Inertia. Took me several years once streaming had taken off and we pretty much exclusively used our Roku and never used our Dish Network box to persuade the rest of my family that the $60-70/mo we were paying for Dish was a waste of money.

I also suspect a fair number have it for the same reason as their landline, as a reliable back up in case of emergencies. I had to demonstrate our antenna was fine for getting local news stations multiple times to deal with this argument.

That's some dense cheese. It would probably break my teeth.

I'm pretty sure most have some form of IPTV. Comcast even gave us a free box for their version. And honestly, usable gigabit speeds are available over coax, what's the need for fiber? Fiber is over-rated. If the use case is streaming, gigabit is ridiculously over-spec, you could stream 20 movies simultaneously at Blu-ray quality including all the unnecessary uncompressed audio streams for every language included on that disc all at once and still be able to browse the Internet while watching all 20 of them.

There's probably some use case out there that needs that amount of bandwidth, but by god it isn't "replacing cable".

> Where is your centralized TV Guide that allows you to browse and stream on demand as easily as cable does?

On the "Search" menu of the Roku?

I assume the Amazon Stick, Apple TV The Streaming Box, and whatever Google's pushing these days, have the same feature?

> Remember when Cable TV offered an ad-free television viewing experience, for a monthly subscription fee?

No, I don't. Nor do most people reading this.

In fact, I don't know what country you're talking about, but in the US virtually all TV channels - the subscription channels like HBO excepted - in the US provided over cable TV have had ads. That's because cable TV started purely as an alternative to antenna TV to relay the affiliates of the major networks to places that had poor reception. Over time cable-only TV channels were added to the line up, and some started off without ads, but most quickly included ads as they developed. MTV and CNN have always had ads, from day #1, and they're the two channels most people think of as the OG cable-only channels, although of course they weren't the first, but their predecessors were never as significant or as influential.

This "Cable TV was once Ad free" thing is largely a myth - I'm not saying there were never ad-free channels in the cable line up, but it was so early in cable TV's "More than just the broadcast channel" line up it barely is worth mentioning. Those channels played no part in the development and popularization of the format. Most cable TV growth happened long after the last free ad free channel adopted ads.

So now China is making too many electric cars and solar panels, compared to domestic demand. Their solution was to export that stuff. Now we want to impose tariffs on those things, so that global demand for Chinese stuff is artificially depressed. But when China loses markets for their stuff, what will they make with their comically overbuilt production capacity? Not solar panels or clean cars, but weapons. It turns out tariffs don't stop the "export" of bombs and missiles and attack drones to Taiwan.

Really good comment. I think I basicallly already thought this, but the way you put it is clearer than how I was thinking about it, so thanks!

In an of itself, that's a perfectly cromulant opinion to hold, but I doubt it's going to be shared by a bunch of people with Robinhood accounts paying electronically for the delivery of "freedfrom from techy surfdom". :D

No, that would be you.

Some people are so obsessed with how great AI is in their mind they can't take it when others point out obvious problems. You would be one of those people. You need to recognize the technology isn't what it's sold as, and you shouldn't be worshipping a technology like a God anyway.

Except the Amiga. Obviously. That was perfect.

Low quality PC to console ports have always existed (and vice versa for that matter.) Define broken - crashing your console?

I'm a game programmer, 20 years in the industry shipping dozens of games across the entire history of consoles starting from the PS2/GC era up to and including the consoles of today. Take it from me, the fact that console hardware is fixed ensures the experience of running games designed to push hardware to their functional limits is far more stable/hassle free.

If you don't wanna play games that do that, then this might not be as big of an issue. But the fixed hardware of a console simply cannot be discounted. Valve is not stupid for making a "verified on our console" program. The console platforms spend OODLEs of money ensuring that console games are by and large rock solid. (Counter examples not welcome, I'm just saying in comparison to the arbitrary hardware landscape of the Windows PC install base)

Also console OSes are designed for their main purpose - turn it on, play the game, stop playing the game whenever you like, come back to the game whenever you like. They're optimized towards that experience in a way that a general purpose PC struggles to do (admittedly Steam's big picture mode is pretty good, but you can't totally handwave away the fact that Windows is running in the background)

I'm not against gaming PCs, I have a nice one, it's my main daily game driver. (Also have a PS5, because I'm not only a developer, I'm also a customer!)

there are 5 billion Roblox accounts created

5 billion more accounts than you have brain cells, apparently

Will you fuck off with this shit?

You car fuckers impose your stupid driving-only life on more or less the entire country, then pretend everyone in America likes it that way, despite the fact most Americans who have visited Europe or NYC (thus experiencing a real city) suddenly realize how great walkable cities are, and then you have the audacity to pretend those arguing in favor of building more walkable cities are somehow forcing you to sell your home and live in city.

No, you can continue to live in your bland personalityless suburban HOA home for as long as you want. You can shag your car's exhaust pipe every morning, we don't care. You can pretend you live in the "Country" because there's a few fields of cows between your ugly neighborhood and the office where you work. Knock yourself out.

We just want to be able to live in a real city, rather than that. Because we don't like it. Nobody sane who's lived in a real city does.

Motorola's are inexpensive, have very few changes to Android, and most still come with headphone jacks.

China calling Elon. Come in, Elon! :)