The Linux Foundation has what now?

I know it's a corporate front group but this is a whole new level of fucked up shit. Fuck the Linux Foundation.

It's been 10-15 years, and people still don't really understand streaming. "There are too many services" - too many compared to what? I'd rather pay $30 a month to three of five providers for an ad-free service, each of which providing way more content than HBO or Cinemax ever did, than $100 a month to one monopoly. "It now costs more than cable did", no, you can subscribe to just what you want, and supplement it with free services like Tubi or Pluto. Also basic cable may have cost $40 in the 1990s, but it's been a while since it cost anything close to that. Try way north of double that, if you're lucky, once the fees are tacked on.

Now, if we can somehow stave off or cancel completely the enshittification...

You probably should familiarize yourself with or, if you have an allergy to Microsoft, OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc. It's a good general purpose data manipulation tool. There are things it does badly, but other things that are better than anything else in its class.

I definitely wouldn't brag about not knowing it, that's like boasting you've never used a personal computer.

There are already first-level companies that no longer require a degree for entry-level positions... Google among them. This is only going to accelerate. There will be more things like 3rd party certification programs that to some extent replace traditional degrees. Colleges can either adapt to this change, or be wiped out by it.

You get two stories a week because the current model of education we have is broken beyond repair, and to some extent, obsolete, and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. You don't need to go away to a campus at a debt of six figures (or a cost of six figures to taxpayers) to get an education anymore. If anything, the Internet has revolutionized and democratized education to an extent undreamed of in human history. From the freely available works of the greatest minds in history to real time or recorded remote instruction, people now have everything they need for a first class education at their fingertips. It's all about personal motivation at this point. The resources are there, often at little or no cost. How hard is one willing to work to get the education? That's what it comes down to now.

The old model is going to have to either adapt to this reality, or die out and be replaced. I think some of both will happen. You already have 100+ colleges a year closing in the United States. That will only accelerate with AI now in the mix.

It's common the world over. But one aspect of America's system really gets my goat: you can be thrown off a jury for saying that you do not automatically believe the police. It's literally a question in many jury questionnaires and if you answer that you wouldn't assume a cop is telling the truth, you might as well have said you're in favour of jury nullification.

Israel has citizens beyond the borders you're talking about, many who were born there or brought there as children. So withdrawing is not an option. You can argue, reasonably or unreasonably, that's unjust, but you have to deal with the world the way it is, not how you got there. It would create new injustices to undo the changes, not right a wrong.

It would be wonderful to time travel back to the late 1940s, get Truman to offer Texas as a location for the new Jewish state, and avoid the problem altogether. But time travel doesn't exist, and it's not clear anyone would accept that deal. So now we have a country that people have been born and raised into, that's majority Jewish, in a world where it's been proven over and over again Jews will suffer persecution and cannot rely on the hospitality of other nations to accept them as refugees.

Don't lose sight of that just because Israel's current political leaders are evil rotten people.

Netflix vs Paramount is Woke vs Anti-Woke? How? Both outlets are right wing. Netflix is basically violent action movies and right wing comedy, Paramount was just bought by members of Larry Ellison's family.

You guys just label everything "woke" - by which you just mean "non-fascist" - without actually even a second of thought or research, don't you?

To be honest, I'm kind of surprised this bullshit doesn't happen organically.

Presumably ChatGPT reads plenty of advertising copy as it trawls the Internet trying to read everything it can. Why doesn't it just repeat, albeit garbled, advertising slogans regularly?

My sympathies to the woman involved, as Linehan is a shitty person and no-one other than actual pedophiles deserves that kind of label (can I venture a guess that the woman involved was being accused of that because she felt suicidal children suffering from gender dysphoria should have access to psychiatrists, who in turn should be able to use mainstream psychiatric therapies for GD?), but I'm reluctant to say that ambushing someone with a camera and microphone isn't a legitimate occasion to have your device(s) damaged. You're intentionally trying to piss someone off.

It sounds like the failure here was X holding Linehan to account (whether due to their own policy, or the UK not having laws allowing obvious defamation to be pulled down.)

I'm increasingly of the opinion we protect property far too highly over privacy and other basic rights to be treated humanely in the western world. And everyone can be manipulated into doing things like property damage or minor "violence" (pushing back, etc). These things shouldn't carry a criminal sentence, not even even if you're a rotten person.

