I was hoping to see the Hacker's Diet mentioned in the comments, so thank you. Appropriately, I also discovered it from a Slashdot comment long ago.

Reading his book and using his website to track my progress worked wonders for me. I lost 60 pounds (more, if you consider muscle mass gained) over 10 years ago and have kept it off. Changed the way I think about food and exercise and I owe him greatly.

You forgot HFCS and 5G cell towers.

The market belongs to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. The studios need to make peace with that.

Produce shows for one of those three and negotiate your deal. Standing up all of these new services is not going to work.
I'm not paying for something new. I cut the cord to save money, not just because I hated cable. Having to pay for 8 different streaming services is going to be more expensive than cable and I'm not doing that.

LK

Your Adobe example just shows that you don't understand what Doctorow is saying. The problem isn't digitally-delivered or even subscription-only software (though I'd argue that does have its own set of problems).

Enshittification, according to Doctorow, is when a "platform" operator begins operations by courting users with friendly and open policies. Once they have some level of market share, they switch tacks to courting business partners who they think would be interested in selling or interacting with their new user base (for example, advertisers or consumer product makers). This done to increase their market share and dominance and is often done at the expense of the user. Finally they abuse their power over the market to extract value back into their own pockets, this time at the expense of the user and the business partners.

You can disagree with him, but this exact scenario has played out over and over in the last 20 years. Facebook and Amazon are perfect examples, and two of the early cases that he used to make the point.

Hah! Fair point, though actually, it's not far off. Some places don't even keep the check anymore - they just scan it to capture routing and account numbers and immediately run the transaction electronically. If checks were still prominently used, I could see them incorporate that into the payment consoles that are customer facing.

I've yet to see a Walmart with contactless payments. Maybe some of their stores do, but none I've visited; it's one of the things I dislike about Walmart's self-checkouts.

Thankfully they seem to have abandoned the bullshit feather-sensitive weight checking that most other places still do. On the other hand, I've been delayed by their trash overhead camera "omg he is stealing" system repeatedly, just because I set an item on the shelf next to the scanner while bagging the previous thing.

While this is an incredibly shitty take on Ubisoft's part, it's not enshittification. Cory Doctorow coined the term, meaning

Since Ubisoft has never been good to their users and they don't really have any business customers, there is no market so the term doesn't apply.

This is just Ubisoft being the same old greedy and shitty Ubisoft. One of their clowns just said the quiet part a little too loudly.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading Apple (out of historical curiosity - I was about 15 when it was written in 1997) and the "the engineers who make all the decisions" was one of the real problems that Apple had after Jobs was ousted. It works for startups, but it absolutely does not work for a company with a larger product line who needs to make strategic decisions and investments, or who has unpleasant baggage to deal with. Engineers tend to like shiny new problems to solve and not every product is a brand new Macintosh computer.

But you're not wrong either about sales driving decisions being a problem (for similar reasons). A favorite phrase I got from Raymond Chen (long-time Microsoft developer, ironically) is "Somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature":

Maybe, but _who_ do you think lobbies for the convoluted tax laws? Who benefits from citizens feeling like taxes are "too complicated" to do without some expensive software holding their hand?

But even with the absurd deductions, credits, loopholes, and other tax nonsense, it's the IRS that is responsible for navigating, implementing, and enforcing all of these rules. They have thousands of pages of detailed explanations for how to calculate taxes already available. If anyone was in a good position to build a tax computation system free for citizens to use, it would be them (assuming of course, they were actually sufficiently funded).

Could it turn into a boondoggle like the FBI's infamous Virtual Case File system? Sure, but it might also be great for ~90% of American taxpayers, who currently pay around $3-4 billion dollars every year to prepare their taxes. So if we spent a whopping 3 billion dollars to build a tax preparation system free for everyone to use, it would pay for itself in one year. After that, the yearly maintenance costs should be pretty trivial.

*shrug*

You made a claim without evidence to back it up; I refuted it with the same amount.

But in short, in most US jurisdictions, an ambulance ride will be billed to the patient the same as any other medical expense. Failure to pay your portion as dictated by your health insurance policy will result in the ambulance company sending the bill to collections with all the associated penalties and burdens. In many places, you can even get hit by surprise "out of network" fees, if the ambulance company isn't contracted with your health insurance provider, though some states have finally started passing laws to limit this. And if you're lucky enough to get a helicopter ambulance ride - look forward to something like a $30,000 bill.

One of the only distinctions I'm aware of for ambulances is that you're usually only billed if you're taken to a hospital. If they show up and you reject transport, you're not liable for any costs.

As for

that's just nonsense. Insurance companies don't "cover" any government deficit - if anything the government _subsidizes_ them and has had to _force_ them to limit overhead and profits on premiums to 20%. And the negotiated rates the government uses for programs like Medicare easily cover the "true cost" of the care - even if they don't give private health companies the same amount of absurd profit that other payers do.

Everything in these two sentences is incorrect.

You might want to grab an amp clamp or similar to measure the draw on those monitors. Modern stuff has gotten pretty efficient. A recent TV that I use as a monitor is 43" and draws 70watts when displaying mostly white, 69 when in darker mode.

Or, the simpler way: do they get warm at all?

...if the Cray 1 was (could be) overclocked to match...

I'm far from an expert on the topic, but given the Cray 1 was sucking 115kW of power and already built inside of a integrated refrigeration unit, uhhh... No, I don't think it could be overclocked. I think they'd pushed it to the max already.

But included? Yes. Especially since NASA said they would include them the last time this came up.

A private company, Astrobotic, paid another private company, ULA, to launch their payload toward the Moon on their Vulcan rocket. NASA is not involved.

NASA should keep their word and include them in their lunar missions, but they haven't broken that on account of this mission.

The screen goes round and round keeping me cool but the text stays level . Brilliant