> No, they really are producing too much.

Yes, but with qualifications. It's not too much in any absolute sense. It's too much for the current grid infrastructure, and in particular, the amount of energy storage capacity that is available on the grid.

In other words, as usual, they got the cart before the horse and did things in the wrong order.

It's important to understand that statistics are statistics. Individual cases vary, widely.

My high school English teacher eventually (end of senior year) confided to me that he had been in the habit of grading my papers last, so he could have at least one good paper to look forward to and finish on a positive note. (He liked my writing style; not everyone does, but he did. My papers always got good grades from him.) My surname starts with E, FWIW.

My point is, your grade isn't mostly determined by your position in the alphabet. It's mostly determined by other factors. Position in the alphabet has a statistically significant effect (and yes, the nature and extent of that effect almost certainly varies from teacher to teacher), but it's a secondary effect; other factors have a bigger impact. I expect it's not especially relevant at either the top or bottom end of the grading curve, but in the middle of the curve, where there are a ton of average students who produce just about equally mediocre work, it could be a bigger deal. Sometimes. Up to a point. The first paper the teacher graded that was a comparison/contrast between Barbie and Ken, two weeks after that movie hit theatres, probably got a better grade than the thirtieth such paper, especially if all thirty of them made basically the same points. But the student who didn't see the movie and turned in a comparison/contrast between the Illiad and Beowulf probably got an A, and the student who spent five minutes right before class hastily scrawling a short incoherent paragraph about smoking weed, got the low grade it deserved. Probably.

If there's a take-home point, it's probably this: software that collects student assignments and then presents them to the teacher (or TA or whatever) for grading, should probably present them in a randomized order each time. Well, pseudorandomized. No point making it cryptographically sound; if you're going to go to that much trouble, skip the randomness and rig it so that each student's position in the order is as close as possible to an even distribution over time.

It depends.

If the workers were fired for having opinions outside of work on their own time (e.g., on social media that they were using from home while not on the clock), then they have a valid grievance. That's, at least arguably, a form of discrimination.

On the other hand, if they were busy protesting all shift instead of working, while being paid to work, that's entirely a different thing altogether and falls under "refusal to perform job duties", which is a valid firing offense in any jurisdiction.

Pharmaceutical research (i.e., the search for new medications) is also (and has been for decades) disproportionately funded by America. Europe and a few other countries (e.g., Japna, South Korea) do also contribute, but their contributions are consistently a much, much smaller portion of their GDP.

They already have that. The Youth Unemployment Rate is so high they've stopped even publishing fake numbers, because any number low enough to publish, would not be believable.

Yeah. The Chinese economy is facing some "challenges" at the moment.

I don't know if that's going to work, given that the youth unemployment rate has gotten so high they've stopped publishing numbers for it, because either they'd be too high to publish under Chinese law, or else no one would believe them. Granted, that's not tech-sector-specific, but a *lot* of those unemployed young people are college educated, and STEM fields are quite popular over there. Employers may in fact be in a stronger negotiating position than the prospective employees.

Don't PG&E have a cheaper rate option overnight? The math on green generator+battery combos isn't so much selling the excess for buttons, but that you used your free, locally generated, capacity as much as possible during the daytime peak rates, with any excess going into the batteries, then topped off the batteries at the cheap rate each night. Any shortfall in your demand against local generating capacity during the day is then drawn from the batteries, so (system inefficiencies aside) you're basically getting cheap rate electicity during peak rate periods.

For my UK supplier, there's around £0.20 per kWh difference in the two rates, so every 5kWh of battery capacity saves me about a £1 per day. A decent 5kWh modular battery pack can be had for around £1,500 so, allowing for some inefficiencies, RoI is around 5 years, and the battery packs are often guaranteed to last for at least 10 years, with some allowance for capacity reduction - typically to less than 80% with that kind of daily cycle pattern. The practical capacity limit on stacking the modular batteries is how much charge you can get into each stack within the cheap rate window, but you can run and charge more than one array of batteries in parallel if you know what you're doing. We currenly have a little over 20kWh of batteries installed and even with a PHEV our bill is almost entirely based on the cheaper overnight rate, rather than the daytime peak rate.

