outside because the other employers followed the same strategy. They will be no replacements available.

They might be able to eek out a few more years by paying someone a king's ransom to come out of retirement for a couple years, but for obvious reasons, that won't last forever either, even if they can afford it.