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....

Which is why it is a priority for Republicans to lock in long term bans on regulation of AI. Damaging society has become their highest priority, almost as if they are controlled by our primary adversary.

You can't seriously , actually believe this....can you????

If so, you might wanna quit talking to the bot(s)....go outside and get some fresh air....log off awhile, get away from the TV and your echo chamber....

"Companies have one job in a capitalism - make money. Thatâ(TM)s their *only* societal responsibility..." This is false, it is merely a claim made by sociopaths. A companies "job" is to perform in the way its owners desire, in the past there were differing goals that companies would have (and that's still true of smaller companies). The "make money at any cost" approach comes from Wall Street, not capitalism, it is human nature.

With most any company of any decent size, the "owners" are the stockholders.

And with stockholders....pretty much the sole obligation the people working the company for the stockholders is to make money for the stockholders.

I mean, that's pretty much the ONLY reason anyone buys stock in a company.....why else would they do so if not to make a profit?

Global Net Zero is dead. You can tell this by looking at COP and at the policies of the largest and fastest growing emitters. None have any intention of reducing emissions, in fact their universal policy is simple, and consists of two elements:

1) Grow your economy as fast as possible and let emissions go where they may.

2) Attend COP and make sure it never agrees anything binding to do with reducing emissions or fossil fuel use.

Anyone who doubts this just has to look at the record, both of their conduct at COP and at what they are building themselves.

This means that what the English speaking countries do about energy is a matter of energy policy. Its not a matter of climate policy. You cannot have a climate policy when you collectively do about 20% and falling of global emissions, when the 80% are as a matter of policy growing as fast as unrestrained economic growth leads to. Nothing you do in the name of climate has any effect on it. This will greatly upset many people here. But just look up the numbers. What is China, what is India, building in coal fired power plants? How large are their plans in relation to the total power generation from fossil fuels in the English speaking countries? There is your answer. You may not like it, but its a fact.

So you have to look at Australia's situation (and that of the UK, Canada, US) in a different way and ask a different question. That is, are their Net Zero plans a feasible and sensible energy policy in the world as it is? The answer is becoming clear, and its pretty obviously negative. The UK is probably the canary in the coal mine on this. All it has managed to do, at great expense, is try to convert its electricity generation to wind and solar. Leaving untouched all the other sources of emissions. And the result of this has been to raise electricity prices and lower security of supply. Meanwhile it has also tried to close down domestic (North Sea) oil and gas production, and the result of this has not been to reduce demand but has been to increase dependence on imports.

The reason for this is just physics: its intermittency. The problem is the same everywhere in the world, but its most clearly documented on a daily basis for the UK, here:

www.gridwatch.co.uk/wind

There is no way to use such an unreliable supply to power a modern industrial society and economy. You have to get through periods of a week or more, in the coldest part of winter, where peak demand is around 45GW and actual wind output from 30GW installed plant is under 5GW for the whole period and under 1GW for several days within that period. There is no way of managing this.

This of course will not stop the current UK energy minister, Ed Miliband, from keeping on trying it, but the result will be blackouts. It will not stop New York State from keeping on trying it, but its not going to happen. The recent court case in New York shows the same thing - people in charge of policy having committed themselves in law to the impossible can see where its going, namely blackouts, and are frantically looking for the exit.

The best thing that could happen to Australia would be if it too would admit both the impossibility and the futility of Net Zero, make a realistic assessment of what risks global warming really poses to its citizens and society, and take measures to allieviate the worst effects. Which will not include reducing emissions.

At the moment the Western countries who remain committed to Net Zero because climate are like someone who refuses antibiotics for their child on the grounds that there is a global problem with antibiotic resistance. There may be. But you are not going to affect that one way or the other by depriving your child of life saving medication today.

The problem is, most no-one using spreadsheets has any idea they are actually doing programming. In this case, on this scale, real system programming, not trivial scripting. They have never heard of methods and safeguards. Ask them how they document their code and they will stare blankly at you. Ask how they test it, Same. Ask them how they manage versions, same.

The result is their work is full of errors, if you look hard enough. But they have no idea in the maze of loops, iterations and go-tos that their code (which they don't even know is code) is full of.

