Todd Howard loved that.

I think even the idea of dropping $250 for a video game is absolutely bonkers, and calling Skyrim "ground-breaking" is being vastly too generous. The only reason Skyrim has had the staying power it has is (1) modders and (2) Bethesda's inability to release more than 1 game every 5-6 years, leading to 10-12 years between each franchise game.

Pretty valid point. If *anything*, if AOL had executed a tad more successfully, then we might not even have had widespread adoption of the internet. We'd be all complaining about how AOL has a monopoly, but how else could you imagine a global online network functioning except inside a monopoly? Weirdos would be bringing up that crazy Internet thing that came out of ARPAnet and everyone would laugh about how that would have not possibly worked...

I think if AOL had established 'AOL for University' and 'AOL for Business' technology deployments to businesses and campuses, maybe by around 1992/1993 or so, they would have had a good chance of heading off the explosion of the 'friendly' internet as realized popularly by Netscape. Early 90s internet left a lot of the less technical crowd scratching their head and not seeing where things could go, but could get what AOL was putting down.

This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.

Specifically, they cherry picked 2022/2023 and pretended those numbers were good examples of "normal" hiring. Looking at the chart, it's clear they had a huge hiring boom, enough to overcome the prior 5 years of demographic shift. This is consistent with the general hiring boom in tech that came about then, just before LLM hype launched into the stratosphere.

They talked as though 2024 was a precipitous drop, but as you say, it was just a return to 2021 levels.

Without AI, we probably would see similar employment trends in tech and note it as a "correction". With LLM in the mix, it becomes hard to say how much is genuine shift to LLM to take care of things or LLM as a rationalization to get rid of the tech workforce the companies probably didn't need to hire up so much in the first place. Can certainly say which option generates more clicks though...

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

Don't see too many cars on walking paths and sidewalks. The number of e-bikes on walking paths and sidewalks has skyrocketed. It's almost as if someone decided being a pedestrian is a sinful activity, and that every walkway must now be infested with morons on wheels.

Then let me get started on mobility scooters.

I'd just like them banned from walking paths. At least once a day I'm getting some crazy asshole ringing his bell as he comes flying up behind me. I'm not a fan of any kind of bike on walking paths, but at least the people on regular bikes have more control. The worst are probably older riders who often seem like they're barely in control. And the three wheeled ones take up outrageous amounts of space on smaller paths, regularly forcing other users on some of the narrower paths I frequent to get to the side of the road.

It's hard to imagine, short of motor vehicles, anything more hazardous to a pedestrian than some stupid prick on an e-bike.

Note this was mostly a simple demographic observation being written about, *not* about relative popularity of university among the populace.

It's not that there are the same number of high school students but fewer want university, it's just that not nearly as many people were born.

Since the housing crash, domestic stability has eluded so much of the population that you would count on to have children.

So particularly the cost management is certainly something to watch, but your deeper problem is just that society is failing to instill confidence in the people that they can support themselves and children.

I looked at some houses, and the Opendoor ones were just sad travesties.

What was likely nice wood grain cabinetry just blasted with paint. Just sprayed on and painted all the doors shut. Same for handrails, which felt horrible to touch. Nice grain patterns replaced with light beige wall paint. Looking deeper, they never fixed anything that I would have considered important, just made things worse with new paint without regard for the thing being painted. I think they were more valuable before they had it screwed over.

Changing a feather to a leaf seems a weird thing to consider harmful. A leaf is supremely uncontroversial and it's not like the feather was somehow core to why anyone should, even in theory, care about the ASF.

I don't know but *suspect* the people that were concerned would have been sufficiently satisfied by removing "Apache" and ignoring the feather, hence my theory that it's probably more reaction than was strictly called for.

I'm not exactly sure about the 'real' problem in this front. In my opinion the closest thing to a 'real' problem is that the foundation hasn't really had a specific meaning in a couple of decades.

I could see HTTP/3 as a bit more of a tricky thing for Apache. Other servers largely declined to have 'in-server' extensions and they get more freedom with how they treat network sockets.

Apache has a lot more things that are implemented as fairly intrusive extensions, and I could imagine a change from TCP to UDP being a more difficult thing to navigate.

If you have need of some of those, HTTP/3 is probably a broader problem for you anyway. If you don't need those extensions, then switching to something like nginx isn't a huge burden, and the default performance in nginx tends to be better than apache except for some of those select extensions.

But the ASF barely cares about Apache. It was the kindling to spark a 'foundation' when 'LAMP' was all the rage, but now it has next to nothing to do with anything they bother to think about and only remains as a residual brand from their heyday of the 90s to early 2000s.

I would wager it was less the feather, and more about doubling down on 'Apache' by adding the feather.

It all started with "hah, it's funny that "A patchy webserver" sounds like "Apache". Then when it actually took off, they retconned it as honoring the Native Americans, despite pretty much being a bunch of white guys with no particular affiliation with the people the name would represent.

I generally think the 'cultural appropriation' sorts of complaints are frequently overblown, but this seems a bit much. Without any context, one would reasonably assume 'The Apache Software Foundation' would have at least something to do with Native American involvement, despite it not being the case.

So I can see that 'ASF' being a compromise makes sense, the feather to leaf however might be an overreaction, but ultimately harmless.

Frankly in general I don't put a whole lot of weight behind ASF nor the LSF as they both got turned into more marketing assets for corps than curating some cohesive software sentiment across a portfolio.

I think it's a symptom of streaming services. They want to offer a massively wide variety of shows to try and capture as much of the market as possible, which means a large number of titles. But money and human resources (writers, actors, directors, etc) are still finite, so now they spread those resources across twice or three times as many shows as they used to back in the 24/26 episode seasons. Then multiply this across a dozen different "platforms". So now we get 8 or 10 episodes per "season".

Add to that their desire to keep people hooked and subscribed. If they drip-feed seasons, people will be more likely to stick around because several shows they have started are still unfinished (some kind of combination of inertia and FOMO). So now we wait 2-4 years between seasons (which, to be honest, bothers me a *lot* more than the shorter seasons).

It really sucks in a bunch of ways. Aside from just making everyone spend 10 years to watch a 4 season show, huge breaks make for problems with the availability and visual appearance of aging actors. Writers and showrunners come and go more frequently, making seasons inconsistent and lacking a coherent plan, and the small number of episodes means every episode must be SUPER EXCITING AND IMPORTANT or people feel like it's a waste of precious screentime (which it kind of is). This means there should be fewer "filler" episodes (even though there are still a lot of them) and a lot less episodes that focus more on character development vs plot movement.

Oh, and episodic storytelling has completely died as an art, so every season has to be part of one HUGE IMPORTANT series arc which is almost always disappointing because none of these shows are planned more than one season ahead. Companies want to be able to cut any show at any time, so nobody is willing to commit to 3 or 4 seasons with a planned story. And it turns out JIT storytelling mostly sucks.

Streaming kinda ruined dramatic TV.

I agree with your larger point, but it's not entirely fair to lump covid response in with the tax breaks. From a quick look, it appears that something like $5-6T of that $17T can be attributed to tax breaks and spending related to the first couple years of the pandemic.

But $11-12 trillion in 8 years is still absolutely bonkers.