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.

Most of the people protesting technology putting people out of work do so because they know the same people saving big with the tech will fight tooth and nail to make sure we do NOT adapt the economy. They want the displaced to go die quietly somewhere that is not in their back yard. Unless/until that changes, every displaced worker brings us that much closer to an ugly social uprising.

We need to look at UNDER employment as well. Especially on the west coast, a number of the homeless are, in-fact, employed. Some full time. But because our job market is ruled by supply and demand (rather than needs), a glut in supply has resulted in employed people that can't even afford a shitty apartment.

Many of the homeless I see are doing the "thorazine shuffle", a gait that comes from years of treatment with major tranquilizers/antipsychotics. So for those, mental health issues is a good bet.

The last time I needed any sort of "advanced" support from Comcast, the person in India had no way to escalate other than mark it on the ticket and hope someone called me back in 24 hours (they did NOT).

It turned out someone assigned half of my already assigned block of static IPs to another customer.

So step one, give the AI a way to ring tier 2 at least.

"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone

Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.

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.

Obviously not. The Constitution applies to the government of the United States. It applies to the U.S. GOVERNMENT everywhere in the world. If a U.S. LEO meets an American in Mexico, the Constitution still applies. If a U.S. LEO meets a foreigner in Arizona (or mexico for that matter), the Constitution applies.

Wherever possible, give MS the boot. Also the Windows admins.

If they weren't doing virtualization, that might explain why the cloud brought spend down. A few big servers running everything in virtual environments would have increased utilization enough to get prices below cloud costs. If IT is run badly enough, nearly any change will be for the better.

Also, doing everything on Windows didn't help costs or reliability any.

Stupid admins can easily mis-manage cloud resources just as easily as they can mis-manage on-prem. It's just that when someone manages to mine bitcoin on your cloud services, you get a big bill at the end of the month as well as having performance problems.

The key to saving a ton of money with on-prem equipment is getting techs that know better than to let MS manage it.

Except it doesn't actually save a buck. It's actually like those outfits that rent you furniture and appliances. It looks cheap to start but in the end it costs you several times as much as ownership.

Cloud computing only makes sense for overflow capacity and perhaps disaster recovery.

Being in tech after 35 means knowing that the latest silver bullet is just warmed over slop from 10 years ago and will work no better now than it did the last time it was abandoned but will probably cost twice as much. It also means remembering and being able to adapt a technique from 10 or 15 years ago that worked really well and didn't cost much.

Many younger programmers find embedded work on micro-controllers to be hard because there's no room for "application frameworks" or kitchen sink libraries. It's actually reminiscent of programming in C for small 8-bit home computers like the C64. But only older programmers ever had that experience.

I suspect hydrogen will never get there. If someone comes up with an efficient process to synthesize propane from a renewable source, we'll have something. Unlike hydrogen, there's a fair bit of distribution infrastructure and off the shelf hardware for it.

The thing is, plug-in hybrids are still viable now as a bridge to ubiquitous fast charging. What would be best is a plug-in with and extended battery. For many people there exists a reasonable battery capacity that would allow them to operate as an electric car for 90% of their travel. For some, that is within the typical battery capacity of a hybrid. For others, adding just a bit more would cover it.

They would do well making that plan-A.

What key? Sibling languages, alternative alphabets, and unconventional word choices don't have a key. If they want to learn shorthand, they can take a course at the community college like everybody else.

I never said anything about hiding my phone. I DO routinely encrypt data going in and out of my phone and some of the data is encrypted at rest. Nothing nefarious there, it just means that I use WhatsApp, Signal, and a web browser. Also SSH.

I guess if they want to go on a fishing expedition, they're SOL. If they have an actual good reason to suspect me personally of a crime, I guess they'll have a look at the phone. It would be nice if we could rely on law enforcement to not go on fishing expeditions and on judges to not approve of them (given that they are against the law), but here we are.

Like I said, they have a right to search. They do not have a right to find or to be able to make anything of what they might find.

If you ban E2EE, you render many law abiding citizens vulnerable to all manner of fraud and other financial crimes.

Amusingly, there was a period of time when the Italian Mafia had access to law enforcement communications in Sicily using a back door designed for "lawful intercept". That is, the police and prosecutors hoist by their own petard.