I haven't thought news on the big 4 networks was particularly fair or comprehensive for decades. IMHO, it's very constrained by time, viewer attention, placating advertisers, organizational priors, and "if it bleeds, it leads". I haven't seen a story which I thought told the whole picture for a long time.

But given that, what I wonder is where do people think they get their current events news? Facebook? TikTok? Podcasts? TV? Radio? Church? Moe's bar? I know a lot of people just don't care about current events but they have to have some idea where they'd learn about what's going on in their town, county, state, country, and planet.

Well, you need both.

Just thinking about it, you need base generation and you'd hope that would be cheaper per Joule than load-following capacity. If it's not, it's not an effective base load system. Then you need some sort of generation you can spin up and down. If that's cheaper than your proposed base generation, you'd just use that for everything.

I personally know nothing about how much wind, solar, nat gas, coal, traditional nuclear, and proposed nuclear solutions cost so I don't have an opinion about which is best for what.

You could say that about any new technology. You could have said that about solar and wind 30 years ago. You could have said it about the Interwebs or computers. You could have said it about color TV, B&W TV, radio, cars, railroads, plows, the wheel, anything new.

Here's the thing: if someone wants to pay for it, I don't have a problem with them risking their own money. If someone asks me to fund it, well, make a good case. If someone wants to use tax money to fund it, that's yet another discussion. And naturally, we'd want to have a discussion about safety (although I think fears about nuclear have been wildly overblown since about 1970).

Ahem. Installing a SMR has an obvious benefit: base electrical power generation. If you're not able to see that it's difficult to have a rational conversation about it.

Whether that benefit is worth the cost or risk is a different question. Just please don't ignore that there is a reason people want to install nuclear. It makes you seem like the crusty nerd who is fixated on wind/solar as the only possible solutions because that's what you were told as a kid.

Sure, I'll give you three. Bear in mind we're talking about a proposition. Being annoyed is sufficient reason to vote for or against one.

Say you've got a bag of dried apricots. There's only so much room on the label for marketing blather, idealized images, mandated nutritional information, and the warning. My eyes aren't what they used to be but I do read the nutrition information. I'd rather the nutrition facts were larger and easier to read rather than having the Prop 65 warning.

The apricot packager has compliance costs. They need to have some people who track the ever growing list of prop 65 chemicals to see which items need the warnings and which do not. They need people to track whether the label requirements have changed, in terms of size, placement, fonts, and whatnot. That isn't free and needs to add a (admittedly small) cost to the package of 'cots. Multiply that by the thousands of products you buy every year and the millions of consumers in California. Granted it would be quite hard to measure the actual cost but it's not zero.

Finally there are lawsuits. I just checked, the number of them in increasing over time, abut 3,400 in 2023. If the proposition was having it's intended effect, by now you'd expect the number to be going down (as producers learn to just not include the offending chemicals). Settling these suits costs money and that money comes from consumers (via increased costs) or investors (via lower ROI). I have a noticeable amount of my retirement savings invested in stocks, and you may too, which means we're paying for those settlements.

You might dismiss the last two as "purely free-market theoretical" issues but I do not. They're good examples of concentrated benefits, distributed costs. It would be difficult to accurately quantify the costs but we can pretty confidently say it's not zero.

I can't remember the last time I was in that situation. Can you list some examples of when you had that choice?

If the labels help you, well that's great for you. You're literally the first person I've ever talked to about this (and I've lived in California since before Prop 65 passed) who even hinted they thought the warnings informative and useful. That means you're in a very slim minority. The small benefit you get is swamped by the cost and annoyance they are causing all the rest of us. And, I presume but don't know, the cost of the arm-twisting lawsuits raised by unscrupulous lawyers and their either unscrupulous or well-intentioned but misguided clients.

Which cookie law? Perhaps I misremember history.

What I recall was the EU passed the GDPR and that mandated anyone operating a web site in the EU had to ask for consent before collecting personally identifying information, that is, cookies. Since web sites are global, that meant anyone operating a global site had to comply with GDPR requirements.

If something else happened, please complete the story.

In theory, true. In practice, virtually every free site funds themselves with ad revenue and so you wind up getting inundated with banners. I'm sure the backers hoped requiring consent would incentivize web site operators to not collect and sell tracking data. It would be interesting to see numbers whether implementation of the requirement actually had that effect.

ObJoke: What's the difference between theory and practice? In theory, nothing.

It's intention was to cause consumers and manufacturers to avoid toxic chemicals. That's a fine, high minded intention but intentions are not results.

What it actually does is incentivize everyone to put a Prop 65 label on virtually everything, making the labels useless when selecting products. I do not, in fact, get a choice of two grocery stores, one with a Prop 65 warning, one without.

What I expect it also actually does is allow some set of law firms and public interest groups to make bank filing Prop 65 lawsuits. TBH, I don't know how often that actually occurs but it would surprise me if those interest groups didn't vehemently oppose repealing or scaling back Prop 65.

Note we have a Bootleggers and Baptists situation here. Well meaning environmental groups want to improve public health. Those are the Baptists. Lawyers want to file suits and collect fees. Those are the Bootleggers. Be wary if you identify such an alliance. Be even more wary if you see a voter proposition and you can't identify the Bootleggers and Baptists because it means you haven't thought about the issue carefully enough.

I could be running this site: Europe's Cookie Law Messed Up the Internet. Brussels Wants To Fix It.

That's what I get for reading from the top down.

If anyone wants to challenge EU regulations on the grounds of user experience, how about GDPR instead?

If I have to click one more "Accept cookies?" dialog, I'm going to SCREAM!

If nothing else, let me use a browser setting to accept all, necessary, or no cookies. I do not not want to have to interrupt my flow to click this dang dialog, even on the same freakin' web site, time and again.

There was an attempted attack about two years back. I seem to recall the attackers had to back up a few repos to get their code injected and undetectable. IIRC they first (successfully) attacked the tools to build the final project.

Anyone remember the details?

If you want to build from nothing but source code, how do you bootstrap the build? The first thing you'll need is to create a compiler, probably from a shell script? How do you know your shell isn't compromised?

Of course they do. They're a business, not a charity. What else would you expect of any business? I know I don't go to work every day anticipating giving away my work product for free.

That's not exactly right. You can continue to use W10, you just won't get any bug fixes or security updates. Shoot, you could still run W2k if you wanted. That end of support is an issue tells me what you want is not literally the same W10 you bought three, five, or ten years ago.

You're asking Microsoft to provide support for free and they're the greedy ones?

Tell you what: create a petition saying everyone who wants continued support for W10 will pay $1/month/system for it, then we'll talk.