The fundamental problem is mixing code and data in one object without any space for comments or documentation. Hopeless. If its anything but finance they are doing this with, its a miracle the planes even take off.

I well rememberr a young woman with a liberal arts degree talking to me about her first exposure to spreadsheets. She was absolutely delighted at the power and ease of it. Yes, I said, but be careful, you are actually doing programming. A blank look.

Why spoil the party?

In the UK you can easily pay 75p per kWh, say $1.00, at a public charger.

Still think EVs are cheaper? Pay 50% more to buy one, pay more to insure it, get charged 3p per mile in addition to the high price of the charging....

And why does it cost so much to charge? Well, relatively speaking it doesn't. Its only a bit under 3 x the domestic power rate, which is around 35p.

This is what you get from trying to move the country to wind and solar. Well, that and blackouts, which are coming.

The point of the per mile tax is to replace the tax which is levied on gasoline, when gasoline is no longer used by EVs.

The gas tax does not fund road building and maintenance, its yield is many times greater than the spend on roads, and its anyway not hypothecated.

What you have to pay attention to in this tax is how policy in the UK Labour Party evolves, bu the end goal remains the same. The basic idea is to tax transport. The old way fails, so a new way of taxing transport is introduced. Whether its such a great idea to tax transport to this extent is never discussed.

It was Tony Blair's great achievement and insight to realize that to achieve the goal of an essentially socialist state control of the economy and corporations it was not necessary to nationalize them. Repeal Clause Four, and do the job through regulation and taxation.

We see the same thing on housing. Labour has always hated the private rental sector. But you don't have to abolish it, all you have to do is tax and regulate it out of existence. At that point, and the effort is well underway in the UK, the only rentals will be done by large corporations. You don't have to make private schooling illegal. Just tax the schools, and tax the parents, and no-one will be able to afford it.

In farms, you don't have to nationalize them either. All you have to do tax their inheritance, and you will end up with farming being owned and run by large corporations. Same thing by the way with family businesses of all sorts.

All these businesses should be unionized of course, because the more union members there are, the more campaign contributions can flow in from them. Its also important to increase the welfare class, because this is the main constituency (along with some liberal university towns and the public sector unions). The bigger it is, the more votes.

The end goal is a country in which everyone works for, buys from or rents from one of a few large corporations which are not nationalized but are so closely regulated that formal ownership makes little difference. It is to recreate the GDR on the Thames, complete with denunciations for politically incorrect views and visits from the local Stasi to tell people to straighten up. But I broke no law, you say. They look at you pityingly and explain that this is a non-criminal incident which will be recorded on your file.

And the great thing about this latest way of getting there? The word "socialism" need never be used or even mentioned.

That's why I would never lock myself into a limited smart tv. Id rather grab an old laptop and use that.

Or just get a streaming "box" like FireTV or AppleTV....those generally seem work fine, have a remote and an easy to use interface.

I'll stick with them, as long as they aren't that iPhone17 orange abomination.

I'm with you on this one....WTF was up with that orange color???

That AND...no Space Grey or Black?!?!

That's pretty much one of the only things keeping me from upgrading my 12 pro max to the 17 pro max.

I'm hoping in a few months maybe they'll offer better colors....?

I tend to keep my phones a long time.

I tend to buy top of the line loaded ones....I'm currently on the iPHone 12 Max Pro...loaded storage available at the time...I think 1 TB?

Before that I had the iPhone 6 Plus (did they have a pro?)....and IPhone 3GS before that....

Right now, not seriously in the market....my phone still had plenty of space on it, runs as fast as I need, I don't see any speed or battery degradation on it yet.

I will admit I'm looking at the 17's camera and ability to shoot RAW video...that is starting to tempt me.

I guess my phones are not well over $1K, I generally just put it on Apple Pay, get my 3% cash back and pay it off interest free over 12 months.

I have the cash, but figure why not use "free money" if given the opportunity, eh? I keep may cash for it in an interest bearing account or invested, etc...

I frankly don't give a fuck what anyone thinks of my phone, if they think anything at all.

As I'd written earlier, I think in the US, phones are such a commodity, no one looks at them as any sort of status symbol and hasn't for a long time now...

iPhones do indeed work with external storage...in and out.

In fact you HAVE to use external storage if you want to shoot video in RAW format.....

HTH.