> is to learn

Sure, but schooling isn't education. It's weird, degenerate daycare.

> Modern technology has made the entire concept of centralized learning into this weird anachronism we cling on to.

Modern schooling exists to keep teachers employed. It was created by the Prussians as a propaganda mill to produce compliant factory workers and soldiers, but it doesn't even do that any more.

Smart kids have never benefited from government schools. Even before the Internet, smart kids would likely learn more from the local libraries than from school.

But teachers are now a huge voting block and no democratic politician wants to tell them to 'learn to prompt'.

Yeah, the disks themselves seem pretty delicate as they're probably close to the limits of what the existing tech can handle in terms of data per disk. I had one that played properly once and then never played without glitches again; fortunately Amazon returns took it back and send me another copy.

But I gather a lot of people just play them once to rip them to a hard drive and then put the original disk away.

I've seen a number of people complain about the 4K Lord of the Rings trilogy because they "enhanced" it to look more consistent with the Hobbit movies. So there's also a chance for more enshitification.

I've also seen a few soft shots which weren't out-of-focus enough to spot on DVD or Bluray but are now visible in 4K.

We have a video rental store about fifty miles from here. We also often borrow DVDs and Blurays from the local library.

Yeah, I was going through the "$5 Bluray" display at a store yesterday while waiting for my girlfriend to finish her shopping. Didn't buy any because they were mostly post-2010 Hollywood slop but there were a bunch of movies I'd heard of in there.

> The only trend that's kind of fucking that up is these shitty 4K blu-rays. Seriously I do not need a 4K Blu-ray for a 1980s grindhouse horror movie. Meanwhile it's a huge pain in the ass to play those because the DRM is extremely onerous.

From what I hear it's easier to rip 4K Blurays than DVDs these days. All the region and copy protection is done in software so you only need the decryption key and there's none of the stupid stuff they used to do on Blurays putting hundreds of fake copies of the movie on the disk.

But it is amusing that, as you say, we're getting 4K Blurays of old 1980s B-movies because they were shot on 35mm film whereas many movies from the 90s to 2010 were either shot on HD cameras or edited at HD resolution so the "4K" version is a crappy AI upscale that you could do yourself from the HD Bluray.

The biggest problem with the Republican party is that they are not able to sufficiently stop the Democrat party from destroying the American republic and the global world order.

Both sides are useless grifters. You're just supporting your favourite wrestler without understanding that the fights are all rigged to keep you tuning in every weekend.

As far as I can see only idea Republicans have had since the 90s is to do nothing except grift.

Allegedly they control Congress and the White House yet they basically get nothing done except borrowing lots of money and giving it away.

The UK has had a massive brain drain since WW2. Half the kids I went to uni with in the 90s left the UK in the next decade.

> I keep waiting for Trumpistas to honestly respond to the scattershot nationalization of the economy under Trump.

You're confusing Trump supporters with Conservatives.

Trump is basically a 1980s Democrat, not a modern "Send All The Jobs To Mexico!" Republican.

Isn't that rather the point of calling them a "supply chain risk"?

If the Department of War calls itself the Department of War, who's going to tell them they can't?

We could just send everyone to Carousel at 30.

Or we could go back to the old days where we expected most kids to die early and stop demanding Safety At Any Cost.

> "Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not."

This clearly shows Matrix AI isn't very smart. Most mammals only 'develop a natural equilibrium' because predators kill most of them.

We typically have one or two voles in our back yard because the neighbourhood cats keep the population at that level. Every few months one or more voles disappear and then a few weeks later another one appears and finds a nice pre-dug hole in our flower bed to move into.