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Comment oh brother (Score 1) 247

how much is the cheapest TV today compared to the 90s

You can't eat your TV. You can't drive your TV to the grocery store. You can't take your TV into the bank and get a home loan, nor can you take your TV to a home seller and get a reasonable price. You can't hand it to the university and be handed back an education. You can't give your doctor your TV and receive surgical or even preventive care or the meds you need.

Your problem (other than the root one of spewing disingenuous nonsense) is that you're looking at the pricing in the electronics sector and pretending it's representative of the extremely high basic living costs I called out (which of course it is not) — nowhere did I say anything about either the pricing of electronics or the need for a TV to achieve a reasonable cost of living. Nor should you have. But here we are.

Comment Economic worship (Score 4, Insightful) 247

Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.

"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"

Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up

Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.

The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!

Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.

Obligatory: get off my lawn.

Comment Re:Bare minimum in EU (Score 1) 236

>Once passengers have arrived at the train station somewhere in
>Nevada & found their way to Las Vegas,

Once upon a time, the railway station in Las Vegas was downtown.

Or to put it better, Las Vegas grew *from* the station.

The old classic shots you see of Fremont street were taken from entrance of the Union Plaza--the hotel eventually built on the railway property.

You actually accessed the station *through* the casino.

I took Amtrak from it to Iowa once. The oddities of accessing central Iowa by air at the time meant an overnight stay/airport sleep! So taking the train meant leaving at about the same time as for the airport.

I'm sure it makes sense to *someone* to not simply join up with the existing track and stop there again, but . . .

Comment Re:Bare minimum in EU (Score 1) 236

Speaking as a local the monorail was insanity from the start.

At the time, the taxi companies still had the "juice" (as it's termed here) to block it from going to the airport, which would have been part of any sane plan.

AFAIK, its only sane feature was meeting the requirement that the cost of demolition be escrowed.

In its bankruptcy a decade or so ago, Judge Markell actually rejected the agreed reorganization--something quite rare. He pointed out that, in spite of the agreement,
a) the court had an independent duty to review, and
b) one of the requirements for confirming a plan being that it wasn't likely to need another bankruptcy--and that this one pretty much locked in another one down the road.

Extending it *might* make sense; I don't know the current economics. But if so, it should go to the airport, downtown, and the nearby stadiums--or don't bother.

And if we're going ahead with tunnels (a big question itself), the monorail would be redundant, anyway.

Comment Re: If there really is too much solar during the d (Score 1) 332

>And then of course, there's the whole matter of your car often being
>on the road or parked somewhere else when other people in the
>house might need it to be parked in your garage.

But this is about California, where the obvious solution is to raise revenue by requiring advance purchase of a permit to remove the car from your garage!

Comment Re:Lack of options (Score 1) 165

>followed by sci-fi itself which generally revolves around some
>Earth/Solar System/Universe threat which only one man (it's almost
>always a man) can solve.

That would generally be "space opera".

There are notable space opera protagonists who are at least nominally female: Weber's Honor Harrington (probably the most successful modern series in the subgenera), Moone's Kyla Vatta, Shepherd's Kris Longknife.

Of those, the first two could pretty much flip the sex of pretty much every character except Harrington's pregnant mother with no real rewriting, while the latter might be an exhibit for why male author's *shouldn't* try to write actually female characters.

Then again, there bulk of SF male protagonists aren't male in any more than name, so . . .

hawk

Comment Re:How does the FTC have this authority? (Score 1) 93

note that the pendulum has swung back.

Note, for example, the 2000 Morrison case, in which the USSC choked on the notion that a violent act a woman was inherently intra-state act.

While the overreach of the Commerce Clause still needs to be reined in, it doesn't (over) extend nearly as far as it used to.

hawk, esq.

Comment Re:Outsourcing to outsourced outsourcers (Score 1) 32

I've heard there are more slaves now than at any time in history. Of course that might not be true if normalized to a percentage of the work force; but the mere fact that it even still exists is of course awful. We've sanitized slavery by re-naming it as "convict labor" or in this case pushing it overseas and wrapping it in layers to disclaim responsibility.

Comment Re:Refocus on hardware (Score 1) 49

Task: Recite as many digits of pi as you can.

Me: 3.14159. I know there are ways to get more.

AI: Arbitrary number of digits subject only to some hard-coded constraint, as well as able to tell you about all the algorithms for approximating pi along with their strengths and weaknesses, then run the algorithms for you.

Let's see 29 Watts do that.

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