Massive incentive for EV owners to soak up that excess at very little cost

My UK elec supplier has a specific tariff for exactly this. You give them access to control your charge point, plug your car in to charge and it'll charge up in the overnight cheap rate slot as normal, but with the added benefit that if they need to dump any excess capacity they'll turn on your charger and top up your EV batteries, plus any powerwall type batteries, for free (yes, really, "free" as in beer). They are, of course, getting paid some stipend by the grid operator for doing this, but the main thing is that it's avoiding wasting already generated capacity. You can obviously still override things and do a charge when ever you need to as well.

Or they could just spin up other mechanical things to sink the power; as you suggested, anything that can run part-time would do - producing hydrogen, desalination plants, carbon capture systems, pumping water up hill/heating salt for later energy recovery, hell, even mining crypto (ISTR someone looking into doing just this a few years back).

...need to be brought against both the principal studios and against the subcontractors. They're not supposed to allow this to occur. If their own supply-chains are so poorly documented that this occurs on any sort of large scale then it's reasonable to pursue penalties on even if on simple negligence.

We don't even need that. Just have another major volcanic eruption at least on the scale of Mount Tambora (there are several volcanoes in Indonesia capable of this right now) and watch Earth's climate drop by over one degree Celsius and Europe wondering why it froze over in winter.

Here's a llama there's a llama,
and another little llama,
Fuzzy llama, Funny llama,
llama, llama, Duck.

My guess is that the rise of the cell phone has helped a bit, it has meant that developers were getting used to writing for lower-powered devices again and not everything was simple bloatware.

I still have sitting on a shelf a first-generation 64 bit AMD laptop running Windows XP Media Center Edition with a beautiful screen and keyboard, that has only 1.5GB RAM because that is all that it supports at the chipset level. I had 1.5GB RAM on a desktop computer first in 1999 or so and that the first 64 bit intel-compatible units couldn't do more than that was an insult, but I needed a new laptop when I bought it and it didn't occur to me that it was going to be a problem only a short time later. Oh well.

If you look at it from an e-waste point of view, it's not a half-bad idea to have minimum standards for the new device in a given market so that it will last a long time before going functionally obsolete and ending up being disposed of.

I've always been a fan of buying as much capability for the soldered-on components as I can. At one point that was just processor and things like the screen (ie don't buy the 800x600 passive-matrix when the 1024x768 active matrix was available) but lately it's transitioned into RAM. Anything under 32GB on a new device is simply not in the cards for me, spending the extra $50 will mean a couple of years of extra service-life out of the laptop. We end up using our devices for the better part of a decade, so to me that actually matters.

This was part of the reason why I stopped even considering Apple several years ago, I had to give up hardware features that I felt were important in order to get other hardware features that I felt were important. Things like an actual physical escape key. And doing away with both USB-A and SD or even MicroSD at the same time was a dealbreaker for the sorts of devices that I use, like digital cameras. You'd have to go back almost fifteen years to find an Apple laptop that has anything close to the combination of features that would have worked.

Sounds like the computer did the audience a favor.

That's the crux of it. Does it really matter if about half of the movies produced each year are original screenplays when the overwhelming majority of that 50% are things like arthouse, foreign language, and budget productions that have a very limited amount of screentime, even less marketing, and only get shown on a small number of screens so the chances of the average movie goer finding out about it, let alone seeing it, are near zero? Cinemas are businesses after all, and if the latest Disney prequel/sequel/spinoff/remake in a franchise they've already been mining for decades has the better prospects of putting butts on seats, then that's what they're going to show.

While I'm sure a lot of those original movies are, in fact, total crap and deserve their obscurity, there are still going to be some diamonds in the rough - plenty of what are now regarded as classics (cult or otherwise) did not do well at the box office during their original runs. If you want more quality originality, then the problems you need to solve are finding those diamonds, and making the public at large aware that this is a movie they need to see so the cinemas provide the screentime, and that's something I'm sure producers of those movies have been working on since the days of silent movies and still don't have a solution for. I'm not holding my breath.