(Oh, and cops are notorious for being able to do that kind of manipulation to get bogus assault charges against victims they've provoked, it works both ways.)

Break the fucking cameras.

...no real evidence either way.

Most of the opponents are unions. Their interests will be ignored unless a Democratic government is somehow put into office before the merger completes, which is doubtful.

Paramount opposes it, but every argument they give would also apply to the Paramount takeover of WBD they are arguing for, so... I don't even know why their lawyers submitted this brief.

This year there have been multiple mergers, all heavily against the public interest, where it became clear the deciding point was whether adequate fealty was paid to Trump. Two massive TV station operators were involved in seperate mergers that are only going ahead because they opposed ABC showing a comedian critical of Trump and because ABC "settled" a bogus lawsuit filed by Trump. CBS is going ahead because it cancelled a major Trump critic, also settled a bogus lawsuit with Trump, and the new owner is run by a right wing nutjob relation to Licence Ellison. T-Mobile bought US Cellular after dropping anti-discrimination policies, paying towards Trump's inauguration fund, and funding the "ballroom", despite DOJ objections. And, so on.

The merger will go ahead just as long as Netflix keeps up its steady stream of crappy right wing action movies and right wing comedy specials. And, of course, makes "donations" to Trump "causes".

2024 Corollas aren't like 1997 Corolla's, they're pretty much the size Camrys were back then. The fact it has grown in size, and the fact that there isn't a lot of competition (does Ford even make sedans any more? Best I can find is the Mustang - a quick look at this page shows that "alternatives to the Corolla" are mostly crossovers, the Jetta, Forte, Impreza, Elantra and Civic (of course) being the only similar vehicles considered competition), suggests that the entire market segment is poorly supported by both manufacturers and consumers alike.

While have you seen the amount of SUVs and pick-up trucks on the roads? It's absurd, especially given the vast majority are owned by people who'll never use the things that make them expensive and fuel inefficient.

So one Ford pick-up truck, out of a selection of Ford vehicles that makes up top selling pick-ups and SUVs, outsells the Corolla 4:1? That's a sign Toyota might eventually phase out the Corolla in the US, not a sign the Corolla's market segment is popular.

It sucks, but there you have it. Hopefully things will change, but with this administration in charge, it's going to take a while.

Are you claiming that inflation was the fault of Biden? You do know what happened the year before Biden took office, right? That continued for two more years and caused supply chain issues that wreaked havoc on the entire economy?

Also throughout 2021-2024, despite all of this, we had full employment. I'll take temporary inflation over unemployment thank you, even if it's not been US policy since Carter decided to adopt monetarism.

Even the summary gives some context to this, which is that it's about lowering fuel emissions standards in the supposed belief that this will somehow make small cars legal (uh, what?) So, it's still dumb.

And I'm not praising Trump for some slightly positive thing he might have said any more than I'm going to praise a certain German dictator of the 1930s for building an interstate highway system, improving the trains, and starting a company to make small affordable wagons for the volks.

Look, in the end, we know what Trump's doing. It's a grift. It's not even a smart, well hidden, one by a smart person, it's just dumb shit that takes advantage of marks who'll buy anything. Trump accepts bribes, he sells things with his name on it at ridiculous prices, he's in it for one thing only. In the meantime he hides, as his ilk always does, his gross incompetence by pointing a finger at minorities with no power, claiming they're responsible for everything wrong, and making public displays of "cracking down" on them, where the cracking down is intentionally cruel and rotten so nobody can claim he isn't "doing anything".

So he promoted small cars? So what? You think he's doing that because he cares about global warming or intracity congestion or sky high car prices? You think that him promoting them will in any way make America a better place, even if that's not the intent?

Think that's still going on. We had to replace our minivan recently, and I got a three year old Odyssey for only slightly less than what it cost new three years ago. And that was very much market price, we couldn't find anything much cheaper. Of course a new Odyssey would have cost 25% more.

The situation is insane right now though, with a lot of people completely priced out of the market. And then there's people who shouldn't be spending $70K on a pick-up (for example) who are doing so anyway because they think they have to.

Another reason to hope that $25K electric pick-up will be a success. If nothing else, it might smack some sense into an industry that's gone insane.